Gygax 75 Challenge - Overview
Over at the OSR Pit, Ray Otus has started a thread about the Gygax 75 Challenge, which is based on an article Gary Gygax published in the April 1975 issue of Europa, a wargaming newsletter. Ray also wrote a booklet about it which is available here for free. The idea is to jump-start the creative process for making a campaign.
When I first started running games, I put them in my own homebrew setting. I borrowed elements from all of the various things I was interested in at various times (Middle Earth, Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné setting, the works of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard, etc.) but there wasn't really much rhyme or reason to it -- I would put in something I thought was cool, at the point I thought was cool to do so. And it worked fine, but it was small-picture stuff. I had the idea that there was a huge campaign world in my head, but I just needed some time to get it sorted.
Later, I revisited that setting after decades of running games in other people's settings, and I now had ideas of how I wanted it organized. My setting was kitchen sink and contained a lot of elements from disparate genres: I figured out how that could happen logically, and was delighted when the reasoning led to including more cool stuff. New fan properties gave me new ideas, and those new ideas now had a logical way they could fit without upending the whole kit. I stuck to the big picture, and as a result, I felt my new stuff wasn't quite as charming. Everything had to have a reason, and I felt straight-jacketed by my previous choices. As famous British guy Lord Dunsany puts it in the introduction to his fantastic book The Gods of Pegāna, I "became heterodox to my own heterodoxy" and broke old molds to put in new ideas.
When I first started running games, I put them in my own homebrew setting. I borrowed elements from all of the various things I was interested in at various times (Middle Earth, Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné setting, the works of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard, etc.) but there wasn't really much rhyme or reason to it -- I would put in something I thought was cool, at the point I thought was cool to do so. And it worked fine, but it was small-picture stuff. I had the idea that there was a huge campaign world in my head, but I just needed some time to get it sorted.
Later, I revisited that setting after decades of running games in other people's settings, and I now had ideas of how I wanted it organized. My setting was kitchen sink and contained a lot of elements from disparate genres: I figured out how that could happen logically, and was delighted when the reasoning led to including more cool stuff. New fan properties gave me new ideas, and those new ideas now had a logical way they could fit without upending the whole kit. I stuck to the big picture, and as a result, I felt my new stuff wasn't quite as charming. Everything had to have a reason, and I felt straight-jacketed by my previous choices. As famous British guy Lord Dunsany puts it in the introduction to his fantastic book The Gods of Pegāna, I "became heterodox to my own heterodoxy" and broke old molds to put in new ideas.
It's been a few more decades, and I've come back to the small picture. As you get older you realize that there are no absolutes in the world: absolutes are an artificial creation of Man. Everything contains bits of its opposite, every Yin has its Yang, every black its kernel of white. The small picture has elements that break the big picture, and that's perfectly fine. With that realization, the world in my head has gelled in a way it hasn't before. It might actually be time to put it on paper. And this challenge looks like the right way to do that.
Looking forward to this.
ReplyDelete