While it is doubtless something done before, I am recently active and thought I would ask to see what books, films, TV shows, manga, anime, whatever it was that inspired some of the elements of your settings -- and i do include D&D itself.
M last session ended up not being a session at all as we all got sidetracked on the things that inspired the worlds we love to play in -- and for reference, my campaign is often a lot of "sure, bring that funky thing in".
Not just for the world, itself, but for the adventures. And, since it usually falls to the person doing so to start the process, here's my list:
For the Campaign proper (the mainline) I polled all my players and asked them to give me good films they liked. Then I had to watch them and pick ones I could work with. It was known that I was going to re-do an adventure I had done in the mid 80's based on Stephen King's It (novel, not miniseries or films). The list that came out was this:
It, Blade, The Shining, Deliverance, Smokey & The Bandit, Knight & Day, The 5 Element, Mission Impossible, No Country for Old Men, Sleight, Violet Evergarden, Under the Tuscan Sun, Casablanca, The Incredibles, Labyrinth, Encanto, The Craft, Seven, Cast a Deadly Spell, Gangs of New York, The Warriors, The Godfather, Wyatt Earp, Fistful of Dollars, Sons of Katie Elder, The Big Sleep, Ocean’s 8, Thief, Mr & Ms Smith, Rescue the Princess, The Losers, The Princess Bride, Akame ga Kill, The Mummy & The Mummy Returns.
Those form the inspiration of all 20 of the initial core Adventures (there is a 21st that ties it all together). I am looking forward to the upcoming book because of how it pertains to certain heist examples. Note that while there are romance storylines, they are subplots for the characters that interweave along the others. And yes, there is a bit and a piece of almost every genre possible worked in.
For cultural references, we have the big ones: A Western Cowboy culture, a "traditional Fantasy culture", a few nomadic ones, and a first for me: two ocean/river cultures. The rest are all amalgamations that include inspiration from Gangster films, matriarchy and Patriarchy, tinkerer, and isolationist -- as well as an outright magiocracy.
Then came the book and TV show requests -- and ended up including a couple video games, that all had some piece or bit or thing that folks wanted, as well as the decision to make this a world that was different. I have mentioned that one of the rules in lace was "none of the original inspirations" for D&D, but I didn't note that the corollary to that was also "more stuff by Women and POC authors". Note that this means that I was not allowed to use Tolkien.
And I was suppose to make this work with D&D, mind you. In any case, the whole thing started out with direct influence from both McCaffrey's Pern and the Niven/Pournelle/Barnes Heorot series -- this laid the foundation for the "start of the world". I did a really rough early history start, and then we started adding in other things.
Books
55 different authors were consulted for different bits and pieces. Many of them are "paranormal/urban fantasy", but less about the settings and more about the ideas. Magic in them left people tired and worn out and they had limits on how much they could do -- but it was also an energy that ran down. They wanted that style of play.
One of the oldest influences was Elizabeth A Lynn's Watchtower series --and by oldest, I mean in terms of what we could use. Elizabeth Moon's Paksenarrion series (just the books about her) was in the bubble as well. My professional life gave me a from grounding in 1800's to very early 1900's study and a broad smattering of world mythological patterns and natures, so that was thrown in because they like it when I surprise them, lol.
Clive Barker's Imajica and Weaveworld had a major role early, but that tapered off over time. K. F. Breene added in stuff from the The Warrior Chronicles. Glen Cook's Black Company added in a way of looking at magic but mostly established the Knightly Orders, lol. Don't ask how. C. L. Clark's The Unbroken gave me a way to handle inter realm stuff. Kate Elliot had a big impact -- Crossroads, Court of Fives, the Cold Trilogy all had an impact, especially on three specific realms (out of 12, lol. Was supposed to be 7, but got out of hand). bits and pieces from several of N. K. Jemison's works made it into the effort so far. Both Itand the Gunslinger series by Stephen King are core parts. Mercedes Lackey's Hunter trilogy had a part. Shannon Mayer did as well -- though honestly itis hard to pin down, because it was the Elemental, Rylee Adamson, and Questing Witch stuff, though I liked several parts of the Desert Cursed series. Alina Boyden’s Gifting Fire and Stealing Thunder.
