Hey! It’s Writing Wednesday again and today I’m going to talk about RPG books. Books for Roleplaying Games like D&D, which I’ve talked about on the blog before. These books can be amazing tools for writer, especially fantasy writers. While you might be skeptical at first, trust me, these books can be a great source of information and inspiration.

A couple of weeks ago I took part in a Google Hangout with R² Writes. I’ve mentioned her on the blog before. If you haven’t checked out her blog, stop by and take a look at it, she’s really great. Anyway, in the background, I noticed what looked like a Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual on her bookshelf. When I brought it up, she revealed that she owned a few of these books for the purpose of looking through monsters for her own writing. They can be an amazing starting point for inspiration in a person’s writing. I’ve always advocated the use of these books to other writers and when I saw it on her bookshelf, I thought it might be worth doing a blog post on the subject.

The Monster Manual books are great, from any edition, and have some fantastic artwork inside of them. They can also be used for an interesting look at lore, though your mileage will vary with different books and different description. While those books are great, they’re not so different from finding collections of bestiaries and flipping through those. So, while those are useful RPG books, there are some with even more uses.

About twenty years ago a company named White Wolf acquired the rights to the world of Ravenloft created for Dungeons and Dragons. White Wolf proceeded to make quite a few products about Ravenloft, my favorites being the gazetteers. They numbered five in total and each book covered only a couple of regions that make up Ravenloft. For each region they would discuss how much education the average person had, and how much a wealthy person had. They addressed the number of wealthy to the number of poor, the fashion, the languages, and the cultural traditions of the region.

The information you acquired about a town, a region, would most likely be more than you could ever make use of in your Dungeons and Dragons campaign. However, it was there, the information was present. The DM could use or disregard any of it. For writers, this is what we need to achieve with our own novels and our own world building. These book can be wonderful sources because we can look at great world building and see what it involves. We can look at different regions and question ourselves about the different regions in our story. Then, just like with a Dungeons and Dragon campaign, some of the information will be brought into the story, some won’t, but it will all be there if the storyteller needs it. They can be wonderful for inspiration but they can also be a guide for you to look to when you feel your own world is underdeveloped. They can be a blueprint of the things you should know about your own story.

Now it’s your turn! What helps you with inspiration for world building and monsters? What sources do you look at when you feel your own world is underdeveloped?