Kicking My Imagination in the Butt (or Ask and Ye Shall Receive)

The provision of my Lord and Savior is always inspiring to me and in this case it’s extremely timely as well.  As I’ve covered in my last post I’ve been struggling with coming up with ideas for this new campaign and not making any real progress.  I’ve been surfing my usual sites looking for inspirational sources and discovering that almost half of them have been quite for at least a month and in some cases much longer.  So no help there.  And honestly it’s hard not to want to ‘borrow’ whole-cloth from some sources, BaronVonJ and LeadAddict’s Beyond the Wall campaign is brilliant, why couldn’t I have thought of that?  Oh well.

So now you’re wondering, I thought something good happened based on the first sentence but he’s just lamenting his current lack of creativity and that he can’t find inspiration in the usual places.  Hang on, I’m getting there.  One of the key factors for me as a DM in crafting a campaign is an interesting idea or two to hang the setting's history or backstory on, and thanks to John Matthew Stater of LAND OF NOD fame I think I’ve found it.

Matt’s been writing a series of posts about Mythic Races, where he makes races out of various pagan pantheons, and the latest one in the series - the Primordials in which he combines Aztec deities with dinosaurs - just clicked with me.  My reading of this particular post just happened to coincide with my discovery of the Aztecosaur species in the KingsIsle MMORPG Pirate101 (My exploration of the Spiral in KingsIsle’s companion MMORPG Wizard101 had not yet made me aware of the Azteca location’s existence until today’s internet research session).

My exposure to this idea from two separate and discreet sources has really sparked something for me, and remember I believe in providence not coincidence.  So thanks to the inspiration that has been given me, my campaign setting is no longer the temperate woodlands that I had been imagining; now it’s a lush sub-tropical forest with geography not unlike the Seattle,WA area, with plenty of marshy, swampy areas and the ruins of Mesoamerican-style stone cities and step-pyramids poking up through the forest canopy.  I now know what pre-human ruins my ill-fated abbey has been built upon.  And I have a pretty good idea as to what kind of savages might be lurking around out in the wilderlands…

Thank you Lord!  Hallelujah!

General Update #2 and News About Basic Edition D&D

I had hoped to bring you a substantive post today, but the one I was working on was a look back at previous campaigns in an attempt to draw out the things I did right, but it wasn't feeling right for some reason.  Still can't really put my finger on it but in part I believe it's because I want this blog to be about moving forward and moving on, not the past.  So that rather massive post is history, in every sense of the word.

So that decision has left me without a post and for that I apologize.  And perhaps I should have just let that be, and not posted this filler piece, but while looking around on the web for some inspiration on what to write about I dropped by my favorite online shops and was delighted to see that the Basic Edition D&D rulebook is a top seller; No.1 and No. 2 respectively at RPGNow.com and DriveThruRPG.com.

I am so amazed and happy about that, I just had to say something.

General Update #1

You're probably wondering where the posts about the campaign are, after all that's what it says at the top, right?  I'm buying time with these posts while I try to absorb the material in Matt Finch's Tome of Adventure Design (ToAD) and the sandbox stuff from Kevin Crawford's Red Tide.  Buying or wasting it, I can't be sure which.  I do know that several of the blogs I read have said very complimentary thing about the ToAD book.  I am also working on answers for Jeff Rients' and Brendan's Twenty Quick Questions (making it Forty Quick Questions really) before committing anything to blog.  So I guess the truth is I'm still trying to get it straight in my head first.

In the meantime, I hope you'll settle for another player character class that I know I want to use...

Begin, Be Bold...

Another blog about Dungeons and Dragons?  Merciful Savior in Heaven why?!  Good question.

Mostly because I'm hopeful that putting the details of my campaign plan online will help drive me to completion this time around.  As my nephews and brother are all too aware I've tried this before many times without success.  The pressure of a career, the obligations of family, faith and responsibility all seem to conspire to rob me of the time necessary to plot out and plan a simple D&D game, never mind the time to play.

But in the immortal if misquoted words of W. P. Kinsella "If I build it, they will play."  I know they will because of a recent game of Dungeon played after Thanksgiving dinner, it really made everyone's desire to play - especially mine - obvious to me.  Fortunately I do have some advantages in this situation: I'm single and have a little time most nights and every other weekend, actually every other weekend I have a good bit of time available.  Of course, until recently I've been sinking that time into things like the Mass Effect trilogy, Torchlight 2, Neverwinter Nights, World of Borecraft, even ::shudder:: The Sims 3.  But I'd really rather get the family together and play D&D.

So I have a plan, there's more than enough sources of inspiration on the web, from the members of the OSR and their multitudinous publications.  I'm following several (too many) of the OSR blogs and I believe I can cobble together a simple but good game without having to sink every spare hour into it.  If there's anything I've learned from my online perusals it's that random tools can accomplish a lot, the danger is over-reliance on them and allowing them to dominate your own creativity.

I don't know of what, if any, interest this blog will be to readers; if it's not don't waste your time.  As I said at the start of this, this is mostly for me.  Hopefully the spectre of public failure will be too ghastly a prospect for me to embrace, forcing me to push ahead.

At the very least I've begun, boldly I hope.  As for the rest of it, well, I'll try to follow the advise of Horace here...

“Begin, be bold, and venture to be wise.”
― Horace