As I wrote about last month, the act of pure, imaginative creation isn't something I do (or have ever done, really). I have always taken the bones of what others have done and added my own meat to them, which is fine--a lot of people game that way--but sitting down and actually making something new and unique was a novel experience for me. I liked it. It was challenging for sure...but it was good.
I mention this again as I have now started my summer vacation from school, and I am looking at a lot of free time that I need to fill. I am a creature of habit to my core, so I'll do the same things over and over again ("peace is the tranquility of order," as St. Augustine said). What I want to build into my daily routines is some creativity...and that's hard for me. Here is why: there is just so much stuff. So. Much. Endless books and pdfs and websites and podcasts and message boards and Facebook groups and Discord channels and Youtube shows and podcasts. I can, literally, spend all day every day swimming in the infinite seas of TTRPG content and never reach the end. And that doesn't include the limitless depths of my Kindle, or the internet in general. The title of this post is a reference to the Phillip K. Dick short story of the same name (trading 'imagine' for 'remember'; it is the basis of the old sci-fi movie Total Recall). [Note: the movie is 36 years old, and I am now old and dying and how did this happen?]
Also--and as far as problems go, this is a good problem to have--I am at the point in my life where I can pretty much buy whatever I want to, whenever I want to. I try very, very hard to keep my buying of stuff to a dull roar, but if I see something I want, I just get it. There is an element of collecting (vs. actually using) that I need to be ever mindful of as I move through the TTRPG space. I often tell my friends that I have dragon sickness when it comes to game stuff. We...wants it. We...loves it. We...needs it, my precious...
So last night I was just poking around the wilds of the net, looking at stuff, and it occured to me that I was engaging in what I always do: searching for things that other people made as a way to exercise my imagination. I should buy this book! I should get this game! I should subscribe to this...whatever. I, literally, have every single issue (in PDF) of Dungeon Magazine, Dragon Magazine, Kobold Quarterly, and The Crusader. That's like five years of content I have not even scratched the surface of, yet I'm still hunting around for more stuff.
Why, I ask you? Why?
I have been thinking that maybe I'll put some constraints on myself this summer and try to force myself to think differently. Only use what I already have, for example. Stick with the old stuff (DMG, MM, PHB, the C&C core books). I had so much fun just creating a randomly generated hex map. Why don't I do more of that? Setting up a pointcrawl on some map I find online. Throw in some factions, a couple of pre-generated 'random' encounters...why not? As Thoreau said, I don't want to die with my music still in me, and to be completely honest, I may come to the realization that I am not terribly creative to begin with. If so, so be it. But maybe I need to spend a bit more time in my own imagination instead of enjoying and building off of the imaginations of others.
Live without discipline, die without honor! No more buying. Mostly. For now.
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