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What Inspires you?
I recently put up my "inspirations page":https://terrasia.obsidianportal.com/wikis/inspirations-for-terrasia for my campaign and was wondering, what inspires you? What books, historical events, video games, and movies have influenced the feel of your world, your campaign and your GM or play style? Did you put up an inspiration or further reading page for your campaign?
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Only kidding, but seriously, Tolkien more than anything, when it comes to fantasy writing, but being a bit more open and wide ranging:
Greek and Roman civilizations, gods, soldiers and political systems,
Ancient Egyptian myth,
Celtic and Nordic myth,
Ancient Chinese and Japanese cultures,
Dinosaurs, Dark Elves, and Sinbad the Sailor
Star Wars and Star Trek,
HP Lovecraft, Michael Moorcock, Frank Herbert, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E Howard, Arthur Conan Doyle, Wiliam Shakespeare,
Films of Kurosawa,
Films of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg,
The Human Spirit,
Black Holes and Quantum Mechanics,
Robin Hood, Ivanhoe, William Wallace and Robert the Bruce,
Jules Verne and HG Wells,
Arthur C Clarke, Philip Jose Farmer, Clark Ashton Smith, Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley!
twiggyleaf
CURRENT CAMPAIGN: "Mysteria":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/mysteria - set in Wolfgang Baur’s MIDGARD.
Previous CotM Aug 2012: "Shimring":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/shimring
"I met a traveller from an antique land....."
CotM May 2016: Mysteria: set in Wolfgang Baur’s MIDGARD.
Previous CotM Aug 2012: Shimring: High Level Multiplanar Campaign
Inner Council Member
I like reading other people's sites on Obsidian Portal because, not only can it inspire me - I can draw directly from it to add elements to my campaign.
I spend quite a few years immersed in the background of my campaign (HarnWorld). I wrote a few things that got me second author in a few publications and I've just recently gotten back into reading and discussing the background with HarnFans on the "Harn Forum":http://www.lythia.com/forum/
Working with such an established background is both a help and a hindrance to my players.
It's a help because I can answer the most ridiculous questions ever asked as well as the more common ones.
It's a hindrance because I've had to hunker down and rework the bits that annoyed me most (like the details about certain gods). This reworking has moved my pHarn (my version of the background) away from cHarn (canonical-harn, the published material) mostly in subtle ways. But then, most Harn GM's do similar then go to the HarnForums and argue out why their version is the bestest! ;P In a friendly fashion, of course.
Harn has a whole book to introduce the world to players (it's called HarnPlayer and contains common myths, a "cleaned" version of the HarnDex (short descriptions of places, rulers, and historical events), timelines, and basics about world economics). It... doesn't seem to be for sale by Columbia Games Ltd. any more.
There's also "an introduction to Harn":http://www.lythia.com/harnworld/general/harnworld-intro/, but I don't believe I've ever recommended it to my players.
Other sources:
The Cadfael series by Ellis Peters,
The works of Michael Jecks, Bernard Knight, and the Medival Mystery writers.
Cadfael (BBC1 collection), Longmire (AETV), British cop shows (their pacing is perfect for my gaming style plus the stories tend to be timeless).
Name of the Rose (both the book by Umberto Eco and the film).
Admittedly, I never thought of putting up an inspiration page for my players.
Thanks for the idea.
-
ketherian
"Signs & Portends":swtwc.obsidianportal.com
Signs & Portends, Dwarves of Lost Koldukar, In a certain realm
That and copious amounts of hallucinogens...
Ketherian, I didn't know that the Harn your campaign was in was an already established world! I'll have to look into that. I too love to read others' OP campaigns. There's so much creativity on this site.
Basileus I want whatever you're on.
My D&D/Pathfinder world is largely based on a pre 4th Ed Forgotten Realms, with a liberal spicing of other things thrown in (Like Klingons and Tharks). However, it is a shared campaign world, of three worlds actually, and the nother two are based to varying degrees on Krynn and Oerth respectively
My Sci Fi games, well they cover everything form Stargate and Farscape to Star Wars and Star Trek, and even include Mass Effect, SWTOR, Firefly and other things
As for Shadows, well, tha'ts already stated on the site, but, after The Dresden Files, there's Buffy, 24, James bond, Ghostbuster, and a whole plethora of TV shows and books.
Keelah Se'lai,
Keryth
"Shadows Over New York":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/shadows-over-new-york
"2013 Campaign of The Year":http://blog.obsidianportal.com/2013-coty-shadows-over-new-york/
"Campaign of the Month July 2013":http://blog.obsidianportal.com/shadows-over-new-york-julys-campaign-of-the-month/
@Basileus - How on earth could I ever had omitted "liquid acid"......?
@Lxcharon - I actually meant the ACTUAL human spirit - I am a bit soppy at times.
@Keryth987 - I'll join you on "James Bond" as well......
plus......
I should have mentioned Wolfgang Baur's Midgard, which is the whole basis of my current campaign, "Mysteria":https://mysteria.obsidianportal.com/
twigs
"I met a traveller from an antique land....."
CotM May 2016: Mysteria: set in Wolfgang Baur’s MIDGARD.
Previous CotM Aug 2012: Shimring: High Level Multiplanar Campaign
Inner Council Member
Just trying to help out.
