We all have one, that place where we keep all the really cool ideas that just don’t fit in the world we’ve built. What you got? What’s that cool thing you made that toy can’t really use?
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A lawful neutral (as in the dispassionate laws of nature) god of wind and weather called the Storm Archon. It takes the form of an everlasting stationary tornado and speaks through thunder echoed off of the hills behind it. A party of adventurers, angry at their hometown being destroyed in a storm, does what all good little JRPG protags do and goes on a quest to kill the god. They succeed in committing deicide, but as they journey home they notice the rain stops and the air becomes stagnant. They’ve doomed their world to a slow death as the atmosphere gradually dies.
Oh shit, that would be such a heavy ending. Just this slow and somber decline after what you had believed was a triumph.
A campaign where characters are in a quantum leap type scenario and don’t realize it going in. First session is normal. Generic D&D setting and basic quest like “Cultists of the Red Hand have kidnapped some people from a nearby village and King Harold has tasked your party with rooting them out from the nearby abandoned castle.”
Next session, change the setting entirely and without warning, but keep the general details the same.
“Sheriff Harold has deputized your posse to round up the outlaws of the Red Hand Gang which has kidnapped several townsfolk from the nearby settlement. They’re holed up in the old abandoned mine.”
Next session, same thing.
“Grand Judicator Harold has contracted your team of specialists to rid the sector of the Red Hand Space Pirates who are holding a group of colonists hostage at a nearby abandoned station.”
Keep changing the setting/genre every session, have the PC’s be the only ones aware of the changes. Main storyline is figuring out who/what/why is causing the reality shifts and trying to get back to their own reality while still fulfilling the original quest objectives.
Settings start out predictable (Fantasy, sci-fi, western, etc) but slowly grow more unhinged (circus-world, cells in a body Osmosis Jones style, otherwise normal world but everyone is a fish in individual tanks piloting mechs, etc.)
Just to add to when you eventually run this, one of the settings should be identical to the first setting, but now it’s the evil team working for evil Harold to kill the evil townfolk beforethe good red hand manage to rehabilitate them. Then you can make all their favorite NPCs into bastards and make the badguys really likeable.
I have a character that I don’t know how to use but I love anyway. The Demon Frog Prince:
A demon prince is cursed into the body of a frog, only to be released when he receives true love’s kiss. Which, as a demon and now also a frog, seems like a remote possibility. However, he is still immortal, so he lives his long life as a frog in a pond. Occasionally he is caught by predators, and even torn apart and eaten, but he always reforms into a frog.
One day, he is caught by an advisor to the king. The king has gotten into his head that he is likely to be imminently poisoned and has decided that the best countermeasure is to have a frog taste all of his food, believing frogs to be particularly sensitive to poisons. The advisor places him in a tank at the court along with other frogs, and pulls one out at random for every taste test.
This method works because most frogs are vulnerable to most poisons, so the royal family adopts the practice for generations, until one day the demon prince is selected to taste a poisoned dish. The frog doesn’t die, but the king is fatally poisoned. Because of the test he is assumed to have died of a natural illness, but the advisor becomes suspicious, and performs a series of tests on the frog, ultimately discovering that it is immortal. He keeps it in his secret laboratory and subjects the demon prince to much cruelty.
At some point, a child meets the demon prince and adopts it as a pet. Might be a royal heir, might be the advisors child, maybe a child of one of the palace staff who snuck into the lab. But the child loves the frog like a child loves a pet, and one day kisses it on top of the head. The child’s true love for the frog breaks the curse and frees the demon.
At this point, the story can veer off in a number of directions. I imagine the demon will have some kind of affection for the child who freed it, and maybe they become best buds and go on adventures together. Or, maybe the demon just deigns to spare the child’s life. Maybe the demon and the child team up to topple the dynasty that imprisoned the demon for so long.
Holy shit that’s amazing! I want a whole book for this!
