Creative Process

So I've been thinking about my creative process lately. How do I come up with ideas, how do I process them, how do I funnel them into creative outlets? In analyzing this process I've come to the conclusion that the majority of my creative spark starts with mental images. I get a picture or snapshot or image in my mind and then grab on to it and extrapolate it and build off of it to create something more complex and fleshed out. I sometimes also get like series of events or actions playing out in a sort of day dream type of thing, but a lot of the time my creative process starts with a "still image".

For instance, as I have been working on this new campaign world of mine I have had to build up from scratch a whole lot of content. Most of this building has been done in creative bursts following a visualization of a scene or place or person in the world. Like when I was trying to decide what the nation of Rholmstag would look like. I saw a picture of a city in a dark, ancient forest. The city itself is composed of homes and buildings built into and around enormous trees, about double the size of redwoods. The whole city is surrounded by a wall composed of these giant tree trunks, in a classic wooden palisade style. Soft electric light glows from floating globes atop the walls and arcing arcane lightnings dance between glowing blue runes in a defensive perimeter. Snow covers the ground between the trees and even more is falling heavily. Dark shapes and glowing eyes can be seen in the darkened wilderness all around the city. That is one of the main mental pictures that inspired this nation for me.

From that mental picture I extrapolated a bunch of different facts about Rholmstag:

- It is a nation of dark, ancient forests. All Grimm's fairy tales style filled with monsters and things that go bump in the night.

- The people who live here live in heavily guarded and fortified settlements and the wildness around them is on their very doorstep.

- The nation has some amount of ability to manipulate electricity, though not in a modern technological way but in a more mystical, arcane style.

- As stated in Point 1, there are big bad scary things in the night. The woods are filled with werewolves and evil fae and witches and all sorts of mythological themed creatures.

- It is a cold and forbidding place that grows a strong, formidable people.

- It snows a lot, in fact I decided there are some areas where it never stops snowing. Which led me to the idea that there is a war going on between winter fae and storm giants; and where one faction holds sway the associated inclement weather type is always present.

So I got all that from that one mental image. And then these ideas have led to more ideas and then to even more ideas, and in the end the nation of Rholmstag is turning out to be pretty dang cool and interesting. I'll probably talk more about it later because I'm sure I'll type up some entries about this campaign setting.