Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 15 - Homebrew 101 - Sources for Plot Ideas

Episode Date: April 5, 2020

This episode starts a series for GMs about Homebrewing adventures.  We cover borrowing plots from mythology, music, movies, and other media.  He talks about adding organizations with earth analogies.  Finally, he demonstrates the techniques by making an adventure based on The DaVinci Code and the movie Megamind.

This episode of the Taking 20 Podcast is brought to you by Walk and Roll Food Delivery. Need curry in a hurry? Maize with mayonnaise? Creme brulee parfait? Then let's walk and roll! Thank you for tuning in to episode 15, Homebrewing 101, Sources for Plot Ideas. This episode begins a series focusing on the homebrew, coming up with ideas that are outside of pre-published adventures and adventure paths. For more information, by the way, head over to Taking20Podcast.com. I'll have additional resources there as well. Previous episodes you can listen to, you can like, subscribe, and connect to our Patreon from there.

So, Taking20Podcast.com So, homebrewing. This is by no means comprehensive and I fully expect this series will be revisited multiple times in the future. Let's start talking about the basics of plot. You have broad strokes for a plot idea. You have a rough hewn idea of what you want your plot to be. Let's start with the bad news. Your plot probably isn't new. There have been 700 years of books, there have been 2,500 years of dramas and plays and stage acting, and 130 years of motion pictures. Your great idea for a plot isn't new. There's a lot of theory about there's only

so many different plots in the world. There's only three plots, seven plots, 36 plots, whatever the number happens to be. I'm going to have an episode in the future fully focused on the different types of plots that are out there, so I'm going to stop talking about how many plots there are, so just expect more on this in a couple of episodes. But there's only so many different kinds of plots that you can run, and if there's only a few types of plots, and if there's really not much that's new under the sun, then let's borrow or steal plots from everything that we can. Like, for example, movies. Right now, think of your favorite movie and start breaking down the plot and maybe even write it down if you have time.

Think about it in terms of really broad plot points. For example, I'm going to pick the movie Fifth Element. By the way, spoilers ahead for a movie that's more than 20 years old. So if you haven't seen it and you want to see it, where the hell have you been? By the way, if you haven't seen Fifth Element, go watch it. It's a wonderful lesson on how to do transitions perfectly. Anyway, the plot of the movie The Fifth Element is this. You have a former military expert who's left the military and he's trying to live the life of a common man. He just wants to move on with his life and he has some challenges. Unbeknownst to him, but notes to us,

the saver of the universe comes crashing into his life, quite literally, as she falls through the roof of his cab into his backseat. Through a complex series of events, he discovers he has to collect all five elements and transport them to a desert temple to save the entire universe from this never-shown big bad. There's all sorts of subplots and sub-beats to the story. Zorg's motivation to work with this faceless Mr. Shadow because he's really, really greedy. You've got Ruby Rod's cosmic radio program bits. You've got the priest's attempt to help the Fifth Element and sometimes work against the protagonist. You've

got the Mangalores who want to commit violent acts against the government in revenge for the genocide that was committed against them. How do you break that down? How do you steal these broad plot points and to make a campaign out of it? Okay, so your party has a MacGuffin, which by the way, I've used that term before. And in case you don't know, a MacGuffin is like an object or device or event that drives the plot. But the party has this MacGuffin fall into their lap, and it doesn't matter what it is. It could be a person. It could be a sword. It could be a crown. It could be a gem. It could be the essence of a dead god. But whatever it is, they have possession of it.

Others want that MacGuffin. Meanwhile, the party has to use that MacGuffin to collect more MacGuffins and take them to a remote location to stop the big bad evil guy from destroying the world, draining the swamp, eating all of the dwarves, whatever it is. Along the way, they can meet interesting characters and have side plots, and some of these characters are working with them, some of the characters are working against them, and some of them are just working parallel to their actions, but just happen to cross paths. Wait, that analogy just broke, didn't it? Parallel to their actions and happen to cross paths. If you're parallel, you never cross,

never mind. A plot based on Fifth Element with MacGuffin chasing MacGuffins, that kind of thing, sounds like it could be a fun night, fun adventure, fun adventure path even, maybe even a full campaign. There's so many other examples, way too many to name as far as movies go. Bridge on the River Kwai, you could have an entire adventure or campaign about escaping from prison and being forced to work against their will and they have to sabotage the enemy's capabilities from within. You could do Star Wars, the old farm boy turned hero story. You could do Psycho, have a scary story in a haunted house with a possibly crazy owner trying to kill them. Borrow from King Kong, where the party's trying to hunt and capture some great beast from afar,

only to learn how human-like it really is. Raiders of the Lost Ark, you're trying to find an artifact before someone else does. Pick a movie, write down the broad plot points, and steal to your heart's content. Another thing you can steal from is music. It's a little tougher, but for example, pick a song's lyrics and think about how it would possibly apply to an adventure. I mean, you can make an interesting one-shot based purely on the song Hotel California. It's a dark desert highway, and no, I'm not going to sing. It's a dark desert highway, and the party has to stop for the evening because they're running out of daylight. There's strange people and strange goings-on inside that could be real, could be phantasms or ghosts,

could be manifestations from the ethereal plane or astral plane. There's a rich, materialistic woman there with shallow friends that the party has to help. There's a wine steward there called the Captain. A bunch of strange things happen throughout the night. There's a complete absence of the normal, twisted versions of real things, parody versions of virtues, so love becomes lust, need becomes greed or obsession.

