Let’s just ignore that I haven’t written anything for the blog in two weeks & we can skip the apology/excuses/justifications and get back to a topic.

“Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down,” per Robert Frost, and he also described it as playing handball without a wall. Most of us don’t play either sport but handball, I’m guessing, is even rarer which is why the front half of the quote is the bit we remember.

I like the handball analogy better because sometimes I don’t get really creative until I literally¹ bounce off a wall. Or until I find the right kind of person to bounce ideas off of. The tennis net always seemed more arbitrary, and when a ball hits the net, it stops. And then you have to reset and go through all the motions to get the ball back in play, which is why players avoid it.

Anyway, the point of Frost was that without some structure and a few rules², you’re not really writing Poetry™, at least as he preferred it. But just like a couple of kids can have fun with two rackets and a tennis ball without having to keep score, free verse is still poetry³.

In designing games, particularly board games where many of the rules will be given both representation and often physical form in the printed board and components, we have all kinds of structure to work within. Our game is the board is the structure is the rules. Folks can ignore the rules⁴ but since we’re using the same pieces, even variations tend to be pretty close to form. Italian sonnets and English sonnets are not the same but 14 lines is 14 lines. Board games are fun, but playthroughs of Monopoly and Risk all tend to look the same – and while both are now traditions in some families, the tradition is also usually to play them just once a year.

Card games, particularly those that use the now-standard deck of 52, in four suits, are probably the closest we get to a “Frostian Poetic” genre of games: there is structure, there are rules. But there is also a lot of creativity in the variations. A single deck but ‘according to Hoyle’ we have a couple hundred variations of play. Within the limits of 10 + 3 times 4 we get Poker, Bridge, Rummy, Cribbage, Blackjack, Solitaire, and War, with all kinds of ways to match, count, or rank cards and just as many ways to ‘take tricks’ and keep score. Eventually we hit limits, and we add a joker — or we get variations like Pinochle, or the UNO deck. We keep the vocabulary (draws, hands, playing out of the hand face up on the table) but use new alphabets.

And eventually we get things like Mille Bornes [1906 or 1955] and Magic: The Gathering [1993]. Is MtG still playing by the same design rules as Poker?⁵ There is a very distant family resemblance. MF Doom and Robert Frost stand a century apart but Doom and other rappers are most assuredly still using rhyme and meter.

And with that, I think I have stretched the analogy just about as far as it’ll stand.

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RPGs have rules, obviously. And many, many available accessories, minis, and tokens that can make some sessions play more like board games or war games, at least in part.

But RPGs, at least those played on table tops⁶, are more like a free-form collaborative story-telling game. The rules we start with give that story some structure, and also help shape the course of play, but over time we’ll change the rules, too, to get closer to the kinds of stories we want to tell.

Maybe more importantly than the rules of an RPG is the vibe of the RPG. And I specifically chose vibe to describe this because I am Gen X and cringe and trying too hard to sound cool, but also because the Vibe of a Game is a mix of things: quite a bit comes in the published settings or ‘worlds’ of the game, some in the rules-as-written, some from other media including the sources used for inspiration by the game designers, and some from roughly 50 years of playing these games and the 20 years of mid-century sci-fi and fantasy that came before them.

Mork Borg is a Vibe. Apocalypse World is a Vibe. Blades in the Dark is a Vibe.

Pathfinder has a lot of overlap with D&D but the settings of Golarion and Forgotten Realms have very different vibes. [Even within D&D: Dragonlance, Spelljammer, Dark Sun, and OG Greyhawk are all very different games to play though technically they share a common rule set — if we fudge a bit. Different D&D settings came out for different editions, and 2nd isn’t 4th isn’t 5th.]

A really neat thing about RPGs is that the rules almost don’t matter. Characters can be defined in different ways, the labels can change. A paladin could be called a Holy Warder, Realm Guardian, Templar, or Lightbound but if a player wants to play a character with that paladin vibe, we find a way for it to fit the overall vibe of the game world and we give that character Smite, because paladins, even if the rest of the class kit and power set are wildly different. I can build a paladin by rolling 4d6 multiple times to generate stats or I can start with 100 points and break out some of the GURPS manuals. I can search online and find the appropriate PbtA Playbook [edit to add: Dungeon World’s Paladin. there ya go.]. I can grab my copy of Band of Blades (it’s in my to-be-read pile) and see what the deal is with Chosen [edit to add: It’s a whole different Vibe].

When even whole rule sets are optional and swappable (to an extent) what is the limitation we put on our RPGs? What’s the rhyme scheme and meter?

