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Morithias
2013-10-25, 10:04 PM
What kind of media do you enjoy and how does it shape your worlds?

I've already talked about my love for the teenage perverted comedy. The harem anime, the visual novel, the eroge, the cheesy JRPG, and Sentai, and how they shaped the insane world of Rosewood.

What about you? What created your worlds? Where did the ideas come from? What made you think "that would be awesome, and I'm going to re-purpose it for my own use?"

jedipotter
2013-10-25, 10:24 PM
Doctor Who and marvel super hero comics. And a huge mix of movies and TV shows from being a latch key kid.

Delwugor
2013-10-25, 10:53 PM
I get alot of inspiration from real world locations such as
The world's largest cave in Vietnam http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/07/son-doong_n_3873341.html
The most exciting wooden bridge of Chang Kong Cliff Road http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2332642/Chang-Kong-Cliff-Road-Tourist-trek-thousands-feet-Chinese-mountain-700-year-old-wooden-boards.html
I ran an adventure in the Crystal Caves of Wisconsin http://www.uwec.edu/jolhm/Cave2007/TeamC/TeamC/CrystalCave/Crystal%20Cave%20Map.jpg
Never got to use the Derinkuyu Underground City in Turkey http://europe.knoji.com/the-ancient-underground-cave-cities-of-turkey/

CryptoArcheology is always an inspiration, I ran a short campaign of the Spanish Conquistadors in the Inca Empire based on reading Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods.

An inspiration I've worked on and off for 2 years is a modern discovery and exploration of a 50,000 year old underground arcology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology).

Westerns and especially Spaghetti Westerns for one shot adventures, even in a fantasy setting.

tasw
2013-10-25, 11:33 PM
What kind of media do you enjoy and how does it shape your worlds?

I've already talked about my love for the teenage perverted comedy. The harem anime, the visual novel, the eroge, the cheesy JRPG, and Sentai, and how they shaped the insane world of Rosewood.

What about you? What created your worlds? Where did the ideas come from? What made you think "that would be awesome, and I'm going to re-purpose it for my own use?"

The Anita Blake novels, Roman history, buffy/angel but through a mirror darkly and the supernatural show. And being human, the American version not the goofy UK one.

TheThan
2013-10-26, 12:08 AM
I grew up with sword and sorcery; you know Conan the barbarian, Red Sonja, Sinbad movies from the 50s-60s, Boris Vallejo artwork, that sort of stuff. When someone says “fantasy”, that’s the sort of stuff that pops into my head first. Not Tolkien, or Martin, or even Pratchett. (Not that there’s anything wrong with those authors or anything, mind you).

I’m also a big fan of 80s era cartoons and action movies, give me Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and to a lesser extent Van Damme any day of the week.

SO naturally i draw inspiration from those (and other) sources.

Gamgee
2013-10-26, 12:19 AM
Real life, history in particular.

Zaydos
2013-10-26, 12:23 AM
Classic 80s fantasy films helped me cut my teeth; Rankin and Bass's The Hobbit, Ridley Scott's Legend, and other movies such as Krull, Conan the Barbarian, and Willow.

But it was books that held the most influence. While Legend (which I think of as my introduction to Fantasy) does inspire my forests and use of unicorns, I draw more from Tolkien's descriptions of Mirkwood, my first real fantasy novel.

Fantasy and Science Fiction in general are my biggest sources, especially the old pulp works of Lovecraft and Howard. Although that's not to say I don't draw from other works (Moorcock inspires a lot in fact possibly the most, and Vogt and Zelazny have each inspired at least one base class I've made recently) or from other genres (I ran a campaign where slivers were the backbone of the enemy army and there were Lovecraftian abomination sentai) but the primary one is literature.

Craft (Cheese)
2013-10-26, 12:41 AM
When I want worldbuilding ideas, this is what I do:

1. The music sets the tone of the idea session: Must be chosen carefully. For worldbuilding, gotta put on the power metal. Disturbed and Blind Guardian are my favorites for this.

