Public Domain Images II

Spawn of Endra asked how I found some of the pics I do. I posted about a year ago about that.  It's been so long that Archive.org changed the interface of their online reader.  But for the most part I think the steps hold up.  A few more thoughts, especially if you're bypassing OBI and going straight to Archive.org:

Finding Cool Stuff is Mostly Just Luck
If you want to find generally interesting pictures the best way to start would probably be to search for "Fairy Tales" or "Arabian Nights" in the search bar of the texts section.  A lot of the great illustrators did work in those spheres and they are subjects that are far more likely to have illustrations.

If you want to search for something specific like a knight or a shield, you'll need to be clever with the key words you use and get lucky.

For example, Gorillas were apparently unknown to Westerners until around 1860, with scientific study not taking place until the '20s.  Good luck trying to find a nice gorilla illustration in the public domain.

You can improve you specific search luck if you can come up with keywords in different languages that's good, there are a bunch of great French, German, and other language books up.

Tracing a Pic's Source
Theoretically, if you like a picture I post, you can find more like it.  I try, as a practice, to leave picture file names as I found them so you can figure out the original source.  (In a perfect world I would post source and artist information for every picture, but that seems so much like work I doubt I would post much).  So, for example, the first pic from the last post is called:

giantcrabotherta00jataiala_0073

What do you think I was actually searching for? : ) I'll give you a hint: its a creature in OD&D.  Hopefully, you can figure out from that info that the book is: The Giant Crab, and Other Tales from Old India (1897) and there might be other illustrations in it that you like.

Search for Artists you Like
You can also look on the title page to find the artist listed as W. Robinson.  That's too common a name to help, but a search on Wikipedia brings up W. Heath Robinson. Put that in the search box and Bingo!, a list of books to check out.  ('Course this only works if the uploader was diligent enough to tag the illustrator) Searching through all those, I found a couple quirky pics:

But check this angel with five-o'clock shadow out, it appears to be by his brother Charles:

And, coolest for me, I found a nice silhouette of this "very distinguished lobster":

If it were a Crab, the cyclical serendipity would have been perfect, but it's still pretty cool.

Enough of that.  One more tip:

Google Sucks
They kinda do these days.  They go to the trouble of digitizing thousands of books and then upload images so contrasty I don't know what people even do with them.  The illustrations are too jacked up to be useful to me.  Project Gutenberg is a great project but doesn't handle images well.  MSN or any named university claiming a digital upload means it will suck.  Also, the same books are often scanned and posted multiple times, which, inexplicably don't always show up in searches.

Pop quiz, in the image above which link do you follow to find good illustrations? First one is MSN, no.  Then two by the Google, nope.  The last two should be okay.  I gravitate to the last one with more downloads.  This seems trivial, but if you are looking for art on Archive.org it will save you hours and hours.

Hope that helps.

The Perfect OSR Product

As we enter a new year the thought of where the OSR might or even should go next is natural.  There seems to be a lot of dissatisfaction with "retreads" and the possibility of "too many retroclones."  Which is fine, I can understand the thinking there.  What is problematic for me is the assumption that the solution here is for people to find just the right kind of product to put out and everything will be swell; an innovative product, a artful but familiar product, a useful product.

This feels to me like I'm sitting here in my AC Cobra watching the buggy whip salesmen fighting tooth and nail over the last of the dwindling market of buggy owners.

That AC Cobra?  This here blog community.  I understand the sentiment that something doesn't exist in the gaming world if it doesn't exist on a shelf in a brick and mortar store.  But that is just not true any more.

I've learned more in the last year about playing rpgs than I had in my whole life prior.  Part of that was because I was reading all the awesome stuff you've posted, part of it was me working to come up with something equally cool to give back to you.  It wasn't because I bought all the key products put out by OSR designers.

I don't mean for this to be an anti-capitalist rant; if you want to package your cool blog stuff into something people can buy, fine.  In fact the weakness of a blog is that cool things can be spread all over it, difficult to find, and in draft form.  Editing and polishing can be essential for ideas. 

The problem is when people start thinking unless their ideas have been packaged into a product and unless they have sold well, they are not valid, or useful, or not somehow real.

I'm reading your blogs.  I'm using your ideas in my weekly game.  I'm even posting in praise of those things that seem really interesting or game-changing to me.  Your ideas are real for me without me having to pay for a pdf.

One bad aspect of focussing on products is people keeping things hush hush so that the product, when finally released, will make a bigger splash.  "I'm working on a cool thing but I can't tell you anything about it." Lame.  Why are you blogging about it if I can't know what it is until you finish it and sell it to me?

