A guest article by G.F. Pace
Additional contributions & Editing by Mike Bourke

A light-bulb moment for this crowd. Image by Marcello eM aka Marcello99.

I recently moved to London from Italy. After a good beer (or several) in a London pub, I can easily imagine the environment in which Tolkien and Lewis (and so many of the other Gods of the fantasy genre) began to perceive the potential of the ideas bubbling away in the back of their minds. I can picture these men sitting around a huge table, drinking ales and talking about the beginnings of Elves or the hostility between Dwarfs and Giants. Maybe I can see this scene because I’m a Poli of the Clan of PoSch, but we’ll delve deeper into that matter in few hundreds of words. Take it as it comes, for now.

After a bunch of decades we are fully connected, online with a concoction of perfect strangers who write things on something called the Web (Hail Mother Lolth, pray for us sinners!), spreading ideas in random directions online for anyone to read. We could call it inspiration, or call it plagiarism, but the idea is persuasive: that creativity, imagination itself, is changing, manifesting new ways of sourcing its building blocks. We can now live in a Collaborative world.

The romantic idea of spending a lifetime manifesting and refining ideas into works such as Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Kafka’s work of the same name, Lovecraft’s magnificent scripts, or Tolkien’s papers from the dreams of an isolated individual now sounds clunky to us, people made of bits; in the modern world, it’s possible to discuss your ideas with professionals and be inspired by them, without even moving from your house.

That is the exact thing that happened to me a week ago, as I write this.

Crowdsourcing: A Personal Example

Before reading further, I suggest you to visualize in your mind Tolkien discussing his embryonic ideas with Lewis at the “Eagle and the Child” in Oxford. If you can construct that mental image for just a fistful of seconds, it will soon be useful.

In the last 3 months I have been wandering about, trying to find a group of players – actually, I prefer the term team – to try Numenera, the latest Monte Cook game. I had bought the books and consumed them greedily (I really admire Monte’s ideas). Briefly, Numenera is our world in a billion or more years, a setting filled with ultramodern steampunk concepts like Psi-powers and Nanotech.

As I always do, I started to imagine my own world, quite different from the basic model, because I wanted to do something that I can my own. As usual, I started to read something related to the settings, so I picked up some e-books by Philip K. Dick and started to read it. [If you do not know who-the-hell Dick is, you have to fill that black hole: if you like Modern settings, Dick’s ideas will easily fit in your game]. After reading one of his short novels my imagination-engine roared loudly to life and I started writing a basic plot. Following a process suggested on this site by Mike – A folder for every file: My Document Organization for RPGs – I started to make a few tens of folders in my laptop and then I tried to fill them.

It occurs often that this engine abruptly shuts down on you; you can feel the inspiration draining from your mind, and the only thing that you can do is ask someone else a question related to your topic in hopes of re-firing that creative spark. Many times you do this only to fix your ideas firmly in mind – a lot of people don’t realize that the more mental channels you involve when working on a topic, the better will be the retention of the salient points within memory).

If you were a gentleman of the 1930s, and one of Tolkien’s friends, maybe you would have gone to a pub and sat with your own inspiration to share, in search of comment and analysis to improve the clarity of your thoughts.

In more modern times, we have the internet and can go to our laptop, take our beer and tweet something like: “#Brainstorming on a setting mental-illness-based. Any suggestion from PROs? @gamewritermike @DaddyDM @Digitalculture0 Maybe Clans or Tribes?”.

That tweet inspired this article. I had not yet decided which of the replies I had received to use as the direction for my creativity to follow, but that is not the point! These days, it is very easy to reach out and talk with experienced authors and great Game Masters, to share your experiences and problems, and to use their suggestions.

It can be seen as a new age in storytelling and directly relevant to RPGs. I personally like to share my plots and my subjects with other GMs, or with Players from outside my Team; I gain some different points of view, and improve the stubs of my ideas. On this specific occasion I was helped in many ways, with suggestions that contributed to everything from the Background of the setting to Character creation.

Crowdsourcing defined

Before we start to say discuss the main topic, it might be useful to define “crowdsourcing”.

Wikipedia offers as a definition, “the practice of obtaining needed service, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers”. This is a neat and clean definition, but it’s a little clinical. Here’s the reality: You share an idea and ask for input. If you ask the right people, you get many ideas back, which you can interpret and cherry-pick to fill the gaps in your own thinking. It’s collaborating at a distance.

