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Getting Ideas for your RPGs
by Mike on 15 July 2024
Over at the Sly Flourish Patreon I get asked where ideas for our games come from. For me, great ideas come from great fiction.
Chapter 25 of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master offers a list of fiction I found fueled my own GM's brain attic. It's been a few years so I extended the list with the one below.
These books, TV shows, movies, and games are sources of fiction that spoke to me. They may not speak to you. Instead, write up and share your own list.
Books
- Bloody Rose by Nicholas Eames
- East of West by Jonathan Hickman
- Fairy Tale by Stephen King
- Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
- Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames
- The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin
- Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson
TV Shows
- Andor
- Book of Boba Fett
- Castlevania
- Dark
- Dracula by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat
- For All Mankind
- Good Omens
- Locke and Key
- Love, Death, and Robots
- Mandalorian
- Midnight Mass
- One Piece
- Peaky Blinders
- The Expanse
- The Outsider
- The Witcher
Movies
- American Werewolf in London
- Avengers Infinity War & End Game
- Blade Runner 2049
- Clash of the Titans (the old 1981 one)
- Color Out of Space
- Doctor Sleep
- Dungeons & Dragons Honor Among Thieves
- Dune part 1 & 2 (Denis Villeneuve)
- Eternals
- Everything Everywhere All at Once
- Hereditary
- It Chapters 1 and 2
- John Wick 1-4
- Midsommar
- Nope
- Pan's Labyrinth
- Prey
- Snowpiercer
- Tenet
- The Endless
- The Green Knight
- The Witch
- Thor Love and Thunder
- Wakanda Forever
Games
- Baldur's Gate 3
- Diablo 4
- Elden Ring
- Horizon Forbidden West
- Remnant 2
Other RPG Products
The amount of material published for fantasy RPGs is tremendous and it's all useful to fire up your imagination. Borrowing ideas for your game from published RPG material is a time-honored tradition. Wolfgang Baur, lead kobold at Kobold Press, said that people stealing ideas from Midgard and bringing them into their own world was his greatest hope for the setting.
For some excellent 5e-based products to boost your creativity, check out Notable 5e Products and Ten Notable 5e Products for 2022.
Shaking Up Your Brain with Random Tables
Another great tool to shake up your brain and generate some great ideas are random tables and generators. Whether it's a random monument, NPC generator, magic item, or something bigger like a whole world; random tables get your mind out of a groove and push it in a new direction.
I built the Lazy DM's Companion with this need in mind. It offers story-based adventure ideas, each with lists of twenty options for several variables to give you all new ideas.
It's Jaws but with a chaotic chimera awoken from a long slumber that sprays acid living in a volcanic cave protected by hags and hunted by greedy bandits.
Raging Swan has some awesome random tables if you're looking for random tables beyond those in the Companion.
Fill Your Mind Palace
Generating good ideas comes from all of the sources you let into your brain and the practice of transforming them into new ideas. Our favorite RPGs let us do this transformation every week if we exercise it. Watch some great shows, play with some random tables, and draw upon your own list of awesome ideas for your game.
More Sly Flourish Stuff
Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos on Excellent Short-Form 5e Adventure Publishers and Ulgar – Champion of Ramlaat – Shadowdark Gloaming Session 36 Lazy GM Prep.
Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics
Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs. Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video:
- City of Arches Kickstart Coming August 6th!
- The Negative Feedback of D&D Beyond's Exclusive Offers
- The Lost Modularity of D&D and How to Get it Back
- Is Shadowdark the Best D&D Starter Set?
- The SlyFlourish.com Downloadable Archive
Patreon Questions and Answers
Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers:
RPG Tips
Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:
- Give two or three paths for longer journeys to adventure locations.
- Break up travel with interesting encounters at fantastic locations.
- Add interesting lore to typical random encounters.
- Stage random encounters at notable locations.
- Give the characters the latest news through town or city heralds.
- Let the characters see the long term results of their heroic actions.
- Give the characters a nice coffee shop they enjoy hanging out at between adventures.
Related Articles
- The Best LLM for Generating RPG Stuff – Your Brain
- Good Books of Random Tables
- Breaking Conventional Thought with Random Tables
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Sly Flourish's Books
- The City of Arches
- Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
- Lazy DM's Companion
- Lazy DM's Workbook
- Forge of Foes
- Fantastic Lairs
- Ruins of the Grendleroot
- Fantastic Adventures
- Fantastic Locations
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