Impossible Landscapes won an ENnie!
One of my favorite projects of the dark, lost year of 2020 was doing the layout and graphic design for Arc Dream’s Delta Green RPG book Impossible Landscapes. I’m thrilled that this book has won GenCon ENnie award for Best Layout and Design! This is a huge recognition in the RPG world, and I’m incredibly honored and pleased.
When Shane Ivey, Dennis Detwiller, and I first discussed their plans for this book, they said they wanted things to start out fairly normal and then gradually become weirder and weirder. They wanted stains and grunge and a creeping sense of dread. Lots of handwritten notes and typographical oddities cumulating in full-blown surreal cosmic madness, all to lead the Agents (players) on a mind-bending journey across decades and through countless horrors. Hell yes!
I remember doing some preliminary pages to send to them, and they said it looks great, but make it even more weird and even more grungy. And given free rein to be as messy and layered and chaotic as I wanted (while still respecting the long-standing Delta Green aesthetic), I completely fell in love with this project. It was an incredibly difficult and time-consuming collaborative process that drove me a little bit mad (much in the spirit of things!), but the result is one of the books that I’m most proud of. (Other than my first large-scale RPG book design project The Fall of Delta Green of course!).
By the time I came onboard the project, the text and most of the ideas for handouts and Dennis’ illustrations were complete. My working process is largely improvisational and intuitive, so having Dennis’ amazing art to riff off of to develop each spread layout was incredibly inspiring. I’ve always been fascinated by the interplay between text and images, and this was the perfect project to explore that.
One of the section divider spreads. I loved the movement of the fabric in Dennis’s illustration and echoed it in the circles.
One of my favorite spreads, displaying Dennis’s great sense of chiaroscuro and some of the full-blown text weirdness toward the end of the book.
One of my other favorite parts of this book was the opportunity to create many pieces of interesting ephemera which are to be given to Agents in the course of the game as clues. I was given text for each item and a general idea of what it should look like. I think I’ve realized too late in life that my dream job would be creating props and graphic elements for imaginary worlds such as movies, but creating these things for a book definitely scratched that itch!
A very special invitation… For this one I raided my stash of vintage odds and ends for the perfect embossed bit of cardstock.
A bit of handwritten madness…Oddly, no matter how much I try to disguise my handwriting it still looks like my handwriting to me.
And my favorite- some strange sheet music. This is the second draft. When I sent the first one for approval, they asked “can it actually be sung?” The answer was no, because I had just made something that looked like music. So I made sure that this one actually makes sense as music and is readable as such while still looking slightly odd. Some intrepid Agents on Reddit actually recorded a couple of different versions!
The other thing I enjoyed about this project was reading the text to get ideas for images to add to the pages. There is so much interesting imagery in this book! I love the hunt for images, whether from my own large stash of photos I’ve accumulated for my own artwork or design projects, or combing various public-domain image sources online.
The text on this page describes a murder scene in which three chairs appear. Finally found a use for that random street chair I photographed ten years ago!
A magical orrery/carrousel allowing persons to travel to The Skeleton City and Carcosa!
I honestly wish I could share more of this amazing book here, but really, if you like the Delta Green RPG, Lovecraftian Horror, and anything weird and fantastic, you should get yourself a copy!
(And I’m always open to discussing further mad collaborations with anyone who has a project in need of a designer!)