Personal Brand Session with Sarah Moore: Game Designer, Actor, Producer, Writer, and Friend

Last week on The All Worlds Traveller, we showed the Golden Age of the Silver Screen look for Sarah Moore, which we photographed as an add-on to her November 2025 personal brand session. This week, we’ll show images from the main session. Whereas our Golden Age of the Silver Screen look appeared in monochrome, Sarah’s personal brand session explodes with vibrant color in concord with her vision and message.

Sarah Moore, Game Designer

Sarah works in the tabletop role-playing game industry as a game writer, game master, and performer (and other roles I’m probably not even aware of!). For the past several years, Sarah worked with Wizards of the Coast founders Peter Adkinson and Steve Conrad on World of Chaldea and Actoroke; she recently co-created the Crowned RPG with Formerly Feral Games and The Vanishing Lands with Jeff Moore; she’s a game master with Rough Magic (professional game master service); she streams Sarah’s Table on Twitch. Sarah currently has links to all of these right on the front page of her site, so check them out at Pixies and Pins here!

The Mission: Sarah’s Personal Brand

Every Distant Era session begins with a consultation. This is the time when we brainstorm, explore, and discuss the objectives for the session. The consultation allows me to figure out what’s essential to the session and prepare for it in advance. It lets me ask questions, clarify objectives, and begins a collaboration with the client as we build the idea for the session together.

I’ve been friends with Sarah for eight years in 2026. Despite the role-playing game industry being a significant part of both our professional lives for many years, as of this writing we’ve never played a game together and seldom discussed the topic; we primarily know one another through performance-related work. Hence why the consultation is so important.

Not every consultation starts with a concrete idea. The consultation is often the discovery of what we’re going to do and make. At the beginning of Sarah’s consultation, she said she had more vibes than specifics, so we began by talking about those vibes, and through that conversation I learned about Sarah’s principle of joyful gaming.

Sarah told me her brand was built around three tentpoles: joy, whimsy, and feeling safe. “There’s a lot of queer in it,” she said. This gave a us a great starting place. During our consultation, among the many notes I wrote, I underlined this:

Sarah just wants to make sure that in this world she’s doing everything on her own so that it FEELS like her. Not sanitized like “I’m so professional.” What makes Sarah the one to work with over some other game master is her JOY and WHIMSY. Without explaining it every time. The things she’s presenting in website and photos are doing the heavy lifting for her so that she’s reinforcing it rather than explaining it.

I also included the following note to myself:

Note to Steve: We need to show the above in a GAMING CONTEXT. She’s a game designer, actor, streamer. It’s all around this RPG industry. So we want to keep it focused on this, within this sphere. That will keep it the most useful.

That note was an important reminder for me that we were not doing a performance-oriented shoot like all the others we have shot together since 2018.

When we began our consultation, we knew we wanted photos for Sarah’s website in general. By the end, we had a solid direction and mutual agreement about what we were going to make together.

The Session

Sarah arrived for our November 2025 session with makeup artist Lauren Keating, who assisted her throughout our shoot and got Sarah looking and feeling her best throughout. I hired my regular teammate Jacque Bischoff as production assistant on that day; instead of makeup this time, Jacque helped hold lights, reflectors, and stands, and she served as a second set of eyes to call my attention to important aspects of the shoot, from the way our lighting looked on the monitor to discussing the background elements to complement Sarah’s wardrobe

TOP LEFT: Production assistant Jacque Bischoff doing the light test.
TOP RIGHT: Behind-the-scenes photo from makeup artist Lauren Keating. Jacque holds reflector, Sarah poses, I shoot.
BOTTOM: Makeup artist Lauren Keating making adjustments.

With our dream team in place and ‘80s music pumping through the speakers, we progressed through this joyful session, moving from look to look as it pleased us. We shot with joyful, vibrant colors in mind, everything coming through the monitor looked great, and we all had a blast. We looked through the photos, agreed we’d accomplished the mission, and then we set up for Sarah’s Golden Age of the Silver Screen look, which we discussed last week on The All Worlds Traveller. Jacque helped pack up the studio in record time, and we were finished with the session.

Editing

Because we took care in our preparation for Sarah’s session, things looked good out of camera, and with a few slight adjustments, they looked great. There aren’t many dramatic tales to tell about the editing except that I waited to edit the session until I’d renewed my Capture One (photo software) license. While that was costly, its improvements would theoretically help me to finish more of these kinds of images images faster. Purely for science, I wanted to see how long it would take to edit every image from the session. The answer was roughly one full work day. As a result, Sarah got a ton of images. While doing this normally would be nuts, I got to know my way around the tools Capture One has introduced in the last couple years, and they did speed up my workflow.

Here are a dozen images from among the hundreds that resulted from Sarah’s session.

At Last

Navigating to Sarah’s website today, in early 2026, a banner greets the viewer. It reads:

Sarah Moore is a professional game master, actor, producer, writer, and friend.

Soon, some of these images may accompany and support those words.

Sarah Moore and I first discussed doing a personal brand session around the time quarantine lifted. It’s been years in the making, and at last we’ve finally made it happen.

Thanks to Sarah Moore, Lauren Keating, and Jacque Bischoff for this session of joyful creation.

But wait, there’s Moore!?

This won’t be the last time we Sarah Moore this year, or even probably this month. We’re coming up on three years since Distant Era’s 2023 Gods and Heroes of the Aegean series, and Sarah appears in the second composition… coming soon…

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Steven Townshend is a fine art/portrait photographer and writer with a background in theatre, written narrative, and award-winning game design. As a young artist, Steven toured the US and Canada performing in Shakespeare companies while journaling their moments on paper and film. In his transition from stage to page, Steven continued to work as a theatre photographer, capturing dramatic scenes while incorporating elements of costume, makeup, and theatrical lighting in his work. Drawn to stories set in other times and places, Steven creates works through which fellow dreamers and time travelers might examine their own humanity or find familiar comfort in the reflections of the people and places of a distant era.