Comment on “The Work Before the Work”

Please accept my congratulations on 4,000 posts, Alexis. I hope I speak for a number of us when I say that for as long as you write, I'll be here to read and reread with abandon.

With regard to the subject at hand, reading: I and my game have certainly profited by reading extensively in nonfiction as I've come to adopt a historical game world over the last few years. There's just so much to KNOW about the world, in different eras and different countries of the past. I appreciate your reminder to reach back into the world of fiction more frequently. I've read the books listed in the middle of the post, but I'd never heard of the Forster or Stendhal ones.

Joey Bennet, if you're reading this, I think nonfiction could be just as useful as fiction for getting a handle on what NPCs ought to be doing and thinking, and how you can present such info to the players in a naturalistic way. I, too, struggle with off-the-cuff descriptions ... However, slooooowly but surely, as Alexis says here, load more and more context into my brain has given me ready-made chunks of "the game world" to fall back on in the large. Even though I may fumble the moment-to-moment transmission to the players, if my head is teeming with enough facts, something I've read about sumptuary laws, or religious processions, or civil wars, or battle formations, will reliably pop up to let me add depth to the world.

Training yourself to instinctively activate that "popping up" feeling of having game world info at-hand in your head is, admittedly, harder. I can recommend to you some habits/tools from intensive memorization practice that could help you there -- the kind of thing that will train your working memory and recall. Might be useful, caveat emptor, it's at least helped me cope with a deluge of historical facts. Feel free to contact me (maxwelljoslyn@gmail.com) or ask further here (if Alexis doesn't mind.)