2. Browse through random environmental paintings and landscapings on deviantart. Bizzare locations are my favorite, with a particular obsession with underground spaces (http://wanbao.deviantart.com/art/dungeon-312673055), abstract unnatural landscapes (http://ewkn.deviantart.com/art/The-Summoning-101885306), oversized stuff (http://keepwalking07.deviantart.com/art/Clamps-305369516), floating stuff (http://marcsimonetti.deviantart.com/art/Dust-Empire-Nicolas-Bouchard-358254929), castles (http://noahbradley.deviantart.com/art/Moat-343798441), and cities (http://noahbradley.deviantart.com/art/Ur-Draxa-277983342) the more of this stuff combined into one location the better. Vast. Dark. Bleak. Hostile. Don't be afraid to mix fantasy and sci-fi stuff too, that's often the coolest stuff. The most important part is that you make something the players want to see: If the players don't care about the location then they won't want to interact with it, and your work has effectively gone to waste.

3. Less into character art, but my favorite character artist is probably HelloBaby (http://hellobaby.deviantart.com/art/The-Guardian-of-Darkness-306332507)'s work. Her overdesigned dresses are a love it or leave it sort of thing, but I love 'em. Not gonna lie, I've based several characters on her work.

4. Go on RPGSolo (http://www.rpgsolo.com/play.php) and hit that "Get Setting" button a few times. Mash the results together into a single location. You'll get something that sounds really weird (Battle-scared Chasm + Fantastic Settlement + Sinking Rock Formation + Vanishing Desert!?) but that's the point, weird is what we want. Use the C.Q. and C.D. buttons to ask questions and get further information about the place, like "What sort of battle happened here?" > "Release/Investment". What kind of investment was it?" > "Interestingly/Ugly".

Zaydos
2013-10-26, 12:46 AM
When I want worldbuilding ideas, this is what I do:

1. The music sets the tone of the idea tone session: Must be chosen carefully. For worldbuilding, gotta put on the power metal. Disturbed and Blind Guardian are my favorites for this.



Oh man how did I leave that one out. Yeah music, especially heavy metal is big... I mean I made most of my dragons while listening to Manowar.

Gamgee
2013-10-26, 02:24 AM
Mythology of different countries. Science also. They can make some interesting combinations.

Subaru Kujo
2013-10-26, 11:22 AM
Random moments of inspiration. Ogre chef dual wielding giant meat cleavers was I think one of my favorite ones, even considering the simplicity of it.

BWR
2013-10-26, 11:37 AM
I tend to run established settings so whatever fits the setting. Currently, I'm running a Mystara game and just barely started another L5R game.
For both settings there is a lot of published material and a lot of fan-made content to fill in the cracks.
The Mystara game is classic dungeon crawl/wilderness adventure. High on the action, low on intended RP (though there is plenty of stuff from the players, I just haven't made it the focus of the game). So inspirations when I'm not using existing modules is anything that fits high adventure powerful but unoptimized magic users, random villages where there for some reason aren't enough powerful people willing to take on the legendary Bugblatter Beast of Traal, vast stretches of wilderness where the adventurers can found their own domains, etc.

Since Rokugan is a very Japanese setting, anything that fits typical samurai drama, Eastern ghost stories, etc. This game is the sequel to my last game where the PCs found and destroyed a powerful evil artifact (the Anvil of Despair), directly and indirectly caused the deaths major political players in a powerful clan (3 of 4 Crane daimyo, including the champion) and were awarded with their own clan (the reborn Boar clan, to safeguard the death palce of the First Oni and make sure nothing like the Anvil of Despair can happen again).
This game is basically domain building and resource management than pure "PCs go around and do stuff", much like a Covenant in Ars Magica.

Tim Proctor
2013-10-26, 12:09 PM
Most definitley Heavy Metal, I've designed entire campaigns by stringing together lyrics of Metallica, Black Sabbath, Pantera, Dio, etc.

I do get a lot of ideas from TV, Movies, and Games but I prefer to give the nod rather than rip-off, so the more subtle the better off. Mainly I will just use the names and concepts when I want a style of character.