It’s just like an RPG: the Mage does his spells, the Fighter slays foes on the battlefield, the Rogue is there to trick and steal, the Cleric to heal and commune with the Gods, and so on. Everyone does his part, and together those contributions combine to solve the problems they encounter.

Everyone involved in crowdsourcing only has to do only a small part of the big work, and the heart of the major work remains your own.

It is a nice idea, useful and easy to implement, and it carries many improvement to the starting concept. As Paul Valèry said, “Enrich ourselves of our mutual differences!”.

But there are pros and cons you probably have to face when doing something like crowdsourcing your idea, and before you embark on such an endeavor, you should be aware of them. And that’s what this article really concerns.

Your Idea Is Now Only Partially Yours

This is the first pitfall, and maybe the most important one to keep clearly in mind. You cannot control the direction the discussion will proceed, you can only try to assemble the resulting jigsaw into a coherent whole.

That is not so bad, because the outcome could be much better than you could ever hope to achieve on your own. Walter Benjamin foresaw in his masterwork “Das Kunstwerk in Zeitaler seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” the theoretical possibility of reproduction of every piece of art (Yes, I intentionally chose the scariest version of the title, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”). Copying works of art is a simple thing these days, though even the simplest of reproductions is inherently “lacking of something”; no reproduction is perfect, though the differences may be indiscernible until examined with an instrument more powerful than the human eye.

Crowdsourcing takes an idea beyond the point of a simple reproduction of the idea seed, because while every participant makes a small contribution, the totality has a life of its own. ‘Original’ now has a new meanings. You can’t even claim as yours the part you exclusively wrote: it’s the total, not that core, that gives the total its weight. Think of it as a snowflake; each starts with the same core, a mote of dust; but each has its own unique pattern at the end of its growth. You could start with the same idea, expose it to three different crowdsourcing communities and end with three very different outcomes – provided that you somehow avoided cross-contamination of the idea pools.

The Leader Question

Every human relationship that involves more than 2 individuals requires – and creates – a Leader. (In Psychoanalysis, there is the concept of a dual relationship which describes the relationship between a child and its mother, which is emotionally symbiotic; qualities of that relationship tend to be repeated with every subsequent one-to-one relationship that the child enters into. The term leader doesn’t fit such relationships very well, so don’t apply the opening statement of this section too liberally).

Through over 100 years of study, we have learnt many things on the topic of relationships between people, though much more remains to be discovered, studied, and understood. As far as this article’s subject matter is concerned, it is enough to describe whoever had the central idea being developed through crowdsourcing should be the Crowd-Leader. When this is not the case, the crowdsourcing effort tends to run off the rails at a hundred miles an hour, a runaway accident looking for a place to happen. Control – and ownership of the conversation – should be relinquished once a question has been posed, but resumed when it is time to decide the next question to be considered.

Crowdsourcing for ideas is done everyday by many enlightened Leaders because, as psychology says, the Folk sometimes can reach deeper into a problem than an Expert, because their naivety make their thinking clear and free from prejudice. When you are stuck on a question, simply to Trust the Crowd!

Developing The Idea

The crowd-leader is the one who puts a topic before the “crowd” part of crowdsourcing, and thereby directs the avenue of exploration within the greater whole. After developing and incorporating the suggestions raised by my first tweet, quoted previously, I followed with another, which is a great example of the process: “@newbiedm @theangrydm @daddydm @gamewritermike Thinking about role of artifacts in a mental-illness campaign. Drive to madness or sanity?”

I know that some of you might think “What a useless question. For me is clearly [fill the blank]!”. That’s the point. I was stuck in conflicting and contradictory ideas of Madness-causing or Sanity-imparting artifacts and I wanted another point of view!

Thanking Oghma, Mike gave me proverbially exactly what I needed: “@crux_mm @newbiedm @theangrydm @daddydm Why not both? Used sparingly, sanity. But they are one-ring-style addictive, inducing worse insanity” This introduced a new topic into the collaboration, the thought of Addiction.

I am not worthy to hold the Leader’s scepter of such an assemblage of professional and experienced group of contributors, but I am nevertheless the actual Crowd-Leader because the initial project is mine. At the moment, at least; each of the participants, and any non-contributing onlookers are free to take the same seeds and grow a completely different set of snowflakes from them, discarding those things that don’t fit their own model of the ultimate gamesetting and campaign.

The CCC Rule A.K.A. Comparison: Collision Or Confrontation?

