Do you ever get that way where your so full of ideas you don’t know where to start?

A few RPG bloggers are getting together as part of a world building exercise and we are at the stage of dividing up the land and getting to work on our own wee corner.

I know exactly how I want my area to look and I know exactly how I want it populated. Now ask me where I’m going to start. I honestly haven’t a clue.

Someone mentioned that as we come from all over the world it would be a good idea to take ideas from our own history and locations. Living in Scotland though means I have such a huge amount of history and such different geography that I’m struggling to pick just one area and stick with it.

So far we have a Lord of the Isles style geography for my kingdom and I’ll be stealing much of my style from the Celts that populated the UK back in those times. I’ll be stealing the vikings in one way or another to add a little spice to the mix but other than that it’s looking very good for back story.

I’ll be keeping the sea-going population with access to towns and villages only by sea and having sea forts for protection. No main roads and highly specialised trading posts and skills spread out amongst the nation. I just need to work out how I’m going to arrange their navy and I’ll have most of the basics sorted. So where do I start with getting it down on ‘paper’? I’d usually right a short piece of fiction to get me started and to get a feel for the setting but with this it’s all about taking the history and working it into setting. Very little of it will be completely original. Maybe that’s my problem? No complete control over what I produce so I’m finding it hard to get started.

Either way I get the feeling it’s going to be a labour of love. Hell I’ve even started drawing maps for it and my regular readers will know how much I detest the work that needs to go into a fully functional and playable map these days.

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