| icelevistus |
/casts Summon Tangent I
Out of curiosity, how do all of your ideas end up turning into queries?
For me, it all usually starts with laying in bed very tired while watching a hilarious episode of the Simpsons ("Homer goes to College" is a superb example AND it contains a D&D reference) or while sitting on the john with one of my favorite D&D rulebooks. Snap! Inspiration hits me.
I follow the idea and build upon it in my head until I hit a deadend. Either the idea easily falls into cliche, is full of plotholes, is boring in execution, or just plain sucks. BUT, one in four times, the idea makes it past this first mental filter.
That's when I start typing the adventure background. I ALWAYS make these way too big (up to a full page). Even if 2/3 of the paragraph doens't make it into the final cut, it still helps my immersion in the idea.
Then I start with the adventure summary. This is hard; fully half of the adventures begin to fizzle in the first few paragraphs. Usually this is because I had a cool idea that cannot be easily executed. I also draw rough maps and quick stat sheets of the NPCs so I can see what I'm getting into.
Once the summary passes this test, I tack on the villains and treasure section and I'm done!
except I'm 500 words over.
That's where the cut begins. The backstory always gets stripped disappointingly bare. I begin hunting out extra sentences in the summary and cutting some of the less interesting parts.
After this, I go on my comma hunt. We all have quirks...I, use, too, many, commas, because, I, think, in, very, dramatic, voice.
Then the query rots (or ripens?) in my computer for a few days, while I occasionally return to reread it and correct errors. During this time, the process starts over with a new query.
After a few days in a row of being satisfied with the query, OFF it goes to the gatekeeper.
If I worked continuously (8-12 hours), I could probably churn out about one query a day.
What's YOUR process?