This week has been a little slow due to illness, though we have been working hard on upcoming features as well as improvements to the character sheets — more on that soon. For now though, I wanted to go into a bit more debt about the feature we introduced last week, the colour schemes.
With that, we also introduced the ability to upload your own image background, which will of course be the primary visual feature of your campaign, being even more prominent to your players than the campaign icon. We already mentioned some tricks last week about what type of image would work well from a design perspective, but we want to expand on that to help you personalize your campaign to your liking. After all there are other factors to consider beyond design.
Clearly the setting itself is a major factor: a space opera will need to take a different approach than a fantasy or modern game. But the image you choose does not just communicate the setting, it also communicates “mood”. Mood does not just affect what your campaign looks like on our platform, but it is also a powerful way to communicate to your players about what they can expect… and what is expected of them in terms of characters.
Both images below are, appropriate for the time of year, themed around a medieval horror campaign involving the undead. The first though is oriented around being “creepy”, with the implicit assumption that characters should be emotionally more complicated, while the second has the implicit assumption that the campaign will be action filled and see combat against an undead horde. Both are valid play-styles of course, but a bar-wench character who has a terrible secret might find such a character to be a better fit for the first campaign, while a wisecracking, battle-hardened veteran sword-master might be more at home in the second.
Once you know what mood you want to convey, finding the right image becomes easier — but never easy. To help you out, many sites have large collection of desktop backgrounds, and many of those are excellent for use with your campaign.
In the end, personalizing means that you must decide what is and what is not a good fit, but if you have questions about it, we would be happy to give our views in the forum. We have no changelog this week, but keep an eye out for new features next week!