When Multiverser was first going to publication, artist Jim Denaxas suggested that from henceforth everything in my life had become tax deductible.

  My job today is to create worlds, and to find ways to import worlds to games–my games and the games of referees around the world.  Whatever I do in pursuit of that job is a business expense.

  If I go to see a movie, I’m researching plots, stories, and sometimes fantasy or science fiction settings.  If I read a book, it’s the same thing.  The newspaper is a source of world ideas; so, for that matter, is the television.  But those are the obvious things.

  I could go on vacation, and justify it as a study of other parts of the world.  How much more realistic could my development of a Greco-Roman culture feel if I’ve walked the Appian Way, or stood before the Parthenon?  Could I write as convincing an Asian setting without visiting China and Japan?  If we’re setting this in the mountains in the summer, a trip to the Poconos is helpful, but wouldn’t it be so greatly enhanced by traveling to the Rockies, the Alps, and perhaps the Himalayas?  I can visit the beach and learn much; I can visit Historic Gloucester, legendary Malibu, and even the black beaches of Hawaii and learn so much more.

  And no world experience could be quite complete without understanding the food.  Fine restaurants offer the opportunity to understand the culture, my own or any of a hundred other nationalities and ethnic groups.  Concerts, whether longhair in my father’s more traditional sense or in my generation’s reactionary sense, add to my comprehension of a people, a place, a time.  And I could spend hours wandering around museums–natural history, science, art, culture, or technology, all great sources of ideas, information, background.  No matter what I’m doing, I am involved in research, finding ideas for worlds and stories and games.  And since that’s my job, it’s all tax deductible.

  Well, I’ll argue that with the Internal Revenue Service another time.  Don’t get me wrong–I usually win when I’m dragged into court.  I just don’t know that they’d be so willing to accept my definitions of business expenses as I propose.  Meanwhile, there’s another point.

  But in order to get to it, I’m going to wander away from it.

  I took a Creative Writing:  Fiction class back at Gordon College.  At the time (probably 1977), I had no expectation of ever using it in life.  I hadn’t heard of role playing games, and saw my future as a musician and composer, not a writer.  (If you’re in college and you aren’t in some highly technical field that guarantees you a job in a lab somewhere almost before you graduate, the best advice I have is keep your options open, learn broadly everything you can about everything they offer, and keep your books and your notes.  If your degree isn’t something very specifically in demand, it isn’t your primary goal.  Yes, you are there to get a degree; but far more important than that, you are there to learn everything you can, to know what is taught, and to understand how to learn and how to think.  Those are the real things you learn in college:  how to think first, how to learn second, how to find information third, and the lessons themselves fourth.  The degree, a scrap of credential, only shows that you had the opportunity to learn these things.  It’s not the goal, but evidence that the goal may have been reached.)  I took this creative writing course because it sounded interesting, and I wanted to learn about writing; I thought I might one day write the next great fantasy novel, in the far future, but it certainly wasn’t on my list of career objectives.  Yet it has proved in several ways to have been one of the most valuable courses I took.

  One of the basic requirements of the course was the maintenance of a writer’s journal.  We were to carry a notebook with us at all times, and every day to write something–anything–in it.  It could include descriptions of things we saw or people we met; plot ideas or story concepts; dreams and fantasies; drafts of bits of required papers; mental observations; images and similes and metaphors.  I started it because it was required; but I kept it up intermittently for years thereafter, and have three notebooks packed with such writings.  In there you’ll find story and world ideas for fantasies and horror and science fiction.  You’ll find my realization that mysteries have to be written backwards–that the author has to know who did it and how from the beginning, and then unravel it by presenting the clues available to the detective.  You’ll find the original notes which became my Confessions of a Dungeons & Dragons™ Addict article.  I wrote about the technical details of some of the jobs I had; I described landscapes and skyscapes from many times of the year in several parts of the world.  Co-workers were sometimes sketched as potential characters, and conspiracies were hatched.  I wrote a few entire short stories in those pages, and from these taught myself much.  In one, I examined the difference between what a wizard might have done and how his victim might have perceived it, recognizing that magic is less about what the user can do and more about what he can make others believe he did.  And you’ll find the moment I realized that Frank Herbert broke perspective to capture a moment, and the moment I realized that he and J. R. R. Tolkien held my attention by splitting the action in their stories between several stages and moving from one to another.  So much that I learned about people, places, plots, and ideas can be found in the pages of those notebooks.

  And every once in a while I go back through them, looking over the old ideas.  I wrote a few short stories for my sons’ teachers to use in their holiday celebrations in school, and dug through the books for color and descriptives that would make the scene more real.  They have proved quite valuable.

  And that brings us back around to that point I mentioned a few paragraphs back.

  Every minute of your life, every step that you take, you are surrounded by story ideas.

  The clerk at the grocery store–look at her.  Is she young and pretty, and expecting a wonderful life ahead of her?  Is she old and tired, doing this to support her three kids?  You don’t know; but notice her, watch her, make some guesses.

