I’ve started wireframing possible layouts for the core rule book of my Voidpunk pen-&-paper RPG, and there’s the question of illustrations. Or rather, several questions that I want to touch upon in four (non-consecutive) posts.

The overarching question is “style.” In my book on game design, Ludotronics, I differentiate three style categories:

• Genre style. Literary and cinematic genres as entertainment categories like fantasy, science fiction, science fantasy, western, mystery, horror, survival, romance, hard-boiled/noir, contemporary, military, cyberpunk, or post-apocalyptic.
• Period style. Art styles like Archaic, Classical, Byzantine, Tang, Muromachi, Kuba-Bushong, Realism, Expressionism, or Art Deco; architectural styles like Neolithic, Khmer, Romanesque, Aztec (Mēxihcah), Gothic, Victorian, or Bauhaus; and typographic styles from cursive to movable type, from gothic to humanist, from Roman to Ming and beyond. (There’s also musical styles, but we don’t need them here.)
• Presentation style. Artistic renderings, often simulating other media forms and media types (through advances in digitization and media convergence) that stretch from lifelike realism to comic/anime to wood-block printing to papercutting to graffiti. (Or, not applicable here, animated styles like stop-motion or rotoscope.)

While not everything can be straight-up mapped from digital games to book illustrations, it’s a good start to think about it. My plans for the Voidpunk core rule book so far are:

• The genre style should be a mixture of science fiction and horror with a dash of cyberpunk.
• The period style is tricky. Streamline Moderne is my preferred period style, and I tend to overuse it. Also, in its original form, it wouldn’t be an ideal fit for a far future setting. So what I’m trying to come up with is an idea how to fuse or combine Streamline Moderne with other elements, applying design thinking similar to Feng Zhu’s “Ask ‘What If?’” section from his “A Live Art Demonstration of Creating Worlds through Design Thinking” presentation (it starts around the 11:30 mark). I’m still working on it.
• As for the presentation style, I want to do something different. Most pen-&-paper RPG rule books have specific styles that, up to a certain point, define their respective worlds’ look & feel in the players’ imagination. But I want to give this imagination a lot more leeway, individually and/or collectively. Thus, I’d like to have a variety of styles instead by going with the personal styles of individual artists.

That should do for today. In future posts, I will look into each of these three style categories in more detail.