One of the things that has become evident during my scan-and-shred exercise is that I repeat the same ideas and motifs a lot. Quite a bit of this seems to come from aping what I thought I saw in published campaigns, but it's fair to say that even back in the day those published settings weren't quite so repetitive. (Seriously, every one of the settings I've tackled has had a number of cities, each with exactly three taverns detailed - one that is a good haunt for adventurers, one that is of moderate quality, and one that is a dive. And that's only the most easily explained repeat...)
Of course, I was aware of that to a certain extent. I've always had particular ideas, characters, and symbols that I like to come back to again and again. And in some cases, that's no bad thing. As I've said before, my favourite one-time author (David Gemmell) basically retold the same story again and again - but it was a good story.
Still, what this highlights is that I would certainly benefit from more variety in my thinking. Though that might be tricky - even being aware of the internal biases, it's tricky to recognise them when applying them in practice, and it's also hard to train the brain to produce new ideas.
(On the other hand, the exercise has thrown up some ideas that I hadn't revisited in quite some time, and some of the other stuff has fired some interesting notions, some of which had never occurred to me before. It has certainly been an interesting and worthwhile process!)
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