I started the process of scanning and shredding my accumulated RPG papers over the weekend. The biggest takeaway from this is the sheer scope of the task - there are four big folders almost entirely filled with old campaign notes, plus a big box fill of old character sheets. As anticipated, even a lot of the material that was originally printed out (and so already exists on my PC) has been edited by hand and so requires some attention.
The other thing that I had fully expected was that a lot of the old setting material is unalloyed dross, or worse - I wrote much of it in my teens, and was labouring under some really bad setting-design advice at the time, so this isn't entirely unsurprising.
But I have, thus far, stumbled upon one really good idea. And while it's something I've seen in sci-fi reasonably regularly, it's not something I've seen in fantasy settings previously (this is, of course, where if I mentioned this on a discussion forum, it would immediately be met with a chorus of people listing settings where it is a common feature...). Specifically, one of the settings I developed all those years ago had colonies on two of the planet's moons.
(I should note also that I have seen settings where a moon or moon has life on it. I'm not aware of any that specifically have colonies, or widespread trade with those colonies. Again, in fantasy rather than sci-fi - it's quite common in the latter!)
Of course, that doesn't mean that the material is useable as-is. Effectively, this is one cool idea, but something I'll need to re-purpose and re-develop if I'm ever planning to use it. But I like it - gives a really nice pulp-y feel to proceedings. But how to use it...?
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