D&D General Outside Inspirations

[Scott Christian]

Just wanted to ask and share some outside inspirations for in-game campaigns. We all have different passions outside of our D&D table, so I am curious what they are and how they inspire your DMing or playing. So, what are your outside inspirations?

I'll start with a few of mine from the past year:

The first is a wonderful hiking/camping trip to Joshua Tree National Park this winter. It inspired the campaign we are presently playing!

The second is a book I just finished, The Word Hord by Hana Videen. In it, they go into a lot of detail about how monks acquired paper, made their inks, etc. It was fascinating, along with having a bunch of words that connected to old myths as well. This inspired a unique spellbook for the campaign.

Lastly, I was watching a video on the theremin and couldn't help but associate to somatic components in spellcasting. I can think of no other thing that would probably simulate what its like. The lady discussing it and the musician interviewing her are quite positive and informative. A fun watch.


Can't wait to hear some of the outside influences that you folks draw from.

 

[dave2008]

I played soccer (football) as a child up through high school and that sense of team work can comradery always influenced how I felt about my adventure group.

 

[Stormonu]

My dad used to take the family camping up in Yosemite, so my wilderness adventures/travels tend to draw from those memories - I'm a bit fickle about "setting up camp" so you don't get nightly bear visits, for example.

I used to also do a lot of archery growing up, and that has tainted how I tend to approach that subject in game.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

My home game is Arabian Nights flavored. I've drawn on "in-game" resources--e.g. Al Qadim, GURPS Arabian Nights--but much more heavily on both fictional and RL examples.

The Thousand and One Nights (SOME of which are real Arabic tales...and some are not)
The Seven Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
The Book of Contemplation by Usama ibn Munqidh
And, naturally, some inspiration from the Qur'an.

I've also included bits and bobs from less-codified stuff, e.g. my "Genie-Rajahs" are strongly based on the idea of the "pre-Adamite Sultans," though mine have nothing at all to do with the awful, racist version of that stuff. (The cool version of the pre-Adamite Sultans is, more or less, a land-based Atlantis that disappeared long ago. I re-purposed this into genies who used to rule the mortal world long ago before they evacuated to Jinnistan for complex magical and social reasons.)

 

[GuyBoy]

I guess books are the obvious ones, so Tolkien, Howard and myriad others loom large as inspirations.
I played a lot of rugby, so a similar sense of teamwork to @dave2008 in that respect.
I had a pretty tough upbringing, combined with the punk scene of the late 1970s, this makes social justice a pretty key part of most of my characters, translated into whatever the campaign setting is.
As a historian, history provides great inspiration, including the various castles, Hill forts, narrows etc that occur all over UK and Europe.
In terms of places, I’ve been fortunate enough to travel widely, so visualising craggy peaks, savage shorelines, gloomy forests, steaming jungles and arid deserts is pretty easy.

It works both ways of course; when exploring a castle or hiking a forest, I often think about D&D games.

 

[J-H]

My first 5e campaign (now published as Castle Dracula on the DM Guild) was a level-by-level adaptation of Super Castlevania IV (SNES) for 5e, for levels 3-12. It worked out pretty well, with varied terrain/hazards and enemies by area, plus an easy choice of music for each level/area.

My next one featured some loosely-Aztec-inspired Aarakocra and their gods, plus some Nahuatl names, and a map that resembles central Mexico if you squint really, really hard. The sleeping kaiju on a volcano is renamed Rodan (from KOTM/Godzilla). Nobody chose to wake it up in my run-through of the campaign. That one's also on the DM's Guild, and ended up as a level 13-20+ hexcrawl and a LOT of pages... too much to ever do that style again.

I'm currently working on a module where something (probably hags) made a bargain with a modern farmer, and now his ghost is stuck in a pocket plane version of his modern earth farm. The tractor and farm truck are deadly enemies, one encounter is inside a grain silo (grain engulfment and dust explosion are both hazards), etc. I guess "modern rural hazards" counts as an outside inspiration.

 

[dave2008]

I completely forgot about Howard. Conan: books, comics, art, and movie, had a big influence on me. I like the low magic world of Conan and have emulated my campaign settings on it every since (mostly). So soccer as a player, Conan as a DM

 

[Mad_Jack]

I grew up in semi-rural New England - The local landscape, local history (particularly the whaling days) and local tales of ghosts, witchcraft and the occult have all made their way into my games to various degrees over the years.
On a more general note, I'm kind of a minor history buff, so a lot of both ancient and slightly more modern historical events from all over the world, as well as different cultural mythologies, have inspired characters, places and plotlines.

I'm also interested in psychology, sociology, anthropology and archaeology, and exploring various elements of human experience (both individual and societal) tends to drive a lot of the choices I make for my plotlines and characters.

A great deal of my creative ideas and lore for my games starts out as "what if?" thought experiments - I'll propose a set of parameters and then extrapolate what would logically happen in those circumstances, or take a fully formed creative element and reverse-engineer it by asking myself, how (i.e., under what circumstances) would that particular thing arise given the fiction that I've already established... How does the geology of an area determine what sort of society arises there? If I need a nation that worships an evil god to be the bad guys, how did that nation come to worship that god?
My current Dungeon 23 project started out like that - I used the D23 project to motivate me to flesh out a basic adventure idea I had (an earthquake suddenly reveals the ruins of a lost Dwarven settlement in a nearby swamp). Instead of just drawing a simple dungeon map like the project was intended to be, I've now got a brand-new world, with parts of five of the sixteen continents sketched out, and vague notes on over 50,000 years of its history, lol.

 

[Scott Christian]

I've also included bits and bobs from less-codified stuff, e.g. my "Genie-Rajahs" are strongly based on the idea of the "pre-Adamite Sultans," though mine have nothing at all to do with the awful, racist version of that stuff.

That sounds really cool.