The Value of A Plywood Shack
When I was in high school I became fascinated by this random self-published (as a Google Doc!) novel I found called The Shaker. I wrote a fan letter to Stephen DoCarmo, the author, who sent a kind reply explaining that it was basically a Pynchon ripoff that he wrote to better understand his favorite author. As he put it:
'My own little novel may be a plywood shack compared to the skyscrapers and cathedrals I love, but standing on its roof gives me a new and interesting perspective on those skyscrapers and cathedrals.'
Learning that (and later reading several books by Pynchon) didn't make me love The Shaker any less, and his metaphor has stayed with me over a decade later.
Earlier this year, I learned that Gene Wolfe honed his craft by literally rewriting books by his favorite writers.
For millennia the dominant form of oral literature was to memorize and remix epic poetry assembled from stock phrases.
In my IRL job, I've been translating an ecological model written in C# to R; doing so has honed my coding skills to a greater degree than most of the original projects I have carried out.
Somewhere in the spectrum between 'rote replication' and 'creative remix' there's immense educational potential. Re-creating another's work forces one to pay attention to the unsexy details: how a writer structures sentences, how a programmer organizes their code, how an artist utilizes light, shadow, and texture.
The last year of writing Archons & Armigers has been no exception; the core system is my attempt at remixing OD&D into something I'd want to run. Taking it seriously as a project has led me to devote attention I'd never otherwise spare to all of the Gygaxian building blocks, be they spells, items, monsters, classes, procedures, random tables, etc. Hell, many of my illustrations are just master studies of public-domain artwork I collected.
Archons & Armigers is quite silly and might well be a dud, but by forcing me to pay attention to those unsexy details it developed capacities that I can bring to any game I run (and other future creative endeavors).
It's easy to decry retroclones as unoriginal (I too roll my eyes at the millionth crowdfunding announcement for 'B/X but slightly different') but I suspect their perennial appeal is less a result of consumer demand than of the desire for writers/designers to deconstruct rich & fascinating source material.