When your game can technically be played across an entire whole world, it’s often necessary to drop two sets of parallel lines down and make ourselves a board. Starter village, dungeon, quest hub, capital. Quite a few early sessions fall back on the familiar so we can ground ourselves and figure out the Vibe, both of the game and setting, and also what this particular table, this set of players with with this GM, how that’s going to feel as we play 3-5 hours at a time.

That’s our ‘board’, I think. And across many different genres, I find the parallels. It could be horror-survival on a sci-fi space station but we’ll have a Safe Starting Area, a Dungeon equivalent, eventually a quest hub, and probably a goal, destination or end game — in a fantasy context, the ‘Capital’ — whether that means impressing the monarch or taking their throne. A wild west setting will have some sleepy frontier town, Canyons and Badlands and the things in ‘em, and maybe eventually some sort of slowly simmering plot that leads the story to the Big City, or even Back East. The road there and back again starts in the Shire but eventually takes us to Minas Tirith, and as a “road movie” it’s more about hitting the landmarks than bouncing around a quest hub but there’s comparable story structure there.

Twisting expectations, and (as a GM) finding whole new ways to make a “starter village” and “dungeon”, that’s what keeps the game fresh⁷. And of course: with the biggest dungeons, the whole campaign can just be town and vaults, back and forth but always exploring deeper or farther, until we find the story in it and the eventual endgame.

A lot of us have stuck with D&D (various editions with various additions and often a lot of homebrew) but only because that’s where we started. The basics of D&D have proven to be pretty adaptable, and folks have done some wild things with just 12 classes and a handful of character backgrounds. But the tropes of D&D and our expectations going in are also ‘grounding’ in a way – and grounding in a couple of senses: a foundation underneath us, and a sort of electrical ground for the rules to keep things from short-circuiting.

So to answer my own question, yeah, the tennis net is kind of necessary. Arguably, the rules we agree to, at the table, keep the game ‘on the rails’ just as surely as the clockwise track around Monopoly, and the limits of the setting (fantasy or otherwise) are also the edges of this (huge, imaginary, but still contained) game board. RPGs don’t have to be limited, but we accept the limits. That’s the vibe we like and the type of stories we’re looking to tell.

Just like no one is actually playing Monopoly by the official rules, no two GMs run their table the same way, and no two groups are playing the exact same game either. Everyone adapts something. Every GM has had a player who wanted to do something that required either a creative interpretation of the rules or some sort of exception (hopefully minor) from them. This flexibility is core to RPGs; not unique to RPGs but much more common among them.

So you might disagree with me. The poetry of what you’re making is maybe more spoken word than dactylic hexameter or alliterative Old English or strict quatrains and couplets.⁸ But I feel like some limits are probably necessary, especially when the boundaries of what we can imagine are basically limitless.

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The image at the top of the post is only tenuously, tangentially related. Though I needed some starting point for thinking about the post today, & I took the literal boundary drawn on an otherwise completely open-ended map. It’s the latest version of the template I’ve been working on for making hex World Maps (for fantasy settings or other things that work well on hexagonal grids) – you can see the last couple of posts for more on the scale for the map, and what the rectangular overlay is for.

Eventually I’ll find a final template I like and work up a couple of samples that use it and put together a packet, a pdf, & make that available on Itch.io

¹ “literally” in its modern meaning, not literally literally.

² Like the Pirate’s Code, rules for poetry is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules

³ Frost was using a version of the tennis-and-net analogy as far back as 1933, Ginsberg wrote Howl in ’55. So whatever trend Frost was responding to, it wasn’t specifically the Beats or Ginsberg. And arguably the use of repetition in Howl gives it a structure and, especially when performed, the spoken word cadence is just as effective as a strict poetic meter would have been. But enough commentary on poetry I am way out of my depth here.

⁴ Everyone is playing Monopoly wrong, for example.

⁵ Magic should probably be compared to games like Rummy instead of Poker, in that a bunch of cards are played in front of each player and you can react to what your opponent played on your own board, albeit in a limited fashion

⁶ Table tops, real or virtual. A lot of people play the game on screens these days, so we can’t differentiate just based on ‘is it software?’ anymore. But for MMOs, JRPGs, and other computer RPGs the game world is kind of a fixed thing, and you interact through your PC (both your Player Character and your personal computer) and your options are strictly limited to those of the interface. For “table top” RPGs, we’re playing as the PCs and we interact with each other. The options are close to being unlimited, so long as we agree to keep telling this particular story to each other, even if we do occasionally let the dice decide some outcomes. There may eventually be some sort of hybrid, certainly some companies keep working toward that as a goal. But the original sort of game, played in person in living rooms, dens, and at kitchen tables, with or without a lot of battlemaps and minis, will always be an option available to us.

