There is a concept in creative circles known as “blank page syndrome”: when you’re just starting to work on something, it can be hard to know how to start… so you don’t. Maybe you doubt every idea you have, maybe none of your ideas get you fired up.
It’s a particular type of writer’s block, and I find it’s my biggest hurdle as a gamemaster. It’s easy to fill in more details, but how do you go from nothing to something?
For example, I love the feel of the Old Gods of Appalachia setting. I ran a short 4-5 session campaign based on one of the intro adventures in the book–with the cliffhanger ending and some of the lore from the book as inspiration, the ideas seemed to flow out of me.
But despite running several sessions and reading several books of east Tennessee history and folklore, I’m at loss on how to write a completely original plot hook that leads into the type of game I want to run.
Blank page syndrome strikes me most often when I’m running TTRPGs that aren’t D&D-style medieval fantasy. What story do I want to tell in this genre? How do I hook the players in a way that feels organic? What level of realism (and in the case of Old Gods, historical references) do I want to bring in? What themes and tropes do I want to play with?
If you’re suffering from blank page syndrome, it’s hard to come up with an answer that meets all of these requirements. So you just… don’t.
I know it sounds overly simplistic, but the best way out of blank page syndrome is simply avoid starting from a blank page.
This is easier said than done, of course. I’m still struggling with where to start an Old Gods game. Not every writing prompt will give you the results you want, in the genre you want, for the system you want. But there are some tools you can use to help you in your ongoing games.
Shared World & Town Creation
Ryuutama is one of my favorite TTRPGs (you can read why here), and one of the things I loved about the campaign I ran a few years ago were the World & Town Creation sheets. (You can find them on their Resources page.) Here’s how I used them:
When the party set out on a new route, I would often end the session by filling out the Town Creation worksheet. I always had a few fields pre-populated–maybe the name, environment, or population, depending on how I was feeling. That helped me fit the town into the bigger picture and the vibes I wanted.
And often, I’d get something interesting from the players that produced a stream of good ideas for side quests and threats.
The village of Sayben was given a longhouse-like Council Hall. It was the perfect place to hold the meeting where the party was roped into some local trouble with a marauding monster.
The town of Waterford was given a shipping company with too much influence over the town. So when the PCs arrived, the company’s goons used tightened restrictions to impound the party’s wagon loaded with valuable cargo.
I was always surprised how only a few sentences could blossom out into a more complex idea that I instantly felt compelled to fill in. Before, I had no idea where to start. And then I suddenly needed to turn a simple concept into a lived-in world.
Ryuutama’s not the only option. Fabula Ultima has their own version of world creation. I’ve also heard The Dresden Files RPG has a “city creation” step that occurs during character creation. Find a game you like, and find a way to fit their system into your game.
Blank Maps
When I started my current D&D campaign last year, I had a plot hook, a couple of towns, and a vague idea (a militantly expansionist Empire surrounded by a couple of remaining free kingdoms). I figured that was enough to work with, and I could fill in the gaps as the players made choices.
The thing I didn’t expect to help was a blank map.
A friend handed me a “bean map” after a birthday party that featured an arts & crafts table and requested I use it in my next campaign. (The idea is you drop handfuls of dry beans or rice onto a sheet of paper and trace around them.)
I was skeptical, because I’m the sort of sicko who wants to do everything intentionally, by myself (even if I’m not particularly good at it). Dropping my own cities on a pre-made map? That felt like forcing myself into a box instead of letting the story evolve naturally.
But actually, it really helped.
Putting yourself in a box gives you some constraints–which means your page is no longer blank.
I imported that image into Inkarnate and started adding locations as the story evolved. I load it into Owlbear Rodeo as the party is planning their travel.
I knew Turnbeek, the starting town, was going to be on the frozen frontier, so I stuck it off in the mountains way up in the northwest.
The map was vague enough that I wasn’t locked into too much, but specific enough that it dictated basic geography. It raised new questions about how these towns fit together–how things like travel and trade worked.
When our blood hunter decided to take revenge on the dark fey that entranced his family? His mountain hometown made perfect sense in the range that divided the continent.
That heavy mountain range to the southwest? Perfect for a few isolated villages, an ancient entrance to the underdark, and the ruins of an old dwarven city.
Those little geographic details on the map unleashed a flood of ideas. Maybe it’s a mining town in the mountains, or it’s near an important mountain pass. Maybe it’s on a bay or a sea, or near a river, or some marshy area on the coast.
Of course, you don’t need to make a bean or rice map. You can find various random generators and stock art on the internet. If you want something simple, Fabula Ultima’s downloadable World Sheets have a basic land map, while its Techno Fantasy Maps have blank solar system and galaxy maps.
Random Tables and Prompts
Much like blank maps, I was skeptical of random tables. I’m a bit of a snob that way, wanting to put intention into everything I do.
And there’s definitely something to that. You want your world to make sense and have a certain feel, not just be a jumble of ideas that each seemed good in a vacuum.
So you curate and shape the results of random tables–maybe you reroll things you don’t like and tweak the results as needed to fit the feel of your world. There’s no rule that says you have to use a random table as written. You use it as a way of generating ideas, but you’re still in control.
(I’m not going to wade into the AI debate here, but I will say if you are using AI, you need to be approaching it the same way. Don’t run what an AI chat bot spits out without fitting it in to your own vision; at best, it should be a writing prompt or a first draft.)
Mike Shea at Sly Flourish has a good list of random table/generators you can find online in his article about AI alternatives. The “Gamemasters’s Book” series is also a good source of these sort of tables. And if you want a game that integrates a lot of random tables into mechanics, take a look at Land of Eem.
NPC Motivations
Obviously, you can’t start a whole campaign off of NPC motivations. But when you really get going, if you’re taking good notes and thinking about what’s happening behind the scenes, you know what your NPCs and factions want, and you know what they’re willing to do to get it.
If you’re tracking what they’re doing while they’re “off-camera,” you can think about ways to nudge them back into contact with the player characters.