What is currently inspiring you?

[Barastrondo]

Game 1: Primarily Gormenghast, Labyrinth, Edgar Allan Poe (Masque of the Red Death is gaining traction) and bits of the Abhorsen books. Some nods to certain Japanese manga/video game artists, oddly enough; there are some beautiful clockwork designs that inform the visuals of certain elements, as well as some grandiose architecture.

Game 2: Renaissance Italy in general; the game-opening section in the neo-Tuscan countryside is borrowing heavily from Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing and Assassin's Creed 2 for the visuals. Count of Monte Cristo. Sabatini. Strong doses of Blade of the Immortal and Brust's Dragaeran fiction (Phoenix Guards & the Taltos books), some more of the Abhorsen books, Mike Mignola art (specifically some of his Lankmar & Hellboy designs).

Both are comparatively new games, though, and are still finding their feet. I'll probably sack and pillage a whole lot more before I'm done.

 

[cmrscorpio]

As a player, Rambo 4 heavily inspired my character. Zhazl is an orc fighter (battlerage vigor talent) well past his prime.

You see an orc that seems to have stepped straight out of any one of the many cautionary tales about the savage orcs. He seems unable to stand up straight. His posture stoops forward. He is a hulk, a mass of tough, solid meat. His muscles, while thick and plentiful, lack the clear definition of a youth. Under his thick, pronounced brow, sharp eyes glare from deeply sunk sockets. His greenish-gray skin is toughened to a leathery hide, and bristly white hairs jut out of his chin. The left side of this orc's face is paralyzed as a result of an old injury. As such, he always appears to be scowling. His speech is impeded by the paralysis, making most of his words mumbled. He wears an old, ill-kept set of scale mail with tinges of rust visible where the metallic plates overlap. Two handaxes hang in leather loops on his belt, and he carries a greataxe in his hands. When he places his full-faced helmet on his head, he loses any semblance of intelligence. He is a monstrous hulk; a mass of tough, solid meat encased in tarnished steel.

"I have been a warrior for twice as many years as I was an immature whelp. The first whelps I sired have had whelps of their own, who now turn out whelps of their own. When others of my kind count their battles, I count my wars. My existence has been a ceaseless march across blood-soaked land. Every orc I knew as a youngling has fallen in battle or in treachery. I am not the fastest. I am not the wisest. I am not the strongest. I am not the toughest. Yet I endure when all others have fallen. There is no great secret to my life. I spill more blood than I shed. Much more. In hell, a river flows, quenched with the blood of those who fall by my axe. When I made my first kill, those many years ago, I was just another grunt. I had my axe. I had my lusts. It was all any orc needed to get what he wanted. It was all I needed. It got me everything I wanted. When I made my first kill and returned to my tribe, I was allowed to take a female of my choice. When I survived my first battle, I took my first slave. When I survived my first war, I was one of the elite. I had survived where so many others had fallen. I was strong. I was alive. The dead were weak, and undeserving of life. I lived the life of an orc. I ate when I was hungry. I slept where and when I was tired. I raped my women when it pleased me. I killed. And killed. And killed. It was our way. It was all I knew. Tomorrow did not matter. Tomorrow, I might be dead, so I took all that I wanted when I wanted it. The years dragged on. The endless cycle of wars took their toll. Other orcs fell, but I grew more scars. They died, but I lived. I lived long enough to grow old. When I grew old, I grew tired. When I grew tired, I grew thoughtful. When I grew thoughtful, the haze of my bloodlust began to fade. When the haze faded, I saw all that was around me. My life meant nothing. Today, the other warriors, all younger than me by at least a generation, give me respect because I continue to survive. When I die, they won't care that once I lived. I know this, because I have seen it happen to every warrior who has died before me. It was all so hollow and empty. I saw the oblivion of death waiting ahead of me. Behind me lay a barren waste of a life. I wanted something more. I wanted meaning. I may have wasted every day until now. I don't want my life to be for nothing. If I need to I will die in order to make my life worth something. No one else understood. I tried to explain. They would not listen. They laughed at me. In my youth, I would have cut down any who dared to laugh at me. Instead, I picked up my axes, and I left them.

