Musical Inspiration

I’ve written a little about my brainstorming methods before, but lately I’ve been using another method I hadn’t touched on there:  plucking phrases out of existing works and building something around them.  A good phrase can be inspiration for an NPC, an object, a location, or an adventure.  They can come from novels, poetry, movies, television.

And song lyrics.

A couple of ideas generated by my playlist recently:

Someone tell me where the pretty girls are — those demigods with their Nine Inch Nails and little fascist panties tucked inside the heart of every nice girl.
…These precious things, let them bleed, let them wash away… let them break their hold over me.

– Tori Amos, Precious Things

Not exactly a subtle song, but you can’t fault the imagery.  The immediate idea it suggests to me is a possession plot:  something evil has taken over a young girl and is, through her body, doing one of the usual sorts of terrible things.  What that might be, exactly, isn’t even very important, as far as the idea goes.  The twist to the adventure is in its setup:  can the characters stop it from happening while also keeping the innocent girl safe and, ideally, freeing her?

Ah, but why stop at one girl?  Maybe there’s more than one of these evils, and more than one victim.  Maybe the PCs are uncaring enough to kill one — but the evil thing just jumps to another victim.  Will they be callous enough to keep killing the girls when that’s proven not to affect the monster?  (Hopefully not… but there’re going to be repercussions for that first death, assuming anyone else knows about it!)  Will the same method used to free one victim work on the others, or do these things learn from each others’ mistakes?  Can the characters come up with enough clever plans to save all of the girls, while also stopping the villains from achieving their purpose?

When the world swallows whole all you’ve known,
There are no landmarks you can recognize.

– James, Stripmining

This one made me think of hollow worlds.  What happens if some great power causes such a world to be transposed, so that what was outside is suddenly within, and what was inside is suddenly on the surface?  This is most entertaining if the residents, or at least those who weren’t involved in the transposition, are not transported.  Suddenly, there’s wide-scale confusion as everyone finds themselves placed in a new, unknown, alien environment.  Widespread panic, the fracturing of societies, the outbreak of battles over resources and perhaps territory, strife caused by opportunists seizing their moments… times two.

It might be a great way to introduce a hollow world if there’d been no previous indications that one existed.  It makes a great excuse for playing with the natural laws of the universe… or changing the house rules around, as the case may be.

And if the transposition proves permanent, or even very long-term, then you’ve got essentially a whole new campaign setting, because it’s not just the geographical landscape that’s shifted — it’s the sociopolitical one.

Some folks pull this life like a weight
Drab and dragging dreams made of slate
…Don’t let the loveless ones sell you
A world wrapped in grey.

– XTC, Wrapped in Grey

Something has begun to leach the color from the world.  Things are just less vibrant than they used to be.  And it’s not just hue — it’s emotion, too.  It’s slow, at first, almost unnoticeable, but over time, the process quickens.  Colors fade.  Sounds hush.  Tastes grow more bland, scents more indistinct.  Even the sense of touch grows deadened.  Great rages, great sorrows, great loves, great despairs, these are all things of the past.  The new emotional state is calm and apathetic.  The people, too, grow dead and indistinct.

Except, of course, for our heroes.  They are still as vibrant as ever.  In a monochrome world, they blaze brightly.  In a world without emotions, they alone laugh or cry.  They alone realize what was lost.  They alone have a chance to recover it.

If, that is, they don’t go mad first.  After all, they’re now effectively alone in the world…

They’re all decent seeds.  With a little fleshing out, and some consideration of the characters’ backgrounds and hooks, they’d all develop into fine plots for a game.  And they all spring from taking a couple lines of lyrics more or less literally within the context of a game setting.  In other words, it’s almost no work at all to grab the initial spark.  At that point, the plot develops naturally from there.  If you’d like to get more interpretive, you can certainly take that approach, too.

With a method like this, there’s an almost limitless amount of inspiration to be found — and unlike lifting the plot itself from a novel or movie, it’s unlikely your players will ever link your adventure to the quote that inspired it.

Related posts:

1. Adventure Design 101
2. Murder Most Foul: The Usual Suspects
3. Character Development: Flashbacks
4. Round-Robin Gamemastering
5. Adventure Design 101: The Setting