Every time the party tries to leave, they run out the front door only to re-enter the same room of the building. The main course at dinner reanimates and tries to kill them. The group needs to survive the night. If they do, at dawn, the hotel completely disappears. This sounds fun, actually. I'm probably going to go back to re-listen to this and write down this one-shot idea because I really want to run this. Okay, anyway, I have a group coming over this weekend and I hope they're not listening to this episode, because this is probably what we're going to do. It doesn't necessarily have to be the lyrics. Now, I will grant you, for example, it may be hard to make

a campaign out of the song Gucci Gang, or Can't Touch This, or Torn by Natalie Imbruglia. Just think about the song and how it makes you feel throughout the roller coaster of emotions that it might convey and write an adventure that tries to convey emotions in that same order moving to easier fare you can always grab adventure ideas out of mythology grab a book of fables myths legends pick a random page read and you can probably make a pretty decent adventure out of it i would say be careful about g Greek and Roman myths. They get a little rapey. There are common themes for mythology across civilizations. Things like rescuing someone from the afterlife, omens and portents of death, and you receive it and realize that you're going to die, and so you try to run away from your fate only to run directly into the

death that you're running from. If you don't like ancient mythology, pick urban legends. Things like Bloody Mary and Candyman and Chupacabra and Kuchisaki Onna. There's so many urban legends that are out there that you can pick from and make a pretty decent one-shot out of them, at least. Another thing you could possibly borrow from would be plays. Shakespeare is rife, and I mean rife, with plots to steal. Mistaken identity, tragic loss, unrequited love, descent into madness. There's all sorts of things you can steal from Shakespeare. There's a reason he's called the Master Bard. But he's not the only one. Tennessee Williams, John Osborne, Oscar Wilde. There's so many other playwrights that you can borrow from. So if you

love plays and you've read a lot of them, read the broad overarching plot and steal that to try to make an adventure out of. Yes, it would be hard to turn something like Death of a Salesman into an RPG campaign, but let me think about this a minute. Okay, a mediocre sheriff is coming to terms with the end of his life, and he wants the party to take him to hunt a murderer, a serial killer, and ensure he dies along the way, thereby making sure that his son gets his pension and can better his life because of it. Actually, it'd be pretty fun one shot too, because how does the party come to terms with the fact that the sheriff actually wants to die on this little mini adventure? Anyway, plays are a potential source for plot points as well. Books are just as diverse as movies. So many books are actually based on fantasy and sci-fi that you can steal from them

wholesale. The Dragonlance series. I have a son right now who's reading it and I think he's kind of in love with it. In the series, clerics are gone from the world and have been for some time. In the series, clerics are gone from the world, and have been for some time. The players, as they're reuniting, they find the first true cleric on the planet in generations and must protect her. There's a war imminent with an invading race that's never been seen before on the face of the planet. And former friends have been tempted into joining the antagonists, so there's all kinds of tie-ins to character backstory. Grab any other book you want to think of. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Da Vinci Code, The Eagle Has Landed, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Okay, I know, you're like, what? Like, kids book Very Hungry Caterpillar? Yes,

kids book Very Hungry Caterpillar. A ravenous monster is eating people, buildings, and metal and growing by the day as it keeps eating and eating and eating, and the party has to stop it or help it transform into something else. If you can borrow from books, you can borrow from short stories. The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, Night Shift by Stephen King, Kipling, Chekhov, Cheever, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway. Grab a short story you like and try to write an adventure around it. There are gaming modules, of course. You can make entire campaigns that you can stitch together using dungeons and opponents from four or five different modules. Piece together the adventures,

design an overarching plot or bad guy to connect them together, like a war or some sort of world ending event. Borrow, borrow, borrow, steal, steal, steal, and you can actually write really good plots that way. But you may be thinking, Jeremy, if I borrow from Harry Potter, won't the players figure out as soon as Hagrid shows up? Okay, maybe, yeah, if you describe Hagrid as exactly like he is in the Harry Potter books. So change Hagrid. Now he's a short kobold with an Indian accent who takes care of the livestock and magical creatures. So try to change and reskin things.

