Natural 7

GLÅUGUST 2026 - 6

This is a continuation of my entries to the GLÅUGUST 2026 challenges. You can review all previous posts here:

If you want to follow along, you can read the Nothic's Eye GLÅUGUST 2026 challenges here.

Challenge the Sixth

5 - Write about the effects of in-world fashion or clothing on your elfgame.

I see several ways one could go about answering this prompt:

  1. Someone in your party makes a specific fashion choice for their character. How did that affect the game/world?
  2. The world has some specific fashion. How did that affect the adventures played in that world?

I'll try to present an answer for each of these possibilities.

1 - Player Fashion Affects World

OK, thinking about this prompt was a challenge. I skimmed through most of the campaigns I've run and found nothing related to player fashion making a huge difference. Yes there are always fun wardrobes in my games and often a wardrobe change halfway through a game, but no it doesn't usually have any effect.

So, instead, I thought about games I've played in (which is many) and I think I've come up with a good example. Let's talk about the Mythic Bastionland westmarches game I played in (I've drawled ad nauseum about this in my first posts on the blog).

Every character in MB gets some interesting starting equipment which helps inform the vibes of their specific Knight. In the case of the Gazer Knight (p. 108), they get a tapestry cloak which tells a unique story. This story portrays an Event and a Subject. They also get a toothed blade, which is a whole symbol in itself, but I won't count that as a fashion statement here.

We had two Gazer Knights in the game I played in. The first was played by a good friend, and the second was played by me.

The tapestry cloak of the first Gazer Knight told the story of their own death. We never described this scene until it actually happened: at the hands of another Knight in a duel for rulership of the realm.

The tapestry cloak of the second Gazer Knight told the story of the death of a seer. This scene was described right from the get-go, because it was a very important seer whom everyone cared about dying. It put a lot of shame on the Knight themself, because it was obvious that they were the one who had killed that seer.

Both of these pieces of fashion, while dictated by the game, were integral to these characters. They were involved in nearly after action they took, adding a certain weight to their actions and reputation. Seeing the face of death woven into these cloaks truly changed how we interacted with each other and how NPCs interacted with us (especially in the case of the second Gazer Knight, for it became a very negative story to tell).

Notably, when the first Gazer Knight died, their tapestry cloak was taken to hang over another knight's mantlepiece so that they would be forever remembered.

2 - World Fashion Affects Players

The second long D&D campaign that I ran was inspired heavily by the artwork of Kan Liu (link to instagram). The robes, hairstyles, silver bangles, and inky colors did wonders for my worldbuilding, which in turn affected how my players engaged with the world themselves.

Having a strong fashion theme gave a lot of opportunities for my players to latch onto something specific about the world and create their own experience from it. One player became a monk based on descriptions of an elemental monastery; another player took the images of constructs and made their own unique spin; other players used the "panache" of Kan Liu's artwork to develop cocky swordsmasters.

The fashion also spread out beyond clothing and style, and helped me design adventures across a scattered archipelago. My base was strong enough that I could rely on my improvisation skills to create NPCs and locations on the fly when necessary, just because I knew what they would look like to fit the greater environment.

Also, having a huge collection of reference art for characters is a great way to get your players inspired. I think being able to skim through all of Kan Liu's work and quickly understand "what is my GM trying to portray about the world" did wonders for engagement and campaign reception. My friends in that game have sited the worldbuilding as their favorite of anything I've run so far.

Final Thoughts

This was a harder challenge than I expected! And it's (probably) the easiest of the options I had for the sixth challenge. The other ones involve a lot more mechanical thinking, which is fun, but not something I felt like engaging with this week. I'm glad my dice agreed and rolled the fashion challenge.

When I was brainstorming how to respond the challenge, it was hard to get a good grasp on what I wanted to say. At first I wanted to just write about six pieces of fashionable gear that I've given out as treasure before, but that didn't feel as genuine to the prompt as really thinking about the narrative implications of what people wear.

The Gazer Knight cloak was the closest thing I could imagine to a player's fashion affecting the game world in a significant narrative way. I skipped over it, but their toothed blades also held tremendous narrative weight in our game. I also didn't mention much of the context around the characters, but it's a really long story to explain why and how they were so important to the narrative.

Suffice to say that the first Gazer Knight died at the hands of one of my characters (see my post on Evil Characters if you want to know why I killed other PCs in that game) and their death was legendary partly because of the tapestry cloak depicting that moment. Also, the second Gazer Knight became a Knight only through trying to redeem themself and choosing to wear the shameful tapestry cloak.

For the second response, about world fashion affecting players, I was pretty confident in that answer right from the start. I often source artwork for campaign inspiration, but Kan Liu's was the largest collection I had ever sent to my players with the words: "anything this guy has drawn is fair game in this setting."

I encourage you to think about how fashion/clothing has affected your own games; it's a really good brain exercise if it hasn't crossed your mind before.

Thanks for reading!

Things on my radar: