A Brilliant Idea!

 Howdy you Tempestuously Avid Spectators!

Got a question for ya:  Are you a writer?  If so, where do you get your ideas?  ...Ok, I got two questions for ya.  Do you get people ask you that?  THREE!  I got three questions for ya!  Bet ya didn't expect that!  Because NO ONE expects the Spanish Inquisition!  Hey, if you're gonna steal, might as well steal from the best, right?  Four!  I got four questions...ah, never mind.

One of the most common questions writer-types get asked is "How do you get your ideas?"  It doesn't seem to matter whether you write short stories, novels, comic books, sitcoms, plays, movies, or RPG adventures...chances are you've been asked this at least once.  I know I have.  This has spawned this little essay which I like to call:

A BRILLIANT IDEA!

(That's What I Need, A Brilliant Idea!)

Well, I don't know about you, but I can't get away from ideas!  

I get ideas from the books I read, the shows and movies I watch, the games I play...the list goes on and on.

Sometimes, I'll watch a movie and wonder how the story would be different if the hero had made the OTHER choice a half-hour in (or an hour, or whatever).  Suddenly, it's a different story.  

Or, I wonder how the story would be different if the main guy was this OTHER character from this other story.  

Sometimes you get silly fan-boy fantasies like...what if Fafhrd and Grey Mouser met Elric?  Or...what if Conan was let loose on Middle Earth?  Or...what if you put James Bond and Jason Bourne (hey!  They have the same initials!) in the same story?  Would they be working together, or on opposing sides?

Sometimes you get an idea for a situation, not a whole story.  Sometimes you just get an idea for a character, or at least the start of an idea for a character.  Like I said when I was talking about Mutant World, I saw the pictures of those characters and used that as the starting point of who they were and what they were about.

I get a lot of ideas from different RPG supplements.  But then, that's what they are for.  Little adventure scenarios, weird and sometimes cursed magic items, mysterious locations, the barest seeds to spark an inspiration and grow your own adventure.  And they can be re-used and re-interpreted in different ways, even different genres!

Check it out:

A runaway princess learned the secret to undoing the terrible secret power of the evil wizard-king.

This could totally be the premise of a thrilling sword-n-sorcery tale starring Conan, or a sprawling high fantasy epic like Lord of the Rings.  Then again, it could be the set-up for Star Wars.

Sometimes you're forced to be creative.  Some time back in...I guess the 90's, TSR published a gameworld for the Dungeons and Dragons game...the boxed set was titled "Red Steel".  The short version (and probably not the fairest description) is that it was D&D in the wild west.  The land was suffering from a curse (three, if ya want to get technical) that get everyone magic powers...or mutations depending of your POV.  

This sword-n-sorcery in the wild west premise intrigued me...to this day I'm not sure why (I was never really into westerns).  But suddenly I wanted to write a fantasy/western.  Due to copyright reasons, I couldn't use their geography, so I made my own world by doing a sort of alternate-history thing.  I came up with a town called Sovereign, in the Nevada territory, and I came up with a witch named Persephone Bliss to explore it.  It came out pretty well, I think, and it did receive some positive responses from slush readers, but positive enough to make a sale.  Now, the first and (so far) only story, Persephone Bliss and the Journal of Emerson Thrarn, is currently available only in The Adventure Sampler, a free gift given to those who sign up for my mailing list.

So where do you get ideas from?  EVERYWHERE!  The media you consume, the experiences you've had, the places you visit...  Everything and anything can spark a flash of inspiration, and usually pounce upon you when you least expect it.  The best you can do is try to figure out which ones are the Good Ones and try to put them together into a reasonably passable and enjoyable story.  

It ain't always easy.  But that's the goal, and I'd better get back to it or these stories will never get done!

Until then, I wish you all...

Good Adventuring!
Timothy A. Sayell

The Creation of Aurivyn

Greetings to you Tremendously Astute Spirits!

So, I'm gonna tell you straight up:  I'm taking a little break from Mutant World.  Now, now, calm down.  Yes, there WILL be more Mutant World coming in the future.  But I'm taking a little break to write up a few episodes of another series called...

I won't lie about it, Aurivyn grew out of Dungeons and Dragons.  

I don't really remember when or how I first learned about Dungeons and Dragons, but I remember being completely enthralled with it once the concept was explained to me.  My sister had the Basic Set, and I got to look through it and formulate impressions that have pretty much lasted my lifetime.

Played a few one-shot adventures, and collected books, adventure modules and the BECMI boxed sets.  Of course, I moved up to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, and 2nd Edition is the version that I played the most.  

  

Over the years, I created a fair few continents...not really complete worlds...but definitely big enough to house several campaigns.  Never really got to play them though.

Eventually I found the world of Mystara, and it quickly became one of my favorite published campaign worlds.   I collected as many products related to it as I could.

Someplace along the line we had moved to another state and I lost my gaming group.  Being socially awkward and the demented loner type in my younger years, I rarely tried to hook up with new players.  Eventually I grew out of the habit of playing, and looked at the material as inspiration for writing and drawing.

That's the preamble, now for the beginning of the actual story!

I was taking care of my Poor Old Mother (TM) and somehow it was decided that my oldest brother's two boys should get to visit Grandma on weekends.  We decided to take one at a time.

The younger of the two boys, my nephew Jason, came to visit for the weekend.  I'm afraid he probably spent most of that weekend fairly bored.  But he popped into my study to see what I was doing, and spotted my collection of D&D stuff, so he asked about it.  I told him it was a game and that there was no board, you use your imagination instead.  I told him some stuff about it and he decided he wanted to play.

So, I drew up a quick five-minute dungeon, we pulled out a sample character and a map from one the box sets and we played.  I don't really remember why, but I figured he would dislike it and never want to play again.

Boy was I wrong!

So when I took him home, it was all he talked about.  So of course his older brother--Richard--wanted to play, and I mus admit that I wondered how he would have handled the adventure.  So he picked out a sample character and I sent him on the same adventure.

What was the adventure?  Well, they lived in a rural town populated by a superstitious medieval people.  A small statuette was positioned on the edge of town as a ward against evil spirits, and one day it was missing.  Each of my nephews was sent off--separately and alone--to retrieve it.  The search led them to a secret dungeon in the nearby forest, where they faced monsters and traps, rescued the statuette and found the person that stole it.

They both loved the game and wanted to play some more.  So the next weekend, both came for a visit.  They decided to keep the same characters and I sent them on a brief published adventure.  Their third adventure was a watered-down version of yet another published adventure.  

But for their fourth adventure, they were returning to the village where the first adventure took place and suddenly I had a problem: which one of them retrieved the statuette?  They didn't go together.  Some villagers would swear that Jason returned the statuette, while others would insist it was Richard.  How could I fix this?

Suddenly it hit me:  I had two alternate realities overlapping!  The rest of the campaign was about them trying to fix this.

I've always wanted to write up these adventures, so I'm going to!  I'm adding in some other elements from some of the other homebrew worlds, partly for plot purposes, partly for legal reasons--to differentiate my story-world from the published game setting.

I have written a couple of stories that take place in what would eventually become Aurivyn.  The Saturday Serial story "The Crystal Cage" takes places there.  So does the story "Buy the Sword" currently available in "The Adventure Sampler", which is a free gift received by the folks who sign up for my newsletter.  But these were minor experiments while I was trying to hammer out the plot for the series.

I have the details worked out now, and I'm pleased to announce that I am working on the first installments of an Aurivyn story arc called "The Wrath of the Ancient Prisoner", and it all started on that weekend when my nephew wanted to play a fighter!  Little did we know what that began...

Well, I'd better get to work, so until next time I wish you...

Good Adventuring!

Timothy A. Sayell

Ideas At Large

Hello to one and all!  I offer you Toasts And Salutations!

So, when you're making idle chitchat with someone, and they find out you write stories, that's when the usual list of questions comes at you.  What kind of stuff do you write?  Have you been published?  Where?  

And then there's the mother of all questions:  Where do you get your ideas?

This is kind of a silly question, because ideas and inspirations are absolutely everywhere!  Sometimes I think they lay in wait to ambush you as you wander by.  You get ideas from everywhere and everything, usually when you're not actually looking for them.

I've gotten ideas from books, comic books, radio shows, and movies, video games, role playing games, pictures, songs, and toys.  Sometimes you get an idea from some random throw-away comment someone made during a conversation.  

As for stories, it could be as easy as this:  You watch a movie and at some pivotal point in the plot you wonder what the story have turned into if THIS had happened instead of THAT.  And this could drastically change the outcome of the story, perhaps the whole thing if this pivotal point occurs very early in the story.

What if Conan's tribe had defeated Thulsa Doom's thugs?  Conan the Barbarian would've been a very different film.  What if Aunt May had died instead of Uncle Ben?  What sort of a man would Peter Parker have grown into?  They actually had an issue of What If? that explored this possibility.  What if the Darth JarJar theory actually happened in the movies?

All of these stories would have been very different.

Sometimes you only get ideas for moments, or characters, and keep them on file until you find an appropriate story to use them in.  

Then there's another possibility:  suppose you insert a different character in the protagonist's place.  In theory, THIS character would act and react differently than THAT character, and these two characters should react differently when stuck in the same situation; so the story would come out differently.

The story would read much differently whether the hero was a greedy knight or a sentimental archer.  

This, of course, is the most elementary of examples.  The more little changes you make, the more differences there are from story to story.  

But the real point I'm trying to make is that ideas come from everywhere!  And I do mean EVERYWHERE!  It doesn't seem to matter where you go or what you do, inspirations are just lying in wait, ready to pounce upon the unwary creative mind.

They're on All Sides!

All you have to do is be in the right place at the right time to find them.  And then you have to be perceptive enough to know the good ones from the bad ones.  And then to use them when ya need them.  But getting ideas in the first place?  That's the easy part!

There's a good chance we'll talk about this some more in the future.  But that's all for now!  I've got some writing to do!

Good adventuring!

Yours Truly,
Timothy A. Sayell