Last week, we discussed a mind map. Today we’re continuing with an example of a mind map I created just for these blog posts. Now comes the fun part. Just take the first thing that comes into your mind when you see your starting word. In this case, the first thing I thought of was “rogue”. Don’t censor your idea—just write it down near the first word and circle it:
Now draw a line between the two words, like so:
Now, write down the next idea that comes to you. For me, it’s “pickpocket”. Since that was triggered by the word “rogue”, I’ll put it coming off of the “rogue” circle:
Now you just keep going like this. The next word I thought of was “winter”. Since that was triggered by the word “adventure”, rather than “rogue”, I’ll put it off the “adventure” circle. Here’s the map after a few more ideas:
You’ll notice that in some places I’ve connected a word with more than one circle. If an idea seems to relate to more than one idea already in the map, I’ll connect it to all of the ideas that seem relevant.
That’s how you do it. Just keep writing down and connecting ideas. Eventually, the single phrase ideas will start connecting together to form a larger idea and blam: you’ve got your adventure.
There are several theories on mind maps. Some have specific rules like each new idea can only connect to one parent, but I find those rules too limiting. Since my whole point here is simply to get my ideas flowing, like game rules, I keep what works for me and change or drop what doesn’t. I think technically what I’m creating here is called an idea map, but I don’t want to get bogged down in terminology and rules. This is simply a tool to generate ideas; use it as you see fit.
Next time, I’ll cover the adventure idea drawn from this map.
Other Posts in this series
Articles Zemanta thinks may be related
- Game Master Tool Illustrated: Plot Flowcharts (campaignmastery.com)
- The incredible value of the mind mapping “two-step” (mindmappingsoftwareblog.com)
- Using Mind Mapping for your RPG Planning from RPG Circus – RPGBlog (rpgcircus.com)
- Unstuck: An Overview of Mind Mapping by Mark Dykeman (nowsourcing.com)
- Mind Map Your Way to Creativity and Success with SimpleMind for iPad – The Photoletariat (thephotoletariat.com)
