Where do you steal your material from?

Where do you steal your material from?

Pic related. I've stolen a bunch of quest outlines from runescape quests and mixed in my own elements and spiced it up a bit, because none of my players have ever played.

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m.youtube.com/watch?v=bKJSC_mteIg
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Runescape, desu.

Warhammer, too, in groups that have never played it. One of my favorite factions was a group of kobold that was essentially tau in underground tunnels.

Nice taste, user.

I used their pantheon as inspiration for some of the deities in my setting. Other than that, Dark Souls. Lots and lots from Dark Souls.

Compiled all games, books. movies I've interacted with in an Excel list and look at it when I need ideas.

Man, that brings back memories.

Dune. I have stolen so much shit from Dune it is unbelievable. The entire supernatural aspect, with the dream visions and subtle psychic stuff, I have used over and over because I think it's a great add-on to sci-fi. I have taken Alia as "mystical girl with mental powers and mental issues" and turned that into at least two separate characters. The knife fighting I have stolen almost outright. Huge amounts of my material are indirectly inspired by Dune, sometimes it takes me years to realize it. I keep trying to get my group to read Dune but I do warn them that if they do they will suddenly realize where 50% of my material comes from. That's a huge exaggeration, but I guess it's just... the style? Perhaps? that is what really influenced me. The feel of the world and story. Maybe I'm taking it too far, it's just uncanny how much that book has cropped up in my own creations.

Why are you writing as if you were giving an interview.

I crib stuff from all over although for my sea faring campaign im looking at recycling the Sinbad saga

I shit you not, the next shadowrun I'm giving to my players is based on the opening of Mystic Messenger.

M O N K E Y
M A D N E S S

with an incomplete guide

Jesus fuck can you imagine the average D&D (insert your substitute of choice here) party trying to complete Monkey Madness with the same conditions as in the original game?

this gives me an idea.

My Rogue Trader campaign started off as a ripoff of Raiders of the Lost Ark

Those weird pathfinder adventures that are always 25-50% off for some reason.

Always and forever

I don't know. I told this to one of my friends the other day when we brought up dune and I basically was envisioning talking to him while writing the post.

Pulp novels, Scooby-Doo, and unpopular anime. And I've taken some monsters from AdventureQuest.

Movies
Songs
Books
Cartoons
Anime
I also love to "translate" Sci-fi plots into fantasy adventure.
My previous campaign was basically Fantasy Mass effect with Illithid in place of Reapers.

These two books have given me a huge amount of inspiration in terms of tone, setting and narrative.

>people having to appear incompetent to survive
>world in moral and violent decline
>not!Rome setting
>not!Sejanus BBEG
>replace Germans with orcs, Britons with human-sacrificing elves
>madmen and degenerates in power

In the Grim Darkness of the Early Prinicipate...

I like to take some of the side contracts in the witcher 3 and use them.

I often directly rip plotlines from, or am heavily inspired by, the lyrics The Residents.
The Mole Trilogy in particular is pretty ripe, and it's pretty easy to give the ethnic conflict story any coat of paint for any setting.

Zork, Dirk Gently, and whatever flavor-of-the-week anime my playes are most likely to enjoy. Every player here is either an elitist who can't stand the thought of someone who didn't grow up with AD&D playing any Veeky Forumss, or a complete weeb.

>On my way to Constantinople!

From books, lots and lots of books my players don't ever will read.

What is Monkey Madness? I googled it and it just seems like some Runescape shit. My brother was addicted to Runescape for like, 15 years but I don't know anything about it.

Was one of the most complex and convoluted runescape quests for a while.

Honestly a lot of fun. You essentially help gnomes infiltrate an island of sapient monkeys and you fight a demon in the end. Good shit.

The usual: other people's campaigns/stories, movies, books, etc

Random examples... Some specific enemies, traps and terrain features in my dungeons I've lifted from roguelikes. Brogue's flammable, putrescent zombies and flooded, eel-infested tunnels come to mind. Also, Fallen London. Crates of souls and devils' embassies made of shiny brass. Stuff from Damasio's novels, too, which I'm fairly certain no one here has heard of, considering the lack of translations.

That sounds cool as hell. I need to re-read the series and steal some stuff too...

I usually run low to mid fantasy campaigns, so there's a lot of influence taken from real history and folklore.

t. History nerd.

Just goddamn everything. I like to take the Strike Legion school of thought: if you jam enough things together and mash them around to fit each other, you've essentially created something original

>complex and convoluted
>You essentially help gnomes infiltrate an island of sapient monkeys and you fight a demon in the end.
>complex and convoluted

Erotic dark fantasy by Hitomaru has been a good bit of inspiration.

Not him (never played Runescape) but he probably means the adventure takes the form of a series of weird shitty puzzles, nonsense fetch quests, and things to do in an obscure order. That sort of thing.