But probably the biggest is the Players, they generally come up with enough hooks on their own to fill a campaign.

AgentofHellfire
2013-10-26, 12:31 PM
I actually get like half my inspiration from politics and/or history, actually--not in the sense of basing Fantasy cultures on RL ones, but more in the way of using RL political philosophies as a baseline for ones I design, or RL historical events to determine the actions of organizations.

Another large part is probably the genre conventions of whatever I'm playing--which I like to twist around and experiment with: Orcs are generally either the generic evil horde or a persecuted minority? I'll make them the evil horde that thinks itself a persecuted minority. After the adventure ends, everything's saved and the world fades from thought? I'm going to see what happens a generation later.

And so on and so forth.

Frozen_Feet
2013-10-26, 12:59 PM
History of European warfare
History of China
Christianity (esp. the Bible)
Buddhism
Hinduism
Shintoism
Ancient Finnish pagan beliefs (esp. Kalevala)
History of Alchemy and Chemistry
Works by J.R.R. Tolkien (esp. Silmarillion)
Works by H.P. Lovecraft (esp. At the Mountains of Madness)
Works by C.S. Lewis (esp. Out of the Silent Planet & Perelandra)
Works by R.E. Howard (esp. anything with Conan in it)
Evolutionary biology
Evolutionary psychology
The Legend of Zelda (esp. Link's Awakening & Wind Waker)
Pokemon
Dracula, by Bram Stoker
Dungeons & Dragons (esp. Holmes BECMI and 1st Ed AD&D)
Works by Petri Hiltunen (esp. Praedor)
Lamentations of the Flame Princess
Games by Spiderweb Software (esp. Exile 1 - 3)
Loads and loads of heavy metal music: Insomnium, Before the Dawn, Ghost, Iron Maiden, Nightwish, Viikate, Alice Cooper, Lordi, Judas Priest, Dio, Black Sabbath, Heaven & Hell, Amorphis, Rammstein, Metallica, Sabaton, Uriah Heep etc.
Anime soundtracks: Naruto, Bleach, Puella Magi Madoka Magika etc.
Game soundtracks: everything from Touhou
Other kinds of music: Emilie Autumn, Chisu, Indica, Maggie Reilly, Anna Puu etc.

I've noticed that works I've consumed lately have had increasingly less impact on what kinds of games I like to play and how. Something similar has also happened with my taste of music: I listen to completely new bands less than I used to, mostly relistening my favorite albums and artists. Lamentations of the Flame Princess exemplifies this pretty well: in theory, it is a new game, with new material for it, but in practice it is a retroclone and draws from many of the sources I liked already - most notably, history and heavy metal.

Seriously, after listening to Sabaton, I started crafting a setting inspired by Sweden's time as a Great Power... and then, Jimmy went and published a module (Better than Any Man) taking place during the 30 year war, something that is celebrated here yearly. I felt like he was stealing my ideas. And now I'm butt-hurt because I don't own a paperback copy of that module. :smalltongue:

valadil
2013-10-26, 01:00 PM
Each campaign I do has different sources of inspiration. LotR and ASoIaF come up a lot. I've been planning a Cryptonomicon inspired game for almost 5 years and I doubt it'll ever happen. I usually get a CD or two attached to each of my games and listen to those while writing. Whatever I'm watching on TV plays a part as well. A lot of this is stuff that you'd expect.

My weirdest inspiration is pro wrestling. I don't really borrow plots or stories from it because I'm not trying to write a bad soap opera, but the structure of stories and the emotion involved translates pretty well into gaming.

For instance, I give the players lots of little conflicts with someone. No big fights, but enough to get them pissed. They won't actually have the fight until the wrestling equivalent of a pay per view. And then they'll probably get a fight, but lose due to a cheesy finish. This will leave them wanting more and we can up the ante at the next confrontation/PPV.

