Illustrations & Emojis

One of the questions I think about with TTRPGs is:  How much should a rulebook rely on illustrations? 

After all, roleplaying is mostly about words and imagination.  Roleplayers are highly literate, and are used to reading novels that paint incredible pictures using words alone. 

You've probably read rulebooks where the illustrations actually made a setting feel less compelling because they didn't really nail the tone or quality that you expected. But I think even high-quality illustrations can undermine the reader's imagination if they are overly-specific.  A picture can be worth a thousand words, but even just a few of the right words can be more evocative than any picture. 

Back in the pre-internet days, rulebook illustrations were a lot more important because there weren't many ways you could find images of orcs, elves, etc.  But nowadays with Google Images, Pinterest, video games, etc., everyone has seen these things a bajillion times already and have a mental image of what they should look like.  

Anyway, for illustrations in Smile Police 2084, I'm mostly staying with a few spot illustrations done in a style that splits the difference between "gamey" and "casual corporate".  It suits the tone and also my personal art style. I've been drawing these on my iPad Air in procreate.

And more recently I've gone in a direction that uses emojis in the sub-headings.  The nice thing about these is that they reinforce the social media satire while also acting as micro-illustrations that make it easier to scan the page.  I'm using the Noto Color Emoji font as base (which I especially enjoy because Noto is from Google, which Yazzle is a parody of), but I'm modifying many of the glyphs to be more legible and match tonally.