Creative Origins

All of the articles and advice we read on running Dungeons & Dragons, while useful, can’t replace what you bring to the game. Your experiences, inspiration, and creative origins¹ are more important than anything created by someone else. Recognize and reuse that which inspires you and don’t look back.

Flying ship: night view by Sedeptra

Experienced game designers write published adventures that blow our minds. But without a game master, they’re nothing more than pages in a book or on a screen. Beautiful but static. Our hobby is much more. Game masters breathe life into those pages, absorb what is useful, & discard anything that isn’t. It’s our experiences and unique interests that guarantee a game unlike any other.

Think about your creative journey. What inspired you as a child? Which books, shows, or video games transported you to another world? Which poems, artwork, or stories resonated throughout your lifetime? These are the seeds of your creative origins. Returning to them will honor your past while providing inspiration and a path to the future.

For me, it was helpful to revisit my creative origins and experience many of the artifacts again. It’s helped me appreciate who I am and the stories I like to tell. It’s also provided endless inspiration for future stories as I lean back into the things that excite me the most. A few examples:

• Pokémon
• Gargoyles the animated series
• Siegfried & Roy: Masters of the Impossible
• Broken Sky by Chris Wooding
• Crystalis
• Legos
• HeroQuest

Take a few minutes and reflect. Identify the biggest sources of inspiration for your creativity and appreciate them. Lean into them as you prepare to tell stories well into the future. Your creative origins are unique and no one else can tell the stories you will tell.

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. - Walt Whitman

Game on.