Stealing Inspiration
Header Image: Stars Wars, Michael Wang
The secret to success for any GM is to steal as many ideas as possible. You might be worried that if you steal ideas or inspiration, than you won't be as creative as you want to be or that you'll be unoriginal in some way. There is no such thing as an original idea or concept, everything that is created is inspired by something else before it and then twisted into a new idea, word, or concept.
I’m constantly looking for inspiration, for running my games, for world-building, for crafting the perfect villains to unleash on my unsuspecting players… every piece of media I consume is used as fuel to help inspire and create.
What Is Stealing an Idea?
When I say “steal as many ideas as possible” that can come across as sounding pretty bad. Stealing an idea isn’t about just taking someone else’s idea and just plopping it into the middle of your world. Instead, stealing an idea is being inspired by that idea, and then taking it and making it your own. In essence, you morph and adjust the idea, keeping the spirit of the idea while changing the components that make it up.
For example, let’s say I need a villain for one of my campaigns and I’m struggling to come up with a suitable villain with a solid bit of motivation. There are so many villains to choose from and each has their motivation! With so much media out there, you can find the perfect villain! For my needs, I’m going to look at the Star Wars prequels for my villain, looking specifically at Anakin Skywalker.
Anakin Skywalker
His descent into becoming a Sith (spoilers) is exactly what I need as a BBEG. The best part about it is, if I want, I can also take his relationship to Darth Sidious as inspiration and include a Bigger Badder Eviler Guy if I think it fits the story I need.
Looking at Anakin, we have our motivation of wanting to save the person he loves. In addition, he is powerful, a type of protégé for the force/magic, is a fighter and magic-user, and has committed horrible atrocities to save someone he loves.
This gives us plenty of ideas to work with and helps us define his path to becoming a BBEG. He was once on the good side, he destroyed the good side in an attempt to save those he loved, and now he is one of the ultimate BBEGs. This immediately screams paladin to me, a fallen type of course, and just flipping through the Monster Manual, this fits the description of a Death Knight perfectly, so we have a suitable stat block. We can use this idea of Anakin we have to now help define our Death Knight BBEG.
What We Steal
Looking at what we stole, we took a motivation, a backstory, a modus operandi, and the mechanics of how Anakin fights. We’ll rename the BBEG to Nikana Reklawyks so that our players never guess who they are actually fighting (or maybe Sir Jim or Sir Bob - names aren’t my strong suit), adjust the backstory so he is no longer a Jedi but a paladin, change his lightsaber to some sort of powerful flameblade longsword, and then make changes to his backstory so that it best fits our world.
In addition, now that we have our inspiration, we can go through and begin morphing his backstory. Instead of turning against the Jedi, he instead, for our world, cast aside his vows and led an army of undead against the world of the living. Instead of getting his legs and arms cut off and hideously burned in a magma-planet, he instead found horrible secrets to continue his life into undeath. Instead of the one he loves dying from a broken heart, they instead were killed by his enemies who had attempted to kill him when he first began his campaign across the world of the living.
What We Don’t Steal
What we aren’t going to do here is just put Anakin whole-cloth into our games. We are stealing the inspiration for an idea, but we aren’t stealing the entire character. We adjust his backstory, we change the outcomes of past decisions, and we make his character fit into our world, changing anything that comes up. We aren’t just trying to stick a square piece into a round hole because all his character is, is the inspiration for Sir Belac the Knight of Death.
When Is Stealing Bad?
In another situation, we need an idea for a location and decide to steal inspiration from Lord of the Rings and take Minas Tirith. With this idea, we just plop it into our world with almost no effort in making adjustments without much thought if this city even works in the location we placed it in. Are there mountains nearby? Where did the white stone come from? Does the name Minas Tirith make any sense in your world? Why is there a steward instead of a king in charge? What’s with the white tree?
Just taking an idea and then plopping it down into your world creates several problems. Your world becomes a mishmash of conflicting cultures, you draw on so many sources that it’s more like a fanfiction of the greatest hits of pop culture instead of something new for you and your party to explore, and it shows a lack of creativity. Your theft of ideas should be subtle callbacks, not just word-for-word copies.
Creativity
Creativity isn’t the ability to create something ‘original’ and completely new. There is no such thing as an idea being completely original. Everything that has come and gone has been inspired by previous ideas, and inspiration can come from fictional and factual events. There is a wealth of ideas in our history books, from the politics and conflicts of the Hundred Years War to the rapid expansion of Ghengis Khan’s empire to the evocative gods of West Africa with entities like Anansi. All of these moments can be taken for inspiration, and have been used as inspiration, to create our pop culture today.
Take, for example, the idea of Star Wars. It’s been inspired by Flash Gordon, the Japanese film The Hidden Fortress (1958), and even Lord of the Rings. There are references and subtle call-outs to this inspiration, like Darth Vader's helmet is samurai-based, but the ideas have been changed and adjusted to fit the world of Star Wars. These subtle call-outs shouldn’t detract from the idea but instead, inspire your players who in turn get ideas and inspiration from the ideas and concepts that you create.
Making It Your Own
Every idea has to start somewhere and gathering as much inspiration as possible can create new ideas to help build your world. The secret to proper world-building and creation is that every idea that inspires you isn’t just dropped into the world without thought of its impact. Each idea that you introduce should be thought of, twisted and turned around in your mind, and placed in with care for what has already come before. This might mean awesome ideas you have don’t fit in your world and you are forced to set them aside in exchange for another idea, or it could mean that you have to change those ideas into something similar for it to best fit.
Stealing ideas is the best way to fuel your creativity and gain inspiration, but when you make no effort to adjust those ideas and change them, that’s when it becomes theft.
When creating your world, steal everything, and then twist them and make it your own. Combine ideas, discard things, and make them your own by adding your flair to ideas. By stealing ideas and turning them into your own, you'll only be making your world, your villains, and your monsters that much better.
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