  There’s a gas station on the corner; they just built it last year.  What was there before that?  I drove through my home town a few months ago on my way to visit my parents, and realized that I did not recognize anything familiar but the road itself–if any of the stores were there when I was a boy, I did not notice these.  Each building can be part of your world, or an inspiration for part of it; and in a matter of only a few years, some will be gone, and most changed in some way.  Capture the present.  Make notes on the past, what you can remember of it.  No, I’ve never used downtown Ramsey in any of my game worlds (or, not yet, anyway); but the bits of it that I remember make good fodder for other worlds.

  Look at the sky, the trees, the ground, the roads, the houses.  What month is it?  How many times have you run a game in which the season for the characters was different from that of the players?  Do you really know what summer looks like, smells like, feels like?  How July is different from August?  How summer rain and spring rain differ?  Can you convey that within your descriptions?  Can you convey the difference between December and January while sitting around the pool in June, and make your players shiver from the cold?  Learn the settings.

  I read an interview with a successful French photographic artist.  In it he gave the obligatory word of advice to those who aspired to a career akin to his.  His was quite interesting.  Ignore the standard social convention, he said:  stare at people.  You must see them to be able to understand what they look like.  I would say the same thing:  stare at everything and everybody, at least in a figurative sense.  Don’t think of anything as mundane or insignificant; it is in fact the mundane and insignificant that provides the best color, and often the most interesting ideas.

  Do you need a notebook to do this?  Probably.  Maybe right now you don’t–maybe you can draw from your current experience pretty well, and create things from what you know.  But there are many things I wish I’d written when I saw them.  I would have a much larger base from which to create had I done so.  I have many years of experiences which are faint memories now, good and bad memories lacking the detail for which I could wish.  I suspect no matter how thoroughly you preserve your observations, there will always be things you forget and wish you could remember–the pleasures and pains of life, the family gatherings which seem so routine at the time and so poignant later (”the last time we saw Grampa alive”), the daily activities of school or work that you would rather avoid but which will not be here forever.  Life is packed with these moments, stories, people, places.  You don’t need me to give them to you–you just need to preserve them and shift them into new combinations.

  So in a sense this entry in our series has been about keeping a notebook.  But it’s more essentially about keeping your eyes and ears open, paying attention and noticing things around you, and finding a way to keep those observations for future use.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

  I’m looking for world ideas.  I’m always coming back to that.  I’ve got books to write, games to run.  For every idea someone promises to prepare for publication, I need another one lined up in case it doesn’t come through.  So I’m looking for world ideas much of the time.

  Right now I happen to be looking for them in my office.  But they’re here–you just have to know how to look.

  The room is a mess.  I’d like to tell you that it’s because I’m still moving in, and I could get away with that as it is true.  For the last couple of years I’ve had office materials in two places, and everything from one of them is here–but the other houses two file cabinets and many boxes of books and papers which will have to find a place here.  But the truth is that I’m a messy sort of person, and have been so since I was very young.  I read an article thirty years ago that mentioned that creative people preferred a degree of clutter, and I’ve armed myself with that as a defense ever since.  I’ve a pretty good idea in which of these piles to look for anything from world maps to bank statements.  Still, I should put some of this away.

  Across the room I see four mugs on top of a cabinet.  The cabinet will eventually house some of those books and papers.  I’ve never done a world about corporations and businesses; but who would want to play in such a place?  The mugs are of more interest to me.  The first was a Christmas present from one of my kids; it’s one of those Coca-cola™ mugs with the playful polar bears on it.  I’ve done an ice age world; it should be published soon.  My second son has written a sketch of a world with intelligent animals and dumb humans–not really an original idea; Jonathan Swift did a good job with that, but it has potential.  I don’t see combining the two ideas, at least not at present.  And those bears would make for a bit of comic relief, but not a world.

  The second mug has been mine for a long time.  I’ve had my coffee in it at late night games for as long as I can remember, took it with me when I was teaching cub scouts, and keep it in my room so that no one will break it.  I’m surprised it’s lasted so long.  It’s got a Magellan age map on it, and says Captain.  I don’t think I’ve done a good swashbuckler yet–a merchant sailing adventure of that period, yes, but I could do something on the order of Captain Blood, where the pirates are the misunderstood heroes.

  The third mug was another gift, an “I love you” mug from one of my younger sons.  It’s really very Valentines and Lace.  I remember playing in a game in which my character fell in love with a non-player character; and I remember running a game in which one of the players went actively seeking a wife.  Come to think of it, there have been a lot of romantic interludes over the years, from the time Marsonian rescued Lemunda the Lovely to the time Chris married Olivia in The Dancing Princess and Bill asked Blake’s 7’s Cali to be his bride.  But I’ve never tried to do a setting in which romance was the focus.  I’ll have to give that more thought.