The worst case scenario for me is when someone has blogged about something, received the benefit of an attentive audience, received helpful comments (even if only in the sense that they are encouragement), and then after turning it into a product they yank it all off their blog so you have to buy it to read it. Man, that sucks.

I guess in a nutshell what I'm saying is when you put something on a blog you are in fact publishing.  You can have an audience without needing an sku or a distribution company.  And I think that's pretty damn cool.  That was supposed to be the point of the Internet, right?  So why then is everyone scrambling around trying to come up with the perfect OSR product when it's right under our noses?
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Okay if you've made it this far (and in keeping with the spirit of this post I might add) here is my coin for the boatman:

Nested Golems
Being difficult and costly to create, a few savvy wizards have learned to make golems one inside another, the outer layers made of the cheapest materials.  Meant primarily as guardians, the idea was that least amount of resources would be spent in dealing with any individual threat.  Usually of humanoid shape, when one layer is destroyed the next slightly smaller golem will step free as from a shell and continue assaulting intruders.  The particular layers are varied, one know configuration follows:

• 1st layer: 1hd, 8ft tall, clay- impervious to electrical attacks
• 2nd: 2hd, 6ft, brass- impervious to fire, successful hits on it inflict 1d4 heat damage on attacker.
• 3rd: 4hd, 4ft, silver- impervious to acid, ray or beam attacks reflect back on attacker.
• 4th: 6hd, 2ft, lead- 1/2 damage from weapons. Successful hits on it must save of have the attacking weapon stuck in the soft lead.
• 5th: 8 hd, 1ft, gold- impervious to electrical, acid.  1/2 damage from weapons.  Successful hit on it cause all creatures within 30ft to save versus charm or feel they should just leave the area.

All damage based on weapon type.

Public Domain Images

I love old engraved illustrations. Unfortunately, good sources seem to be trickling digitally onto the web more slowly than you might imagine. If you're trying to find an image to represent your magic item or put in a module you're probably having a hard time. I figured in the spirit of sharing and DIY I'd share the secret to my public domain image source. I've scoured the web but found one particularly rich vein this year:

Step 1: Go to the Old Book Illustrations Scrapbook Blog. Subscribe to their feed or check often.


Step 2: The OBI blog puts links to sources under all their pics. Look for promising illustrations hosted on the Internet Archive. Why? Because often there will be many more illustrations in that same book, sometimes cooler than what OBI chose to display, and you know archive.org will have the whole book. Also you can get a little better resolution images.

Why not just start at archive.org you're probably thinking. You can if you know what to search for, but try as I might OBI has soundly defeated my search-fu; they find stuff I didn't even know to search for. My favorite so far has been several illustrated French dictionaries of furnishings.

Step 3: Follow the link to archive.org. The entire book is available in various formats on the left. Grab the whole pdf if that works for you and realize you can a) import individual pages of a pdf into an image editor as an image (I use the Gimp) failing that b) you can capture a screenshot of the page your interested in and work with that.

For some reason large pdfs are sloooooooooooow on my machine. So slow that I had to figure out this different process which probably works better anyway.

Step 4: Read online. Archive.org has a cool feature that lets you flip through every page of a book as jpgs.


Step 5: Go to multi-page view and scroll through the whole book.


With the images scaled t0 ~11% you can go through the book pretty fast while still catching interesting pictures. The arrow points to the page view controls.

Step 6: Click a page you like, scale it up to 100% and right click to save your image.Then click the multi-page view and continue your treasure hunt.


The online reader is smart enough to save your zoom settings, so if you like 11% multi-page and 100% single, you can toggle back and forth to your heart's content.

Step 7: Edit. Of course that's a little more difficult, but you'll probably want to at least crop the image and change the mode from color to grayscale. Some of these illustrations are faint so I fiddle with the contrast. But the real fun is creatively editing them or pasting them together as collage.

I hope this wasn't so obvious as to waste your time, but I've found some illustrations this way that I haven't seen anywhere online. Like this picture of the Elephanta Caves from a British book on India:


That looks so gritty and mysterious I want to explore it. Hopefully you find something equally cool.

On Sharing

I thought I should say explicitly, you can use everything on my blog under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Sharing is important to me. I'm a big Free Software advocate. I'm not sure if the license I've chosen isn't too restrictive. What I mean is, I'll use it as a legal baseline, but I would rather you use my creations than worry about thanking me specifically for them. And if you want to use them in a module you're planning on selling, just contact me, I'll probably be thrilled.