IdeaBox: Concept Outline

As promised, here is my next big idea.

IdeaBox is going to be a GM toolkit of a type you have never seen before, although you will definitely recognize various elements of it, it will just be organized in a much more intuitive and accessible way. As with the Aqualii Temple module and my new interactive style, the PDF is going to be non-linear and extensively hyperlinked.

The purpose of the document is to provide the GM with the maximum amount of information at the table to serve as hooks for their own ideas. The document helps YOU come up with better ideas, build better worlds, etc. It does not create the ideas for you, it provides the structure for you to create them. The first version is going to be medieval fantasy oriented, but if successful I would love to do it for other settings.

The primary page is a menu of sorts, offering a variety of possible things you might need; monsters, doors, rooms, towns, cities, full encounters, etc. For purposes of this discussion, I am going to follow the branch for Rooms, but just assume that there are other branches for all sorts of other concepts.

So you click on Rooms. The game then gives you another range of choices, oriented towards your needs as the GM. There could be options like "small dead end room" or "large high-traffic room" and so on. You click on one of those options and it continues to give you a number of options until you end up with a small storage room that has no exits and hewn stone walls with a few crates, one of which contains a longsword and a magic scroll.

The document is cross-linked, so you can be in the Rooms path, need a door to give an exit from that room, and jump over to a screen where you choose a door, then jump back to your Room. Or you need an item, so you jump to a page from which to choose items, then jump back.

All of the information in the document is designed to trigger your memory recall and just give you the idea. As the GM, you provide the vast majority of the description of the stuff. But the document is there to trigger those ideas in your head, in a way similar to how my impressionistic module concept works (definitely more meat than in that, I'm just citing the concept).

So you can use the document at the table to build something that you need right then, or you can use it ahead of time when you are brainstorming over your notes.

Thoughts?