When you share your Grand Idea with someone you have to figure that there is a very real possibility that your thoughts won’t give the same sometimes-celestial sound in their minds as they do yours. And, also inevitably, someone else’s ideas will collide and conflict with your own. When you are thinking about a topic, in my particular case it was about the strength of a Hero, you have a narrow range of thoughts because you are working alone.

In the act of crowdsourcing, you must consider your Grand Idea as an opinion, a starting point, a seed, but not a final statement. We normally use the term Open-minded to describe someone that can change his Point of view, but delving deeper into our discussion of crowdsourcing, a more specific definition can emerge. Colloquially, that could be stated as “Someone that puts his own ideas into a mixer knowing that from the confrontation could emerge something better”.

It is fine for ideas to collide. It is not useful to the collaborative process for the people behind those ideas to become confrontational, and that is the inevitable result of attempting to own too much of the original idea; collisions become perceived as challenging the authority of the speaker, and turn into confrontations.

Many times, during the quick Brainstorming that occurred over the twitter channels, the topic shifted and improved in ways that weren’t even on my horizon at the time! From the people I consider professionals in their craft, I acquired the idea of an Environment-based illness, for example. A Hero could feel fear of the dark because something bad is hiding around, or on the other hand an Hero could feel fear in a moment and – after an appropriate check – that fear could result in something lurking in the underbrush!

My romantic way of thinking tells me that even Lewis and Tolkien, helped by a Red Ale, experienced collisions of ideas during the Inklings’ meetings. We cannot know the exact flow of their discussion but we all know the outcome!

I cannot recommend strongly enough that it doesn’t matter if a response is against or in accord with your preconceived ideas, because you, and only you, have the last word on what you use and what you discard. If there is an objection to one of your ideas, no matter how negative or vehement, treat it as constructive criticism and re-examine your idea for flaws; take this as an opportunity to enhance the overall construct and check your personal ego at the door (or, in this case, the keyboard).

Lifting Your Single-Minded Veil

In other words, crowdsourcing is a form of Brainstorming, teamwork that is performed with slightly different means and via a medium other than face-to-face. Commonly, Teamwork means something like “Work done by several associates with each doing a part but all subordinating personal prominence to the efficiency of the whole”, so if everyone does his share but contributes nothing new, at best the outcome will reached faster, not necessarily better. Every single topic of discussion can be approached by many sides; crowdsourcing at its best takes full advantage of this.

As a psychologist I know that the human brain is social. One of my ancestral predecessors deemed that we were actually a social animal, and that we NEED other brains to share with, to communicate with, to collaborate with. Doing so in a healthy social environment improves our internal sense of self-worth, of contribution, and produces feelings of pleasure and satisfaction.

The Limited Pathways of the Mind

It’s known to Psychology that a human can’t think along more than two or three conscious pathways, can’t concentrate on more than 2 or 3 things, at the same time, so as a single individual you can only view a few facets of a problem at the same time. Considering all aspects of a problem can therefore take a lot of your time.

As a team, problem-solving is more effective and consideration of the problem at hand more global and comprehensive, inevitably resulting in a better and more satisfying result. Even crowdsourcing on twitter with one or two chosen others provides sufficient cross-communication and inspiration to achieve all the benefits of team brainstorming.

Let me offer another example from the dialogue that I have been using to illustrate the process throughout this article. I was wondering why, in this setting, the habitat would be full of mental patients; my strongest notion was of a social experiment that had gone wrong or been forgotten, which excited my interest in psychology! After discussing that possibility for a while, Mike offered a tweet about a Genefood experiment inducing susceptibility to insanity. This idea fitted perfectly because the development of an aberrant psychological development takes a long time, and specific behavior can’t come out from nowhere, it takes time and works like an emergence system. Without delving deeper into some specific pathogenic mechanics, my starting point could potentially twist the setting’s mechanics; and at all times the basic mechanics of the game must be clear in a player’s mind, or the campaign won’t be fun for them). Mike’s suggestion greatly accelerated the time frame to the point where any medical response would be overwhelmed, while make the mechanics simple and universal. From that idea, creating the necessary mechanics for an on-demand pathology system becomes almost trivially simple (Evil grin)!

The Team is a good way to solve a problem you have. It’s an even better way to solve the problems you aren’t even aware of yet!