As a DM, most of my inspiration comes from TV channels like History Channel, NatGeo, Discovery, etc. Pawn Stars has become a favorite show of mine due to the fact that customers will come in with really interesting artifacts (and quite a few reproductions and poor-quality copies) and when experts come in to verify the authenticity of the item they often give a wealth of awesome information.

 

[Aeolius]

and

with a hint of

 

[Pig Champion]

For my most recent campaign, Cambodia has provided a lot of inspiration. I had a bugbear nation, lead by a half-bugbear in a Year Zero fashion, Angkor (with elements of comic book cities) provided the main bulk of my urban plot hooks.

I have/had two sister's interlocked into a gang war, they were inspired by the
Trưng Sisters with splashes of Japanese female gamblers.

Basically all my ideas and inspiration come from Asian and Pacific culture, history and comics.

 

[Kinneus]

I'm a video game fanatic, and believe in video games as an art form. Therefore, I often borrow heavily from them.

Bioware's Dragon Age was a great game, though probably not the best ever. It had three aspects I really admired:

1) A close-open-close campaign design, a standard for their games. Basically, you start off in your origin story, where you're more or less 'railroaded' into joining the Grey Wardens. From there, you have three places you have to go to. You can choose to go to them in any order, but you have to go to all three eventually. Afterward, it's on to the grand finale. It's nice because it allows at least the illusion of choice to players, but it also lets you know roughly ahead of time what you have to prepare. When you know that the players will be visiting the Dwarven Keep, the High Mountain, and the Elven Wood at some point, you know where to focus your world-building efforts. You don't know when they'll see your work and fight your monsters, but you know they eventually will.
It's a few baby steps away from that deadly sin of railroading, heh.

2) It just has a cool premise of a cyclical 'Blight' that sweeps over the continent every so often. I liked the idea of an unstoppable horde that everybody knows is coming, but is unable to stop. In Dragon Age, the 'Blight' is basically a bunch of Tolkien orc rip-offs lead by a dragon, which I found lackluster. I changed it zombies for my campaign, because let's face it, zombies are cool. And a fantasy zombie Armageddon is something I've wanted to do for a while.

3) The moral choices in the game are just fantastic. Usually, when a game tries to do good or evil, it comes off very black and white. "Do you want to save the village, or murder puppies?" It's really pretty lame. Dragon Age was great about providing you actual moral quandries to answer. My favorite concerned the golems. Golems are massively powerful creatures in this universe, comparable to an entire squad of soldiers in one body. But in order to create a golem, a dwarf must be sacrificed. Ideally, only willing volunteers would be turned into golems, but everybody suspects that, in times of dire need, people might be 'drafted' into service. The main character is given the choice to destroy the artifact that allows the creation of golems. And it's a really tough choice! On the one hand, it's immoral to kill dwarves to create golems. However, what if a dwarf is willing to make that sacrifice for his people? Shouldn't he or she be allowed to? Also, just because this power was abused in the past doesn't mean it will be abused in the future. Morality aside, is it really a good idea to destroy the dwarven people's greatest weapon when they're faced with the very real threat of extinction at the hands of the Blight? Also, there's the simple fact that this is a one-of-a-kind artifact, the likes which will never be seen again. Is it really a good idea to destroy it just because you don't understand it, just because you don't like its ramifications?

It's a fascinating moral question! And while moral grey area isn't the best for every decision of every campaign (we all like to unequivocably 'be the hero' sometimes), I think it's great for mine. I'll definitely let players know ahead of time that 'unaligned' is the recommended alignment, heh.

Also, I was just recently inspired by Baldur's Gate again. In it, the main plot makes great use of dopplegangers, as the main character discovers that they've infilitrated a surprising number of organizations and societies. In my 'Blighted' campaign world, a major theme will be all sentient people scrambling for shelter in the face of the coming Blight. Sometimes, they will resort to some pretty terrible things in order to make sure they and their families are safe.

Observing how Baldur's Gate made use of the dopplegangers gave me a great idea for a side quest. The PCs are forced by adverse weather conditions to take shelter in a backwoods town. As soon as they arrive, they're greeted by the sight of an angry mob subduing a gnome. They overhear that the gnome has been accused of murdering his wife, and will be hanged. The gnome swears he's innocent, and begs the PCs for help.

If the PCs try to intervene, he finds that the town guard is unusually cold toward them. "This is none of your concern," they'll be told. "You're welcome to trade at our general store or spend the night at our inn, but you are welcome nowhere else in this town."

