Ways to find homebrew ideas

[Djinn_in_Tonic]

I tend to avoid generators and the like, as they tend to be fairly cliche in my experience.

My favorite methods of inspiration are...well, a little strange.

• Wikipedia's Random Article Button
• Opening a dictionary to a random page
• Picking a single word that relates to the theme I'd sort of like to design something for
• Browsing DeviantArt or Google Image Search for random keywords, or for whatever strikes my fancy
• Put on Pandora or just listen to random music from YouTube or my music library

I then tend to toss around the word/article/whatever in my mind until it begins to take some cohesive shape. This shape is often incredibly tangentially related: I'll just follow through any train of thought I happen to have until I start to find the edges of an idea I like.