#genre aesthetic

[fallensapphires]

Aesthetics: Dark Academia

I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.

[secret-restaurant-press]

An excerpt from Nate Hoil's new short story published in PULP LIT MAG. Read the full issue HERE

[abnormes]

Spirit, George Roux (1885)

[castielsprostate]

i hate you "influencers", i hate you tiktok, i hate you "content creators", i hate you "unalive" and "s€x" and "dr/ügs", i hate you instagram, i hate you consumerism, i hate you family friendly, i hate you puritans, i hate you facebook, i hate you family vloggers, i hate you violating other people's privacy, i hate you modern day social media

[prokopetz]

It's actually kind of striking how tightly wedded most major genres of tabletop RPGs are to the decades when they were popularised.

Trad fantasy tabletop RPGs – even those that aren't positioned as revivalist – are so intent on emulating the sword and sorcery literature of the 1970s that the only reason they don't come off as quaintly nostalgic is because nobody reads sword and sorcery anymore.

Cyberpunk tabletop RPGs are, at this point, essentially an exercise in retrofuturism, endlessly polishing a vision of what people in the 1980s thought the year 2015 would look like.

Urban fantasy tabletop RPGs might include smartphones and electric cars in their equipment tables and mention 9/11 in their lore chapters, but culturally and aesthetically, most of them are taking place in a world where the 1990s never ended.

I don't mean this as a criticism – I'm just fascinated with how this tendency is so strong that, for example, a brand new urban fantasy RPG written in the year 2024 is liable to end up being a 1990s period piece at heart even when that was 100% not the author's intention, simply through the inertia of the medium's well-established tropes.

I'm mostly curious what the characteristic tabletop RPG genre of the 2020s is going to end up being thirty or forty years from now, and I hope I live long enough to find out!

[goryhorroor]

horror sub-genres: lovecraftian/cosmic

[life-imitates-art-far-more]

Joseph-Marius Avy (1871-1939) "Bal Blanc"

[lionofchaeronea]

Nighthawks, Edward Hopper, 1942

[acinematicworld]

Tyra Banks, Lindsey Lohan, and Jere Burns in promotional photos for Life Size (2000)

[fallensapphires]

Genres: Dystopia

Where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission.

[diemelusine]

Aline Marie Chazal Tristán, "The Artist's Mother" (c. 1889) by Paul Gauguin. Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

[vintagecandy]

Page full of paint study doodles that i spent way too long on ❤️ going to turn them into stickers too :)

[abnormes]

Lovers in the Small Boat, Maximilian Pirner (1884)

[tk-sketches]

Sharing some footage from my little robot murder mystery game - there’s been a MURDER and YOU gotta solve it!! Gather clues! Compare witnesses! Yell at people!! That’s right - we’ve got it all! 

(gonna try to get a demo out when i can!)

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

[goryhorroor]

horror sub-genres: werewolf