Portrait packs?

DanHeidel

Mongoose
Has Mongoose ever released packs of portraits for use in games? I'm running into situations in a lot of the modules where some of the NPCs will have portraits but not all. I'd love to be able to have a pool of character portraits done by the same artist(s) so that I can have portraits to include with everyone.

It's jarring to have a bunch of portraits with wildly differing art styles and unless you randomize them, it's pretty obvious to players which NPCs are the significant ones in the same way you always knew which plank on a wooden bridge was going to break in cheap Hanna Barberra cartoons.
 
For VTT, Fantasy Grounds in particular, there are lots of portrait packs to use.

Not using a VTT there are similar portrait packs on DriveThru, etc.
 
For VTT, Fantasy Grounds in particular, there are lots of portrait packs to use.

Not using a VTT there are similar portrait packs on DriveThru, etc.
I'm fully aware that there's plenty of portrait packs out there. The problem is that the vast majority of them are fantasy themed or aimed specifically at urban cyberpunk style sci-fi which is often a poor fit for Traveller unless you're specifically doing that setting in game. And even if the overall theme is decent, you're going to have a hard time finding Aslan, Hiver, etc pictures. There's some Traveller themed artwork out there but, frankly, a lot of it was pretty low quality.

And even if it's high quality, it's clearly in a different art style. That's an immediate giveaway to the players that NPCs 12 and 3 are probably more important to the adventure than NPCs AB and C. My players are certainly good enough to avoid consciously exploiting the metagaming here (even if they are guaranteed to hassle me about it) but it breaks immersion. As a player, it's hard to be completely objective with how you're approaching the game after that - are you interrogating NPC 2 because you genuinely think she's the spy or is it because she's clearly got a Mongoose portrait and is therefore much more likely to be the spy for that reason?
 
And even if it's high quality, it's clearly in a different art style. That's an immediate giveaway to the players that NPCs 12 and 3 are probably more important to the adventure than NPCs AB and C. My players are certainly good enough to avoid consciously exploiting the metagaming here (even if they are guaranteed to hassle me about it) but it breaks immersion. As a player, it's hard to be completely objective with how you're approaching the game after that - are you interrogating NPC 2 because you genuinely think she's the spy or is it because she's clearly got a Mongoose portrait and is therefore much more likely to be the spy for that reason?
Just use all third party portraits, nothing says if a particular NPC happens to have one that you have to use it.
 
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