Influences and creative resources

[cartons]

What fuels your creative endeavours?

Sometimes life makes it difficult to continue progressing on these modules at a consistent rate, and the passions are required to keep the fire burning through a slow spell. I thought it'd be nice to share the little catalogues of infuences, tools, and guides that inform our engagement in this admittedly obscure hobby.

Tolkein's 'On Fairy Stories'.
https://coolcalvary.files.wordpress.com ... ories1.pdf
We're anticipating the birth of our first child in July, and I've been re-engaging with enchantment on a more serious level as I've been considering the cultural environment I'd like to present to my daughter. Tolkein's essay is insightful, and knights us with purpose as 'Sub-creators'.

The Angry GM
https://theangrygm.com/
His tone's not for everyone, but he has dozens (hundred?) of super provocative and convincing articles on everything about building an engaging RP experience from the micro to the macro levels of game design.

Game influences from childhood:
Pokémon
Baldur's Gate 1 + 2

More recent game influences:
Disco Elysium
Planescape: Torment
Hero U: Rogue to Redemption
Many of this community's modules!

Might think up more if folks like sharing this sort of stuff.

[slowdive]

My influences for IB specifically:

Original
-TSR Goldbox games
-Star Frontiers (TSR)
-Infinity Engine games
-NWN1+2
-NWN2 Podcast
-NWN2 Podcast builder round table interviews
-NWN2 Podcast Zach interviews
-NWN2 Tavern of Hidden Tales (gaming group)
-and shoegaze of course

More recent
-IB modules from community
-BG3
-Grounded
-PoE

[Pongo]

We're anticipating the birth of our first child in July, and I've been re-engaging with enchantment on a more serious level as I've been considering the cultural environment I'd like to present to my daughter.

Hey, great news! They're good fun - mine are both young (1yr and 4yrs) and keep me greatly entertained.

In terms of ongoing inspiration, it's mainly reading for me. I tend to read sci fi, fantasy, thrillers and horror, and I'm always coming across stuff that gets my mind ticking. For example, I read Clive Barker's Scarlett Gospels a couple of weeks back and got the idea for tattooed wards from that - one of the characters in the book has something similar. Also, whilst I'm not massively into comics, I'm a regular reader of 2000ad, which often has interesting ideas and short stories (I can never have enough Judge Dredd....)

For gaming, the Gold Box and Infinity Engine games and NWN are major influences for sure. The characters in BG were great - for me, they were just the right balance as they added flavour but didn't have walls of exposition text. I loved the narrative and ideas in Disco Elysium, where your choices felt like they had weight (not sure whether they actually did, bit they felt like it). Knights of the Chalice had great combat and I enjoyed the stripped down feeling of its narrative. And Grimoire knocked exploration, interesting puzzles and locations out of the park - it got me interested in parsar text puzzles again!

I'm mainly trying to capture the feel of my old P&P games though, which I never get to play any more. On Twitter I follow a few folk who talk a lot about their P&P campaigns such as the DM Behind the Screen: https://mobile.twitter.com/Hjorimir and a few others. They always make me wish I had a group to break out the D20s with! Of course, P&P challenges are often about dealing with player agency, which is different to the kind of challenge you get with crpgs, but their world building tips are always interesting.

I also follow a load of indie devs, loads of whom are pretty inspirational. For example, Petri Hakkinen, one of the devs behind Legend of Grimrock - who now seems to be spending his days building an ace looking Gold Box style game for the Vic20 called Fall of the Black Mage. I don't understand his various battles with coding and memory, but I enjoy reading about them, and the game looks great! https://mobile.twitter.com/petrih3.