Having dipped my toes into the Twitter waters, I’ve begun thinking about how to add something worth reading to the vast pool of information, rather than simply reading someone else’s witticisms or, worse, filling choking the internet with drivel about which coffee house I’m sitting in and how I feel about that. As Eileene would say, I need to be a producer rather than a consumer.
The first idea to come to me is RPG adventure plots. I’m good at those, especially ideas with a disturbing twist. The demand is there, too, as evidenced by the perpetual cry on the d6 SW-themed Rancor Pit forum for adventure ideas fitting a given set-up. I like answering those. Maybe I could turn out something like an adventure idea a day. I don’t know whether I can come up with a new idea every day, or every weekday, but I’m game to try. A new idea a week might be a more realistic target. The real challenge is whether I can come up with a new idea every day that can be condensed to 140 characters.
That is not a lot to work with, even for something as brief as an adventure seed. GURPS worldbooks are something of a gold standard when it comes to adventure seeds. Unlike most other publishers, Steve Jackson Games recognizes that a setting isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on if you can’t squeeze adventures out of it, so GURPS authors generally pack a few margins with adventure seeds: brief descriptions of the idea around which an adventure can be built, minus all the space-consuming padding about how the PCs get to the adventure, who hires them and for how much, how tough the opposition is—all that stuff that’s easy to generate once a GM has an idea. Unfortunately, even these brief descriptions typically exceed 140 characters, and those often for familiar, retread standards: stop the bad guys from killing the rightful ruler/heir/hegemon/prime minister, steal the mcguffin from the temple/tower/headquarters, find out what’s been killing all these people, that kind of thing. Ideas that can’t simply be produced by plug-and-play methods and thus the ones actually worth reading, naturally take more space, because the novel has to be more thoroughly described than the familiar. And I’m not sure seeds worth reading can be compacted down to 140 characters—less than twice the size of the first, simple sentence in this paragraph.
I might be reduced to such expedients as removing the vowels. RPGs for lolcats.
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