Posts belonging to Category Description
Posted by Ravyn on January 19, 2012
(Do I even need to tell you what prompted this post?)
When last seen, the broken walls of the old buildings had shimmered in the starlight, haunted by the soft strings and fluting of the lone musician; now the musician is gone, and in the sunlight the walls are merely ruined stone. The carnival last night [...]
Categories: Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Mood, Places, Scening, Technique, World-building |
Tags: locations, mood, roleplaying, RPG Blog Carnival, scening, the perfect version, World-building, writing | 
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Posted by Ravyn on January 18, 2012
My participation in RPG Blog Carnival: Fantastic Locations continues!
Light levels in a scene may be one of the most subtle ways of creating the mood for the perfect version of a location, but they’re not the most counterintuitive way; that honor goes to the people who create a location. After all, people aren’t part of [...]
Categories: Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Mood, Places, Scening, Technique, World-building |
Tags: locations, mood, people, roleplaying, RPG Blog Carnival, scening, the perfect version, World-building, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on January 17, 2012
This series was written for RPG Blog Carnival: Fantastic Locations.
When I used yesterday’s post to introduce the idea of the perfect version of a location, one of the mood-contributing factors I discussed was light. It’s easy to forget, as an element; we’re used to always having at least some around us, and to not being [...]
Categories: Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Mood, Places, Scening, Technique, World-building |
Tags: light, locations, mood, roleplaying, RPG Blog Carnival, scening, the perfect version, World-building, writing | 3 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on January 16, 2012
This one’s back to writing for RPG Blog Carnival. I love the way it makes me think about aspects of the theme I wouldn’t have looked into.
One of the things that a lot of people forget about making locations, fantastic or otherwise, is that the locations themselves are in a constant state of flux. The [...]
Categories: Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Mood, Places, Scening, Technique, World-building |
Tags: locations, mood, roleplaying, RPG Blog Carnival, scening, the perfect version, World-building, writing | 4 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on November 22, 2011
Yesterday, I talked about the importance of getting places to resonate with the people in a world and thus through them with the audience, even before anyone actually sets foot there, and talked about what sorts of factors might give the places that resonance. The next step, then, is to figure out what sorts of [...]
Categories: Description, Exposition, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Geography, History, Places, Scening, Technique, Thematics, World-building |
Tags: Places, resonance, roleplaying, World-building, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on November 21, 2011
One of the things I’ve always loved about a good world-building is a sense of place: the idea that after a little while, hearing a place name alone will bring in all the echoes of what the place actually means to the characters. It’s important, particularly in a narrative that bounces about between cities and [...]
Categories: Description, Exposition, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Geography, History, Places, Scening, Technique, Thematics, World-building |
Tags: Places, resonance, roleplaying, World-building, writing | 3 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on August 17, 2011
I promised earlier this week that I’d talk about how I get from the image in my head through the principles of art to the image I write, when writing action in stories and games.
As with the image composition, I start with the point of focus. Usually this is both a physical point and an [...]
Categories: Art in writing, Cross-discipline, Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Technique |
Tags: composition, Cross-discipline, description, principles of art, role-playing, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on August 16, 2011
Yesterday, I mentioned the design principles of art, and how I use them to create the mental pictures that I turn into my descriptions. So how do I get from principles to composition, and from there to a picture?
The principle I start with when laying out my mental pictures is always dominance. Where would the [...]
Categories: Art in writing, Concepts, Cross-discipline, Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Technique |
Tags: composition, description, principles of art, role-playing, writing | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on August 15, 2011
When I’m trying to get across a piece of imagery, I start with, well, an image. I don’t mean just getting a basic mental picture; I mean taking the time to take that picture and compose it, as if it were a piece of artwork or a short piece of film, then take the important [...]
Categories: Art in writing, Concepts, Cross-discipline, Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Technique |
Tags: composition, Cross-discipline, description, principles of art, role-playing, writing | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on August 2, 2011
Yesterday I talked about distinctive silhouettes and why they’re important in comics and other visual media. My question, thinking about this, then became “What’s the prose equivalent? How do we manage distinctive silhouettes when we’re limited to words?
The first thing we need to remember is that for the prose silhouette, most aspects of appearance aren’t [...]
Categories: Art in writing, Character image, Characterization, Concepts, Cross-discipline, Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, Technique |
Tags: Art in writing, concepts, Cross-discipline, roleplaying, silhouettes, writing | 1 Comment »