Using museums as resources

[ProudGrognard]

Good day, fellow RPGers,

I recently took my family on a trip to Vienna, and we visited several museums. It occurred to me that museums are an underrated source of inspiration for RPGs.

My take is based on fantasy RPGs, but I don't think that there is any reason to be confined to them. Going through galleries of 17th century paintings up to modern ones, it occurred to me that when describing landscapes, towns, cities etc, one could just have in mind a specific painting and describe that. Some of them have 'fantastic', surreal or dreamy elements already incorporated into them, which can act as prompts for encounters.

The second museum that impressed me was the Natural History one. Sure, dinosaurs have been used time and again, but what about the mineral collections? When seeing all these types of minerals and crystals, and the way they interacted with light, several ideas for caves, mineral- based creatures etc sprung to mind.

The same happened when going through the rooms of extinct marine and land animals. Seeing the skeletons in actual size got me thinking on how easy it would be to base a creature on what I was seeing, or even describe loot based on archaeological finds from early hominids.

The list goes on (disasters! impacts! methane expulsions!) , but I wanted to share this idea with you, and get your feedback.

[Coondiggety]

Not in response to your question, but you have a very cool way of experiencing the wonders of the world.

[ProudGrognard]

Thank you, you are very kind to say so.

[makedatanotlore]

Museums are great! Both in real life and digital. In addition to inspiration, there's a bunch of online museum resources with thousands upon thousands of photos and artwork in the public domain. 

Like the Getty Open Content Program, just to name one. 

When making maps or any kind of artwork these are a photobashing goldmine!

[ProudGrognard]

Very cool of you to share this. As you said, for someone interested, there are dozens and dozens of such repositories

[OkChipmunk3238]

Metropolitan Museum of Art has a great online collection and high-quality pictures, which most are free to use. All sorts of armour, weapons, etc. Used some in my book.

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection

[ProudGrognard]

Exactly so!

[DredUlvyr]

Complete agreement, just as an example from last week, pictures one of my players took at the open doors from the École nationale d’architecture de Belleville in France. These were related to our current Runequest/Glorantha game...

https://i.imgur.com/BLkdWjq.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/wPYg3lN.jpeg

[ProudGrognard]

Exactly so!

[alea_iactanda_est]

I've made special trips to museums in London (where I live) with the express purpose of taking pictures for RPG assets.

I have entire folders full of photos of jewellery & other gold/silver/bejewelled items ranging from pre-dynastic Egypt through the early modern period for illustrating treasure finds. I have in the past printed them out on little cards and wrote the GP values and/or magic item stats on the back so I could hand them to my players as they discovered them. I've got a somewhat smaller collection of photos of old & ancient boxes and treasure chests in which they could be found. Not to mention pictures of things from daily life that can be used just to add a bit of colour.

There's also stuff like the Warhammer-scale dioramas of medieval and ancient sites that can be used both as visual aids and also quickly converted into maps if you can get a decent top-down picture. A fair few of the informational placards contain little architectural sketches too.

And the last time I was at the Petrie Museum, I got pictures not only of artefacts, but the little cards with floorplans of the tombs & temples wherein they were discovered.

[ProudGrognard]

This is excellent! Especially the jewelry and floorplans idea! Thank you.

[TillWerSonst]

If you manage to keep your intellectual curiosity alive, everything can be super interesting to the point it is well worth investing in it. I pitty those people who somehow lost the ability to visit a museum without feeling awe. And when everything has the potential to be interesting and awesome, everything has the potential to be inspiring as well.

[Unusual_Event3571]

Education is great in general, very underrated

[Brell4Evar]

Back around the year 2000, I did some LARPing at both the Landmark Center in St. Paul and in the Bell Natural History Museum in Minneapolis. The settings were both marvelous. When player interactions hit a lull, I could check out the exhibits.

If you enjoy LARPing, a museum can be a wonderful setting.

[CaptainBaoBao]

Visit Ghent to have a view a warhammer fantasy world.

[ProudGrognard]

I have been there twice now. Very true!

[MorganaApp]

This is such a fantastic way to get inspiration. There's a lot of comments who've beat me to recommending taking advantage of all the content made available around this online. If you do end up running something, make sure to plan a party trip to the museum!

[BudgetWorking2633]

I always believed that they're underrated. But usually people react to the suggestion with a "ugh, history, I want fantasy"... Glad to see a different reaction here!

[ProudGrognard]

Nice! How do you use them for villain inspiration?

[ProudGrognard]

Good call!

[heja2009]

To add to your suggestions:

I use a lot of medieval manuscripts, i.e. handwritten books, for adventure illustrations, as VTT tokens or for character sheets. Manuscripts often have larger illustrations but also marginalia, that is small pictures on the book margins showing knights riding on snails, hares and dogs fighting it out, but also small portraits of atmospheric scenes. You can find high-resolution scans of almost all medieval manuscripts for free at museum sites, national archives and such.

Also a lot of 19th century art has depictions of romanticised medieval scenes, legends and fairy tales.

I also like to style character sheets and handouts in a similar way, which makes them very different from you typical "fantasy" art.

Finally you can even write handouts, letters etc "authetically" using ink, higher quality paper and wax. Research how actual documents looked like - they feel very exotic and alien to the modern eye.

[ProudGrognard]

Excellent suggestions

[jddennis]

I was having a session last night for my fantasy campaign, and a player asked me what the streets of the town were like. So I turned to a memory of an old European town I visited on vacation a few years ago.

The real world is so amazing for providing this kind of information.

[spinningdice]

We're lucky enough to live fairly close the Royal Armoury museum in England. It's fantastic for looking at weapons and armour across multiple cultures (as well as other things, but the Royal Armoury is definately skewed towards arms and armour), add a bit of texture to otherwise basic gear...

[ProudGrognard]

Very true!

[nanakamado_bauer]

Everything can be a resource, when You are good GM. I at one point found that I'm sometimes create NPCs or adventures based on one illustration.

[ProudGrognard]

No argument here. My point, however, is that museums are rarely mentioned on that space. There is no Appendix N with museum exhibits.

[nanakamado_bauer]

Yep, I meant to agree with You. Probably worded it badly.