Asimov's Foundation series, the character of Hari Seldon and the idea of Psychohistory - has to be mentioned as a patron saint of my delusion/obsession about building/predicting a detailed and "realistic" future history that is galactic in scope... plus my own childhood as a foreign service brat, living through some "interesting times" (the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the Russian Constitutional Crisis of 1993, Indo-Pakistani nuclear brinkmanship, the fact the East Africa embassy bombings hit close to home and made me well aware of Osama bin Laden long before most of America gave a %$#!) makes me OCD about following geopolitics / current events
having been part of the planetary science world at one point, another source of inspiration / being a stickler for details, and of course, the reason I was a planetary scientist to begin with -- too much Carl Sagan and Star Trek at a young age
read allot of sci-fi for a book club - but the Takeshi Kovacs novels by Richard K. Morgan are probably the closest to what I'm going for in terms of setting... interstellar scope without FTL, cyberpunk-ish vibe
watching the televised adaption of The Expanse now on SyFy has me thinking more about "early" days - interplanetary era, not interstellar... thousands of rocks out in the belt to colonize... though go for the idea of an over-populated Earth having tons of random crazy groups that want off and instead of one uniform "Belter" culture, you have thousands of different small asteroid-states with a wide variety of political systems / religious and social conventions, etc.
there was a great quote from an interview of William Gibson (http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fiction-no-211-william-gibson):
Gibson: "If you’d gone to a publisher in 1981 with a proposal for a science-fiction novel that consisted of a really clear and simple description of the world today, they’d have read your proposal and said, Well, it’s impossible. This is ridiculous. This doesn’t even make any sense. Granted, you have half a dozen powerful and really excellent plot drivers for that many science-fiction novels, but you can’t have them all in one novel."
Interviewer: "What are those major plot drivers?"
Gibson: "Fossil fuels have been discovered to be destabilizing the planet’s climate, with possibly drastic consequences. There’s an epidemic, highly contagious, lethal sexual disease that destroys the human immune system, raging virtually uncontrolled throughout much of Africa. New York has been attacked by Islamist fundamentalists, who have destroyed the two tallest buildings in the city, and the United States in response has invaded Afghanistan and Iraq."
Interviewer: "And you haven’t even gotten to the technology."
Gibson: "You haven’t even gotten to the Internet. By the time you were telling about the Internet, they’d be showing you the door. It’s just too much science fiction."
I used to scoff a bit at sci-fi novels where the plot all hinged on *one big change* that had happened between now and then, instead of the dozens of changes you see going on between any decently spaced out time A and time B in any particular slice of history you could look at... and thinking I could write a better, more realistic novel that reflected multi-variate change... but reading that bit from Gibson put me in my place: of course good authors are smart enough to realize multiple things change between time A and time B... it's more to do with the constraints of the form (novels) and the industry (publishers as gatekeepers) that gives us sci-fi novels where only one big change is important
the appeal of a DIY sci-fi setting, a self-published RPG sourcebook in essence, is that you can talk about and play with the full chaotic multivariate mess of history, past and future
And Keryth, Farscape is one of my favorite shows of l time. Which now makes me want to run a Farscape campaign. It's kinda perfect for an rpg setting.
Twiggy Wolfgang Baur is one of my favorite campaign creators as well. I love Southlands which I listed as one of my influences. Him and Monte Cook are great.
I was working on a Sci-Fi campaign that combined Farscape, stargate, and both versions of Battlestar Galactica, it was coming along great, then I got the bug to run Shadows again and all else was forgotten.
So now it languishes, same as my Sci-Fi game that combined Mass Effect and Star Wars The Old republic.
Though, after the next Shadows, I'll probably revisit them, but make em FATE games first
Keelah Se'lai,
Keryth
"Shadows Over New York":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/shadows-over-new-york
"2013 Campaign of The Year":http://blog.obsidianportal.com/2013-coty-shadows-over-new-york/
"Campaign of the Month July 2013":http://blog.obsidianportal.com/shadows-over-new-york-julys-campaign-of-the-month/
Just trying to help out.
Keelah Se'lai,
Keryth
"Shadows Over New York":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/shadows-over-new-york
"2013 Campaign of The Year":http://blog.obsidianportal.com/2013-coty-shadows-over-new-york/
"Campaign of the Month July 2013":http://blog.obsidianportal.com/shadows-over-new-york-julys-campaign-of-the-month/
Gibbon's "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" for really big macro thinking
Nearly all books by Lois McMasters Bujold, she builds more interesting characters and gives them more interesting problems than any other author I have read. Start from the beginning with her books.
A lot of my fantasy campaigns borrow liberally from the themes of P.C. Hodgell. You can't find a better source of gothic fantasy/horror.
Campaigns set in the near past to the near future rely heavily on the worlds greatest source of Urban Mythology: Wikipedia
To follow up on the interview with Williams Gibson, History contains the stories authors are afraid to tell because nobody would believe them. Example: during the American Civil War, Union general John Sedgwick was killed by a sniper, his last words before the fatal shot were, "they couldn't hit an elephant at this distance." He was hit just under the left eye. Apparently elephants were very small that day.
Nathaniel Berger, the shepherd: Tiffany Aching books, Nobita from Doraemon (loose initial concept)
Surolam Arcel, runaway rich girl: Nobilis tabletop game, Haku from Spirited Away, Toph from Avatar (loosely)
Coriander Bliss, baker girl: Bliss book series, Toriel from Undertale
Not sure if anyone wants elaboration for any of those.