GMs, games designers and many players often need themed and styled artwork to help to design, illustrate, promote and play games. The following sites offer licenced images, which can be used freely for a variety of game related purposes. Possible uses include:
Posters and leaflets promoting events and groups
In-game illustrations
Images for web and blog pages
Picture referencing
Most of the sites have Creative Commons or Open Source licencing, so the images can be used with relatively few restrictions. In most cases the source should be credited with a link or an acknowledgement. Commercial use of the images may be possible but it is important to check the exact licence for each image.
SXC, as it’s known, has a huge collection of standard stock images. It offers plenty of pictures of landscapes, animals, people and technological devices. As a result, SXC is good for finding figure references and the landscape images can be modified in Photoshop and similar software. The images are usually licenced for certain types of commercial use but some photographers ask to be notified when their work is being used publicly.
Wikipedia’s media bank is packed with free images. A lot of the images have Creative Commons licences and there are more resizable SVG images available in this collection than elsewhere. The content is of mixed quality but the site has particular strengths in areas like heraldry. A wide range of images of historical architecture and relics, illustrated manuscripts and scalable content make Wikimedia Commons useful for in-game illustrations, leaflets, posters and picture references.
The Open Clipart Library contains over 12,000 free clipart images. The images are available in PNG and SVG formats. Unfortunately, the quality is very mixed, so it’s easier to recommend the site for its potential rather than the current content. The entire set of images can be downloaded to your hard disc for faster access.
Google Image Search and Flickr Creative Commons
Google Image Search and Flickr Creative Commons offer filtered searches for licenced images. The results vary and both search engines are usually only useful for picture referencing.
There are a few hundred fantasy icons available for free at the Treasure website. The collection includes weapons, shields, stars, heraldic icons and other fantasy images. The images are all available in SVG and PDF format, which means they can be put into either drawing or painting software. When used with drawing software, (such as Inkscape, CorelDraw or Illustrator), the images can be scaled to larger sizes without becoming distorted. The images are all provided under a Creative Commons licence.
Overall, the choice of free images available to help out players and designers is limited but not as limited as it used to be. While it’s hardly surprising that there are not a lot of commercial quality images and artwork available, it’s disappointing to see how few players put up Creative Commons images on sites like Flickr. Pictures of games, games being played and minatures would all be useful but most have ‘All Rights Reserved’ stuck on them. Surely there are some half decent, game playing photographers out there who could offer a series of stock RPG images?
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