So You Wanna Be a RPG Blogger? Everyday Inspiration

November 21, 2008 No comments

Writing on a single subject can be difficult sometimes. It’s hard to continually come up with new ideas, or fresh angles to write about things that have already been covered by other bloggers. If roleplaying games are only one of many things you write about on your blog, you’re probably okay because you’re not trying to come up with RPG content on a daily basis. If your blog is specifically about roleplaying games, or about one particular system or setting, you’re more likely to run up again this wall.

Recently, the RPG Bloggers Network instituted some changes to try to filter out non-RPG content. There were complaints about folks’ non-RPG content showing up on the network’s page and RSS feed. For my part, because I did commit myself to supporting the network and want to make life easy for the guys who volunteer their time to maintain the back end, I decided to change my content so it’s entirely RPG focused. My problem wasn’t coming up with things to write about. My problem was what to do with all of the non-RPG stuff that I still wanted to write about. The solution: making it into RPG content.

This post I wrote for this month’s RPG Blog Carnival originally began as a political rant about opinion vs. belief. I don’t currently have a political blog or belong to any political forums where it would be appropriate to post. At the same time, I’d been struggling to find a topic for the blog carnival that hadn’t already been done to death. Being a little slow sometimes, it took me a while to realize that there was some synergy there, and that the points I wants to detail in my rant would translate well into an article on handling religion and it’s intersection with culture and politics within a fantasy game setting. Making a point changed to providing a tool with which players and gamemasters could introduce conflict, the heart of all drama, into a game setting. Viola! A roleplaying article is born.

One of the reasons I ran the Random News Table at UncleBear was that I saw the stories as inspiration for roleplaying game plots. Weird crime, forgotten history, scientific discoveries, it was all part of my grand idea file. I never had the time to flesh out my ideas on how I’d use those stories in a roleplaying setting, more’s the pity, but it was an endless source of inspiration.

When stuck for ideas, think about what’s on your mind at the moment, even if it’s not RPG related. Family problems? Work, school, current affairs? Movies, video games, the book you’re reading? Then think about how that would translate into a roleplaying setting. Interesting NPCs, villains, plot hooks, setting background, organizations, anything at all can be twisted, mashed up, and used as fodder for a game, and your RPG blog.