Pick Two Inspirations and Combine Them
Marcia of Traverse Fantasy (I merely served as her herald) declared a Blog Bandwagon on the topic of Appendices N. For those unfamiliar, that was where E.G. Gygax, alleged co-author of Drageons & Dungons, listed some books that were to serve as tone pieces for the types of tales for which the game was designed. Marcia’s question is something broader, asking about what media inspires a person’s games in general. But it should be noted that Gary was not, I presume, listing the entirety of things that inspired him in general, but things that were inspirational for him in particular when it came to D&D. Thus I view the exercise as more of a project specific lens.
A lot of my projects begin as inspired by particular sources of media. In fact, my first published adventure, Big Rock Candy Hexcrawl, includes an Appendix N which is filled with leftist folk music from the earliest years of the 20th century. Some projects, however, are more loosely grounded in inspiration, such as Prismatic Wasteland, which definitely does draw heavily from things like Adventure Time, Caves of Qud, or Hiero's Journey (itself on the original Appendix N), but in my mind is freer from any one source and is instead like a katamari that I continuously roll around in my mind until disparate items stick and fuse together to form a new planet. And others are heavily inspired by something that doesn’t at all fall within the ambit of media: Barkeep on the Borderlands wasn’t inspired by any drinking movie (I still have yet to see The World's End), but instead by my own youthful memories of indulging in a college town with perhaps too many bars. Music, children’s television, your own personal experiences and adventures: everything can inspire your game design if you simply contract the disease of always thinking about game design no matter what you are listening to, watching, or doing!
I don’t usually suffer from writer’s block. That is probably because a combination of not often having enough time to write so that when I do get a chance to peck at a keyboard creatively I always make the most of it, plus the fact that I am never (or rarely) chained to a single project such that when I lose steam for one piece I can just switch gears to another. However, when I do feel creatively backed up, overconsumption of media is typically the only cure. Something I have not tried, so this advice is currently not rated by any federal health organization and you should first consult your doctor or learned astronomer before employing in your own creative endeavors, is to take two pieces of media (of different types) and combine them to come up with the germ of a good idea. But I do have hope this is a fruitful exercise because one of my favorite adventures of all time, Vampire Cruise, has two inspirations in its Appendix N: The original Dracula novel and the cruise ship essay, Shipping Out.
Roll 1d6: (1-2) Book+Game, (3-4) Book+Video, (5-6) Game+Video.
| 1d6 | Books | Games | Videos |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Don Quixote | Boot Hill | Adventure Time |
| 2 | The Dying Earth | Civilization | Blade Runner |
| 3 | East of Eden | Legos | Dragon Ball |
| 4 | The Great Gatsby | **Minecraft** | Pan’s Labyrinth |
| 5 | House of Leaves | Monopoly | Planet of the Apes |
| 6 | Life and Death are Wearing Me Out | Planescape | The Princess Bride |
| 7 | The Name of the Rose | Pokemon | Seinfeld |
| 8 | The Road | Risk | Seven Samurai |
| 9 | The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon | Root | Spirited Away |
| 10 | True Grit | Zelda | WALL-E |
Let’s test out this generator and see if it works, by which I mean can it force me to combine two potentially disparate ideas and come up with the germ of an adventure or setting that I can begin to build off of?
My first rolled result was The Great Gatsby and Root. A fortuitous combination because I already have a great, punny title: The Great Catsby. If you are familiar with the lore of the Root board game, it takes place in a fantasy woodland where animals can talk and act like humans, including our tendency to fight for power and create systems of inequality. Namely, the woodland creatures were once ruled over by the Eyrie Dynasties, which were an aristocracy of birds, but their dominance was subverted by the invasion of the armies and industry of the Marquise de Cat. My idea is a more social scenario in a settlement ruled by the birds where a single cat has integrated himself with the birds and throws fabulous parties with the birds to try to become integrated with that class of aristocrats. But by virtue of his being a cat, he does not truly fit in. When the Great Catsby is found dead, floating in his luxurious bird bath he had constructed for the parties, the player characters are brought in to investigate.
My second result is The Name of the Rose and WALL-E. I wish I didn’t do a murder mystery for the last one or I would just do a The Name of the Rose-esque murder mystery on board a starliner filled with degenerated passengers where two robots investigate. But I can’t just make all of these murder mystery scenarios, so let’s see if I can squeeze another nugget of inspiration from this combination. Let’s instead visit the other setting of WALL-E: an abandoned wasteland of future earth, strewn in trash, with a few remaining robots who are assigned to pick up the garbage and neatly stack it in preparation for humanity’s eventual return. In WALL-E, the robot becomes obsessed with the movie musical Hello Dolly, which he watches on repeat in his solitude. But to give this concept a bit of The Name of the Rose seasoning, let’s say that the robots become obsessed not with discarded cassettes but with the religious texts, monuments and artifacts that are left behind on earth, among all the trash and debris. These robots now reform the Catholic Church and begin to form their own monasteries, dedicated to collecting and archiving the artifacts of their faith. Centuries go by with this religious robot society and then the players come in as explorers, humans sent to earth to determine whether the home world is habitable once again, but their ship crash lands and they will need to work with these robopriests to get back to the mothership and report back. Do the robots think these humans from the stars are angels from heaven worthy of worship, or are they a threat to their entire society, to be treated with hostility?
For my third roll, I got Risk and Spirited Away, two hallmarks of my late-childhood. Risk is not just about war, it is about world domination. In Spirited Away, the spirits have their own society that isn’t noticed by the human world they inhabit. But what if the spirits are no longer content to inhabit abandoned resort towns and bathhouses? After all, they have dragons, yōkai, witches, and all manner of supernatural firepower on their side. But, more likely, humanity would, upon learning of these beings, seek to do what we do best (or perhaps worst, depending on your perspective): destroy and dominate. Humanity is united at last in its war on the spirits that live, once hidden, all around us, and nature itself is fighting back. Imagine WWII-era soldiers in gasmasks, tanks, and planes fighting incursions of dragons, oni, and all manner of spirits. The entire world is enmeshed in this conflict. Perhaps the players are just going on an overland adventure through the world at war, or perhaps this is more of a wargame, with players controlling the opposing forces.
If all of these combinations are equally fruitful, this table gives you at least 600 ideas for your games. But what would probably be even better a remedy for your specific writer’s block would be to populate this table with your own media touchstones and toss a few d10s around until a combination speaks to you. All that is required to set the creative mind on fire is a single spark.
