Marketing Landscape Paintings

Hey everyone. I'm the author of Fantasy Landscapes on the market. I did this set after seeing the GM Academy video talking about going off the grid, but wanted to know if there was any interest around stuff like this in the first place. In retrospect, it's much easier to just google a piece of cool art to use. Should I keep going with these or try out tilesets/tokens? If I were to make more of these sets is there anything you'd like to see in particular?

My recommendation is to keep track of how much you're earning each month. On the first of each month, upload a new set to the Marketplace, and determine how much each new addition makes. While this is by no means an exact indicator, it does give you a ballpark idea of what people are willing to buy.

I just looked them over and they are nice. I would recommend for a set piece, make a couple main pages then add a few scenery bits to the package like a few tents, a couple different campfires, etc. This would allow a dm to customize the image more.

@Simon Yeah that's one way to gauge it, but, like your map request thread, I wanted to see if people had any suggestions directly. @Pat That's actually really clever. I think I'll play around with that idea and see if I can get something to work. Thanks!

These are awesome. I've been planning to start running certain encounters/games/scenarios in this style, with just the forward-facing visual scene to present. You're right, so far, I was googling for images to collect, that are free to use. But I will consider buying yours on the Marketplace, or future sets. Something I would look for in a future set would probably be: a series of scenes that progress, from one to the next, for example "as you are going deeper into the forest". EXAMPLE to explain this: There could be a swamp pack, with scenes: The edge of the swamp on the town side, will you enter? The beginning of the swamp (less thick, some light, a trail is there). A clearing in the swamp (site of a battle? Site of a ritual statue? Site of a trap?). Deep in the swamp, the trail has disappeared. Finally, a spot in the swamp with some lair entrances, perhaps some caves or holes in the ground. From such a series of 5 to 10 thematic progressive landscapes (going IN, deeper IN to the landscape with each progressive picture), a GM could make an entire adventure, that could last for 1 or more game sessions. Another expansion of the idea is to offer the series of pictures with an adventure, module, or even just plot hooks, "The Illustrated Quest For The Broken Sword" or whatever. I do like the look & concept of your initial offering. Is it a variety pack with 4-5 different scenes? Are they linked so that you'd picture an adventure using all the landscapes, one after another? They appear so divergent that only 2 of the pictures would be used in the same adventure day. If they aren't necessarily linked in thematic environments, of course they can still be useful, with the GM's imagination. For $5 price ($1 per landscape), I want a little more likelihood of actually using ALL the pictures I'd buy, in a single adventure that I can plan for. 5-10 views of the same town, different intersections? I would buy that. It would have the town square, farmer's market, dark alley, steps of the church, steps of the courthouse, view of the mainstreet with general store, yard of the tavern, entry of the stables. 5-10 views of the long approach to a certain prominent hill... You start on a main road and just see the peak of a hill in the far horizon... You see a side path that goes deep into the woods... Then there's a path through the forest and you see a glimpse of the distant hill through the treetops... Then you come to a clearing at the base of the hill. Then you ascend the hill and there's a cave entry. 5-10 landscapes progressing to & through a "Mountain Pass". First view of the mountain in the distance. Then the base camp and the bottom of mountain. Then a precipitous trail with a scary ledge up the rocky mountainside. Then a mountain pass at the top with obvious ambush points. I'm picturing like a slideshow, where you just go DEEPER into the same scene with each passing view. That would be playable in a nice way.

The same location at differing times of the day would be something else to look into. Sunrise-Noon-Sunset-Night should be more than plenty for most people. I used a map like this before with morning/day/night, and all I did was add a lens flare in the sky using Gimp for morning, and tint the image black for night. You'd probably want a bit more for a marketplace series, but at least you don't have to re-do the entire landscape for changing daylight.