Seanan Mcguire's October Daye series had a big impact on how the equivalent for the Feywild works out. Craig Schaffer's Harmony Black, Wisdom's Grave stuff had a bearing. I did cheat and use some Roger Zelazny ideas from Amber. There are other books, all of them from 1993 through 2016.
By far and away the biggest impact was from Anime and TV shows. Very few of them the mega-popular shows, I guess. Except the Magical Girl stuff -- for that we drew from the deconstructions of the tropes. Yes, a lot of isekai, lol -- but we were doing "real world lost in the fantasy world in 1981, because that trope is super old (going back to the mid 1800's). Some examples:
Ascendance of a Bookworm, Ancient Magus’ Bride, Blade & Soul, BOFURI, Fena: Pirate Princess, Yona of the Dawn, The Executioner and Her Way of Life, Kino's Journey, BNA, 7 seeds.
All of this got dropped in a blender alongside 40 years of my DMing D&D, knowing my core players and their teams, and fun as well as lots of my own personal experience and knowledge of Earthly Lore and systems, and then a desire for a tad bit more crunch without affecting our roleplaying (which we all like).
I was only allowed five dungeons max, though. Really hurtful, that.
The world itself has a full lore book, as do character creation and magic (because I had to create spells more like the sort used), and the campaign source book looks likely to be split into two or more books. Because all in all, by the end of this year I will have:
Five Baits for each Story Hook
Three Story Hooks for each Campaign Part (21 of those, again)
Ten Relationship Stories
Twenty Tertiary Stories
Twenty seven Side Quests
Thirty five Errands
NOne of which iis to say that I don't use D&D, lol. Localized and adapted versions of The Ghost Tower of Inverness, Saltmarsh, and a couple others are included.
For video games, two made the cut as having an impact: Horizon Zero Dawn and Mortal Kombat. MK gave me an opening for the fight against the Yog (who are a kind of Devil or Demon cross with Chthulu, natch) and a way to add in something kinda like a monk, while HZD gave me a product of the War of the God's called Warmachines which are basically the machine animals from there.
That blender whirring has taken four years so far (with breaks and earning a living, lol) with start of play being set for early 2024.
Now that I have bored you to death with my inspirations and meanderings, please tell me about yours!
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Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
A lot of my ideas for Elucinor/Exult/The Castoff Realms (I can’t even keep the name straight!) are still in flux, but the inspirations have been largely consistent. They skew more towards video games because collage textbooks have all but destroyed my ability to enjoy reading :).
The Elder Scrolls series is probably my oldest muse that I still draw from. I try for a similar mix of familiar and esoteric, and also got the idea of the different species living in the same towns there. Also, depicting factions/organizations not as these omnipresent movers and shakers of society, but as frequently incompetent workplaces that cause as many problems for themselves as they solve.
Omori, End Roll, and Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass has guided ideas about the Dreamworld and how it interacts with people.
There is one short story, The Demon of the Flower. I’m almost certain that the blights from the monster manual were inspired by this story, and since they’re some of my favorite monsters I’ve thought of how an evil spirit or malign presence could corrupt other biomes and turn its natural elements into servants.
Then there’s the anime Angel Beats. I don’t quite know what its effect is, but I know it’s somewhere.
From a D&D source, because the True Masters, the overall villains of my setting, were originally conceived as the Dark Powers of Ravenloft in disguise, they obviously draw a lot of inspiration from them.
I...don't draw from outside sources all that often. Every once in a while, I might borrow a motif or a hook or an NPC template from something established, but I've been writing fantasy for decades, so if I'm importing ideas from anything it's more likely to be my own stuff. It's living rent-free in my head, anyway, so might as well put it to good use.
That said, the things that do tend to inspire me usually add political elements and/or organized crime to their fantasy - Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Naruto, the Dresden Files, the Gentlemen Bastards series, and Discworld, to name a few. I also like seeing the interplay of magic and morality, which are motifs in all of the ones I listed, as well as things like Dororo, My Hero Academia, and the Ravenloft setting. I also rather like co-opting 2e content (elder evils, for example) and adjusting them to suit my needs from a lore perspective.
I...don't draw from outside sources all that often. Every once in a while, I might borrow a motif or a hook or an NPC template from something established, but I've been writing fantasy for decades, so if I'm importing ideas from anything it's more likely to be my own stuff. It's living rent-free in my head, anyway, so might as well put it to good use.
