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Build Your World with Immersive Daydreaming

by Mike on 24 April 2023

Our imagination is an amazing gift. With a little focus and some fine tuning of our environment, we can use it to build fantastic worlds we and our players can enjoy for the rest of our lives. What can we do to further the creation of worlds in the depths of our imagination?

I've written about this topic in chapters 25 an 26 of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master and in a few Sly Flourish articles including:

Focusing Your Thinking

It's not enough to tell ourselves to simply "think about our game" without any structure to the thought. Many GMs over the past half-century discussed how much of their game came from pondering their game while in the shower, out for a walk, stuck in traffic, at a boring meeting, or otherwise stuck in a moment in time where their only distraction was one that came from their own heads.

If we want to truly benefit from our amazing skull-bound universe-simulators some structure to our thought process can help. We need first to take conscious stock of our intentions — we want to focus our thinking on our game and our world. This involves two steps: setting up our environment and focusing our thought.

Setting Up our Environment

First, we must set up the right environment for our universe-building work. Here are some ideas:

Remove higher-function distractions. This includes smartphones, computers, audiobooks, and other distractions that force us to listen or read.
Add low-function noise. White noise, instrumental music, or the sounds of nature helps us avoid the distraction of pure silence. I'm a huge fan of video game soundtracks but, in particular, I find the music of Siddhartha Barnhoorn to really let my mind wander.

Some great activities in which we can engage in such active daydreaming include:

Taking a walk (my favorite)
Exercising
Going for a drive
Lying in bed listening to music
Going to sleep

It should come as no surprise that all of these should be done away from our smartphones. Don't worry, the world can live without us for thirty minutes.

Focusing our Thoughts

With our environment set we can focus our daydreaming by asking ourselves specific questions. I like to think of this as brain-work. What are we going to work on during our next thought-session? Sometimes this can be higher-order questions like "what three ideas do I want to bring to my next game?" but sometimes it can be true immersive daydreaming with a prompt like "What is my villain seeing right now? What actions are they taking? What conversation are they having with their underlings?".

Here are some potential prompts for your focused brain-gaming:

What does my fantastic location look like if I were walking through it? What would I see?
What mosaics or frescoes would I see on the walls of this ancient crypt?
What does a day in the life of my villain look like? What would I be doing were I them?
What does this fantastic monument look like? What would it be like to look up at a 40 foot high floating obelisk hanging over a pit of bestial bones?
What do the characters look like as they sit around a campfire on the hills overlooking the untraveled valley below?
What do each of the characters look like and what do I think they'd be doing during a long rest?
What would this particular magic item look like? Who forged it? What history does it have? What hands previously wielded it?
Before this location turned into a ruin, who inhabited it? What did they do with it? What did that look like? What remains of this former use?
What would it really be like to face a twelve-foot-tall helmed ogre wielding a two-hundred-pound spiked mace? What would it look like, to face two dozen ancient animated skeletons?

Thinking First Person

One interesting way to fill in details of our focused daydreaming is to think in first person. What would it be like if we were really there. Not everyone can do this, a phenomenon called aphantasia affects about one in twenty according to current research. For those afflicted, this idea of thinking in first person — focusing on images specifically — is difficult to impossible. Not being a scientist in the field, I have little help to offer but potentially focusing on abstract questions without the visuals might still focus our minds in ways to build out our games.

For those of us able to build images in our head, the simulation grows ever more detailed. What does it feel like? What the smell in the air? What would we hear?

Questions to Avoid

When we're using immersive daydreaming to build our world and thinking about our game, there are a few directions our thoughts might go that we want to avoid. These include:

What are the characters going to do?
Where are the characters going to go?
What choice will the characters make?
What direction is the story going to take?
What is the result of the situation in which the characters find themselves?

We're not writing a novel. We're setting up a world for the characters to explore but we are not those characters. Our players are. We can set the stage, set the environment, and set out the NPCs but we should avoid assuming what the characters will do and what direction they will head. We'll find that out when we actually run it our game.

Giving Ourselves Time and Space to Go to Other Worlds

This process of structured daydreaming can do wonders for our D&D game. It lets us imagine the world with all of our senses. It lets us go there. Give yourself the time, space, and environment to use our amazing gift of imagination to build out amazing worlds we and our players can explore together.

Special thanks to Lilia for conversations on this topic.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

This week I posted a couple of YouTube videos on Scarlet Citadel Session 21 and Using "Pause for a Minute".

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs. Here are last week's topics with timestamped links to the YouTube video:

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patreons. Here are last week's questions and answers:

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as D&D tips. Here are this week's tips:

Give characters something to do in every scene.
Let players name interesting NPCs.
Use third-party spells as features of magic items.
Offer multiple paths when traveling overland.
Provide a graceful way to flee from combat.
Use narrative ability checks when fleeing or chasing enemies.
Include interesting non-combatant NPCs in dungeons or hostile regions.

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