Responding to Brian's idea, you could do "The party's campsite, Morning Noon and Night" but you offer 3-4 different camp sites, with the 3 time-based views of each campsite. That would probably be enough to represent ALL the places the party would make camp, for months/years of gameplay. (The GM could re-use campsites, but it's more fun to cycle through 4 different campsites reusing them, rather than reusing the same campsite every night). I must say I applaud the "Landscape view" approach to Roll20. It seems tailor made for more "theater of the mind" type of games, rather than grid-and-token games. I plan to adopt this style and start using more of this approach, starting now, as I already DM some theater of the mind style but without such attractive backgrounds on the screen.

@Gold I was actually tossing around the idea of sequential scenes with things like ruins and the extensions of the town was definitely on my mind. This month I'll be working on a mountainous set as an extension of the original Mountain Pass piece. If I had to describe this first set, calling it a variety pack would fit perfectly, not too specific, but yeah it suffers from not being able to flow into each other. The plot hook idea is really interesting. I can already picture an entire lineup of areas leading up to some final big bad showdown, and I especially love how a sort of fire's been lit in your imagination as well. @Brian I'll definitely do some pieces with different times of day as it's a great skill to have. They'll probably not be included in sets but off to the side so I can group the most important pieces together, y'know? Anyway, thanks for your input and suggestions guys.

So this first set you showed us would be a sample variety pack, eh? :D Those types of sets are something that I could definately use as I've just started a gridless (mapless) campaign that will rely on scene shots to give environmental clues or impressions. I like Brian and Gold's suggestions and those would probably be something that I would use. I still would like a way to customize the scenes also ( I know it would be hard if not impossible to do across all of them) but the ability to toss a side view token of a campsite, various ruins, or other items would do a lot to add variety to each scene.

Oh, exterior views of various buildings like Inns or Taverns, merchants shops, blacksmiths, etc would be nice also if that is within your skill set.

@Pat I was also thinking like, say there's a garden painting with an empty space in the middle. By itself it works fine, but I'd also include in the set something like a statue of a woman you'd be able to place in that spot, some other statue, a floating monster, an uncovered sewer grate, or even something as extreme as an inter-dimensional portal. One worry, though, is unless placed in the right spot some objects'll look weird, but. It'd also allow for something like a general shop interior, but different props to turn it into a blacksmith or apothecary. That being said, all this would make determining a price point a little confusing.

Hey Ridell. Million-dollar idea for ya, free of charge. Why? 'cuz I wanna see it happen but don't have the skill. Colorforms . Anybody remember those? Seriously. Think about it. -Phnord

1 word: Awesome.

Yeah, something like that would work. It doesn't matter if it was not perfectly lined for it is more about a representation of what the GM is describing. If the GM wanted perfect scale and such then he would normally use maps.

I'm a very map based tactical GM/player, but I am trying out a new idea in a new campaign that is similar to what is being discussed here. My combat encounters have maps, and tokens, and all that....but each scene is presented through a hand out. Any opening read aloud text is put into the hand out, and an image is put in as well, in an attempt to give theme/mood to the encounter. Then the GM side of the handout has all the adventure notes and stuff that doesn't really pertain to this conversation. I looked ever so briefly into the market place link in the OP, but saw nothing I would give money for. As, like was addressed in the OT, I can just look up images online. What would be perfect, though incredibly unlikely due to IP, is more specific images, images of specific places in a given published world. Things like the gates into Magnimar for Golarion, or the city of Tyr for Athas...though, yeah, IP. One thing I've noticed myself doing is instead of hunting for the right image anymore, most often I look up a lot of interesting images and try to work encounters based off what I find...which works for some things better than others.

Before roll 20 I used to troll for images and then write scenarios to make use of what i saw, now i build it all from the ground up, actually takes pucks more time, but saves explaining the rubber duckie in the moat...

I'm on board with Phenord's post about Colorforms. My idea for tokens for this would be similar, but you would have mainly the "backs" of the PC's, so they can stand in the foreground and you're looking over their shoulder into the scene. Then monster tokens could be forward facing (and resized down a bit for perspective), and layered under the PC tokens, for depth :)