That said, the things that do tend to inspire me usually add political elements and/or organized crime to their fantasy - Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Naruto, the Dresden Files, the Gentlemen Bastards series, and Discworld, to name a few. I also like seeing the interplay of magic and morality, which are motifs in all of the ones I listed, as well as things like Dororo, My Hero Academia, and the Ravenloft setting. I also rather like co-opting 2e content (elder evils, for example) and adjusting them to suit my needs from a lore perspective.
yeah, 2e stuff was awesome. My current sequence uses some rejiggered versions of old modules for the campaign, and tosses in some crunch derived from 2e, which was probably “my edition”, despite starting playing with the release of the AD&D PHB.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
I have created the majority of my stuff from Folklore and Myth, such as the Norse Pantheon, as well as some research into Eldritch Horror stories by HP Lovecraft.
I also have a few items and settings littered about which are based off of pop-culture references, puns, and books I enjoyed; an extremely manipulative banking house, a set of magic items based off of A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, an entire town dedicated to Cheese puns (see link in sig), and so on.
For the most part though, I have tried to keep my campaign world as being my own creation, which is steadily drifting further from the sheltered shores of the generic fantasy world I started with!
I pull inspiration from the weirdest places sometime, and it's never a conscious effort either: something just pops into my head and is like *this could be a campaign*.
One campaign was inspired by the JJ Abrams Star Trek reboot, where the plot took place in an offshoot timeline with a villain from an alternate future trying to revenge himself on a world he sacrificed everything to try and save, where all the player characters in the Prime Timeline had been friends with the bad guy. That was cool.
I had another more recent campaign where a significant plot line was lifted from a classic jrpg (The Legend of Dragoon--SUCH a good game!) and changed so the dragoons were all bad guys leading a dragon worshiping cult. I also used some LotD lore to set up some main plot stuff (the ancient lost civilization in my world are basically Winglies but I changed the name to "Vengelli" to sound more fantasy).
In that same campaign I ran a baking contest for one of the players who was a baker, and basically did the Great British Baking Show with more sabotage involved.
I also once took most of the plot from a Doctor Who episode (Mummy on the Orient Express) for a bit of an Eberron campaign, with a living Cannith experiment still fighting the Last War on a lightning rail after being unwittingly set loose by a human extremist group.
I think it's best when you pull inspiration from fully disparate sources, because those are the ones that mesh together more uniquely. I try not to plan what I draw from, it just happens to me.
While it is doubtless something done before, I am recently active and thought I would ask to see what books, films, TV shows, manga, anime, whatever it was that inspired some of the elements of your settings -- and i do include D&D itself.
M last session ended up not being a session at all as we all got sidetracked on the things that inspired the worlds we love to play in -- and for reference, my campaign is often a lot of "sure, bring that funky thing in".
Not just for the world, itself, but for the adventures. And, since it usually falls to the person doing so to start the process, here's my list:
For the Campaign proper (the mainline) I polled all my players and asked them to give me good films they liked. Then I had to watch them and pick ones I could work with. It was known that I was going to re-do an adventure I had done in the mid 80's based on Stephen King's It (novel, not miniseries or films). The list that came out was this:
It, Blade, The Shining, Deliverance, Smokey & The Bandit, Knight & Day, The 5 Element, Mission Impossible, No Country for Old Men, Sleight, Violet Evergarden, Under the Tuscan Sun, Casablanca, The Incredibles, Labyrinth, Encanto, The Craft, Seven, Cast a Deadly Spell, Gangs of New York, The Warriors, The Godfather, Wyatt Earp, Fistful of Dollars, Sons of Katie Elder, The Big Sleep, Ocean’s 8, Thief, Mr & Ms Smith, Rescue the Princess, The Losers, The Princess Bride, Akame ga Kill, The Mummy & The Mummy Returns.
Those form the inspiration of all 20 of the initial core Adventures (there is a 21st that ties it all together). I am looking forward to the upcoming book because of how it pertains to certain heist examples. Note that while there are romance storylines, they are subplots for the characters that interweave along the others. And yes, there is a bit and a piece of almost every genre possible worked in.
