Google Images

[RPG Post]

You probably know this, but Google Images is a Storyteller's best friend. True, you can find anything in Google, but storytelling is an inherently visual medium. You paint with words but sometimes a visual aid is handy for the players and sometimes a visual aid is handy for you. Google Images fills both needs with foes, characters, floor plans and more. If there is a trick to searching it is to be specific without being too specific and to use several combinations to find what you want.

[end_news_blurb]

“Floor plan” gets you mostly houses. “Dungeon Floor Plan” pulls up, not surprisingly, dungeon floor plans. [Do NOT add the word “sex” especially with safe search off. Although Don Johnson appears. I have no idea what he has to do with Sex Dungeons. I was afraid to click.] Both types of floor plans can be helpful for an adventure. And they can lead you to sites you might not know. One floor plan I found led me to http://www.rpgarchive.com which is a site of dungeons and adventures. I had never been there before. So now I have a new resource bookmarked. I marked http://www.rpglife.com/maps/index.php also, after another map led me to it.

It's not just floor plans either. If you are like me, a picture can set off a whole stream of what-ifs and how-did-we-get-heres. Adventures write themselves from two or three images. The benefit to Players is, that at key scenes (if not throughout the adventure) you can show them settings or foes. What was “you are tracking through a desolate wasteland of sunbaked and bleached rocks, powdery sand and extremely sparse vegetation. A mesa towers over the unforgiving landscape. Are there signs of a path on the right,” becomes the same description but with this image:

,,

Suddenly all of the characters are seeing the same thing.

Pretty much any creature, any character type, and combination of images is available on-line. Just make sure you try a few different ways. A “dragon smoking A pipe” is much different than a dragon smoking pipe, without the quotation marks or the “a.”

Speaking of desolate wastelands, besides the new Gamma World (which WoTC is publishing lots of little introductory tidbits for), Dark Sun might be able to use the desert picture above. The 4th edition rules came out toward the end of August. It was always my second favorite setting, after Ravenloft. Which is confirmed for 4th quarter 2011. I can't wait. Searches for “Bar Wench” all around.

[Forge]

I could not agree more. 'A picture is worth a thousand words' which could not be more true in a PbP game. You can get much more across with a couple well placed pictures than you ever could with lofty descriptions that could be slow and verbose.

...and like you said...it tends to make sure that all your players are on the same page when further posting in reaction to their enviroment, there is no chance of misconception due to one person's imagination over another. I have been known to tirelessly troll DA for hours looking for just the right image to share.

Also...Dark Sun ftw! I <3 Dark Sun!

[jameson (ST)]

Yeah, of all my D&D experiences, the only ones that don't cause me pain are from Dark Sun.