  The fourth mug is navy blue, almost black, slightly marbled.  I bought this one for myself, because I really liked the color.  From here, it’s just a dark mug on top of the cabinet–hardly a fount of inspiration.  Yet it immediately reminds me of Tristan’s Labyrinth, an underground maze with no exits and no lights.  Darkness can be an important element in a setting.  A world entirely in darkness presents its own challenges.  Of course, as with the labyrinth, the creatures who are native to that world would not rely on sight, or at least not in the same sense as we do.  It would only be interesting if the player characters come from another world, one in which light is abundant, and have to negotiate the darkness.  In Tristan’s Labyrinth there were walls, and if you had no light you could navigate by feel through the darkness.  Perhaps I could do darkness again, this time without walls.

  There is a window fan tossed up on the cabinet behind the mugs.  I just finished an underground world with giant exhaust fans providing circulation, so that’s the first thing it brings to mind.  Is there something else I can do with fans?  I vaguely recall some underwater science fiction piece in which huge impellers drew water into conduits.  An underwater setting has special problems, although you can do it sort of like the Mars of Total Recall, limited biosphere containments on the ocean floor.

  The TV is next to the cabinet; it’s on top of my son’s dresser, which is in here until I can get the extra hardware to put his bunk bed together in his room.  The dresser itself has an almost colonial look to it, suggesting a foray into an historic game.  The juxtaposition with the television and VCR stacked on top creates an impression of an eclectic technology, a world in which the old and the new coexist; and I wonder whether they do so in harmony or tension.

  There is a painting tossed up on the wall behind the TV, partly obscured.  It landed here because it had to go somewhere, and there was a nail in the wall there.  It was a wedding gift from the artist, Bernice Wurst; I’m told she is one of New Jersey’s outstanding artists today, but I still think of her as the lady who lived around the corner and had coffee with my mother once in a while.  And I always remember the Halloween night when she came to the door convincingly made up as a Chinese waiter.  (At ten years old, I did not recognize her; but my mother didn’t either, and thought she was a boy, so it was a convincing disguise.)  But none of that is in the picture, as useful as it might be.

  The painting is a still life, flowers in a vase.  I’m not a florist, but they look to me like mums, mostly in orange and yellow, with a splash of red and leaves in several shades of green down to almost brown.  It’s the sort of painting style which is somewhere between realism and impressionism–I see carnations, but if I look more carefully I realize that there are no petals in the puffs, just splashed on highlights and paint texturing.  In another context some of them would be popcorn balls or cotton candy.  And there is something very strange about this picture.  It hung on our walls for years; and then one day my wife asked if that leprechaun had always been sitting in the middle of it.  I looked and looked, and finally I saw the profile of a pink and white face, the brown hair and sideburns, the green-suited body with arms and legs, seated on one of the flowers as on an ottoman.  I had never seen him before; but now he is the first thing that catches my eye whenever I see the picture.  I suspect that you would not see him the first time you looked at the picture; but that if once you saw him he would be obvious.

  As I think about that hidden leprechaun, it reminds me that you can often hide things in plain sight; misdirection is one of the best tools for building suspense.

  I once ran some early episodes of Blake’s 7 as a Multiverser game.  One of them has a wonderful piece of misdirection that worked like a charm.  The crew boards a spaceship that seems to be in distress, finds the crew drugged and the pilot dead.  They begin sorting through the disorder, and find that the pilot scrawled something with his blood on a piece of panel.  In preparing for the game, I carefully etched the awkward wavy lines to a blank sheet of unlined paper.  This became my piece of panel.  I pulled it out and looked at it, and in character read off the squiggles as a number while handing it to the player, asking his character whether that meant anything to him.  It did not.  The adventure continues, the player has that sheet of paper with that number on it the entire time, and he tries to solve the mystery–who killed the pilot, and placed the gas in the ventilation system?  Why did they do it?

  But those squiggles aren’t numbers; they’re letters.  They spell the name of the killer.  As soon as someone points that out, it’s obvious–but because I told him what number it was, the player only saw the number, no matter how many times he looked at it. He was trying to figure out what the number meant, not what the squiggles meant.

  There’s a speaker in the corner, part of the last bit of musical equipment I ever bought, a P.A. system. I had my computer running through it a while ago, and the audio feed from the VCR still does.  There are a lot of good stories you can do in the music world, but you have to start with a character who is a musician.  In Sliders, Rembrandt Brown was in a world where his other self was a huge success (and in an irony that probably rang deeply with a lot more than musicians, his success was credited to the fact that he went left where our Rembrandt went right).  My Multiverser player character also met a self who had become a star.  Not every character, not every player, is right for such a story.  But it reminds me that some of the best stories are built on the lives of the players, the “might have beens” that they missed, and an exploration of what that could have meant.

  I’ve finished one wall.  There were quite a few ideas there, if you knew how to see them.  I’ve got three more walls I could do, and more things in the middle of the room.  The house has seven rooms and a hall upstairs, three or four (depending on how you count them) downstairs, so I could find many more ideas here.  I could keep going.

  But I think I’ll let you look at your walls instead.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.