For cultural references, we have the big ones: A Western Cowboy culture, a "traditional Fantasy culture", a few nomadic ones, and a first for me: two ocean/river cultures. The rest are all amalgamations that include inspiration from Gangster films, matriarchy and Patriarchy, tinkerer, and isolationist -- as well as an outright magiocracy.
Then came the book and TV show requests -- and ended up including a couple video games, that all had some piece or bit or thing that folks wanted, as well as the decision to make this a world that was different. I have mentioned that one of the rules in lace was "none of the original inspirations" for D&D, but I didn't note that the corollary to that was also "more stuff by Women and POC authors". Note that this means that I was not allowed to use Tolkien.
And I was suppose to make this work with D&D, mind you. In any case, the whole thing started out with direct influence from both McCaffrey's Pern and the Niven/Pournelle/Barnes Heorot series -- this laid the foundation for the "start of the world". I did a really rough early history start, and then we started adding in other things.
Books
55 different authors were consulted for different bits and pieces. Many of them are "paranormal/urban fantasy", but less about the settings and more about the ideas. Magic in them left people tired and worn out and they had limits on how much they could do -- but it was also an energy that ran down. They wanted that style of play.
One of the oldest influences was Elizabeth A Lynn's Watchtower series --and by oldest, I mean in terms of what we could use. Elizabeth Moon's Paksenarrion series (just the books about her) was in the bubble as well. My professional life gave me a from grounding in 1800's to very early 1900's study and a broad smattering of world mythological patterns and natures, so that was thrown in because they like it when I surprise them, lol.
Clive Barker's Imajica and Weaveworld had a major role early, but that tapered off over time. K. F. Breene added in stuff from the The Warrior Chronicles. Glen Cook's Black Company added in a way of looking at magic but mostly established the Knightly Orders, lol. Don't ask how. C. L. Clark's The Unbroken gave me a way to handle inter realm stuff. Kate Elliot had a big impact -- Crossroads, Court of Fives, the Cold Trilogy all had an impact, especially on three specific realms (out of 12, lol. Was supposed to be 7, but got out of hand). bits and pieces from several of N. K. Jemison's works made it into the effort so far. Both It and the Gunslinger series by Stephen King are core parts. Mercedes Lackey's Hunter trilogy had a part. Shannon Mayer did as well -- though honestly itis hard to pin down, because it was the Elemental, Rylee Adamson, and Questing Witch stuff, though I liked several parts of the Desert Cursed series. Alina Boyden’s Gifting Fire and Stealing Thunder.
Seanan Mcguire's October Daye series had a big impact on how the equivalent for the Feywild works out. Craig Schaffer's Harmony Black, Wisdom's Grave stuff had a bearing. I did cheat and use some Roger Zelazny ideas from Amber. There are other books, all of them from 1993 through 2016.
By far and away the biggest impact was from Anime and TV shows. Very few of them the mega-popular shows, I guess. Except the Magical Girl stuff -- for that we drew from the deconstructions of the tropes. Yes, a lot of isekai, lol -- but we were doing "real world lost in the fantasy world in 1981, because that trope is super old (going back to the mid 1800's). Some examples:
Ascendance of a Bookworm, Ancient Magus’ Bride, Blade & Soul, BOFURI, Fena: Pirate Princess, Yona of the Dawn, The Executioner and Her Way of Life, Kino's Journey, BNA, 7 seeds.
All of this got dropped in a blender alongside 40 years of my DMing D&D, knowing my core players and their teams, and fun as well as lots of my own personal experience and knowledge of Earthly Lore and systems, and then a desire for a tad bit more crunch without affecting our roleplaying (which we all like).
I was only allowed five dungeons max, though. Really hurtful, that.
The world itself has a full lore book, as do character creation and magic (because I had to create spells more like the sort used), and the campaign source book looks likely to be split into two or more books. Because all in all, by the end of this year I will have:
NOne of which iis to say that I don't use D&D, lol. Localized and adapted versions of The Ghost Tower of Inverness, Saltmarsh, and a couple others are included.
For video games, two made the cut as having an impact: Horizon Zero Dawn and Mortal Kombat. MK gave me an opening for the fight against the Yog (who are a kind of Devil or Demon cross with Chthulu, natch) and a way to add in something kinda like a monk, while HZD gave me a product of the War of the God's called Warmachines which are basically the machine animals from there.
