Somewhere recently, I read someone suggest doing a retroclone or something similar that cut out all of the illustrations and flavor bits, just boiling everything down to raw, unadorned text.
But I'm wondering: what about going the opposite direction? What about a game rulebook that was almost entirely illustration, with rules as captions? And I don't mean illustrating rules with icons or diagrams. I mean pure illustration of action and the world.
What would that be like?
Take it a step further: no captions. The illustrations must demonstrate how to play the game.
ReplyDeleteThat kind of goes against what I'm aiming for. I personally don't think a no-words approach to the game rules would work, but if it could, it's not that far from minimal word/visual rules attempts that have already been made, such as comic strip presentations of rules or the illustrated wandering monster and dungeon generator posters.
DeleteI'm thinking more of illustrations of the game world, without any explanation of what the *in world description* of any items should be. In short, an illustrated version of the imaginary action in one or more game sessions, with annotations of actual rules used when they occur.