Casting Shadows

This is the ninth day of #RPGaDAY2025 and the prompt today is inspire. This prompt presents itself to me along several fronts. First, it asks me to consider the players when choosing to accept the pitch for this campaign, and their characters when acting, reacting, and interacting within it. It also asks me to consider myself and what will keep me looking up – seeking more and better from myself in the of the GM.

As this series for RPGaDAY is the process of development of a pitch, and so there are no players and therefore no characters, there is no way to really explore what would be appropriate inspiration for them – yet. Eventually, we will need to look into other NPCs in the world beyond Neslinger, the potential patron. With that in mind, let’s just look at one of my sources of inspiration.

Day 9: Inspire

I have a well-practiced and relatively strong imagination. That is rewarding and cool on its own, but in RPGs, the chance to not only hear about what others imagine, but interact with it is actually inspiring to me. It’s like harnessing some sort of perpetual motion machine. We can adopt what has formed in the minds of our fellow players and seamlessly fit it into our own mental version of a moment. Better, when that propagates through the group we all start sharing and resharing a unified conception of the situations in play in sync with each other. Our imaginations act on, react to, and interact with each player’s imagination in an ongoing ballet that should be chaotic, but as we grow in skill as players somehow isn’t.

That is inspiring.

See you tomorrow for Day 10: Origin