In “real life” play, I like to use artwork of photographs as illustrations—in the campaign handout (the text of which is now in the Wiki), or in other “in game” documents (such as notices posted in the Vind Hall. For instance, DeviantArt has been a great source for NPC character portraits _(“Here, this is what Lodur, Son of Rigg looks like.”) However, in posting material to this Web site, I am not willing to use what is clearly copyrighted material.

Thus, the search for things licensed under the Creative Commons license. Unfortunately (for me, but understandably for the artists), only a few things on DeviantArt carry a Creative Commons designation. Though the AvatarArt offer is tempting, I can’t justify the cost of custom-made artwork for every NPC who crosses through the campaign.

So I’ve been spending some time over the past couple of days trawling the depths of Flickr’s creative commons photographs . Searching on “renaissance faire” or “renfaire” photos with a Creative Commons designation has yielded some viable candidates for my photographic mangling. Some of the NPCs now have thumbnail portraits, with attribution to the artist/photographer and link to the original source material in the biographical sections for the NPCs.

I’ve also been toying with modifying the photographs to look like sketches, but being new to Photoshop Elements, my efforts have been a little hit or miss. At least I’ll have something to toy with until I get to run my campaign again.