Yesterday’s post slapped
the women’s image magazine Uncanny around pretty hard for being a vapid and
shallow periodical that dilutes the deep and rich medium of storytelling by
using it as a medium for do-nothing wish fulfillment. It’s a great article, and every fan of short
form fiction magazine, and long form fiction in general, should read it, link
to it, and share it with friends, family, and random homeless people on the
street.
Near the conclusion of the
post, a small compliment on the art itself included a teaser for today’s
post. To whit, images that feature
strong characters doing nothing other than charactering around can serve as effective cover art, but
not for a book or collection of stories where things happen and people take
action. Fortunately, there is a whole
genre of books that do almost nothing but describe characters.
Verbs are your friends. |
They’re called Player
Character Manuals. They are written for –
nerd alert! – Role Playing Games, or RPGs.
They provide rules and suggestions and inspiration for players who are
creating characters. These are not collections
of stories, merely collections of characters or character traits that one could
use to build a character. The characters
built by these books do things on the table or in the game or in your
head. However you want to look at it.
These covers aren’t meant
to sell potential buyers on the exploits contained within, but on the exploits
potential buyers can proxy-conduct using characters they build using the
contents of the book. In this case, the
producers aren’t so much selling the stories as they are selling the
characters. As such, this is the perfect place for a cover featuring a
character just standing there being characterful. The producers don’t need a story or conflict
on the cover because there aren’t any stories or conflict in the book.
(If you’re lucky. Fall too many games include execrable
excerpts of the writing that was so good…it’s author does technical writing for
games.)
These covers tell the
buyer, you can make this. You can make
this do what you want. They sell the
actual contents of the book. When used
this way the art isn’t selling the image of a character, but the depths of what
makes the character work.
Literally. How the character
works within the overall framework of the rules of the game.
To see some examples of
static characters on a cover in action, let’s look at a few of the covers for
the grand-daddy of them all, Dungeons and Dragons. Working without the benefit of state-paid Benefits
or a debilitating mental disease along the lines of autism or OCD, we’re not
going sit and pore through countless covers compiling, indexing, and choosing
which data points fit the pre-selected narratives. We’ll leave that to overweight, rainbow
haired, grudge farmers.
Bang, right out of
the gate, the very first incarnation of the game, the manual for men and
men-at-arms features a character just standing there in all his fantasy-armor
glory. Score one for the Counter-Narrative. Moving on to the first cover for
AD&D…
The aftermath of a fight. This one breaks the mold, conveying a sense
of mystery and exploration rather than characters, but it’s thirty years old
and produced by people just finding their way through an unknown hobby, we can
cut it some slack. It's not static characters, though, it's characters doing - or just having done - things. So how about the second
edition?
Here we see a mounted warrior charging
an enemy, the reader presumably. It shows the action
and conflict one might expect to be able to conduct with characters built using the system. Almost as if they decided to skip the 'being' and get right to the 'doing'. My theory isn't looking too great right now.
The third edition was a faux-jeweled leather affair meant
to represent an actual manual, so we’ll skip it. Fourth edition, though…
Nailed it! Two characters just standing there waiting
for something to happen, the way the gods and The Narrative intended. They don't have to do anything, they just need to stand there pensively, like characters in a Spielberg monster movie. And of course,
the most recent edition…
Huh.
Again we see a character engaged in conflict, the root of all stories
and adventure. Almost as if story and adventure are central to a game about stories and adventure. Oh, my precious theory!
That was an interesting
experiment. The only manual feature
characters standing around being characters was also the manual from the least
successful edition of the biggest adventure game on the market. That should tell us something.Since we're not scientists, we're not going to pout and start looking for data that supports our original hypothesis until we find enough to be proven right, damn it. Instead, we're going to take the data and revise our theory about do-nothing characters on covers.
You can use them to sell books about story-telling and action centered games and magazines, but if you do you're going to move less product than if you had used action packed art featuring stories and adventure.