The Right Way: Shearing The Problem

Every kind of topic or problem is a sort of food for our brain. In evolutionary terms, the newest part of our brain is the neurocortex, and its aim is use all the brain functions to solve problems (and many other things, but I’m not writing a “Neurology Mastery’” article!). Problem solving is the concluding development of an extensive process that includes Problem Finding and Problem Shaping.

The most representative example of that high-complex process it the ability (perhaps not fully shared by everyone) to solve math expressions. There are many basic rules to follow in order to solve an expression and the fundamentally right way starts with Shearing the Problem.

Two approaches to collaboration

One method of implementing a collaborative process enables a group of people to create something new or to work to expand on a topic. Every participant can contribute to either a small part of the whole topic, or to a big chunk such as the question of Theology that arises in every campaign setting. The alternative is for everyone to work on the same topic together at the same time, so that multiple points of view can be brought to bear on that specific subject.

Continuing The Example

Referring to the actual situation being used as an example, we have discussed by twitter the presence of a “Norm Camp” or Tribe containing no mental patients in there, only “normal” people. We debated about the real meanings of the word “Normal” and it was suggested – again by Mike – that the Norms might be there looking for a way to cure the problem, or perhaps were the descendants of such a group from a time after the genetically-modified food had been identified as the source of the problem, who perhaps had a legacy of a distorted sense of healthcare; certainly, looking at the history of the treatment of mental disorders, practices now considered barbaric were not only condoned but celebrated and recommended – for example electroshock therapy (still employed as an effective treatment in more appropriate medical cases) and prefrontal lobotomies. While modern society has learned from past failures in its duty of care with respect to the widespread use of these treatments, those lessons could easily have been lost under the settings of a lost or abandoned interstellar colony, something suggested in earlier discussions.

Inspired by the flow of the discussion, I started from the idea of the twisted healthcare and arrived at the idea that the Norms could be the real enemy, if they thought that they were justified in taking extreme measures in pursuit of a cure. Their attitude would be, “They’re crazy, we lost them. I’m worried about it, they were our brothers, but they are only as animals now, an offense to our Scriptures! We can still cure them madness, with the blessing of [Insert the God’s name here], but we cannot place the welfare of individuals above those of the entire population. We will do whatever we must!”

Theological Implications of this line of thought

To understand the content of this section, an earlier discussion point must be understood – the idea that each “tribe” suffered collectively from the same mental defect, had been somehow grouped together or been drawn together, or that the external agency functioned differently in different regions, perhaps based on the products being farmed in those areas – Mike.

Scripture is a work-in-progress topic. Mike tweeted a suggestion that the Mystic Clan suffered from what were assumed to be hallucinations, but were actually misinterpretations of actual glimpses by the insane of other realities. The Mystic Clan could be composed of Cleric, Priests, Druids and Shamans and their Master could be so damn schizophrenic, and so powerful, that reality could actually bend to conform to his hallucinations.

That was an amazing contribution because it was so far removed from anything I had come up with that I know I would never have reached it on my own!

The Wrong Way: Shearing Off

When a group (or, technically speaking, the group dynamic), starts to seek only harmony and conformity, a harmful phenomenon soon arises without any alert by the members: Group-Thinking. Despite it’s harmless and placid name, this phenomenon can become so entwined within the in-group that it could, theoretically, destroy the unity of purpose that is the very foundation of the group.

Actually, I misspoke: it’s not just theory, it can happen for real.

You don’t need to be a psychologist to experience a group breakdown; the only advantage, if any, of a psychologist in this circumstance consists in an understanding of group dynamics. But often you are too involved in those dynamics yourself to understand them from the inside.

When this happens, the Groupthink in a small group (and it doesn’t really matter whether it’s happening on the internet or live) isn’t much different of what happened during Nazism in WWII. The same dynamic can have many outcomes, even terrifying (so if you are a proto-dictator PLEASE don’t run a RPG session!). Okay, that’s a little extreme. The problem is that an individual can submerge his own sense of morality and independence of control, his capacity to think independently, to the ‘collective wisdom’ of the group, which in turn is following the group leader. When a member of a group begins to experience this, he becomes de-individuated and his critical thinking simply shuts down. His sense of membership within the Team starts to override his self of identity, and he identifies his own ideas as being the creation of the group, thinking of the ideas as born born by a single collective mind, almost a literal hive mind.

A real Team prefers respectful confrontation over cohesiveness. Science is built on the concept of challenging the obvious and establishing what the evidence proves; and successful crowdsourcing requires the same thing. Contrary to group-thinking, cohesiveness requires a severing of ownership of pet ideas (to avoid over-defensive reactions to criticism of the idea), but also the ability to think clinically about the suggestions of others.

