I wanted an artistic rendering of Star Guard headquarters. That's how it started. No, I need to go back a bit before that, because I need to explain Star Guard headquarters for context.
When I set up the Star Guard campaign, I didn't put a lot of thought into their headquarters building. I knew there must be one, and it must be on Bolusca, but as I had set up a situation which involved the players' team being mobile and rarely, if ever, going back to base, I put more effort into realizing their cruiser than I did into headquarters.
But inevitably, I thought of plots that involved them returning to headquarters. So I needed to describe headquarters. I wanted a building that looked interesting, because this was science fiction (seen through a 1960s/70s lens) and things had to look big and cool and preferably have fins. I went through a number of concepts: could it be somehow shaped like the star guard emblem? (too boring) could it be a pyramid? Maybe a tetrahedron? Could it be... an upside-down tetrahedron?
It's an improbable shape for a building to be, and therefore suitable for a comic-book SF concept. And it gives a large, flat roof that you can land a space cruiser on, which is an idea I was instantly enamoured with. And, well, the headquarters building of a group of interstellar super-heroes has to be upside down. (And some people reading this will understand why.)
As we were talking through ideas in a Game session, I even had a prop to illustrate what I meant:
(That's a 4-sided die, used in a number of different games though not in the game system I'm currently using. As you can tell from its condition, I've had it a long time.)
Once I had the idea, I drew up a plan view of the building. Because I like plans. This is just my rough first draft, I'll make it neater before I properly publish it on the web site:
So far so good. This is all I really needed: the concept, the floor plan, and verbal descriptions of the different parts of it the players needed to interact with. And for months, this is all we had, and it worked well.
Then one day I thought, wouldn't it be nice to have an artistic representation of how this building looks? But I can't draw ... oh, here's a great idea: I'll get AI to make a drawing for me!
And that's where the nightmare begins.
It's a long one, so I'll split this into two posts. Part 2 is here.
No comments:
Post a Comment