Thanks! I love writing little character backgrounds like this, I have a ton of them. Usually they’re fodder for a hypothetical RPG campaign I might run but every once in a while I’ll try to stitch them together into a narrative on my own. Maybe one day I’ll manage a whole book but, and nobody ever tells you this, writing a whole ass book is hard 😅
I quite literally have a folder called ‘concepts’ where I toss notes with ideas I have but don’t have the time, wherewithal, etc. to develop at the time. Sometimes I come back to them. Sometimes I delete them because they were stupid. A few get promoted to WIP.
Samples:
- The Fun-stage Situation: A guy shows up, captures some people, maybe a family, and forces them to do fun things under penalty of death.
- Where’s Waldo and Carmen Sandiego travel the world committing crimes
- Lifecycle: Two ships crash into each other, they merge materially and as crew, and grow by devouring other objects but it eventually grows unmaintainable and ‘dies.’
Fun stage would be an amazing horror comedy! Do like part critique on people who take games too seriously, part critique on playing games emotionally, part straight up Saw spoof. Get a marketable enough character and I’m sure you’d have at least 6 sequel movies.
I have been thinking about a TTRPG character idea inspired by the Skyjacks world created by James D’Amato.
A religion based on an existing but absent god. Immortal Angels were the only visible, but rare, part of the Host, but they all apparently died when the god stepped away from the Throne.
They reanimate some long time later without direction from management. The hierarchy of the church has been using pieces of apparently-dead angels as relics, parting them out to churches and temples. When the angels reanimate, they are scattered in pieces and suffering immensely.
The church sees the relics twitch or make noise, and view it as miracles signaling the return of God. Because the miracles bolster the power of the church which has been so long without apparent divine favor, they don’t consider giving up their relics.
One angel reanimates where they were entombed by the old-fashioned priest of a far-flung village. Together they embark on a quest to take back the relics of the corrupted church and get the band of angels back together. With enough angels, maybe they can convince God to come back to the Throne.
I love this. I have in my “unsorted concepts” folder a BBEG who is a true devout in a religious order, who believes in the god he worships. he eventually gets elevated to his order’s head honcho office, and the rules of the cult dictate that he will receive a True Vision from God to guide him in his tenure. When he walks into the office, he sees a letter from his predecessor saying essentially “the last True Vision we received was like four or five leaders ago, they just stopped and we don’t know why, make something up and good luck”. And then he goes on his arch-villain arc to find out what happened to his god. I love the idea of having angels or other divine artifacts that reawaken, definitely going to incorporate some of this into his lore. Thanks!
I love your idea, that sounds awesome!
Oh fuck that’s such a metal and amazing idea! I’ve been toying with the idea that the “living saints” in my world are just liches but I don’t have an adequate pay off for that yet.
Do the saints put on a show that they are fighting each other, but secretly they meet under a tree or something and coordinate the next century of Kayfabe?
I was thinking they hold honorary positions in the church and act as living immortal proof of their religion’s power, but actually they’re nothing more than a well preserved zombie and they serve knowingly or unknowingly to advance the sinister power that actually runs the organization. Some are so fervent they believe lichdom is a stolen ritual and they are the real thing, some don’t remember being turned and might be disgusted to find out the truth, still others may hold this as blasphemy and seek to destroy the current church.
That sounds pretty awesome! I like the stolen lichdom especially.
I imagine it’d actually be the other way around and lichdom is the original but the church uses a combination of other spells to hide the obviously issues with the process. This process is inherently against their own god, so it actually condemns the saints.
Writing prompts saved in a text file, scribbles, drafts of images, spreadsheets to randomly generate certain information
Yeah but like, do you wanna talk about any?
I’ve learnt that if you have a cool idea that doesn’t fit in your primary world, just create a multiverse :p
I mean, that’s fair. Most of my ideas earned their own settings.
My brain does this neat trick of coming up with ideas when I cant write them down (like driving) and then forgetting them forever.
I did a lot of my world building over a walkie talkie app to the other world builders in my social circle. Maybe that might help you out?