If they choose to take shelter at the inn (and they likely will, due to the afore-mentioned bad weather conditions), they'll be flagged down by a terrified-looking halfling. The halfling will be very anxious, casting looks over his shoulder, and tell the PCs that the town has been infiltrated by some weird cult. He'll claim that almost everyone in town is a member, and those who haven't joined are being killed. Those who join are utterly transformed, seeming cold and distant to people they've been friends with for years.

The halfling, who is wealthy, will beg the PCs to help him escape, or put an end to the cult. Naturally, after some investigation, the PCs discover that it isn't a 'cult' at all, but an extended family of dopplegangers that have moved in. Worrying that they're unable to withstand the Blight alone, the dopplegangers killed a few select members of the community and assumed their identities. But, naturally, a few of the murders were discovered... which forced the dopplegangers to kill even more people, and assume even more identities apiece. Small-sized humanoids, such as halflings and gnomes, can't be mimicked by dopplegangers, so they had to come up with other reasons for killing them off, ie. slaying the gnome woman and framing her husband for the murder.

The PCs have a choice. If they expose the dopplegangers and confront them for their crimes, the village will quite literally fall apart. The few innocents left will have no place to take shelter when the Blight comes. Of course, if they just leave the dopplegangers to their work, it's highly likely that they'll collapse the infrastructure of the town themselves, with a handful of dopplegangers struggling to represent the entire town's population. The town will need some sort of fortification that will allow it to withstand assault from the Blight even with very few soldiers defending it... maybe a magical wall of some type? I haven't hammered out all the details yet. But, basically, it lets me combine the 'moral quandry' elements of Dragon Age with the 'dopplegangers are friggin' creepy' elements of Baldur's Gate, throw in some Invasion of the Body-Snatchers stuff for good measure, and get a pretty sweet sidequest out of it.

There's some talented writers and designers making video games today, and I'm not above mining them for source material.

 

[weem]

until recently I was on some kind of nostalgia trip and got inspired by reading old D&D books and adventures. Well, no real nostalgia, as I never played any of the truly old ones, I just like that style.

I love movies as inspiration, Hellboy 2 gave me a real itch of using fey creatures in my game as well as some character idea...

Yes to both! Old D&D books are great- fortunately I have a ton of em. Also, I watched Hellboy 2 on a flight from London to San Francisco (it was one of 4 movies I watched during the trip, haha) and I was thinking "Damn, there is some cool stuff in here".

btw. I love your blog. Great pictures and ideas spring to mind just looking at those...

Well thanks! And yes! That is EXACTLY why I made it. I can see an image and get inspired by it - it can get my creative juices flowing even if the image itself does not present something i would immediately think to use... so why not make a place to share a ton of these things, hehe.

Dragon Age has helped get me into a creative mode lately.

Yea, and Kin mentioned that as well just above - plus I had a friend tell me the same thing. I have it but have not played a lot of it yet.

and

with a hint of

Count me in, hehe - I can imagine this being fun Deep sea stuff seems so cool, but I don't think I could pull anything off there as a DM for some reason.

 

[The Hound]

As a GM and player I get most of my inspiration from books, both fiction and non fiction.

Right now its coming from G. R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series (The GRR stands for GRR! when's he going to finish the next #$&!%^ book!). I've based the society used in a campaign and in a living game on that (with a splash of Erikson's Malazan series).

In the past I've gotten a lot of inspiration from history books. Not so much for the worlds that the campaigns take place in as for the events that happen within them (coups, wars, conflicts, conspiracies).

As a player, I often flesh out character's personalities and traits by basing them favorites from fantasy books.

 

[Guillaume]

These days, although I don't play in a Steampunk environment, the Girl Genious web-comic really gets my inspiration going.

 

[Bluenose]

As a GM, my next campaign is as ready as it needs to be to face the PCs. So I've been playing Mass Effect 1 again and I'm starting to write up some ideas I've had for getting a PnP version of Mass Effect going with the HQ2 rules. The campaign premise I have means I'm grabbing ideas from all sorts of SF novels.

As a player, my current character was inspired by watching Robin Hood on the BBC - hence an archery ranger was born. My next one, depending on what the game is, will most likely combine elements of David Falkayn and Potemkin.

 

[El Mahdi]

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