Extensive (and Inclusive) Set of Photos for Fantasy Campaign

While I usually favour rules light games, I recently decided to switch things up a bit and GM a few sessions of Shadowrun as a challenge to myself and to get a renewed sense for what I like and don't like in "heavy" systems and what makes them compelling.

One of the things I realized I did like and that was missing from more streamlined systems, including my own Weird West rules was a shared sense of a detailed fictional world that you get from an established setting that typically accompanies a more "heavy" system. In particular I think it's the images as well as the rules or game fiction you get in a multi-hundred page rulebook that quickly gets everyone on the same page about the world you're exploring and makes the game world feel that much more real.

While I think I'll return to a more streamlined rules system the detail of a setting like Shadowrun's is very compelling. I'd like to have something like that for the next time I run a fantasy RPG.

As I started looking at a few images to inspire my next game it started to turn into something a bit more ambitious: finding enough images to create a detailed and ongoing fantasy campaign. To avoid a mish-mash style I decided to only use photos (not illustrations) from Movies, TV Shows, and Music Videos. No bad CGI either - I wanted all the images to look awesome.

I also want the setting to be more historically accurate in that it's more ethnically diverse. I've written before about Africans in Europe During the Middle Ages and I wanted the "artwork" for the campaign to reflect a greater range of characters (age, gender, ethnicity, body types, etc) than you sometimes see in RPG material. While that hopefully makes the setting more inclusive I didn't want that to come at the expense of feeling contrived, twee, or cartoony -- first and foremost the images needed to be awesome. I just made sure to consider a wider range of awesome images and not go with the ones that might be more well known.

Here then is the set of images I've been putting together for my campaign setting...

Character Classes

Assassin

Barbarian

Bards

Cleric

Druid

Fighters

Illusionist

Magic User

Monks

Paladin

Ranger

Thief

Monsters

Cockatrice

Demon

Devil

Devil Swine

Displacer Beast

Djinn (Air Elemental)

Earth Elemental

Efreet (Fire Elemental)

Elves

Giant

Giant Leech

Goblin

Green Slime

Gnoll

Harpy

Hippogriff

Hobgoblins

Kenku

Living Statue

Lizard Folk

Medusa

Mermaid

Minotaur

Mummy

Neanderthal (Cavemen)

Ogre

Pixie

Red Dragon

Rot Grubs

Satyr

Scarecrow

Shadow

Skeleton

Spectre

Troglodyte

Troll

Vampire

Wererat

Weretiger (Panther)

Wight

Wraiths

Wyvern

Yeti

Zombie