Borrowed bits in a campaign/kitbashed campaigns

[BluWolf]

I think I'm a very creative guy and a half decent writer.

The REALITY is, I'm not and I think most of us that do homebrews are not as "original" as we might think.

When I started my homebrew when I was in highschool I really thought I was making something original and new. When I hit college and the military I had to put it away for a few years.

Well when 3E started rolling around I founf myself in the position to drag that old game world out and start updating it and getting ready for the new era.

What I realised with some hindsight and some maturity is my homebrew is an amalgam of every great writer, good movie, two bit hack and hokey cartoon I ever saw.

Thats cool.

So when people ask me about my homebrew I tell 'em its the hobby creative writers equivalent of the bar on Mos Eisley. Its like Ragu. Its in Dare.

So, yes. I rip everything off. I think its part of the fun for me is to try and make a logical interpretation of to apparently diametric elements. It doesn't always work, but its fun.

 

[tsadkiel]

When I was playtesting the Liber Beastarius, I stitched a number of d20 modules together with the Liber pc races, the Egyptian gods from an issue of Dragon, and a dash of Cthulhu.

My Oz game is a bit harder to fit standard D&D stuff into. But I have managed to fit Corvis (from the Witchfire tilogy) and the Drak Carnival from the Scarred Lands into Quadling country. And I'm thinking of placing Freeport in one of the outlying countries.

 

[barsoomcore]

BluWolf: Amen to that.

I'm an inveterate kitbasher -- I barely have any original ideas but I am really good at sticking together bits and pieces of other stuff. So my campaign makes use of:

Wheel of Time -- Magic rules (which like any good kitbasher I turned inside out and fit into my campaign's cosmology)

Lankhmar -- using the maps for one of my cities though I've used a bunch of gangs and other elements in OTHER cities.

Dragon Fist -- didn't even change the name of Tianguo, just dropped the whole thing into my world and then set my Demon Goddess loose on it. Poor Tianguo.

Maztica -- add dinosaurs to Aztecs and poof! instant coolness.

I also steal relentlessly from the Black Company (turned one of my players into a forvalaka) and Steven Erikson's Malazan Empire books. Pretty much anything I think will really irritate my players finds its way into the campaign.

 

[Psion]

Re: Golden Rules of Kit-Bashing?

One rule I've found essential to obey when assembling a campaign from assorted bits: "Don't contradict what's gone before; everything else is fair game."

Heh... that's a universal rule for me regardless of your approach to campaign building.

An additional complication for me is coincidences. Very often published materials mimic something I have already done in my game. For example, a group of people called Varishans used to collect evil artifacts much like the cleric in the background of Banewarrens. Likewise, the history of the Drow in my game is not unlike the one that is developing in City of the Spider Queens.

It bugs me to leave these coincidences dangling. I usually try to make coincidences into more than coincidences. For example, if I run the Banewarrens, I will work it in with my background. Either the Banewarrens will become a Varishan vault or the cleric who created them will be a protoge or student of the old Varishans.

 

[Desdichado]

Although the occasional coincidence that really is just a coincidence is good, just so your players don't learn to predict you in a metagame type of way!

 

[Stockdale]

Putting together worlds/empires/cities/stories from published sources/modules/movies/novels/etc. is at least half the fun for my as a GM. In my home brewed world, I even pieced the map together from different world maps I'd seen.

The characters' "home village" was ambigously written enogh in the Dungeon Mag to be dropped right in. For that matter, the nearest major city is an amalgamation of a "map of mystery" altered with various other sectios from modules/adventures run and hope to be run.

At any rate, combining/Kitbashing is my preferred method of derriving stuff for my world. If all I have to do is fix the hook and other minor reworking, great.

 

[Jeeves]

I try to stray away from pure copying of very unique ideas... like very famous cities from worlds or even entire pre-made campaign worlds (like FR and stuff,) for one day I might like to write about the world that has been in my head all of my life, and I would rather not be sued.

That does not mean I do not scavenge Dungeon magazine for adventure ideas. I really like scavenging for ideas and maps and stuff better than just plug-and-playing, I guess.

It never helps to always rely on your own creativity... a secret companies would rather you not know because then you would buy less modules! =)

However sometime taking people's original vague ideas and adding your own flavor to it into making something newer is a good thing... I have always liked the lands of Calormen from the Narnian books so much more than the way-too-white/christian/western/always-right god alegory crap of the main land of Narnia from those books... I liked Calormen so much that I eventually had to break down to realize it was permentantly stuck in my world and could not be removed... thus I changed the names (Calorhastaat now) and over the years it has slowely morphed into something only inspired by Calormen... not a copy or plug and play clone.

 

[Torx]

BluWolf: I echo your sentiments.

I like to take small components from weird sources - not necessarily fantasy - and incorporate them into my world.

Small example: In James Clavell's Shogun there's a prison which is so small, everyone is jammed into three rows. The weak get pushed to the center, while the strong rest their feet on them while leaning against the wall. Corners are a huge reason for conflict in this small prison.

Something like that is small and easy to adapt and incorporate into any game, and yet is not easily recognizable as being Clavell's (though I'd freely admit it).

 

[arwink]

Colsive kit-basher. If its in my collection of stuff, no matter for what game system, and it seems cool, I'm going to jump up and down on it until it fits. It's one of the reasons why I leave so much of my world/s vague until the PC's actually go there. The less decisions I have to make before hand, the more leeway I have when I eventually get around to detailing it for the PC's visit.

I've currently taken a whole heap of stuff out of the Banewarrens Adventure (and the stuff Monte Cook keeps on his website), stuff from the 2e version of the diablo handbook and a campaign I ran with it, and I'm in the process of altering the town in Of Sound Mind to fit the current world. The handout is an amalgum of my own stuff, things I thought were cool from other people's handouts and an adapted set of background feats that came from Forgotten Realms and the Spelljammer thing that appeared in Dungeon a while back.

Adittedly, this many influences isn't the way I'd normally go about starting a game, but the last campaign more or less combusted, and some friends gathered a new group in less than a week and invited me to run the games. So it's a combination of not wanting to use the old world, and getting something together in five days or less.

In the future, I'm bringing in elements of A Heroes Tale (2e adventure), several of the campaign elements of this old system called Dragon Warriors, some of the cool stuff out of dragon and dungeon, and a lot of the location ideas I got from the Lord of the Rings film (Namely, lots of ruins in the middle of no-where that are used as campsites. The remnants of ancient cultures showing up in wierd statues in the middle of no-where. Elves being foreign and strange...).

 

[BluWolf]

Torx

Ah Clavell.

I reread Shogun this spring when I was sick in bed with a hard core virus for a week.

Man I loved that book. I keep trying to find it on DVD.

On Kitbashing again. I steal from modules as well. I have only run three modules in my life. Shattered Circle, Sunless Citadel and Under Illefarn.

Shattered Circle and Under Illefarn were in FR but Sunless Citadel was modified and now resides in a region of my homebrew called Telnarden.

I do steal ideas from dungeon magazine all the time. though I've never run any of the adventures from there I use stuff from it all the time. Some of the best money spent on supplements.