3 April 2024: The Joy of Making Stuff
Today I want to talk more about the part of the hobby that doesn’t involve actually playing, watching other people play, or collecting pretty books you’ll probably never play. I want to talk about the joy of making stuff. Engaging with your creativity, building characters for the fun of it, building worlds, plotting adventures, crafting house rules, all of that stuff.
There are times when you can’t find a group, or life happens and the group you do have can’t get together. You might be enamored of some new system that no one else has any interest in. Sometimes you want to get to know the system a little better, explore its possibilities, or just mess around. You don’t necessarily plan on playing these characters, or running those adventures, but there’s something satisfying in having some quiet time to yourself and making things.
A lot of the books I publish are derived from decades of notes I’ve written, things I created and never used, or things that I did use and have since refined. There are a lot of things I’ve learned, and that’s the wellspring of my output. It’s why my books are all toolkits, when you get right down to it. I started out trying to build my own resources, my own reference books, that would allow me to create even more things. Even if I never got to use any of it at the table.
It’s also one of the main reasons I don’t include artwork. The point isn’t about what I’m presenting, or exclusively about my ideas. It’s about what you do with it. I hate settings that absolutely box me in creatively. Once there are illustrations showing what a thing looks like, that’s what it looks like. Forever. Unless you defy canon.
One of the major flaws of original Traveller, in my opinion, is that every planet in every sector had been defined (yes, I know, but we’re not going to talk about that). There was no room to shoehorn in your own stuff, at least not without breaking canon. And a lot of people care about canon.
A long time ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth and we all had to walk to school uphill, both ways, in a snowstorm, and no one had the internet or smart phones, I ran a 1st edition Shadowrun campaign. There were already quite a few sourcebooks out, and a number of novels. I was only using the core book and a few ideas, mainly gear, from a couple of supplements. Other than that, I wanted to go in my own direction in exploring this world and how it developed.
It did not go well.
The players I attracted wanted canon. They’d read everything, including the novels. They owned sourcebooks I didn’t. And they’d proceed to correct me when something contradicted the published canon, or I’d made up something that I didn’t realize already existed. They had absolutely no chill.
I’m not saying that it can’t be an interesting creative challenge to work between the lines and try to make things that go hand-in-hand with canon. Fan fiction is built on this premise, and we know that people knock out some amazing stories in that arena. Roleplaying, while sharing some common traits, is not fan fiction.
Having source material should be a boon. Fan fiction is based on properties that were meant to be their own thing. Roleplaying is supposed to leave room for the inclusion of your own stories, and the interpretation of licensed adventures and setting material. Canon should not be some sort of straitjacket.
The toolkit approach is, to me, the middle ground. Enough to get you started, not so much that you don’t have enough space to inject your own imagination. That’s not to everyone’s taste, but I’m not writing for everyone.
This is where I’m going to stop for today. Hopefully this rambling will provide some insight as to why my books are the way they are. Please leave comments below, spread the word about this blog, and as always, I hope you’re doing well today.
Berin
