Over the last day or so the creative bug has settled in on me, and I think I have figured out how to harness it. The idea that I had given a few days ago seemed like a good thing, but once I started looking at it, I just realized that it was essentially the same “project” that I had started previously and never really progressed with.
And while my previous attempts at getting a large project off the ground have tended to grind to a halt after something else comes up, I am trying to use that to my benefit this time.
My new project, could end up being of use in a few ways, but the fun parts are all independent so should allow me to keep motion going on it.
The idea is to create a living city, one that could then be used as a base for a Role Playing Game group, or a Web-Comic or even just a piece of literature. I am rough sketching out a city and placing in “Hot-Spots” or places of interest throughout. These are the typical places that you run into in conventional story telling; the local bar, the docks & warehouse district, the museum, the spooky asylum, and so on. In each “Hot-Spot” I will then go in and sketch out some ideas of what the environment looks like and key points. Match that with a paragraph or two of description with a hook or two that those visiting could get involved with, and then sketches of one or two key persons of interest in the location.
With all this information, it would then be simple to drop in a group of players, or a comic character, and let them roam around, encountering places and people that have at least a semblance of a life around them.
This is similar in concept to the Sandbox style of games that have come into fashion lately in video games, the idea that you are dropped into this “Sandbox” and you are free to play with all the sand and tools there to make of it what you will. And in a sense this can be seen as the base of most good storytelling, being able to convey that your characters are not just islands of interesting things, but rather that they inhabit a world of interesting things all around them.
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