I found some ttRPG-industry-related Q&A items that have never made it onto my blog, and thought this week, when I am so distracted and overloaded, would be a great time to offer them up.

Q: When you are writing lore for a new system, where do you go for inspiration?

A: Generally, the seething pool of psychic acid that is my brain.

Now, I feed my brain a lot of raw and distilled ideas. I read up on things like satrapies of the Achaemenid empire, the Trackless Tank Corporation, Mansa Musa (ruler of the Malian empire and arguable the richest man who has ever lived), quantum computing, the political history of the pocket, and whatever else catches my eye.

I read books from as many authors as I can find time for (recently The Shattered Queen, by Jaym Gates). I watch speculative fiction movies, ranging from Gojira and the black & white Spanish language Dracula (that was filmed at the same time and on the same sets as the Bela Lugosi version) to Cloud Atlas to Train to Busan to Lord of the Rings.

I watch a lot of Discovery channel, anime, procedurals, and televised contests.

All that stuff goes into the psychic acid, and becomes an idea soup that rarely lets me down.

And when an idea does slop out of the acid, I do some research on it. What are the real-world analogs? How did the idea turn out historically? What societal pressures arose from it, and how was it taxed?

Just enough to know that if I am reinventing the wheel, I’m not adding it to the Inca Empire without good cause.

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