Sources of Inspiration

[Evil_Lawyer]

Hiya all

I was just wondering what sort of things inspired your world settings or games mechanics.

I went to see Inception today, (which I loved) and it gave me a flash of inspiration which allowed me to fix a setting for my mechanic which seemed to go hand in glove rather then the previous setting into which I was trying to showhorn my mechanic.

Have any of you gained inspiration from films, media or anything even more crazy?

EL

[pstmdrn]

I have been watching a lot of Babylon 5 and it made me run a Space Station space opera type game. I decided to use Savage Worlds System.

My sudden interest in conceptual writing has been making me think about how to apply it to games or gamin in general. Influences range from Borges' Labyrinths, Bok's Eunoia, Goldworthy's article "Conceptualism vs. Flarf" (Ghettopoclypse may fit in here somewhere, the Flarf part) and a bunch of old documents I found at a garage sale.

I was thinking of somehow making the players use the old documents to play the game. Still working on it.

[madunkieg]

The standards: novels, movies, comics. I also get a lot of inspiration from learning about cultures, particularly talking to people from those cultures or people who have lived in those cultures.

Now for a slightly unusual one, manifestos. My entry for the Cyberpunk Revival Project was heavily influnced by the manifesto at the beginning of the Mirrorshades Anthology. Manifestos are so crisp, so clear, so sure of how the world works. It's great fun to take a game and start to poke holes in them, even while you seem to be expressing the manifesto's claims as truth through the game's rules.

[maledictus]

For my game, , my main influence was Starship Troopers by Robert A Heinlein, also the movies Aliens and Predator, the videogames of Haloand Gears of War, and of course also The Art of War.

I'm writing a , my influences for this one are mainly The Wind in the willows and the books from the Woodland Folk by Tony Wolf. That's a big change.

[SheikhJahbooty]

Books, movies, TV shows, art books, comics...

You guys

I mean, just the other day I was reading Aldo's game, El Rey Muerto, and I thought, "This is awesome. I could run very similar adventures to two of my favorite post apocalypse games, Engel and Tribe 8, but I don't need to spend hours explaining the setting to prospective players. I just say, 'Fantasy (like medieval Italy) Steampunk Zombie Apocalypse' and we start playing, with the included rules or anything else simple, like Mortal Coil, or Paladin."

That kind of thing happens to me all the time. In fact, I get inspired or excited by a game more often than I get chances to play.

[maledictus]

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

Other Games are one of the big sources for me as well. It gives me a nice set of guidelines on what rules work or don't and let me see where the road signs are when I want to turn off and do something different.

My first set of rules was a new system for building vehicles for a Car Wars Game Book (Green Circle Blues) in seventh grade. (cicia 1996). We would have armed demolition derby at lunch time. Actual role playing games were introduced to me a few years later, through Rifts - which is why I'm still nostalgic for for such a poor game. So bad, that the first RPG I wrote was to be improvement on that one. The second project, Gangland, was because the first attempt was taking too long. (And is clearly based on the GTA series of video games) Dead and Back was in part because I wanted a zombie game and didn't own AFMBE. (Then I found the later for eight dollars at a used book store about the time I finished writing my game...)

Discovery Channel Specials, PBS shows like "Nova" or "New American Frontiers" and other educational TV is a big part of my life. Much of my stuff has a science fiction bent that in turn displays futurist ideas I want to see in the near future. Ion Drives, Space elevators, wearable computers, mag-lev trains, nanotech assemblers and so on - the anarchy zone is a collection of about every non-space related advancement, and XenoExodous includes many of those.

The Post Man, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Starship Troopers, The High Frontier, Neuromancer - these titles have a definite impact on how I envision the future. I've read a lot of vampire and werewolf stories as well, though I haven't really shared the game stuff based on those since its not quite as original. Furthermore, I read a lot of defense digests about military equipment and many of my settings revolve around major conflicts.

Video games are a major source of my personal entertainment, so some elements creep into my games. Resident Evil's multitude of different T, G, CV, and progenitor virus (plus parasite) induced mutations are of course part of the reason why there are at least eight types of zombies in the anarchy zones. STALKER (all three games, and the novella Roadside Picnic) influences that setting as well, and I hope the combat system has a speed like various the various FPS I've played.

Finally, anime has had its impact, if only because I like giant robots and have tried to run games based on Ghost in the Shell.

[madunkieg]

Wait, should I have included inspirations that make me think, "I could do better than this piece of garbage with both hands tied behind my back, a gag held on with fishhooks and a rusty nail driven through my left foot!" Actually, that's not what I think, but I try to be polite sometimes.

[maledictus]

haha. Yes you should, inspiration can come from many places.