How to Use Sources of Inspiration as a GM

One of the most rewarding parts of GMing can be coming up with material that comes straight from your own mind. All of the major campaigns I have run have come from ideas that I have developed myself. But it's a great deal of work, and great ideas only come along so often for most of us. What are we to do when we want to come up with that initial idea to start a campaign or world a world? One answer is in taking inspiration from other stories and gameworlds. 

There are many ways to adapt other work into a tabletop game, and it can be a delicate art. I've written several tabletop game adaptations of movies, available at the top of the main page. I've also used stories from all across the many forms of media. And finding the right way to mesh those ideas with yours is often the greatest hurdle, and one that we usually don't even realize that we face. This guide is meant to show you how to use inspiration for the greatest effect in your game. 

When I set out to DM Listen Check, a D&D podcast I ran over a decade ago, I wanted a very open world with lots of opportunities for stories. To that end, I decided to come up with 25 quests, all of which the players could access from the right place at the right time. I wanted the city they were in, Torga, to feel like a bustling place that wouldn't grow stale. But coming up with 25 quests was a tall task for me as a fairly young DM, and I reached out for inspiration. 

One quest which I created using inspiration from movies and books was something I titled in my notes "The Heart of the Warriors." This quest followed the opening scenes of the movie The Warriors (check out the one-shot), in which gang leader Cyrus proposes to the assembled gangs of New York City that they organize and dominate the police force. In Torga, all the player characters were in a gang, and so I thought this would mesh well with my existing idea. Unlike in The Warriors, my version of Cyrus is not killed right away, and he became a major villain in the late game, largely due to the other inspiration: Heart of Darkness. Joseph Conrad's novel (which I detest, for the record) depicts a journey to find a man named Kurtz, and when he is discovered, he has gone mad with power and become barbaric. In Torga, my stand-in for Cyrus was named Kurtz, and he went from rational leader to insane terrorist over the course of the late game. 

You can see how I incorporated two very different media--an 1899 novel and a 1979 cult film--into one storyline without having to change anything about my actual world or existing work. I took the interesting elements of the things I wanted and kept only those. A pure recreation of either of the inspiration pieces would have changed the tone of the story I was trying to tell, but using only parts of both gave me one of the campaign's most gripping storylines. And for what it's worth, both The Warriors and Heart of Darkness have pretty similar tones to what I was working to create, so having that on my side was a strong boost. 

I want to show another example of what using partial ideas for inspiration can do. I have published a few lists of campaign ideas  here on this site, and essentially all of them are drawn from inspiration. I have an advantage when I'm writing my campaign materials in that I am in my office, which holds my many bookcases. I can simply look up from my computer and see whole shelves of books sitting there, waiting to inspire me. Here's an example from a list of character backstory ideas: 

1. The Hero Out of Time - You are descended from a long line of nobles who have always done right by their people. But as time has worn on, your position of power has waned, and now you are being ignored like you have never known. The time has come to leave your defunct holdings behind and either set right what took your power or make your fortune anew. You might be begrudging, hopeful, or determined about your plight. 

This description was inspired by the novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. In the novel, Okonkwo is a tribal leader in charge at the time that white missionaries were beginning to arrive in Africa. Even before the missionaries arrive, he struggles with his community over his leadership, and it only gets worse after they arrive. The novel's primary point is to depict Okonkwo's failures to connect with a changing world, and it suggests that it is a tragedy that the world had to change the way it did. I took that central idea and put it into a tabletop game context: I kept Okonkwo's core characteristics and gave this character a drive to get out and be motivated in the game with the final lines in the description. Trying to adapt his entire tribal community into a game could prove unwieldy and break the tone, but keeping just the big idea serves us well. 

I've mentioned preserving tone multiple times; if you are interested in learning to adapt genres into existing tabletop games or turning a movie into a one-shot, I have discussed these ideas along lines, and they deal with the same issue. So if you remember to look for ideas on a big picture scale and take only what you need, you'll be on the right track. One of the nicest things about this form of using inspiration is that it allows you to jumpstart your imagination, but still allows you the room to add, change, and subtract as you like. 

Inspiration can even become a part of the game. Multiple times in my career as a GM, I have used music to inspire and heighten my game. If it's about inspiring mood, the linked article will tell you everything you need to know. But there's also treating music as an inspiration for characters or storylines. And that can be taken to a serious level; in Listen Check, I used my favorite artist to represent the leader of the gang that my player characters were a part of. I had established that the gang leader, Erasmus, had a severe stutter and wasn't a very confident speaker. But when he would play his lute and sing, his voice was clear and bright, and the juxtaposition of these two demeanors really helped characterize him. I also would have Erasmus play songs that matched up with what was happening in the story, so I could also use music by Ben Cooper of Radical Face and Electric President to create new ideas for storylines. 

Ultimately, though, my best advice for using inspiration is to genuinely care about the thing you're working from. A few years back, I tried to create a campaign from player suggestions, and it went pretty poorly. One player wanted to revise everything I decided as DM, another player was offended by the suggestions of another player, and one guy only said, "Final Fantasy VII" for a suggestion. I have never played a Final Fantasty game, so I did some reading about the plot and tried to write around that. But I never got excited about it, and you need to be excited as GM. If you're not, your players won't have a good time, and then what's the point?  

Keeping all these things in mind can be tricky. The siren call of perfectly adapting something you love into an experience for your players is alluring. But so often, our attempts to do a work justice end in mishandling the thing that made the original special. It's best for your own work and enjoyment as a GM that you mix together your big ideas, allow yourself to enjoy what you're working on, and always be on the lookout for the next thing that might inspire your next campaign. 

That's all for now. Coming soon: a guide to each language in my homebrew setting, the diplomatic situatio

n of major cities in my homebrew setting, and alternate rewards to loot. Until next time, happy gaming!

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