What books and/or movies inspire your games?

When it comes to Character Design and World Building, do you find you turn to certain books and/or movies for ideas?

What are you reading and/or watching for inspiration?

Character and world inspiration are vastly different, and plot inspiration is another animal as well.

Best for world building are other invented worlds. My favorites are Middle Earth, Earthsea, and the unnamed colony world in Lord of Light.

Best for character building are lyrics. My favorites are The Be Good Tanyas, The Indigo Girls, and any of the English Romantic or Victorian poets.

Best for plots? I can't generalize, although I can tell you I love to adapt The Warriors to any system. I've also had good luck with The Divine Comedy and with stealing the Clan Invasion from Battletech's future history.

way to many to answer

Though lots of content has come from Money Python, Princess Bride and Conan 

However, I am currently building a campaign based on the Well World by Jack L Chalker 

Discworld has inspired the flavor for a lot of my campaigns, no matter the setting. Its soft magic system and the way it describes the way magic affects the user and the world have helped me solidify plots that sound reasonable despite not being mechanically backed up by the game. Plus it's just a very funny world that focusses on subverting fantasy tropes, so i just steal vibes from it all the time.

I once ran an adventure involving orcs kidnapping a human family on an isolated ranch followed by a chase, inspired by the movie The Missing.

Burn Notice. We really enjoy heists and capers with lots of intrigue at my table. I often think "What would Michael Westen do?" when we are brainstorming.

One book I really enjoyed reading, and I think really helped me with a lot of worldbuilding is a book called the phantom tollbooth. It's certainly an odd book, and not really related to fantasy in any way, but reading through it gave me a lot of really unique ideas. I would definitely recommend it, as it's not a hard read, but really makes you think about some things. I think after reading it my creative view was expanded a lot.

Rick Riordan inspired a lot of how I treat the gods and their relationships with mortals in my homebrew version of Forgotten Realms.

It’s a game, does that count?

Ill say anyway.

When I was started on my campaign I did a game based on Skyrim, now I take a bit of influence from WoW. 

Nice to see a great variety of influences!

It's not unusual for my characters and worlds to borrow from Jack Vance (The Dying Earth, The Eyes of the Overworld, Cugel’s Saga, and Rhialto the Marvellous); China Miéville (Perdido Street Station); M. John Harrison (Viriconium); Mervyn Peake (Titus Groan, Gormenghast); Clark Ashton Smith (the Hyperborea, Poseidonis, Averoigne, and Zothique tales); Lord Dunsany; Gene Wolfe (The Book of the New Sun); Michael Moorcock (The War Hound and the World's Pain, The City in the Autumn Stars, and more); and Fritz Leiber (the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories).

I don't watch too many movies but things like Excalibur, Fire and Ice, and Conan the Barbarian were influences when I first started playing.

Song titles that make perfect names for elements of setting have also made their way into my games.

Books:J.R.R. Tolkein, David Eddings, Robert R Jordan, Ann Mccaffrey , Piers Anthony, Glen Cook,Terry Brooks, Allan Dean Foster, Charles Dickens, Alexander Dumas

Movies&TV: Legend, The Beastmaster, The Neverending Story, Excalibur, Conan the barbarian, Conan the Destroyer, Red Sonja, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,The Crow, Labrynth, Mr and Mrs Smith, Kingdom of Heavan, Three Musketeers, Robin Hood (many many versions), the John Wick series of movies. Dark Matter, Star Gate, Altered Carbon 

Anime: Berzerk,Record of Loddoss War, Ninja Scroll, Mononoke, Heavy Metal, Wizards, Tenchi

Games: Final Fantasy, XI and XIV, World of Warcraft, The Secret World 

Everything i read, watch, and play influences me when i am world building. Even my friends when they are spitballing sometimes breaks something loose allowing me to move in a direction i had not even considered. 

Wow, it's hard to remember them all. Um... some key ones that jump to mind as very clear influences:

Our current campaign, a big chunk of it was inspired by the Marvel Comics "Secret Avengers" storyline "Time Runs Out" by Jonathan Hickman (looks like the movies might be using some of it with all of their references of "incursions"). Of course, once the plot met the PCs, it's gone in completely unpredicted directions, but a big chunk of the underlying situation and plot was heavily inspired by various elements of those comics from the multiple worlds to trying to build a lifeboat to survive the end of the universe. Still want to use some other elements from it because it is such rich worldbuilding on its own!

Also have a group of NPCs sort of inspired by The HU (first heard their song "Wolf Totem" when coming up with various NPCs). Not really directly inspired so much as thinking of it as their background music to help me capture their vibe.

Also, Monte Cook's short story "The Rose Window" in Realms of Mystery is a great hook for a Far Realm adventure that you can even hand the story over to the players as an in-world hook. Not sure I'm going to be able to fit it into this campaign, but I'm hoping to.

