1KM1KT Free RPG Community

So this is something that's been bothering me for a while now:

I'm working on three or four projects simultaneously (Street Rats, an Open Legend setting, a post-apocalyptic roleplaying game, and an unofficial Degenesis supplement), and I've noticed one really annoying trend between all of them: There's no good page background art that I can think of to make the pages look less stupidly white. Anyone know some good ideas for, sources of, or guides to creating simple page background art?

you need to be VERY careful with background art. Wrong color, to many images, even being a tad to dark on 1 side can destroy a players ability to read the text. The was a for pay game (secrets of Zir'an) that used not only a cryptic fantasy language as a background...but it was SILVER in the print version. Light reflective silver, just damn.


just make sure the background works with the text....

Yeah, it's a tough question!

I, for one, don't see white backgrounds as "stupid", but, of course, tastes vary.

What I find a nice solution for page design is FRAMES - not too thick, semi-transparent, frames, that don't really mingle with the text (or just do so for example in one of the corners).

Sometimes (if we are talking about full-page backgrounds behind the text) "paper texture" works (e.g. "parchment"), but, of course, you can't really do cyberpunk on parchment

I'd second the parchment idea. for cyberpunk, maybe the slightest hint of old monitor lines. Like green lines or a light gray with white lines in it. If you can manage it, the computer background should come from a number of different background pictures (4-6?) that change where the lines would be on the page so they would seem to move up or down as you flip through the pages.

I'm fine with busy margins of the page, just not behind the text. The big disadvantage to it is that it costs more ink to print out the pages. There are ways of suppressing layer output in printing PDFs but I haven't figured out how to make that work yet.

http://www.pd4pic.com/paper-stationery- ... old-4.html looks pretty good

Not so much luck with the screen lines.

I'm tending toward interesting borders at the moment rather than background images.

But I've got folders and folders full of parchment effects for page backgrounds that I've accumulated over the years.

I try to attribute where I can, but a lot of these files are so old that I can't remember where I came from (and in some cases I forgot to appropriately label things.