What campaigns have you made and how long did it take to flesh it out?
>>97822264I need some advice on how to be creative, my last two games were stolen premises from other media with me leaning into it once the players recognized some of the names.How do you come up with a plot that feels original, or at least how do I combine the inspiration from multiple different sources in a more coherent way?
>>97822264I'm currently running an ACKS campaign based on the 30 years war. It took about 6 months to write and I've run 35ish total sessions across 3 tables with my primary table playing 29 of those. Plus some solo play party I ran for me. It'll never be totally fleshed out, that's just reality.
>>97822308Use history/politics stuff and mix in Conan, dying earth, lovecraft, Arthurian lore, and lotr.
>>97822308Well not using the same names and giving a fresh coat of paint already prevents most trouble occurring from people recognizing what the source is. The next step is, don't have a single source, use more than one and combine them.What helps you with that is being exposed to multiple sources of media. Books, movies, tv series, animation and pieces of art like paintings, or even music sometimes, depends on what makes your creative wheels spin. What are you struggling with?
>>97822521>What are you struggling with?I think it's mostly me wanting to improvise a lot of stuff since when I do prepare most of the stuff I write before hand ends up being really irrelevant.
>>97822550Ah, you're not alone in that, many people here and outside struggle with that. You may find good value in changing your approach to prep. Like you said, if you try to zoom in and prepare something specific you risk not using it or having to quantum ogre it. YMMV as different groups deal with hooks and agency in different ways, of course.What I find to be really effective in situations where you have to be ready to come up with stuff on the fly is having a more vague prep done, and work on the details when the time comes.You want to have them explore an area, write down just the main players, their agenda and personality. Add creatures, split them into factions. Give a basic framework of how they interact with each other, and maybe a few notable happenings that can come up if someone asks or does something.The PCs enter a valley, there's orcs there. You know that the orcs raid caravans, so that's a possible random encounter. The PCs want to look into it, you know that elves have been trying to trade, but their leader is ill tempered, so there's also a patrol of angry elves around, and maybe they blame the PCs if they loot the wrong thing or act in some aggressive way. Stuff like that.You can come up with stuff because you know what the premise is and how the world would react, but you didn't write down anything specific.
>>97822308I usually just start with a single dumb idea and then expand on it. Like for my current game, I wanted to do a fairy tale storybook adventure. So right away, I decided all the sentient beings are talking cartoon animal people. Then I was like, what if all terrain, plants, and animals were made of candy / desserts? The rest of it pretty much wrote itself from there
