I find a lot of the #RPGaDAY2015 prompts a bit confusing — rather, hard to grasp exactly what they’re driving at. Favorite inspiration for your game is one of those. It’s like asking a writer where he gets his ideas from. ((The correct answer is “a small warehouse in Schenectady, New York”.)) I don’t get the concept for an adventure/mission/whatever from any one place. Even if I were to take the plot of Hamlet and set it in my game on Mars in 2132, I’m going to be adding so much more from things that I have encountered and experienced over the years. It’s hard to get a good answer out of this one, and that’s without assuming I can recall the genesis of moments in those decades of gameplay.
What spawned the idea that the drow and evil races was merely propaganda by the mind-flayer-controlled rulers of the D&D game world?
Where did that idea of cities being living, slumbering giants contained by magical circles formed of ring roads and highway bypass loops in my Dresden Files game come from?
Why does Bruce Campbell keep showing up in my games? ((That one’s pretty easy to answer. He’s a cool guy.))
Let’s go with Bruce Campbell for a second. See, when I was running Shadowrun, 2nd Edition, we had the television show The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., integrated into the game. In Brisco, there was this time-travelling villain, John Bly, who came to the present of the 1880’s with three magical orbs, and that drove the overlying plot of the show. In Shadowrun, there’s this whole Fourth World thing from thousands of years ago when there was magic and now it’s the Sixth World, where magic came back, so it’s not too much of a stretch to say that an evil Immortal Elf ((A big thing from Shadowrun 2. Everyone famous in history? An elf from the Fourth World, living in the non-magical Fifth, disguised as a human. All over the place.)) went from the far past to the far future and then to the relatively recent past and then — in the show, Bly explodes or gets sucked into an orb or something — to more closer recent past and then tried to get his hands on the surviving orbs to do Something Nasty.
So yeah, there’s an inspiration. A confusing one, but still.
I suppose that’ll do.