Sunday, March 7, 2010

Creativity is HARD!

I use the Google A LOT. At work, at home, for fun, for necessity -- I use it all the time. I can scarcely remember a time when it wasn't available for use.

Well, I was looking for stuff - game stuff - and I stumbled upon Microlite74, which I wrote about in a previous post.

At the same time, I stumbled upon "One Page Dungeons." Fantastic!

I have said to my colleagues at work that any idea, that's any good, can be expressed on a single page of paper. One side of that paper is best (8.5"x11"), but I'll settle for both sides in a pinch.

Suffice to say that this concept of a "One Page Dungeon" resonates with me. I wasn't always this way, but when I run an RPG, I like to improvise. A 1PD (my new abbreviation) is a great shorthand for me. It's a framework and (I believe) it's all I'll need to write up to prepare for an adventure. Here's one of many links you can find. Here's another.

So, this weekend I took on the task of building a 1PD for myself.

The first part of my experience was creating an "old school" blue dungeon map for my document. I used GIMP to pull it together and this great tutorial. It took a long time, but that was mostly due to my rusty skills using GIMP. After awhile, I had it down.

Next, I exported the map as a .jpg and dragged it into a 1PD Word template.

That's when things really got challenging.

How can you have writers block when all you need to write is one page?

I slogged through creating this 1PD for a good part of Saturday and even in to Sunday morning. After a brief nap on Sunday, I got up with some fresh ideas and I finished the thing off.

No, you can't see it. Yet. I need to unleash it on my grandson during spring break.

Mwah ah ahhhhh. :)

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