Darkest Dungeon

Due to a gag that got out of hand, Sakuya Izayoi is a part of my universe, and this doujin by Izumi Sakurazawa inspired a possible origin story where she was a Time Thief who slew undead. I eventually ditched this and made the street kid Izayoi into a normal (but still top tier as far as kids go) street urchin, but kept the name of Jack Etheldred.

A major downgrade, but Jack Etheldred is one of the more peculiar aspects of my setting, especially the fact she seems to be able to cross entire countries in very short frames of time. The truth is that there is more than one Jack Etheldred. The original Etheldred died years ago and many urchins who defended their peers with their lives took her name. Each one is a completely different kid.

Naw, Runescape was actually pretty good at not doing that. I've always thought of OSRS and Oblivion as my two ideal quest sources.

MM was infamous for being almost impossible without a guide tho.

>MM was infamous for being almost impossible without a guide tho.
why so?

for one part, for example, so will you need to bring a monkey corpse, a mold, monkey teeth, etc, etc to a gnome at the end of a very long tunnel, in order to craft a magical staff and a amulet to transform you into a monkey and to speak with monkeys, respectively. the tunnel is very long and you will constantly get attacked. the first problem is that there is nothing that is really pointing to the tunnel, so you're not sure "when" you're supposed to clear it, the second is that you almost certainly need healing items and, if you want to make life a bit easier, a plank (runescapes version of a 10ft pole) to clear traps, and maybe some energy potions (so you can run for longer, reducing the incoming attacks, something you might not know you would need. secondly, there is no "checklist" in the game itself, besides maybe some clues from the gnome, so you're kinda guessing on what you actually need to bring. and the kicker is, if you get it wrong/don't bring all the items at the first time, you'll need to run the tunnel backwards and then come back again.. and if you die, it can set you back an hour easily .... and if you didn't bring food/other needed items so will you need to go and fetch some which is a pretty huge backtrack. this is just one part, it's filled with trail and error that can set you back massive amounts of time.

Definitely. Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune are all good books. The rest are wank. Don't listen to faggots who say otherwise.

What can I steal from for Shadowrun

ONE SMALL FAVOR
UNDERGROUND PASS
LEGEND'S FUCKING QUEST JESUS CHRIST WHO THE FUCKING SHIT EVEN PLAYTESTED THIS
WHILE GUTHIX SLEEPS WAS PRETTY COOL THOUGH
NOMAD'S REQUIEM WAS A CUNT AND A HALF
EVERYTHING THAT CAME AFTER THE CHOSEN COMMANDER IS SHIT THOUGH

unashamed to admit that i'm up for a 10 year cape soon and I still haven't finished monkey madness desu, i just can't be fucked.
SLISKE DID EVERYTHING WRONG

Goodness sake, how did you do any melee trainan without a Dscim?

...

Steal shit from Gibson. Shadowrun did it, Cyberpunk 2020 did it, everyone who's run a Cyberpunk game did it.

>Mourning's End II

>that fucking ledge
Did the elves coat it in butter or something?

I don't honestly remember. Probably with a Dlong.

Yep, that's what you'd use before you got scimmy.

I've, personally, never stolen material to use for a game. I sure as hell have gotten inspiration from something, or another, but never a 1:1 rip

Now a certain DM i had... oh, seven (?) years ago, good lord, did he learn how to 'borrow'. One campaign we played (and we didn't learn about this until well after we wrapped up) was ripped from some Visual Novel he happened to love. All he did was change some names, other than that, he even had the same sprites he showed us throughout the course of our campaign
(having that many ready hentai scenes should of been the dead give away)

I steal from literally everywhere. There is no fiction that escapes my thievery.

What about my fiction?
I haven't written anything yet, but I've definitely thought about it.

Baby Driver. John Wick 1/2. Payday 1/2. The two new Deus Ex games, dunno about the original 2.

stolen.
countless times.
its pretty good user

The original 2 too.
If you can, at least give 1 a shot, it's real good if you can get used to the clunky gameplay, the music alone makes it worth it. 2 isn't spoken about for a reason.

Why do you write like this?

Depends on the system. I steal a lot of shit from a lot of different things depending on what I'm running. Sometimes it doesn't even make sense. I once ran a changeling game where all of the npc's and court nobility were comic book character expies for shits and giggles.

y-you too

Final Fantasy 12 and 14 for the overall world.
Witcher 1 and 3 when they're in swamp country.
Castlevania when they're in gothic horror region.
Diskworld when they're dealing with the mages corporation.
The Epic of Gilgamesh mixed with Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan done in the style of Conan for the ancient past backstory.
And more I can't think of.
Just about everything I can mix in there. Hell, I even put in Metal Gear Solid for the one time the party had to stealth in a fortress.

Everything. From Dark Souls to Modern Warfare, from spanish soap operas to LotR... Pretty much anything I play or watch gets dissected into a possible story arc, quest, nifty item or mechanic.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=bKJSC_mteIg

Mostly I throw random Ideas I get from different things together. One Time I tried to make a adventure that was basicly Lovecrafts Shadows over Innsmouth.

Patrician taste here.