What are some works that inspire you?

currently getting absorbed in pandemonium wizard village, for inspiration on monster folk

Dark Horse's Conan the Barbarian comics are a must-read

Jim Henson's Storyteller series is pretty great, both the old show and the comic miniseries they do now. Loads of inspiration to work from, and a tone that I like to strive for instead of just doing whatever comes to mind.

with the abyss being basicly designed as a super-dungeon, there are alot of ideas to use

it's a good source for coming up with weird wildlife

I take a lot of inspiration from The Culture to flesh out my sci-fi settings. Not so much the culture of The Culture (what a shitty sentence) but moreso some of the weirder ideas. One of my favourites was in "Matter," where Banks has a "shellworld" basically a huge planet made of onion layers of useable space. Its a superstructure I hadn't even considered the possibility of before, yet he looked at it from hundreds of little details. Like soil erosion being solved by weather manipulation, making dirt storms or the need for several moving "suns" within each structure's layer to have a day night cycle. He even has a medieval society living in one of the layers, with no idea that there is an "outside."

Dune. It has completely changed how I DM.

Usually some early forms of a madium contain great inspiration in condesend form.
I'm not saying that "older is better" but usually it's more simple.

Actual real world legend are a pretty good sources and most of them are hacks anyway.

I think simple but deep is a good desing philosophy because of that, for my Traveller campaing i get a lot of inspiration from the old captain harlock show, firefly and cowboy bebop.

Now i also want to add to myself.
There is a fine but important difference between, what i call, stealing ideas and copying ideas.

Copying an idea is pretty much creating a thinly veiled carbon copy of the original material. Usually the GM thinks that thise ideas are awsome and should be awesome when he uses them. Most of the times it leads to players seeign right through the material or the GM failing to see the whole system of used narrative elements

Now stealing ist taking something and thinking, "What can i do with it and what do i need to change to make it fit better ?" This actually requires some work on the side of the narrator but usually the single elements fit more well together and it's still less work than trying to come up with new thing.

Essential reading:

Nonfiction

The Next 100 Years by George Friedman
The Perfect Kill by Robert Baer
Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile
Fear And Loathing In Los Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
Zero Zero Zero by Roberto Saviano
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond


Fiction

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
Dune by Frank Herbert
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Neuromancer by William Gibson

But both Fear and Loathing and Guns, Germs, and Steel are fiction? Excellent list though otherwise.

Isn't Guns, Germs, and Steel a thesis on what sparked the industrial revolution, and the gap between civilizations at different tech levels?

Most of my inspiration comes from prog rock albums

It's Jared Diamond's half-baked thesis without much proofs on what sparked the industrial revolution, and the gap between civilizations at different tech levels.

My nigga. I'm working on making a campaign with the idea of Lark's Tounge in Aspic in mind.

Hells fuckin yeah. I'm creating an encounter involving lighthouse keepers somewhat referencing pawn hearts

>The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
My comrade
Came here to say LeGuin's Hainish novels. Most of them are great.

Also:
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Stand Still, Stay Silent by Minna Sundberg
Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

>Fear And Loathing In Los Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
good taste comrade

>pandemonium wizard village
Ah, that was some good shit.
I will forever be mad, I can't read the extra chapter epilogue.

Science news plus project rho is a great way to come up with hard yet fun scifi settings.

Romance of Three Kingdoms.

Machiavelli's The Prince.

Breath of the Wild hits that perfect spot of new old world w some Asian elements and epic fantasy

Made In Abyss is the perfect levels of cute adventure and 'what the absolute fuck' I never knew I needed in a story.

OT: The Hammers Slammers series of short stories and novels provide an interesting look at armored ground combat in the far flung future. Would recommend if you're looking for more grounded sci-fi examples of military technology and application.

I feel like Dune is just something you have to read if you want to run sci-fi properly. Like Neuromancer with cyberpunk. It's such a huge influence on the genre that you're doing yourself a disservice by not reading it, even if only so you can understand the myriad of references, homages, and straight rip-offs it's generated.

I tend to avoid contemporary fiction all together in general, but especially so when I work on a setting as I otherwise feel it easily becomes far too similar.

Instead I almost exclusively draw from medieval sources. The Icelandic Sagas and Eddas are sources I almost always return to for inspiration, as is Beowulf, and the Kalevala.

I get all my inspiration mostly just from music, but also the occasional picture I find here and there.

