Where Do You Get Your Great Ideas?

This week, one for the Dungeon Masters/Games Masters/Keepers/whatever your game happens to call it.

Fair warning, this doesn’t work for all roleplaying games. It’s not great for dungeon crawls (whether an actual dungeon crawl or something SF that’s actually a dungeon crawl in SF clothing) but for RPGs emulating TV series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Leverage, Firefly, Supernatural, Doctor Who, and the suchlike, you might like to go down the episodic route. If you do, try and stick to the X-Files model – arc story episode, monster of the week episode, light relief episode – when building your season. Works well for the 10-episode campaign model of 13th Age as well, where you level up after each session.

You need your episode titles. If you’re lucky, inspiration will strike and you’re not in need of any outside stimulus. If you’re unlucky, well, that’s where this comes in.

I’m not claiming to have invented this method, I first read about it on a Firefly RPG forum many years ago, and it does rely on you being a little bit old-school in terms of what you’ve got in the house…

The Album Track Title Method of RPG Campaign Generation

You know there’s got to be a better name for this. Trackspiration? Not sure. I’ll come back to that.

Grab a CD off the shelf nearby. Or a cassette. Or maybe some vinyl if you’re proper old-school. Use the album name as the arc-story title . Then the individual track names become your episode titles. Obviously you’ll interpret the titles differently depending on the game you’re playing – you’ll get a very different Call of Cthulhu campaign out of “Diary of a Madman” than you will a Leverage campaign. And it works better with some albums than it does with others. “Queen’s Greatest Hits 2” is not, perhaps, ideal as a story arc title, but the tracks themselves will definitely work as individual episodes. Jean-Michel Jarre’s works aren’t great for this (though, thinking about it, something like “Aero” could work for a SF game where the track names are the planets you’re going to… “Your next mission takes you to Equinox IV“), while there’s a whole lot of mileage to be got from Blue Oyster Cult’s “Imaginos” – c’mon, who wouldn’t want an episode called “The Siege and Investiture of Baron von Frankenstein’s Castle at Weisseria“? Take inspiration from the lyrics if you want, ignore them if they’re not helping.

As an example, we’re going to take the Yes album Union and last year’s wonderful Rivers of London RPG.

Fantastic 1991 album from Yes, the giants of prog rock. 16 tracks give us 16 episode titles to work with, so it’s a long one. Each of these is probably at least 2 gaming sessions, so a year’s worth of gaming planned out? Not sure what Union gives us as a story arc title, things coming together? A connection between two parties? Given Peter and Beverley’s relationship in the RoL books it could be appropriate. Anyway, let’s see where we go.

1. I would have waited forever – Got to introduce the protagonists, got to set up the big bad. Starting with a story arc we introduce Wakeman (Or Anderson, Bruford… you get the idea.), a vampire convinced that one of the PCs is his long-lost-lover reincarnated. Now given the nature of an RPG if we start off wanting a deep and meaningful campaign we’re going to end up with What We Do In The Shadows, I’m not going to even try for serious at this point. Will probably borrow “Bat!” as he transforms into a squirrel and makes his escape.
2. Shock to the system – Monster of the week. We’ve got the ball rolling, let’s have the PCs investigate a housing block suffering Major Weirdness with the power system. A former building owner is haunting the grid to get revenge on being screwed over in a business deal by the current occupant of the 5th floor. That the penthouse is owned by Wakeman is merely a coincidence at this point.
3. Masquerade – Light relief. Undercover work at a major demimonde charity event, the PCs dragged in as someone further up the pay chain needs intel or protection that evening. A chance to make connections, a chance to make friends. Equally a chance to spill someone’s drink and make an enemy…
4. Lift me up – Bodies have been found completely drained of blood and slung from fairly high places. Nigh-impossible for a human to have got them there. First culprit is obviously Wakeman. But he’s got a cast-iron alibi for most of the bodies. Are there 2 vampires here we need to be worried about?
5. Without Hope You Cannot Start The Day – Who is Hope and why is Death following her from nursing home to nursing home? Want to link your campaign world with Sandman? Perhaps Hope is Death having her one day every 100 years as a human?
6. Saving my heart – A series of bodies without hearts. The removal is surgical, precise, and instantaneous. This should be a light-relief episode. It isn’t. There are more things in this world than you could possibly have dreamt of and this is a genuine summoned demon. Summoned by accident? By someone trying to prevent his wife from leaving him – or to make someone fall in love with him? You do you, whatever works best. The PCs end up rescuing Wakeman, preventing him from having a heart inserted. What would happen if this vampire gained a heart?
7. Miracle of Life – The PCs get to witness our mystery vampire creating new vampires. One of whom is going to be the grandparent of a PC. Might’ve borrowed a bit of inspiration from Being Human here.
8. Silent Talking – The PCs wake up in a black-and-white silent movie of a world, complete with speaking cards where needed. No communication at the table in-character unless it’s written on a card. Who? Why? What? Enter The Cobalt Archive, an organisation devoted to collecting and storing Objects of Power in a secure facility. Effectively the British arm of the Federal Bureau of Control from the Remedy games Control and Alan Wake. (If you want to hint at connections between fictional universes, setting up the appearance of a particular Blue Box in your Christmas story, feel free to use The Black Archive and have UNIT collecting and storing OOPs).
9. The More We Live – Let Go. The PC’s grandparent comes to them for help removing his vampirism. What will it take? How far would you go to save someone. What if all it took was one really good day?
10. Angkor Wat -Interlude. Things that are happening elsewhere in the world that may or may not have a bearing on the events of the campaign. Give the PCs pregens and get them to explore another country’s department of magical police – like the Germans in The October Man. If you can time it so this is your Halloween one-shot, so much the better.
11. Dangerous (Look in the light of what you’re searching for) – borrowing a little from the wonderfully titled “The Font of All Evil” here I’m going for a landlord cutting corners by installing suspiciously cheap lightbulbs in all the properties under his control. Suspiciously cheap possessed light bulbs. Who’s possessing them? Why are they possessed? Right now, not a clue.
12. Holding On – A ghost with a message to give but not necessarily the right tools with which to do it. (As this is quite some time away in the campaign I figure a little creative vagueness at this point can be filled in with events that have happened in the campaign so far. Someone is bound to have died along the way, giving us a perfect excuse to bring back an ex-NPC… Could be the person they made an enemy of back in Masquerade is either asking for help or has the solution.)
13. Evensong – The calm before the storm of the season finale. A chance to explore the backstory of one or more PCs. Get the players involved in writing this episode, build investment in their characters
14. Take the water to the mountain – Two pubs (The Water and The Mountain, obviously), both alike in dignity, in fair <insert city name here> where we lay our scene. From ancient grudge breaks… you get the idea. Something is causing the drinkers of one pub to have a go at drinkers from the other, and it isn’t something new. This has happened before, with disturbing regularity.
15. Give and Take – The final culmination of Wakeman’s Grand Plan. Hopefully the players have been brainstorming what he’s up to over the course of the campaign so far so take whatever they’ve come up with and run wild with it. This is the big showdown, a chance to lob a ton of magic around and bring the house down, literally if you like.

You get the idea? The liner notes for the CD can be an excellent source for NPC names, the lyrics might give you some clues as to events in the episodes… But you can see that those same 15 tracks would give you a wildly different campaign for, say, Traveller, Doctor Who, or for Leverage, than they would for Rivers of London. And your take on those titles would be completely different to mine.

If nothing else, it’s a grand excuse to keep those CDs around…

So tell me. Where do you get your ideas from?