The Smart Way: Thinking

Avoiding these dynamics isn’t as easy as falling victim to them, but there are many tricks that can help. Many of them are dependent on the size of the group.

• The Leader, or the Team, can assign to each member a requirement for critical evaluation, and ensure that each participant has the opportunity to voice objections and doubts without fear of reprisal.
• In big groups it can be useful to have at least two sub-groups working on the same aspect of the problem.
• Every group’s member should discuss with reliable people outside the group or the project.
• The role of the Devil’s Advocate can be be assigned to a specific member on a session-by-session basis; this increases and empowers each member’s critical thinking.

Critical Thinking

Education systems try to develop the capacity for critical thinking in their pupils everyday, almost everywhere in the world, because it is a critical life-skill. In the long journey to the creation of a new setting, or Campaign, your capacity for Critical Thinking will be your best friend. When presented with an idea, don’t love it immediately, but consider both its benefits to the end goal and look specifically for any flaws or contradictions to what has already been decided. When there is a flaw in an idea, put the crisis that would result in a blind acceptance of the proposal to the group; that’s the basic meaning of criticize. It is the simplest way to distinguish what can be a problem and what can be useful.

Choosing the right point of view isn’t artless, but every art can be learned.

Some readers might suggest that an idea can be both; this is a flawed notion. No idea can be useful and flawed at the same time; at best, an idea can be useful in one respect and problematic in another, or flawed but potentially useful if that flaw can be overcome. By putting the problem with the proposal before the group, you focus their thinking on the critical work of solving the flaw before the collaboration moves on to another subject.

Voluntary Work

Everyone who seeks to collaborate in Crowdsourcing their ideas should know in advance that the wage-free nature of the approach means they will face a high rate of absenteeism. This rate will only increase if you work with people that you don’t actually know in life, but only interact with in an online environment.

One of the basic principles of economics is “Individuals respond to incentives”, or in other words “Incentive matters!”. Without starting a deep dissertation on what an incentive could be, which would unnecessarily complicate the discussion because psychology-economy borders tend to melt together within the subject, we can say simply “no one will do something for nothing back”. In my attempts to involve Professionals in my project I obtained more negative than positive responses.

When you try to crowdsource ideas on a subject, you can’t blame anyone for poor or insufficient work just because you’re throwing your idea in the pond-mind of the crowd. The ideas are free for anyone to develop or implement however they see fit.

It should always be appreciated that anyone who does help is volunteering a measure of their time and abilities, and at the same time relinquishing their capacity to claim the ideas collectively developed as their own personal property. Many professionals will refuse to participate because there have been a number of occasions in the past where people have done so and then been sued for copyright violation after developing an idea that might be superficially similar in some respects. The accusation of Plagiarism can kill a career, so understandably, many writers will refuse to even read a submission from an outside source without written contracts – which contradict the essentially ad-hoc and spontaneous nature of crowdsourcing ideas. Only by declaring the output to be free for anyone, participant or observer, to use as they will – relinquishing all ownership of the work product – can you hope to avoid such future confrontations.

So why does crowdsourcing work?

There are a lot of things that can motivate people to participate in crowdsourcing despite the potential liabilities. These range from the altruistic, to a sense of community, to repaying a perceived social obligation (especially if they have previously benefited from crowdsourcing ideas, or hopes to do so at some future point), or because it offers them an opportunity to develop their own skills, or in the expectation of being able to utilize the ideas themselves, or even some combination. In none of these cases is any expectation of remuneration a factor.

But (and it’s a big But), a few people have been known to deliberately instigate or participate in crowdsourcing sessions with the intent of claiming the product of the work as their own for monetary advantage. So it’s important to be selective in who you approach to participate, and you should be careful to set the ground rules in terms of ownership of the results before the session gets off the ground.

And for those who participate, there is one additional reward on top of all those motivating opportunities listed already: you can never foretell how far the ripples can go, only that they will spread! Any tweet or submission can be the one that inspires someone else, or some other great work. There’s very little that can beat the exhilaration that comes from being able to point to something you’re proud of and being able to say “I made a difference to that” – whether the contribution is big, or small.

Help Is At Hand!

