Casting Shadows

Today’s #RPGaDay Question:

August 15: What types or source of inspiration do you turn to most often for RPGs?

• Either as a player or as a GM, what kind of media or experience helps inspire you for play?

Over the years I have drawn on a lot of different sources of inspiration. The stories of friends, books I have read and reread, films and more films, and the skills – martial and otherwise – I have slowly collected over the course of my life.

Inspiration is a peculiar thing. While at times I have wanted to recreate a work of fiction in full, such as with our ongoing Star Wars campaign, most of the time I prefer to work with unrelated elements from different sources to distill something else.

In a sense, it is like borrowing the refined inspiration of others, and being further inspired to create and recombine from there. For me, and I think for many other gamers, inspiration is in many ways an act of combination and recombination of ideas that emerges at the table as something based in the work of others but is in some way something wholly our own. I suppose if there truly is nothing new under the sun, then all creative works are like this.

With all of these ideas circulating constantly in the back of my head, I find that a major part of my inspiration is the quiet of repetitive activity, such as moving meditation, forms, walking the dogs, washing the dishes and so on. When the body is engaged and the mind is free, I find the thing which brings the ideas to the foreground is music. Buoyed by music, visions for once and future games take shape and beckon me to give them a home in the memories of my group~

#RPGaDay

Tomorrow’s Question

What historical person you would like to recruit for your group? For what game?