Finding Inspiration

  

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Delving Wolf!

In this week's post I want to share some thoughts about inspiration and how to find it, specifically while talking about a setting for a TTRPG campaign, mostly focusing on fantasy but whose principles should be adaptable to any genre you want to play (as a sort of follow-up to last week's post). I will be mostly focused on creating a setting, but some of my ideas should be applicable to describing pre-made settings too.

 

As you can see from the pictures I'm adding to this article, I can consider myself lucky enough to live in place, Northwestern Italy, that, despite its many flaws, has very little to envy when it comes to landscapes: you're in the middle of hills and able to reach, within a couple hours drive or less, both mountains and sea. Sometimes, during weekends, I like to go hiking with my partner in some of these places, and it's during one of these hikes that inspiration suddenly struck me:

I could see myself describing the scene to a group of players

 Take this image for example:

 I had to pause in the middle of my hike to take this picture, because my brain immediately saw the arch of fallen trees over the path as a portal to a Fey Realm; in a few minutes, as I continued walking, I had an NPC in mind, a Fey Prince who sometimes gets bored and lures unsuspecting mortals through such portals and plays with their minds, trapping them in a labyrinth until he's amused enough and decides to let them go back.

Another example:

 

 

As the party reaches the top of the hill, their view opens up to a vast landscape, a neverending wave of hills that continues as far as the eye goes, until the fog covers the farthest ones. Their destination is not in sight, but luckily for them a winding path snakes through the sides of those hills, hopefully leading them to their destination.

 

As I said in the beginning, this inspiration is not necessarily only useful when creating a setting, but also to describe scenes from pre-made adventures in a way that will make your players feel like they're there.

Obviously not everyone reading this will have hills or mountains close to their home (if holidays are a possibility for you, though, you are not limited to something close to where you live), but it's not needed: you can be in a park, or even in a street in the middle of a town and, if you try to not just look around but see things in a different perspective, imagining an adventurer exploring that area and trying to narrate what you see in your mind.

Some of the pictures I posted here, and many more, gave me many ideas, even for a possible setting inspired by this area: one peculiar feature of the towns around here are small villages on top of hills, most of which come with a castle that looks upon the surrounding area. If this doesn't scream Hexcrawl, I don't know what does; but will that turn into something I actually finish and play or publish? I honestly don't know, since my list of started projects that have not been completed is longer than one of B/X-inspired games, but one can dream.

To wrap up this post I ask you, if you are interested, to try this exercise I just described, and if you do, please let me know its results, I'd love to hear from you!

P.S.: For anyone that plays 5e, specifically the 2014 version, you might be interested to know that I just published my first subclass, Barbarian: Path of Bloodlust. It's technically pay-what-you-want, but I don't expect anyone to actually pay for it. Download it, try it and have fun!

This is all for this week, see you next Sunday for my next post!

 

May your dice never betray you,

Kirhon