Anyway, I was doing so idly. I arrived at the section on creating adventures, and I read the bit about starting the process by writing down a bunch of one-line premises to get you started. I thought, Hey, I haven't sat down and just done that in a while. So today, at work, I took pen and paper and started writing stuff down.
The first thing I wrote, with no prompting, no ideas, no nothing:
The PCs must deliver a Philter of Attraction to the princess before she attends the ball - or else, the kingdom will be at war!
At war, you say! With who? Why does she need the philter? Is she trying to mack especially hard on some randy beau who can stop the war? Is she ugly? Rude? A pariah? Does he hate her? Who's trying to stop the PCs from getting there? Where will the chase scenes be set? Is this SF or fantasy? Who's the heavy? How do things go down if the PCs fail?!
I've been really into doing this lately. I'm really into the groove of grabbing a slender idea and fleshing it out. It's nothing revolutionary, nothing fancy; just something fun. This is play, to me. It exercises creative muscles and amuses me at the same time.
I love how you -anybody who tries, anyway- can just slap these ideas on paper and, with a little chin-tugging and giggling to oneself, can turn it into a story, an RPG adventure, a comic, a movie. Whatever. You just look at the premise and start asking questions -- and making up the answers.
Again -- this ain't magic. I'm not a prophet. This is just one of the ways in which this creative stuff gets done, and always has been done. And it's not that it's all that new to me, either.
I'm simply, honestly, and unconditionally amazed by the process, its simplicity, and mostly by how much freaking fun it is.
It makes me want to do something bigger with it.