⁷ …plus new options for character fantasies: classes, subclasses, ancestries, backgrounds — we’ve been building this kit for decades.

⁸ makin’ that analogy work.

I’m building a world.

This isn’t that unusual. In fact, it’s so common there’s a longstanding joke about “world builder’s disease”, where creators and authors of many different sorts become a little bit obsessed with all the pesky little details of a fantasy or sci-fi setting and distracted from actually writing characters and story. Or, in the case of someone working in and around RPGs, becomes so occupied with lore and backstory and possibilities they lose sight of players, and the game.

I’ve got a bad case of world builder’s disease. Not terminal, but I’ve suffered for decades. And the project I’m starting *isn’t* about fixing that—because I’m not sure that world building is the problem to be fixed.

If I do have a problem, it’s that I’m easily distracted—and sometimes that distraction isn’t the internet (I know, right?), I’ll get sidetracked by another idea: A new rabbit hole to run down, a character idea that needs to be chased down and properly sorted, a road ‘less travelled by’ encountered in a yellow wood, that sort of thing. To date, I haven’t found a way to avoid the distractions, and I haven’t been disciplined enough to ignore them.

What slowly dawned on me is going to sound like a stupid idea: I had a suspicion that what I really needed was something *bigger*, big enough to accommodate the ideas and the distractions both. A super-large idea container that I could just start binning things into.¹

So I’m building a world.

I have notes. Lots of notes. Lots of disconnected ideas and story beats and fragments of mythology.² The whole thing could use some structure. And of course I mean literal structure, in that there will be maps, and a wiki.

But by ‘structure’, I also mean deadlines. For inspiration I look at how Dickens and many others wrote their novels: a bit at a time and serialized in magazines before it was all wrapped up (and edited) into a book. Many of us are already familiar with how motivating an actual deadline can be. I don’t know if the self-imposed deadlines will loom quite so menacingly over a beleaguered author’s very soul, but I have a calendar set up for 2022 and we will discover that together.

I’ve been working at this big project in fits and starts all through 2021, and going back into 2020 a bit.³ So parts of this project are already set up, but the ribbon cutting and grand opening will be the first deadline, six weeks into 2022, 11 February. My big goal for the new year, the overall goal of the project, is to publish an installment every six weeks.

I’m still trying to decide both what publish means and what the actual product will be for these ‘installments’, but I’m leaning towards a package of materials for folks who enjoy fantasy role-playing games.⁴ A set of maps and some background and some characters, a setting or adventure suitable for a gaming session, along with some notable NPCs and a new faction and a new town or city, another small corner of a slowly unfolding world.

While I’m working on each Drop [working term, I’ll come up with a better name later] I’ll be adding all that along with the other details and proper names of things to the custom wiki. If I get distracted by something shiny, I’ll add that to the wiki too. And between now and February, as I figure out the actual scope and scale of the 2022 project, I’ll be blogging here, talking my way through my process, telling you the tools I’m using—and learning—and sharing whatever the hell this is, both the process and the project.

Sharing is the best part of what we do online, ideally anyway.

And in the interest of sharing, I’d like all of this to be free. (Mostly free) (and some large part of it always will be free.)

I will be giving away what I can⁵, and we’ll work out the financing later. At some point I anticipate that my project will need art, lots and lots of it, and for that I’m going to need an art budget. Though I do like money, and find it has many uses, this is not a project I plan to make money on. (I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t an outside chance that I’ll build something worthwhile through this — and worth putting a price tag on — but wherever that place is, we’re not there yet.)

This is the point in the article where I try to wrap things up, and end with something trite like, “So Join Me on This Epic Expedition to a New World! I have a lot of ideas, and hope for the future, and though I don’t know quite where we’re headed I look forward to where this Grand Adventure (And Experiment!) will take us!”

At the moment I can’t think of anything better to end on, and far be it from me to make an unexpected break with tradition.

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¹ “Bin” is probably the wrong verb to use here but let’s go with binning for now.

² In addition to the notes I’ve specifically made since this started, I also have older stuff that I might, might, recycle into the new World as well, but I’m not sure how many of those past worlds could find a new home here and which should really stand alone and apart (and are best forgotten). There is a difference between a large encompassing world with many influences, and just putting every failed draft into a blender and hitting frappé.

³ Pandemic. Y’all know. And the long slow crawl up this on-ramp is also why I feel like deadlines might help. A new start, a new year, an actual schedule. Motivation.

⁴ The distance between RPG and Fiction is a short one. Not even a brisk walk down the garden path, more like standing on different parts of the lawn, batting things back and forth over a net. So I hope my decision to favor RPGs over Fiction doesn’t disappoint. Hopefully the flexibility of the format allows me to be even more creative.