Quote from KenMarable >>

Wow, it's hard to remember them all. Um... some key ones that jump to mind as very clear influences:

Our current campaign, a big chunk of it was inspired by the Marvel Comics "Secret Avengers" storyline "Time Runs Out" by Jonathan Hickman (looks like the movies might be using some of it with all of their references of "incursions"). Of course, once the plot met the PCs, it's gone in completely unpredicted directions, but a big chunk of the underlying situation and plot was heavily inspired by various elements of those comics from the multiple worlds to trying to build a lifeboat to survive the end of the universe. Still want to use some other elements from it because it is such rich worldbuilding on its own!

Also have a group of NPCs sort of inspired by The HU (first heard their song "Wolf Totem" when coming up with various NPCs). Not really directly inspired so much as thinking of it as their background music to help me capture their vibe.

Also, Monte Cook's short story "The Rose Window" in Realms of Mystery is a great hook for a Far Realm adventure that you can even hand the story over to the players as an in-world hook. Not sure I'm going to be able to fit it into this campaign, but I'm hoping to.

Comicbook storylines make for great inspiration! I've had characters and worlds that have borrowed from Nemesis the Warlock, Sláine, and ABC Warriors.

I pulled heavily from the "Ironhelm" series by Douglas Niles because my campaign is based in Maztica from the Forgotten Realms. My campaign, literally the first party to run the adventure, takes place immediately following the D&D movie thag came out recently. Essentially, a secret drug cartel fronted by the largest supplier of generic potions and components in the Realms has been convincing people to sign up as "colonists" but really they are the slaves for the plantations of those colonies. The campaign is actually set in Eyulkos which is Northeasten Maztica but the colonists call it Amratica or the Thirteen Colonies of Amratica and the true colonists are a species of lab rats who are an alchemical experiment of the drow. Oh, that reminds me also "Legendof Drizzt" was in my preparation reading.

One of my older adventuring groups once had a PC named Fire & Ice who had a rather disreputable habit of dropping Fireballs and Walls of Fire in highly inappropriate places. Just as towns in the Old West would demand that visiting cowboys check their pistols and rifles in at the town sheriff's office, several towns, taverns and inns, would refuse the party lodging, meals or any other service, as long as Fire & Ice was with us.

This is really hard to narrow down because I borrow or take inspiration from bits and pieces of many things that I read, watch, and listen to. Trying to wholesale reproduce a plot doesn't work because players are going to get sidetracked and want to spend hours chasing down that one throwaway NPC because they had a funny sounding name.

Generally I avoid trying to replicate a whole story from a book, movie, TV show, song, etc. But I'll build the initial framework around a book, movie, TV show, or song and then let the players do what they're going to do once the initial setup is in place. They really enjoyed the one-shots / mini-campaigns I set up based on The Magnificent Seven, My Cousin Vinny, and Smokey and the Bandit.

Other times, I'll take an idea from another piece of media and use it to inform a character, set up a story beat, or add atmosphere. In the village my players had as sort of a home base in a homebrew campaign I took the idea of one house of worship being shared by multiple congregations from Gilmore Girls and adapted it so it was a temple shared by priests of Torm and Chauntea. In the same campaign I had the players searching through a swamp to rescue villagers who had been kidnapped by gnolls and I took inspiration from Predator to have some hidden stalking hunter pick off their hirelings one by one. In the Smokey and the Bandit inspired one-shot, I had party start at a festival in a small town with a public park and a very distinctive gazebo and end at a party in another small town with an exactly similar gazebo just because I find it funny that Gilmore Girls and Hart of Dixie both used the same outdoor lot for shooting and so they had the same downtown, park, and gazebo. I've adapted bits and pieces of Disney's Gargoyles which is funny because the creators of that show took so much inspiration from Shakespeare and other sources.

I did a holiday one-shot one time that was inspired by A Christmas Carol, though I think I would do parts of it differently if I were to do it again. I've taken inspiration from several episodes of Leverage and more generally have gotten a lot of mileage out of the show's thesis that "highly competent people taking down powerful corrupt villains feels really good." I'm cooking up a one-shot based on the Merle Haggard song "The Silver Ghost" but I haven't run it for my players yet. I have another one I'm working on that's inspired by a lot of things but the big ones that sick out are The Mummy (1999) and Hot Tub Time Machine; it's going to start in media res and then flash back to build up to "how did we get here?" But I have to iron out some possible continuity kinks before it's ready for my players. Also, I've used the 1999 version of The Mummy as inspiration a few times because honestly it's just such a dang good movie. I'm also tinkering with some ideas inspired by Disney's Haunted Mansion ride (the Disney World version, not the Disney Land version) but I'm going for vibes more than story beats because honestly with three Haunted Mansion movies done (including one with Muppets that was better than it had any right to be) the plot points have been done enough.

All of which is to say read, watch, and listen to everything you can, because everything can be inspiration.