You can always use worlds that you know. Chances are you have a pretty good understanding of what Earth is like. So take Earth, but use the Pangea map for Earth. Give it a different name. Use Earth in the middle of an ice age so the entire planet is frozen and all the living inhabitants live underground near steam vents coming from the core. Earth, but thin atmosphere that allowed the water to escape so it's largely desert, so people live in caves near underground aquifers. Make it Earth, but far future high tech. Take a topographical

map of the planet and flip it, reversing the land and water so now the Marianas Trench is a massive mountain range. You can always take what you know, movie plots, planets, organizations, just re-skin them and change them to fit whatever adventure you want to run. You can always take organizations and make them part of your plot. Take organizations that you know, like religious organizations, non-religious organizations, and humanitarian organizations. The Catholic Church, Jehovah's Witness, Islamic Mosque. Take some of those ideas and just transform them, drop them into your campaign with slight changes, maybe to the different gods of that realm. Modify a humanitarian organization and make it orcatarian, centauritarian, vampiritarian, like the Red Cross that helps

vampires get blood without killing people. Or UNICEF or Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders. Doctors Without Borders and a lot of charity organizations, I have used those as fronts for bad guys way too many times, so I need to change it up a little bit. Doctors Without Borders gets access to a lot of war-torn areas, and I've had big bad evil guys use that for their own financial and personal gain. Anyway, grab an organization that you understand and steal from that. Grab a social group by age or hobby or passion or charity, AARP. Turn it into, I don't know, a soylent green so that the AARP organization, it helps senior individuals by turning them into food. Take Habitat for Humanity, for example. They build homes, but what the people don't know is underneath those homes are insectoid nests with eggs that are

slowly growing over time, and they are hoping that over the next 20 years, those eggs will all burst forth and allow the insectoid race to overrun the continent. Have ceremonial groups that exist as homages to the past. Have cults and cabals on the fringe of society. Maybe their beliefs run counter to popular culture or their fringe ways of worshiping existing gods. If your world has sports, have sporting groups with common rooting and playing interests. Maybe a group of centaurs that meets once per year to catch up with each other, have a good time, drink a little bit, and hunt humans. Have guilds with common work interests. Fletchers, miners, autoworkers, spaceship designers, whatever it is.

Take a group that you understand and drop it into your world and build a plot around that. For opponents, you can always modify the type of opponent, number, location, motivation, how they group together, their organization, their plans, etc. I think I've said before on this podcast that one of my favorite adventures was Keep on the Borderlands. Maybe you like that, but you want there to be more drow instead of lizardmen. Then change it. Make the bad guys drow. Instead of one priest on the inside that's working against the players, maybe you want there to be an entire fringe religious sect that's trying to change the way worship of a certain deity happens.

Sounds great. Make that happen. Maybe you want to take keep on the borderlands, but you want the captain of the keep to be motivated not by desire to protect others, but to make money. That would change the motivation of maybe the entire guard, and that sounds like it'd be a lot of fun as far as a change goes. So borrow the idea from the adventure, the map, the entire module. Change anything you like about it. But borrow, borrow, borrow, steal, steal, steal. You can get great ideas for plots and adventures just by using what's already there. So, okay, let's make an RPG plot from something ludicrous like the movie Megamind. What's the loose plot of Megamind? Well, you have two rivals, A and B.

B leaves or disappears or retires or gets out of the business or what have you. And A is bored and despondent because of it. So A creates a new rival, C, that he hopes to be exactly the same as B. But come to find out, C doesn't fight by the same rules that B does. A could actually lose life, business, friends, family. So the party has to help A defeat C, and maybe A grows a little bit in the process. So what's that look like? Oh, you have a group called the Stars Guild. The Stars Guild worked really hard and pushed the Nebula Guild out of business. So they won't be viewed as a monopoly. The Stars Guild sets up Planetoid Incorporated as a quote-unquote competitor, but fully intends them to work with the Stars Guild behind the scenes.

Planetoid Incorporated aligns with organized crime of dark dwarves and starts taking out Stars Guild board of directors and presidents. So the Stars Guild hires the party to uncover a crime link in the Planetoid HQ. That's a direct lift from Megamind, and you could make an entire adventure about that. So if you can steal ideas from Megamind, you can really steal from nearly anything. Da Vinci Code. Start with a murder of someone researching the location of a divine artifact. Have clues that are hidden in plain sight that both the party and some secretive organization are searching for. Maybe the secretive organization is a church of an opposed deity or the church of the same deity, but they want the artifact for themselves and want to use it for personal gain. It could be an anti-religious

group who wants to destroy it or agents of some faceless big bad evil guy who needs the artifact out of the way so they can bring about the doom of the gnomes. The party has to find the location. It's a race against time. They have to fight the leader of the opposition group to claim the artifact. It's simple and it's clean. Honestly, the hardest part would be writing the clues. If you do steal and reskin and borrow, just make sure the bad guys have a believable motivation. For example, if the adventure path has the bad guys wanting to establish a presence on the surface, Why would the drow, a race that lives in the dark and has disadvantages in the sunlight, want to establish a surface presence?

It's something you'll have to work out in the early stages of borrowing from a plot. So steal, steal, steal. I mean, make it easy on yourself. There's nothing new under the sun. So borrow plots that you know, borrow ideas from adventures that exist, movies that exist, music that exists, and just change it to be more in line with what you wanted to run. And if all else fails when it comes to plot, screw it. Just get together and have a good time. Thank you for listening. I'd like to ask you to please subscribe and rate us wherever you

found me screeching into a microphone like a drunk banshee. This has been episode 15 homebrewing 101 sources for plot ideas. I'd like once again thank our sponsor walk and roll food delivery. It's only walk and roll but I like it. I'm Jeremy Shelley and I'm hoping that your next game is your best game.