⁵ And releasing as much as I can under a Creative Commons license. Share Alike or just straight-up free to use.

⁶ Worldbuilding might not be a problem that has to be fixed but the jury is still out on my reliance on emdashes, parentheticals, and endnotes.

I suppose I should start throwing things up on this wall and we’ll see what sticks.

[crapgadget tv commercial voice]
”Inspiration hits. You really like this idea! But who has the time to take on yet another personal project?”
[/crapgadget tv commercial voice]

It can be hard to actually get to work and move a project from ‘start’ to ‘done’, even when you’re motivated (more or less motivated) to tackle your growing list of ideas, because you have no idea where to start or what to focus on. It can be hard, too, to know when to call something done so you can cross it off the list and move on to something else. (We can fix and fiddle and add to things seemingly forever, never really getting done.)

At least, it has proven very difficult for me to actually follow through on ideas (ymmv) and I think the popularity of things like NaNoWriMo and Inktober show that for a lot a folks, an extra nudge (and the “let’s all do this together” community aspect) is just what they needed to actually get over that hump. This suggestion isn’t going to be a runaway success like either of those: there is no theme, it’s going to take all year and not just a month, and odds are, you’re not going to like it.

That’s the point of deadlines though. Nobody likes a deadline. This is also why deadlines work: you have a drop dead date and you have to just get done with the thing (or 90% done with the thing) and turn it in.

We all know this, but we never — “we” in this case being me, and possibly some of you — we never set deadlines for our personal projects or back-burner stuff, the stuff we promise we’ll get to, “someday”.

Since it is going to take some sort of outside force to move all these projects along: I’ll do it. I’ll be the bad guy. Not a nudge but a shove. I’m taking a running start and ‘bout to knock you over a cliff of productivity into 2020.

_You_ will have to figure out which 13 projects¹ you’re going to tackle in 2020 but I get to be the evil editor or boss or demanding client who is going to give you a deadline. 13 of them in fact.

There is a neat coincidence about how the numbers line up between the orbit we call a ‘year’ and the rotation of this dumb rock that we call a ‘day’ and the odd-when-you-stop-and-think-about-it habit of dividing days into batches of 7: Thirteen 4-week chunks that we more commonly call months.²

Smaller projects could be paired or batched. Clean up the garage, and then build shelves & a bench, for example. Or organize all of last year’s receipts and then do your taxes and then set up a system to actually keep the paperwork organized going forward. Or just do the “one big weekend” job that is actually going to take you two weekends (it’s true and you know it) and then you have a 3rd weekend to clean up after (you know it’ll take the 3rd weekend too) and have a week off before the due date. Something that would actually take 4 whole weeks might take some planning; making the plan & doing the prep & buying the stuff could be a whole ‘nother prior project with its own due date. Heck, with the planning and prepping and going (and resting after) even a week’s vacation could be considered a “project”.³

Learn a skill. Build a shed. Iterate 8 times on a recipe idea. Pick any of the half dozen things you’ve been putting off for “someday when [you] have the time”

4 weeks is a block of time.
And we’ve got 13 chunks like that in 2020.

Here are your Due Dates for the 2020 Assignments:

30 January
27 February
26 March
23 April
21 May
18 June
16 July
13 August
10 September
8 October
5 November
3 December
31 December

Due dates are Thursdays because I want you to wrap-up what you’re doing, call it done (or done enough) and file it — and then go enjoy at least one weekend off out of four.⁴ We’ve already lost one week⁵ so your first assignment is going to be rushed and I know I popped this on you late but I have two suggestions to help cover that

.Option 1. you could use January to brainstorm (or resurrect) the 12 other really good ideas you’d like to get done this year. Your first project is find 12 projects for 2020, due 30 Jan. Should be easily do-able in three weeks. You’ll probably have time to revise your list four or five times and maybe do some prep work or shopping for the first one.

~or~
.Option B. take the three weeks now to break down that One Really Big Project into 12 more manageable, achievable chunks.

