Inspiration from album artwork

[aher]

About 2 weeks ago, Martin Brown (AKA the grognardgamer) did another one of his fabulous interviews--James E. Raggi IV: Lamentations of the Flame Princess Interview.

In that interview, Raggi says that one of his inspirations was album artwork from Cannibal Corpse.

I was curious whether anyone else has gotten inspiration for their games from evocative album artwork?

Maybe I'm just in a "Robots & Rayguns" mood right now, but two album covers that I'm really liking are

#1 The Silver City by Jeremy Messersmith (2008)



#2 News of the World by Queen (1977)



(Maybe this just means I need to run a Gamma World adventure soon...)

The Queen album cover was painted by Frank Kelly Freas (pronounced "Freeze"), the same guy who created Alfred E. Newman on the cover of Mad Magazine, and illustrated numerous volumes of Weird Tales and Astounding Science Fiction.

In fact, the Queen cover was based on a cover Freas did for Astounding Science Fiction in October 1953. It had the caption: "Please... fix it, Daddy?" There was an episode (Season 10, Episode 16) of Family Guy last year inspired by this album artwork.

You can see the official Kelly Freas web site here, and an unofficial fan site here.

I'm not sure of the background on the Silver City artwork, but you can see a large version of the JPG here.

[Vile Traveller]

I played in a whole campaign inspired by Keith Laumer's "A Plague of Demons" and these:

[kesher]

Awesome stuff! That Messersmith album cover is great!

Man, the Somewhere in Time cover takes me back. For some reason it it always struck me as being done by Jim Holloway as a moonlighting gig...

[jakdethe]

I always love looking at power metal albums, all very swords and sorcery. But one thing in particular stuck out to me lately. I was inspired to make a female bard called the She-Wolf inspired by Megadeth's song of the same name. She'd use charms, sleep spells, and utilize poison. I normally abhor the idea of playing female characters (just because of how most modern gamers handle it like fetish role playing). Seemed like a cool idea but haven't had a chance to test it.

[aher]

I thought I recognized some of the imagery in Iron Maiden's Somewhere In Time album artwork:

- The Bradbury Towers
- The hover cars
- The looming black pyramids in the background
- The neon signs
- The Chinese writing on some of the ads
- The cyborg with a gun
- The marquee over the movie theater even seems to read "Blade Runner" if you squint at it long enough

This is a wonderful homage to the film Blade Runner! Great stuff.

I found really big version of this album artwork here.

[scalydemon]

Hey, good thread

I'm sure there are many that would fit the bill, but this is one I have uploaded on photobucket at the moment that I think has real possibilities