>the abyss is a dungeon
no.
SPOILERS AHEAD

-The Abyss is part of spaceship
-More accurately the Abyss is the remains of the biosphere of said spaceship.
-Ancient Alliums built these humongous explorer ships.
-Figured that the travel will last too long and in the meantime the ''humans'''would evolve and adapt to space-life making them no longer able to live on planetoids.
-humanity was de-evolved biotech and was chilling as primordial soup in the biosphere.
-ship and biosphere were maintained by the Registry Units
-after aons discover habitable planet
-ship crashes
-primordial soup is released into the biosphere and as they travel through the different environments of it the biotech makes them evolve rapidly
-those that make it successfully out of it are humans.
-Registry Units stop maintaining ship and slowly break down one by one
-biosphere starts malfunctioning which manifests as THE CURSE and only affects the humans that left ''the abyss''

on a different note
>lolis mom became a mutant and doesnt remember her
>Reg runs out of juice after they discover the truth about the Abyss.
>loli gets sick and dies on last layer
>it is implied that years have passed until Reg regains conscious again
>he finds that someone has erected a grave on the bottom
>lolis white whistle on the grave
>sads all around
>then he decided to climb up the abyss again

There you go, I saved you from having to read/watch this shitty Utsuge trash.

Diamonds is a meme and there are hundreds of people picking his books to shreds all over the internet if it takes you fancy to read them.
I really like Euro comics and some USA ones inspired in them (right now image has some very interesting ones going, and Artesia was top tier) like the forest of Opal, quest of the bird of time, Lanfeust, Neanderthal/all other comics be that guy and a large etc, and of course some anime and mangas like the twelve kingdoms, Moribito or Berserk.

The manga didn't even end. Where did you read those spoilers, user?

Dude it's his head canon, why the fuck do you mind him.

That's why i'm asking.

Though i wouldn't be surprised if it ends like this.

Read Multiversity

Not so much for plots, but reading Leviathan (the novel, not the Thomas Hobbes treatise) shortly followed by Fallout New Vegas gave me a lot of the conversion ideas for my Mechanicum Magos Biologis army I'm working on. Leviathan has some of the best biopunk art and creatures I've ever seen.
I will also second Dune and toss the Uplift Trilogy of space opera in the mix.

Also biologist IRL, and sometimes we dredge up some fucking wierd things on research trips that work well for games later while I'm busy with my plankton and such. Pic Related is what we found a couple weeks ago in Scotland, apparently it's a Sea Mouse. Cuddly seafloor worms with advanced optical fibers in their chitin bristles around the bottom, so they're iridescent like Tzeench is trying to corrupt the little beasties.

>Uplift Trilogy

Seconding. David Brin isn't a particularly gifted writer of prose, but he manages to cram a tremendous amount of interesting ideas into those books. They're a wellspring of inspiration.

I take alot of inspiration from Kill 6 Billion Demons and the webcomic "Tower of God". I also try to get a studio Ghibli kind of comfy to my world. I also love the earthsea series.

He also keeps his longer plots fairly straight, too. He'll do a bunch of action and plot developments and then say "right, we're going to do a talky chapter to get everyone straightened out, check in on some of the other plotlines quickly and do some neat worldbuilding on the side".

Ulacalthing remains best Xenos. In fact, a lot of the Xenos he did full viewpoint chapters for don't seem like humans in rubber suits, which is nice. Dolphins have their three languages and the Whale Dream, Chimps have all their assorted traditions (although they're obviously MOST humanlike) and Jophur are just wierd.

Dorohedoro, mainly in the "bad guys have enough character you don't even know who's the bad guys anymore" bit.

idk what kind of thing this is supposed to be anymore.

Is that like a filleted caterpillar?

nvm didn't read post

Well, he's upside down at the moment so you can see the fancy chaetae. Upside is all fur and bristles.
Not smart enough to be scared of humans, too, and very soft and nice to stroke. If saltwater species weren't a complete bitch to keep I might get some as pets. I had no idea they existed until a week ago, but nature is awesome.

Yeah. You can easily enjoy the book - half its success is that it is enjoyable and easy to read - but you also need to consider its serious flaws. If you read it with some context of the topics to help you, you can get a lot out of such a heavy-handed claim by considering it and working out where its faults are. It's a good book for anyone who can see it as the pulp novel of serious historical analysis.

Its main problem is that because it is very popular, very easy to read, and promises a one single solution to the question of why this particular combination of winners and losers arose from history, people without the contextual knowledge to see its weaknesses get overly fixated. They buy its arguments wholesale, complete, and invest too much of their identity into knowing this answer that would allow them to entertain challenges to their belief.

