Cover illustration for "Flat Black"?

Role-playing games Flat Black
#12

It might do the job, though. It has worked for a lot of mystery and thriller novels.

Let’s consider it.

  • A vademecum (high-tech successor to the smartphone) displaying the Popular Revised Handbook of Planets app
  • A double-barrelled, blued-steel, percussion-cap pistol with chequered ebony grips
  • A handful of fake IDs, including a Tau Ceti passport
  • A spaceliner ticket or boarding pass (ought to be recorded on the vademecum?)
  • A sheaf of Imperial banknote cash
  • A few scattered orange-yellow transparent gel capsules.

Are we in the ballpark?

#13

I think so but it loses the culture as problem feature that seems important to convey.

Some thing or things to show the strange culture interactions ahead seems important. I said quipu earlier because it’s a distinct extinct branch of information technology. Outside of daily experience but intended at design to carry daily information. Not proscribing here but continuing the brainstorm example maybe a strange material? Like a weird feather or cat5 cable
tied into the knots?

It’s hard to think of something strange and distinctive and not already part of another culture.

#14

Well, we can start with decorative motifs, I guess. The butt of the pistol carved into a stylised parrot’s head. A carved mother-of-pearl amulet of an astronaut? Carved ceremonial mask with mirror lenses?

The best way is to depict someone with bizarre clothes and grooming, and this approach doesn’t favour that.

#15

I like the ceremonial mask idea.

#16

An existing SF game, Fires of Amatsumara from the d6 Space line, took a similar design approach:

pic639832

I think it runs into a potential problem in that you need to have identifiable yet futuristic and exotic items (You’re probably looking at that cover and thinking "Mini-Discs! How quaint!). Spy novels and thrillers can just use guns, knives and passports because everyone knows the world.

1 Like
#17

Also “manual controls on a tablet, how quaint”. :slight_smile:

1 Like
#18

I think that is promising, really.

But for a futuristic pistol:

serveimage
serveimage2320×874 124 KB

And maybe a formica table-top.

#19

How would that look with a laser sight on it? Or an accessory rail?

#20

Alas, all the vendors of such things I can find on a quick image search want to make them look interesting so they display them at a 3/4 angle…

#21

Perhaps what we ought to be looking for, for an equipment catalogue at least, would be one of those snazzy aluminium attaché cases with the foam linings that have special cut-outs for each thing, containing a cap-lock pistol tapped for sights, a laser sight, a screw-on suppressor, cleaning gear, and little boxes of “Blue Sky® 10mm Minié balls” and “Sun Hill® №1 quality hand-picked pistol cartridges”.

The “Flylux” technical air-ute with pintle-mounted swivel-gun can go on the main book.

#22

I’ve just had an idea for a really irritating innovation of which I feel sure the time will come soon:

  • animated or video cover art on electronic books

I ought to patent this business method, right? Right?

1 Like
#23

Well, that’ll stop anyone else using it, so yes.

3 Likes
#24

Players' introduction cover
Players' introduction cover2419×3443 1.15 MB

2 Likes
#25

That’s pretty good. It conveys “on a planet” and “fairly high-tech” well, and the sky strongly hints at space.

#26

I don’t really get a feel for what this cover should be invoking. Other than the green streak at the top, which I can’t really tell what it is because the words are right over it, it just looks like an aerial view of Los Angeles county at night.

#27

The problem is that I don’t have any artistic ability nor even artistic imagination, and that I’m not keen enough to pay an artist.

2 Likes
#28

Yeah, I don’t feel I can add much to this. How do you have a city from far enough away that you can’t see individual buildings and still convey “this is a weird alien culture”?

#29

Mad Idea. Flip the image 180. Keep the text the same.

1 Like
#30

Perhaps what I need is a picture of a person in extravagantly unconventional clothes like the below, with ultra-tech equipment and against some sort of futuristic or other-planet background such as two moon in the sky or a planet seen through a viewport. It’s a clichè, but that’s because it does the job.

image
image746×1093 811 KB

#31

I have a reasonable sense of layout, but I can’t do art.

Conceptually what I would be looking for is “people from the stars are in a weird alien place”. So that might look something like this.

Centre of focus, the party of PCs. They have obvious high-tech gear about them, though it’s not gun-heavy. One of them’s consulting their vademecum, perhaps. They’re making their way through the scene.

Around them: a street scene with humans, but weird humans. These people are in (pick a world) distinctive costume doing distinctive things; maybe they’re all split into groups of obviously-male and obviously-female, or each group has an obvious leader with a set of followers. Something that’s immediately apparent as “a bit odd”.

And in the top of the background, a sky with odd features, perhaps a double crescent moon or a shining ring system.