Index (card) your TTRPG

 Lately I've gotten back to an old project of mine, which I started about 10/15 years ago (and stopped working on a few years later), which is writing a fantasy novel.

Now that I've restarted it I've been trying a new system to organize my notes, especially about worldbuilding: instead of filling a bunch of notebooks of random ideas in the order they come out of my head (I've always been a fan of a more analogue approach to writing, it helps me focus better) I've been trying a method I found online, used by many authors, one of which is Ryan Holiday, who explains it in this video: before starting to write even the first chapter, take a bunch of index cards and write down your ideas, putting a header or topic in the top right, so you can store them and, when the time comes to actually start writing, you can just pick up the notes you prepared and use those.

Why do I bring this up in my TTRPG blog? Because this system could very easily be used for many TTRPG-related things:

  • for worldbuilding, write down different ideas about various regions, kingdoms, populations, religion, world history, whatever your brain comes up with, and only once you have enough put them all in front of you and discover what world you're going to create;
  • for adventure writing, you could write different rooms of a dungeon or areas of a pointcrawl/hexcrawl and only after put them together in a way that makes sense, and the result might surprise you;
  • for your heartbreaker system, write down a rule you like on each index card, maybe even more variations of the same rule on different cards, and once you have enough try to see if you can come up with a set of rules to use in your games (and maybe in the future even publish!

The possibilities are many, limited only by your creativity - and if you're doing any of the things I mentioned above, the sky is the limit.

I'm probably going to try doing the third method soon, and start collecting my favorite rules in a little stack of index cards; if you try doing the same, let me know! I'd love to hear about it.

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

May your dice never betray you,
Kirhon


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