Dining, coffee, side, trestle...

A few years ago I challenged myself to draw something every day, and I managed to keep that going for a full year and have a pile of sketch books as a result, with pages bearing artistic endeavours ranging from a 2-minute pencil scribble to several hours of pen work. This felt like a big achievement and while I'm still not a great artist, I was feeling a lot more confident with a pencil at the end of the year than I was at the start.

I figured the next year I wouldn't do another similar exercise (or continue the drawing), though a couple of weeks in I started doing DuoLingo, which almost counts.

Then Covid.

As part of my attempt to sort myself out, I have started a new challenge. Inspired by recent tinkering with roleplaying games, at the start of the year I began to create a "random table" every day. This is something that is a staple of some types of roleplaying games, where the game master can roll dice to determine a random encounter, loot, or any other twist to the game. Random tables are not to everyone's taste, but they can be a lot of fun for some games and can introduce new twists to a narrative as well as help bail out a GM who needs to come up with content on the fly.

The point of this for me, apart from to build a positive habit, is to address something that I have noticed over the last couple of years. I used to be able to come up with what I will describe as "content" pretty well, by which I mean small elements to fit into my game designs, like names and descriptions for thematic items within the games. I wasn't exactly world class, but I could do it well enough for my purposes. Lately I seem to have got out of the zone for this sort of thing, and it just feels so much harder than it used to be. 

Of course, the classic way to get better at this sort of thing is just to do it, repeatedly, often. 

So that's what I'm doing: every day, coming up with a theme for a table (sandwich fillings, names for fantasy taverns, contents of a desk drawer, etc.), making a list of items fitting that fit that theme, and sharing it online. If you'd like to follow along, I have been posting on my main Mastodon account and on BlueSky - I decided not to post absolutely everywhere that I could.

I'm now 49 days in and it seems to be working. I'm spending less time agonising about what I put into each table, or even what the theme for each table is, so hopefully in a few months' time I'll be able to rattle these out even more easily - or be producing more interesting content. 

A couple of people have already suggested that I could compile all the tables into a book at the end. I suspect a minority of the tables are likely to be of any interest, and the good ones will need a load of editing and rewriting, but a load of them seem to be naturally falling into being part of a slightly whimsical, medieval fantasy world, so maybe I'll be able to combine those ones and polish them into something coherent I can share. We'll see - it's still very early days.