That blender whirring has taken four years so far (with breaks and earning a living, lol) with start of play being set for early 2024.
Now that I have bored you to death with my inspirations and meanderings, please tell me about yours!
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
A lot of my ideas for Elucinor/Exult/The Castoff Realms (I can’t even keep the name straight!) are still in flux, but the inspirations have been largely consistent. They skew more towards video games because collage textbooks have all but destroyed my ability to enjoy reading :).
The Elder Scrolls series is probably my oldest muse that I still draw from. I try for a similar mix of familiar and esoteric, and also got the idea of the different species living in the same towns there. Also, depicting factions/organizations not as these omnipresent movers and shakers of society, but as frequently incompetent workplaces that cause as many problems for themselves as they solve.
Omori, End Roll, and Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass has guided ideas about the Dreamworld and how it interacts with people.
There is one short story, The Demon of the Flower. I’m almost certain that the blights from the monster manual were inspired by this story, and since they’re some of my favorite monsters I’ve thought of how an evil spirit or malign presence could corrupt other biomes and turn its natural elements into servants.
Then there’s the anime Angel Beats. I don’t quite know what its effect is, but I know it’s somewhere.
From a D&D source, because the True Masters, the overall villains of my setting, were originally conceived as the Dark Powers of Ravenloft in disguise, they obviously draw a lot of inspiration from them.
I...don't draw from outside sources all that often. Every once in a while, I might borrow a motif or a hook or an NPC template from something established, but I've been writing fantasy for decades, so if I'm importing ideas from anything it's more likely to be my own stuff. It's living rent-free in my head, anyway, so might as well put it to good use.
That said, the things that do tend to inspire me usually add political elements and/or organized crime to their fantasy - Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Naruto, the Dresden Files, the Gentlemen Bastards series, and Discworld, to name a few. I also like seeing the interplay of magic and morality, which are motifs in all of the ones I listed, as well as things like Dororo, My Hero Academia, and the Ravenloft setting. I also rather like co-opting 2e content (elder evils, for example) and adjusting them to suit my needs from a lore perspective.
yeah, 2e stuff was awesome. My current sequence uses some rejiggered versions of old modules for the campaign, and tosses in some crunch derived from 2e, which was probably “my edition”, despite starting playing with the release of the AD&D PHB.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
I have created the majority of my stuff from Folklore and Myth, such as the Norse Pantheon, as well as some research into Eldritch Horror stories by HP Lovecraft.
I also have a few items and settings littered about which are based off of pop-culture references, puns, and books I enjoyed; an extremely manipulative banking house, a set of magic items based off of A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, an entire town dedicated to Cheese puns (see link in sig), and so on.
For the most part though, I have tried to keep my campaign world as being my own creation, which is steadily drifting further from the sheltered shores of the generic fantasy world I started with!
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I have started discussing/reviewing 3rd party D&D content on Substack - stay tuned for semi-regular posts!
I pull inspiration from the weirdest places sometime, and it's never a conscious effort either: something just pops into my head and is like *this could be a campaign*.
One campaign was inspired by the JJ Abrams Star Trek reboot, where the plot took place in an offshoot timeline with a villain from an alternate future trying to revenge himself on a world he sacrificed everything to try and save, where all the player characters in the Prime Timeline had been friends with the bad guy. That was cool.
I had another more recent campaign where a significant plot line was lifted from a classic jrpg (The Legend of Dragoon--SUCH a good game!) and changed so the dragoons were all bad guys leading a dragon worshiping cult. I also used some LotD lore to set up some main plot stuff (the ancient lost civilization in my world are basically Winglies but I changed the name to "Vengelli" to sound more fantasy).
In that same campaign I ran a baking contest for one of the players who was a baker, and basically did the Great British Baking Show with more sabotage involved.
I also once took most of the plot from a Doctor Who episode (Mummy on the Orient Express) for a bit of an Eberron campaign, with a living Cannith experiment still fighting the Last War on a lightning rail after being unwittingly set loose by a human extremist group.
I think it's best when you pull inspiration from fully disparate sources, because those are the ones that mesh together more uniquely. I try not to plan what I draw from, it just happens to me.