News of Andrew J. Offutt's passing on April 30 got me to thinking about the Sword & Sorcery anthology he edited (Swords Against Darkness) and fantasy anthologies in general. It seems to me you could use such an anthology (or anthology series) for inspiration and nonrandom "random placement" of encounters/things of interests in a hexcrawl or dungeoncrawl.
Simply pick an anthology. Read every story in it (even the duds--but skimming is ok) and pick some interesting element out of each, be it a monster, encounter, location, or item. Place these on your map in order, or arrange them to taste. You could even get more "madlibs" about it and predetermine what you were going to take from each story (an item, a place, an encounter), before you read (or re-read) the story, forcing you to stretch your creative a bit more to fit it in.
4 comments:
That is sad news about Offutt. I was a fan of both is Thieves World stories and his War of the Gods on Earth series.
Interesting idea of mixing the bits of the stories. The Mad Lib spin would be a good way to get the creative juices flowing for a number of different type of fiction projects.
I was just reading Hunt the Space Witch!, one of Paizo's Planet Stories anthologies by Robert Silverberg, and was mentally ticking off boxes in my head. The titular story, in particular, could easily be translated into fantasy, post-apocalyptic, whatever.
Under the Moons of Mars . . . provides the casual reader with
New Adventures on Barsoom
Neat idea, Trey. I often grab bits and pieces from various Thieves World stories. I hadn't heard that Andrew Offutt had died, though. Swords Against Darkness is a great anthology and he will be missed.
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