When you work in a team in a live situation, you will have booked meeting times and a daily plan for the discussion, and perhaps a yearly prospectus and fixed deadlines. This rigidity is a necessary part of the culture of collaboration, but it can suck a lot of the vitality out of the team. That’s one reason why brainstorming is normally performed in smaller sub-groups. One of the most enjoyable aspects of crowdsourcing by means of social media is the ad-hoc nature of the help you can get.

Every time you see a problem, or feel stuck on a view, you can ask the crowd and wait for a suggestion. Yes, you could argue about how good the answer might be; but, as we agreed a little while back, the last word about that kind of project is yours (Maybe that sentence can’t be trusted if you haven’t set your ground rules clearly enough). If you’re on twitter try to follow the #RPGchat hashtag a time or two, you will feel your eyes shining with inspiration after only a brief time, and it’s almost impossible to resist contributing your own excitement and energy!

Setting Summary

If you roll your memory back to the start of the article I mentioned in passing the PoSch clan. To keep the promise made at that time, I will explain in a moment the setting for what it actually is.

But first: Acknowledgement #1
I’m a psychologist who has worked, and am now trying to work again, with patients suffering daily with mental disorders. That means I’m very emotional involved with mental illness so it would never be my intent to make light of any other person’s misfortune. Everyone gets inspired by what feels and sees everyday, that’s all.

INSERT BY MIKE:
A few weeks ago, I wrote an article The Envelope Is Ticking: Insanity In RPGs that was inspired in part by the discussions that G. F. has been using as an example throughout this article. I think he would approve of my quoting a couple of extracts from the concluding section of that article at this point to express Campaign Mastery’s position. Insanity is part of many games, and even moreso a part of the campaign that he is developing, but that does not mean that we need or intend to be offensive or insensitive to anyone’s situation.

I’m sure we all know someone who faces the challenges of a mental disorder, whether we know about it or not, and those sufferers have nothing but my full heartfelt support and sympathy in dealing with those challenges.

and,

If you need help, or you know someone else who needs help, please seek professional advice, and the support of people who care about you.Don’t let yourself become just another statistic.

AND NOW, BACK TO G.F.’s ARTICLE:

Acknowledgement #2: Many things were inspired from other sources, mainly “Clan of the Alphane Moon”, Philip Dick’s 1964 science fiction novel. And from hundreds of other writings because I’m a hunger reader, and derive inspiration from a range of sources.

All that out of the way, here’s the actual concept that has emerged so far:
On a unnamed planet, Earthmen placed many of their Mental patients to run social experiments and gene experiment in a heavily controlled setting. They divided the patients into Clans, each with a pathology in common, so there are the PoSch (poly schizophrenic), ObCom (obsessive compulsive), Para (paranoid), AntS (antisocial behaviorals), and so on to a number yet to be decided. There are many therapist and mental specialist forming the Norm Clan, who think they are normal, psychologically. For some reason, yet to be decided, the Earth government has forgotten or abandoned these people and left them to make their own lives alone in the universe. (Mike’s note: the very idea of “Earth” has probably degenerated into theology and myth, an all-wise and all-knowing Kingdom in the Heavens). The basic idea consists of a setting where the illness and the environment shape themselves contiguously to the perceptions of the “patients”; if someone fears the dark, the dark spawns something bad to haunt/attack him. I love the idea of Psionic and Psychic powers, so these would be a great part of the flavor. I wonder what a PoSch with these power what could do!

All of this is under construction, there is obviously still a great deal of work to do!

Perspective

In this article I have tried to explain, partly to myself, the process that has produced this basic concept-in-progress; such a review can lend perspective that can be lacking when one is a participant in the process. But, implemented properly, that process can benefit others, and it is for that purpose that this article has been written.

Every Game Master knows how hard create a setting can be; but, in these modern days, you can find an helping hand easily on internet – if you prepare properly and take the right precautions!

About The Author:

“G.F. Pace” is Giovanni Felice Pace, a fantasy and RPG addict from the age of 13, when he first met D&D 3.5 and I created his first character. That was ”ZuLu”, a half-orc monk of Kelemvor, omnipresent in every one of his campaigns. He ran one campaign for 4 years and now is trying to run a D&D Next campaign through web 2.0 and to start a Numenera campaign. He is an Italian psychologist and loves to mix his studies with his game mastering to create substance, suspense, or simply to twist players’ minds. As a GM he is a lover of a free-wheeling style of play; if you have something in mind he can find a way to incorporate it (but don’t take that as a challenge, for the game’s sake!) Feel free to reach out to him through his twitter account, Crux_MM.