RPGaDay 2025 02: Prompt

I’ve often said that I’m creatively challenged. That is to say, when I have a blank page in front of me, I have trouble starting. Some people have marvelous imaginations that seem to be able to create things out of thin air. Not so much me. However, when I was taking part in #Dungeon23, I had to learn creative methods. What I found is that I can work well with some prompts. When I have something to riff off of, and I do that regularly, I do have the ability to create new things.

A book that really helped me at that time was the Tome of Adventure Design. It’s filled with prompts (even in the margins!) which helped me get started. Mythmere Games have also recently published a succesor: the Tome of World Building. While I don’t have a lot of experience with that one yet, I’m looking forward to testing it out more.

An honorable mention goes out to Roll 4 Ruin. I haven’t worked with this yet, but I saw it posted by /u/Gammlernoob over on the OSR subreddit. I guess this calls for a post where I test it out to create a dungeon, doesn’t it?

EDIT: so, four days ahead in writing this, I realized I want to make a random table per day. So, here’s a post-writing addition of a random table! In this case, it’s a table I can use when I’m stuck for ideas. It’s a permission from myself to not take things too seriously: I"m just setting up a session for friends, not publishing my own game. So, it’s a table to push me to borrow things from existing media to kickstart my ideas. Roll 3d6 and mix and match from the columns to get a direction to borrow from.

Look forward to more RPGaDay posts throughout the month!