For example⁶, if the really big project is to “finally write that book” the 12 chunks might be:
.1. Read 20 books in the same field/genre
.2. Read 20 more books in the same field/genre
.3. Outline and structure – plot and setting for fiction, scope and focus for non-fiction⁷
.4. Read 20 more books in the same field/genre
.5. OK now think about what works and doesn’t in the 5 dozen books you’ve read this year. Yes, I expect this to take 4 weeks.
.6. Revisit the outline. Revise the outline. If you have nothing to revise I think you did Assignment 5 wrong, but anyway, skip the first two chapters and write starting from chapter three.
.7. Are you three weeks into writing the middle of your book? Good. Now stop that.⁸ Go back to your outline and the beginning and write the first chapter. Revise the outline, because you probably have some different ideas now than where you were at four weeks ago.
.8. Write 10,000 words
.9. Write 10,000 words
.10. Write 10,000 words
.11. You should be around a fifth or a third or halfway through your outline, well, some way through the original outline: it has probably ballooned since and you’re thinking this is going to be more than one book? Maybe a trilogy? How do professional authors do this? Anyway, Stop. It’s the 6th of November and you’re already behind on NaNoWriMo; I’m gonna need 50,000 words out of you on a completely different book by 30 November. No, don’t outline, that’s not what NaNoWriMo is about. Vomit words into a file. Go go go go you’re already late but 6 November is a Friday, you have all weekend to play catch-up. (Hopefully the habit of writing 500-ish words a day for the past 12 weeks primed you for this.) The “2020 Assignment” deadline is 3 December but go ahead and hit that NaNo goal line on 30 November (or don’t, no shame, it happens some–or most–years) and then take a break. Take the weekend, take a week. Take two, why not, get some end-of-the-year holiday madness taken care of. But there’s still one more assignment before January:
.12. Revisit your outline. Read the 30,000 or so words you wrote before November. Go back and re-write your first chapter. Go back and re-write the opening line — spend a couple of days or a week on just that, why not.

See? Easy.

You still won’t have written a book in 2020 but now we have a plan! .⁹

And due dates. Your first assignment is due in three weeks.

¹ Ooooo… 13! Spooky and unlucky and bad. See, this is going to work out great.

² Except months are longer than 4 weeks and we have 12. And the leftover day (or two) each year. And why isn’t this standardized yet? Inertia? Anyway the calendar sucks but days are days and weeks have seven of ‘em and 4 weeks is probably enough time to tackle a project-of-appropriate-small-epic-scale. Also the Earth’s natural satellite might have influenced why we think of 28 or 29 or 29-and-half days as being somehow significant but hell, I ain’t no astronomer, and it still doesn’t explain Juli’s *or* Greg’s calendar.

³ Anything over a week or that requires a passport might take up two.

⁴ Also because the very last day of the year happens to be a Thursday.

⁵ My bad. Though to be fair I had the idea of “due dates” for 2020 last week and I just didn’t get around to writing it up until today. I’m kind of bad about getting around to finishing things. If only I could mitigate or even correct that by having some sort of external, set deadl… oh. right.

⁶ This sample project breakdown is a kind-of-on-topic digression that really could and probably should be its own post but that’s not the way I write or think so… here, have it. If you end up reading a lot of my blog output you might notice that these digressions are ‘a thing’ and damnably, I’m good at them (the digression part; the writing has to stand on its own for you to judge as good or not). I’m not saying you have to write a book in 2020 or that my 12 steps are the way to write a book but if you wanted to follow it I think it would “work” in as much as I admit that if followed, to the letter and as outlined, it’s not actually going to work.

⁷ I call it an “outline” here and throughout but “outline” might have some sort of meaning for you that differs from mine so I’ll stress that a book “outline” could be a lot of things and not all of them are formal or heavy or hard to do. You could be starting with just the story seed and a lot of background notes and half an idea for an ending but not an “outline”. That’s great; take the 4 weeks and think it over and write that down – Or 10k words in a bare-bones we’ll-flesh-the-scenes-out-later super-early not-even-first-draft-let’s-call-it-the-zero draft – Or just a list of all the clues you want to put into the mystery and the killer twist at the end – Or the history of the place you’re about to use as your setting. You might take these 4 weeks to think about your main character and supporting cast and their enemies and do rpg character sheets and backstory for each instead of developing a scene-by-scene outline of the story. It doesn’t have to be a single document, either; you could (and maybe should) use Scrivener or a mini-wiki or an index card deck or a mind map or the random notes text file in Notepad on your laptop or whatever pre-writing structure you find most useful. You might be ready to just dive in and discover your characters and pants the plot on the fly while you write, which is also valid, and so your assignment for 23 April is to just write (but take the break after 4 weeks to go read some more in your genre). Or whatever completely sensible thing you want to do (or end up doing) as part of your process that makes your process different from mine, and better. And this is a lot of really good content, down here in an end note, that quite honestly should be featured in its own post and I must be nuts why do I keep doing this.

⁸ Before the edit this sentence was, “Now stop that nonsense.”

⁹ A plan with potentially 80,000 words at the end of it, though not all one book and potentially not related – but past that and on top of 80K words: an outline & banger first chapter to take with you into 2021.