I'm big into measuring how powerful NPCs are perceived to be and use wrestling logic to arrange this. I have what I call the transitive law of badassery. Namely, if A is more badass than B and B more badass than C, it follows that A is more badass than C. This sounds like basic stuff, but wrestling is where I learned it. Implemented in a game it might look like the party getting whooped badly, they get saved by an NPC (witnessing that the NPC is more powerful than them), then the NPC gets fed to a monster and stands no chance when he puts up a fight. Now the players know in and out of game that that monster is more powerful than them. They're already terrified of it and they haven't interacted with it yet.

Finally, there's betrayal. Nothing pisses off the players/viewers at home like a good old fashioned betrayal. When one of their friends runs in for the same and stabs them in the back/hits them in the head with a chair, they have no choice but to take it personally.

Anyway I realize these aren't unique ideas, they just come from a slightly different angle than usual.

Zavoniki
2013-10-26, 08:40 PM
It varies.

For one of the Eclipse Phase games I am running, I read about the Castle in the Jovian Republic and planned a session about heisting something from the Castle. Then I realized the item I wanted them to heist didn't make sense and the campaign grew from there.

For the Harry Potter game I ran it was some of the Harry Potter fanfiction I read but a lot of it was trying to get that Universe to make sense and be consistent.

A lot of it is a mix of sources. Generally I'll have an idea from somewhere(I guess my inspiration is everything then) and just refine it until I think its workable.

Vortalism
2013-10-26, 09:31 PM
A mix of things, mostly Science Fiction authors rather than fantasy authors. I adore Tolkien's works, but I'd have trouble trying to integrate his ideas for just about anything that isn't superficially an elf or dwarf or ent or goblin or orc (let's just say there's a lot of names).

But mostly I'm influenced by works of Isaac Asimov, Neal Stephenson and the rest. I'm also influenced a lot by real-life history and the history of scientific understanding, because I tend to incorporate these ideas into the actual physics of my world at times. It becomes quite amusing when ancient beliefs actually become reality.

One thing I would say influenced my perception of fantasy the most was The Elder Scrolls series, starting from Morrowind when it first came out. I played that at age 8, it had a profound shaping of my understanding of the fantasy genre. That and WarCraft 3 were the fantasy games of my formative years. So when I got introduced to D&D those ideas came along with me. The idea of intelligent and honourable orcs, fallible elves, dwarven technologists, and the human race being open to more than one shade at a time. Plus Khajiit. Can't forget the Khajiit. Funnily enough from that point onwards video games influenced me the most for D&D rather than other media especially stuff like Assassin's Creed (which I turned into a bunch of homebrewed feats and my monk class replacement).

Silus
2013-10-26, 11:25 PM
Well regarding the last/current campaign I ran/running, the first part was inspired partly by H.P. Lovecraft (bad guy trying to free an unspeakable evil), with the second part being inspired by the first two episodes of the first season of MLP:FiM with a Lovecraft bend to it.

Remmirath
2013-10-27, 12:29 AM
Anything I come across might give me some flash of inspiration, and in fact I'm more likely to use that inspiration if it came from a source I'm not particularly fond of. I won't be as familiar with it, so even just from that it'll end up more different, and chances are that it will be more of the basic idea that I want to put my own spin on. Whatever it was is usually quite unrecognisable (sometimes I even forget) by the time it becomes a setting or campaign.

Reading is by far what I do the most of, but there are some movies and some TV shows and such that I also enjoy. I do spend a lot of time listening to music, especially when planning campaigns. It's almost always some sort of metal, and I generally pick it based on the sort of mood I'm going for in the part that I'm writing.

Obviously if I'm planning a MERP campaign my inspiration will be coming in large part from The Lord of the Rings or especially The Silmarillion (not so much The Hobbit, but some); however, actual plot ideas and NPCs and such I still go through all my usual process on, I just make sure that everything fits in and makes sense both in tone and world history. I try to do that at least a little in any setting not of my own creation I'm playing in, but MERP is really the only case in which I usually don't play in my own settings.

History, geography, and that sort of thing do sometimes inspire me. Really, it's as far as I can tell fairly random what will get me thinking about a campaign idea. It might even end being a snatch of conversation I overheard. The whole listening to music thing is pretty consistent one I start really working on it, and once I've got things going along quite well I'll usually sketch people and places from it.

