It's RPGaDay season again. Here's a link to the blog post with the current year's prompts.
Today's prompt is Inspire.
When I pick up a roleplaying game and read it, I need it to inspire me if I want to run or play it. When I'm reading a book, I get what I can best describe as the 'GM tingles'. This is usually triggered by something within the game or the scenarios that excites me, meaning I want to explore that situation or idea.
At the moment, I'm reading In Nomine with a view to running it at Furnace. This has been mainly driven by a fantastic experience around the time that the game was originally released when my friend Ric ran a short campaign focused around the Northern Ireland peace process. It allowed us to explore the motivations of angels and devils against a very real backdrop that meant a lot to the GM as he has a heritage from Northern Ireland. I've always wanted to explore this further.
Had I not got this past inspiration, I'd have probably given up on the idea, as I found the first part of the book pretty tedious. The core rules are pretty verbose (but simple), the kind of thing that turns me off. However, I've just hit the part about the motivations of angels and archangels and all of a sudden I'm excited and inspired. There are tensions between them that are begging to be explored.
I mentioned in yesterday's post about things that I wanted to explore in some Traveller adventures, and it works in similar ways in published materials too. What are the gaps and tensions that call out to be explored?
Similarly, a splat-book with details for everything doesn't inspire me. Give me gaps and conflicts to explore. If you try to sell me your game on page count, I'm probably not your target audience.
What inspires you when you and makes you want to play or run a game?
9 August 2025
No comments:
Post a Comment