Painting The Medium / Tabletop Games

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• The Dresden Files: The game's rulebooks are... unique.
  • They're presented as a rough draft written by Billy the werewolf and handed over to Harry for perusal and correction. As a result, they're full of marginalia written by Harry (complaining about how Billy describes him, making bad pop culture references, and yelling at him to cut out top-secret White Council information), Bob (technical details about magical beings, plus a bunch of dirty jokes), and Billy himself (responding to the other two), who are differentiated by different typefaces, colors, and sizes of "handwriting." There are sticky notes all over the place, Harry occasionally uses it as scrap paper, the illustrations are taped in, and Billy dropped it in a puddle. And when Harry is being used as an example character and starts griping in the marginalia about how he's starting to hate his "player", the fourth wall is in danger of being tipped over.
  • The second version, Dresden Files Accelerated, does the same thing in a different way. The book is this time the work of Ivy, with post-it note annotations where she and Kincaid argue about puns and swap one-liners. There's even one where they discuss how odd it is that Harry doesn't wear a hat, which goes so far as to have a sticker of the Evil Hat Publishing logo applied.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The rust monster's illustration in the first edition's Monster Manual shows its corrosive antennae eating a hole in the picture's frame.
  • Eberron: Exploring Eberron, a sourcebook that isn't technically Wizards of the Coast canon but is Keith Baker's collected Word of God, has a section dealing with the planes of existence. When it starts discussing Xoriat, the Plane of Madness, the table for determining the unique properties of the part of the plane you're in requires you to roll a thirteen-sided die. Such things do exist, but they're a niche product aimed at hardcore dice nerds - far from standard D&D equipment!
• Magic: The Gathering:
  • In Time Spiral, the timeshifted cards are printed in the old card frame to show that they are from the past. In Planar Chaos, they're printed in an alternate version of the new frame to show that they are from an alternate universe (i.e., they are color-shifted versions of existing cards). In Future Sight, they're printed in a futuristic frame because they are previews of possible future sets.
  • There are numerous single-card examples in the Un- joke sets:
    • "Old Fogey" and "Blast from the Past" are both in the old card face, while "Old Fogey" also says "summon" instead of "creature" in the manner of older cards.
    • "Look at Me, I'm R&D" looks like a playtest card, with a placeholder space for art and scribbled-in corrections.
    • "Richard Garfield, PhD" looks like a religious painting.
    • "Stone-Cold Basilisk has a frame that appears to be made of stone.
    • "Fraction Jackson"'s text box, art box, and expansion symbol are cut in half.
    • "Topsy Turvy" is printed upside down.
    • "capital offense" is printed using only lowercase letters.
  • The Eldrazi get special colorless frames as well.
  • Art for most cards is confined to a rectangular box in the middle. Planeswaker cards often have part of their art poking out the top of it, into the area usually reserved for the card name.
• Paranoia: Player documents have security level Red, while gamemaster materials are classified Ultraviolet. Since the players' Troubleshooters start at Red level, they are technically guilty of treason if they read the higher-level rules. The GM is encouraged to terminate the PCs if they try to game the rules, and players are encouraged — in true Paranoia fashion — to know the rules but to not let on that they know them...
• Planet Mercenary: The rulebook is presented as an in-universe artifact (an RPG produced by the weapons company of the same name as a combined training tool and marketing system) complete with commentary from the writers, their superiors, and the legal department that someone forgot to delete. About halfway through the CEO goes homicidal and the writers stage a mutiny.
• Shadowrun: Game supplements are often presented in the form of in-character online documents, to which various deckers have appended their own commentary. Often, their remarks contain plot-hooks for Game Masters as well as jokes for readers.
• Vampire: The Masquerade: In the original Malkavian Clanbook, various pages throughout the book were altered, using mirrored text and other techniques. One of the most dramatic was a page talking about alternate food sources for some Malkavians. As it reached the end of the page it discussed a particular vampire who fed on words — and then featured a picture of said vampire who appeared to be eating the text off the page, leaving scattered words and a large blank area. What's even scarier, the Malkavian in question was supposed to eat not only words, but also ideas that these words represent. Cue the paragraph about the Word-Eater's diet not only blurring and falling apart under his hand, but at the same time degrading into gibberish ending with an orphaned line on the other page: "...and other butchers' aprons."
• Warhammer 40,000: In the novels, nearly all Space Marine Dreadnoughts are depicted speaking in bold text like this. Example: Bjorn the Fell-Handed in Battle of the Fang. This is a justified case, as Dreadnoughts are Mini-Mecha with a critically wounded Space Marine inside, with their voices being amplified via speakers, and the bold text is the only way to render this well in text. The games featuring Dreadnoughts avert this, instead being able to properly depict a Dreadnought's mechanically bass voice.

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