It gets a bit culty at times.

The book itself is fine, just mostly a 'what if' dressed as a 'this is'.

Sooo...
Is Made In Abyss actually good or is it just another meme anime of the season?

strong athmosphere, life-like character portrayal, a wonderful flair of adventure, cuteness, struggle, an awesome antagonist, awesome manga artstyle and awesome worldbuilding.

check it out, NOW. and read the manga

It's pretty great. I can't comment on the anime, but the manga is 5/5, though it gets pretty fucking dark.

The abyss isn't a place to fuck around in.

It's one of the few mangas than I really liked in a while. Warning than it's a feels heavy one at times and it has normie filters galore.

>Niggers dont know about novels

The novel is already complete btw. just not translated.

Disregard those two disgusting secondaries:

Whether its good depends whether you like Utsuge or not, because most of plot and drama is there for no other reason than to beat you over the head how I AM SAAAAAAAAAAAD everything is.

Looks like a moth/absol
Also reminds me of the gore magala from monster hunter, with the 4 prehensile front paws

>The novel is already complete btw. just not translated.
That's funny because you'd think it would be mentioned anywhere on the internet.

Does your dad work at nintendo too?

>SPOONFEED MEEEEEEEE

no

Nice thumbnail of the manga covers, user

>334x251

Is this the part where you admit that you were pretending to be retarded?
You have reached SJW-Levels of denial there friendo.

Your image is literally titled 'manga covers'

Those are also from the manga anyway. I should know, I binged it a week ago.

is it okay to report someone if he is lying for the sake of shitposting

no, wait, i'm enjoying this.

Ask yourself this, how many times have you seen it mentioned before the anime started? If the answer is none or nearly none, then it's anime of the season.

>pandemonium wizard village
i currently uses it as a setting in a mouseguard-esque way. added some STALKER to it, too

>Your image is literally titled 'manga covers'
Yes, because thats how the actual manga covers look. You know, unlike the others you fucktard claimed were the manga covers.

how about you guys take your autistic ranting somewhere else

It's too obviously of a lie, he probably really believes it.

Made In Abyss is an ongoing manga series. There are no novels for it.

BLAME has been an important source of inspiration for pretty much all my cyberpunk campaigns, especialy the cyborg designs

bump

I loved the Sheikah Slate and the other technological items in the game.

I could see the aesthetic contributing to it, but the concept for BLAME seems kind of far outside what makes something "cyberpunk" to me. I don't mean that as a complaint against it, but the whole endlessly growing Dyson Sphere world and the search for a human when they're probably extinct seem a lot more fantastical in terms of themes than what I would expect out of cyberpunk

a rapist

Domika a QT

This along with some superhero stuff mostly in the realm of My Hero Academia.

I just really really really like the idea of mobsters with superpowers

Alot of "Anti Anti Christ tales" or tales that basically have the reborn Christ and the Anti Christ having no fucking idea what they are doing and just being scared kids.

Try it, the less shithead like him in MiA the best. We have enough waifu posters already.

i want to adopt molte!

Dark Souls' lore, mainly

that reminds me, i wanted to try playing foxtits for my next rogue

CUTE

>Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
I'd advise against ever touching this book unless you're an anthropologist and understand how horribly it's wrong about everything.

...

Marvel's Conan the Barbarian comics are a must-read

>But both Fear and Loathing and Guns, Germs, and Steel are fiction?
So is The Next 100 Years.

Here is some recommended reading:
Dying Earth Tetralogy by Jack Vance
Wizard-Knight and Book of X Sun series by Gene Wolfe
Saragossa Manuscript by Jan Potocki
The Moment of Truth by Vladimir Bogomolov
The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda

>The Next 100 Years by George Friedman
>Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
>Ursula K. Le Guin
Plebbit called, they want their shit taste back.

The OG sources are classics for a reason, the Odyssey, Beowulf, the sagas, the eddas, the Arabian Nights, Arthurian shit, Kalevala, etc, hell, even the bible has some pretty badass myths.
I love Robert E. Howard and JRRT. I also really like William Morris, check out House of the Wolfings.
I'd say the video games I played as a kid are also a huge influence on how I DM. I love the rgps made by Spiderweb Software, Exile/Avernum, Geneforge, Nethergate especially.

>Odyssey
Gods all shaped like people, Cyclops are boring antagonists, we didn't even get to SEE the sirens, bigass serpent thingy.
Anything I'm missing?