Mono Vertigo
2013-10-27, 05:02 PM
Shin Megami Tensei (including Persona, Digital Devil Saga, etc), Silent Hill, Rule of Rose, Fallen London, Tales of Symphonia, Final Fantasy 7/9 are all games that inspire me, particularly in terms of themes and imagery. Sometimes, there's an Easter Egg in the shape of an item or a monster.
Then, there's Fullmetal Alchemist or Monster or Fringe. Someday, I hope to come up with plots and characters as interesting as those featured in these series, and make the PCs feel as important as their protagonists.

Dienekes
2013-10-27, 05:07 PM
What kind of media do you enjoy and how does it shape your worlds?

I've already talked about my love for the teenage perverted comedy. The harem anime, the visual novel, the eroge, the cheesy JRPG, and Sentai, and how they shaped the insane world of Rosewood.

What about you? What created your worlds? Where did the ideas come from? What made you think "that would be awesome, and I'm going to re-purpose it for my own use?"

History. Easily my biggest influence, I steal cultures wholesale and whole plots from minor side events from a myriad of wars and events ranging from the Peloponessian War to the subjugation of the Native Americans. There is more interesting events than in any fiction I've ever read.

That said; the works of Joe Abercrombie, George R. R. Martin, and Neil Gaiman have also had a hand in developing many of my characters and tone.

For more modern games; James Bond movies, Eye of the Needle, DC and Marvel comics have all had a hand in my ideas.

Quorothorn
2013-10-27, 11:57 PM
In my current campaign, one can find stuff in some ways inspired by Journey, The Wheel of Time, the works of Tolkien, Monty Python, The Order of the Stick, and lots of history amongst other things.

tommhans
2013-10-28, 04:30 AM
LoTr and hobbit has of course been some of the inspiration i used, also the gamers films the way they told the story. Supernatural has also been inspiring the way they treat all the mythologies in a cool and different way, also HP lovecraft is ofc an inspiration

Gettles
2013-10-28, 04:47 AM
Well, things that I knowingly filed the numbers off of was influenced by when a I ran a game included:

Discworld
John Dies at the End
Baccano!
Borderlands
Disgaea
Discworld
Assassins Creed
Fate/Stay Night
Soul Calibur
Shadow Hearts 2
Real World History

ElenionAncalima
2013-10-28, 09:01 AM
Just getting starting with world building, but two places that I am drawing heavily from are The 10th Kingdom and The Black Magician Trilogy by Trudi Canavan.

Although, I certainly get ideas from other places as I watch movies and play games.

Jay R
2013-10-28, 10:28 AM
My current world owes much to Prydain and Lloyd Alexander.

I've used Tolkien, Lewis, Malory, Howard and others in the past for fantasy games.

Dumas and Sabatini are good inspiration for Flashing Blades.

My latest game of Champions was set in the Silver Age, and I stole many plots straight from the comics. In the first game, they heard a report about a rocket landing near town. When they got there, they saw a large, orange, super-powered monster near it. They got in a fight with the aliens, and it went on for awhile before they eventually found out that they had blundered into the origin of the Fantastic Four.

Finally, I spent two years as a Philmont Ranger. I've found that Philmont makes a great wilderness location, since I know it well.

sumptesh
2013-10-28, 01:44 PM
Like most I've gone mostly for fantasy and sci-fi works, but recently I've found some interesting notions going back to sci-fi pulps from 1930's.

Check out project Gutenberg to find them.

Mono Vertigo
2013-10-30, 08:50 AM
Well, things that I knowingly filed the numbers off of was influenced by when a I ran a game included:

Shadow Hearts 2

Oh, yes, I forgot that one.
... wait, another Shadow Hearts fan? Who's also a roleplayer/GM? Aw yeaaaah, I'm not alone!

Mastikator
2013-10-30, 09:07 AM
I tend to work from the bottom up, work out a few premises and speculate what the consequences of that is. It automatically leads to a sensible history of whatever it is. Also I never know what I'm gonna get in the end really.