Creating a world/story based on art

Has anyone ever created a world based on a piece of art?

I am considering beginning to write this world but I would like some help. I have been influenced by the like of JM Perkins and his salt in wounds setting and would like to begin work on a whole new world but am at a loss as to how to start it out. I am no artist myself but there is an artist that I have in mind to draw influence from.

Anybody have any interest?

I'm always more than happy to help with world-building :)

Start small and work your way out. For example, if your art inspiration is a painting of a frog with a banana and bandanna, then your might ask yourself what the bandana says about the frog. Then you might imagine the frog's culture and backstory. Then more details about the culture, and geography, and history, etc.

As always, don't be afraid to change stuff. Just spitball and if something jumps out at you that you want to flesh out, you can do that, too.

For a game setting, you really need just a starting location, and a basic premise of what the world out there is like. The rest can be filled in as you go.

I have nothing helpful to offer as I'm no expert at world-building, but I just want to say taking inspiration from an art piece is a great idea! I often create characters (and their backstories) from art I find around the internet. Good luck to you! :-)

Reminds me of the old Everway system. Part of character creation was to draw from a stack of cards with evocative scenes, people and items on them and describe what those things meant to your character.

Interesting! I'm totally working this in next time I run a game! :-)

So what im going to be using to create this world is this gentleman's work.
Your text to link here...

The work of Simon Stalenhag is very interesting. His themes put the words "pseudo apocalypse" in my mind. Like some kind of biological outbreak happened and a group of mad(as in TOTALLY INSANE) scientists came together to solve the issue with SCIENCE! in the form of robots and machines. Somehow they managed to nearly wipe each other out. Life continues on a level similar to today's world, but there are remnants that spring up know and then. Half-rusted automatons (nano, human sized, and giant) pop up and go berserk, following programming that no longer serves a purpose. Nightmare biological monsters lurking in the woods at night, striking when the opportunity presents its self.

Very cool stuff.

World building is such a fun activity! The song 'Heretic' by Avenged Sevenfold inspired a setting for Cortex Plus Dramatic for me. My execution left a little to be desired... but it was fun.

The first Shark Bone iteration was all about pulling story ideas from media and my current show focuses on world building. I love pulling inspiration from all over.

Also, that art is pretty cool. I don't think I've ever come across Simon Stalenhag's work before.

So my initial idea is to use SCIENCE! and global warming (trope) basically the ozone burns up the north freezes, and the equator gets to hot to travel through, all that is left in the green zone is middle america or around 35 degrees longitude. Make it a travel adventure from one side of the world to the other. Then, use the pictures to describe encounters along the path as they go along.

That is really good too.I can totally see that kind of story in that artwork.

FATE Core (and, originally, Dresden Files) has a world building pregame set up. It's structured to create themes, locations, and faces to represent organizations/locations/forces of influence.

There is a system called Microscope where the game is a sort of meta-game. There is some loosey-goosey rp, but mainly it's purpose is to create a history. It's almost like taking the world building mini-game in FATE and blowing up into a game in and of itself. I've heard of people using it before starting a campaign to generate the setting.

There's another one called Kingdom which I haven't read, but it I believe is for creating a more physical location and the organizations/powers within it rather than a history.

There's a supplement for Dungeon World called Perilous Wilds which has a pretty nice system for creating a world for exploration which leaves open space for still discovering the things in between the stuff defined in the mini-game.

The commonality, I suppose, is that all of these are collaboratively created, and so reflect what players will want to see in the game to come. My point is, perhaps, you don't need to fully define the world. With art that evocative, you could do a game session worth of creation before hand with a others to add coolness to the pot, and then see what emerges from play.

Genisisect introduced me to Questlandia's world-building phase which I really liked. He plugged it into a D&D 5e game, and I subsequently plugged it into my Dungeon World game.