Reading lots of fun and weird stuff, or informative interesting stuff, enhances the Gamemaster’s “game” tremendously. It’s one of the really great aspects of being a gamer. It’s hard to avoid. If you are a gamer, and especially a GM, you are always looking for inspiration, source material, and ideas for your game.
Sometimes it’s hard to keep your genres separated. You know – you start out in a fantasy setting, but then you watch Mad Max and get drawn into the post apocalyptic mindset, and soon your orcs are driving cars across the wasteland.
Is this your experience too? Is it just me?
Anyway, I’ve been reading all the Hellboy compilations. Well, not all of them. I’m on number three right now. Good stuff.
I tend to read/watch only related genres when I’m working on projects so I don’t have this issue. That said, sometimes cross pollination is a GOOD thing – you’ll come up with ideas you never would have otherwise.
Similar to Christopher, I try to stay focused on movies and literature relevant to what I’m running at any given moment. There was a period of approximately 1 year, while I was running a wuxia game, when I watched little else but wuxia movies and TV series and read Chinese histories. This was rather easy to do, as there is a lot of wuxia media out there to consume.
I find most genre mash-ups to be highly idiosyncratic, personal visions that I can’t get into. Some genre mash-ups are less objectionable than others; the post-apocalyptic genre seems more amenable to mixing with other genres. But I’d really rather not have any orcs in my wuxia or samurai games.