Sunday, August 28, 2022

RPGaDay 2022 #28 Style Sunday: Roll 1d8+1, tag that many friends with your favourite RPG cover art.

 Tooting my own horn a bit, I'm going to say that my favorite cover art is my own. Well, not that I did the art itself, but I did commission it for the cover of my game, Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road.

Although AiO is not technically licensed, there's a tendency for games based on existing properties to feature the main characters on the cover in some way. Star Trek RPGs usually have the cast from one of the shows on the cover, for example. Some other games will have characters on the cover that resemble the characters you could be playing. The most recent Star Trek RPG went this route, with unidentified Starfleet characters on the cover.

I didn't want to put existing characters on the cover of AiO for 2 reasons. First of all, one of the main reasons to do an Oz RPG is to expose people to the wider world of Oz from the books and putting Dorothy & Company on the cover would feel like just another retread rather than offering them something they might not have seen before. The second reason is that I had intended to release my own edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and they were going to be on the cover of that.

In fact, because of that plan, I commissioned the same artist to do both covers and intended them as companion pieces. The WWOz cover featured the characters from that novel, while the AiO cover featured characters from the deeper canon that shared some similarity with one of those characters. So I wound up with the best of both worlds: I got canon characters that fans of the novels could appreciate, while those coming with fresh eyes would see something familiar, but also distinct.

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