The Dungeon Masters Workshop, Getting Started – Creating a Creative Space

I see you found the door, sorry about the mess on the floor I'll l clean that up in a bit , but for now, WELCOME TO THE WORKSHOP ! A place for new and experienced DMs/GMs alike to work on their craft of story telling irrespective of their setting or table top RPG setting . My name is Jack Sunaway and I'll be your friendly neighbourhood rock gnome helping your tinker away. I'll write about my experience with RPGs in a later blog post but for now lets get to the meat of the matter , the crème of creativity as it were .

Today we’ll be discussing something I find incredibly important and that is finding the right place for you to be at your creative and my experience with trying to find the best place to write.

My workshop for planning my sessions over the years has taken the image of many places , my desk at home is littered with monster manuals , campaign settings, adventure modules , dungeon masters guides and a mix of homebrew and real life maps to take inspiration from. All of this culminates in an environment that for the purpose of dungeon design can help a lot , I have all the resources I need and no one is here to look over my shoulder and silently judge what I’m drawing on my grid paper and looking in bewilderment at the illustrations in the books I’m pouring over.

However while its my home and its great and all …the view does get a tad boring after a while, and a change of environment is great for the creative process.

I’ve talked to both professional writers and musicians about this very topic on a number of occasions and while we all agree that everyone is different and no two experience are the same , a change of view and environment can be seriously beneficial for encouraging a creative work flow.

At this moment in time I'm hidden deep in what would usually be unfriendly territory . I'm currently sitting at a large coffee chain of which I wont disclose the identity of but its name may rhyme with “Barstucks” writing this post before I start work on my dwarven capital for my DnD game. How is this possible you ask? Simple, to everyone one else I just looking like I’m at my laptop doing work , I got a coffee, sat down , put my head phones on, took a deep breath and relaxed in the comfortable feeling of well loved music and hot coffee.

For me these two things make me comfortable almost anywhere. I've done writing in a lot of place before I found this particular coffee house, the free parking certainly helps things I'm not going to lie , but I've done writing in bars , restaurants and sometimes if my laptop decides it can hold a charge for longer than 20 minutes I've done work on a Sunny day at the Park. These different places may not all of worked for me but they did allow me to write in a different way with different influences , with out being hampered by my resource books and just letting my creativity flow, So go exploring with your note pad or laptop and go and find a new safe place for you to write in.

That’s all from me for now , I hoped this helped even in just the tiniest of ways. Next time we’ll talk about getting feedback from your players and why this is important for everyone who is playing. 

Bye for now peeps!

Jack