What Do I Know?

I’m running behind, so it’s time to play catch-up. We are up to day twelve of the RPG A Day questions, and today’s question is as follows:

Which RPG Has the Most Inspiring Interior Art?

Tough question. Most RPGs from at least a moderate sized company have very talented art directors, with a crew of talented artists to draw from. I think that, first off, I’m going to exclude anyone that uses existing artwork from other sources. That means things like DC Adventures is out the running, because while the art is inspiring, it’s also directly from the source material. It still takes a good eye to format the art, and a strong sense of what is needed to choose the right existing art, but it feels like a different “category” than we are discussing here.

I’m not going to say that this is the “most” of anything, because there are too many games out there. I will say that Headspace was very striking to me. Brian Patterson’s artwork does an amazing job of portraying nuance within a comic strip style of art. The characters in the book are in a terrible cyberpunk world that has suffered criminal abuse from corporations, but the operators still have a certain determination that conveys the feel of fighting a difficult uphill battle to make the world better, but believing that battle can be won.

The contrast between the setting, and the goals of the operators, and the combination as expressed in the illustrations, make this a product I wanted to call out.