“Where do you get your ideas?” It’s a famously cliched question for novelists and other creatives at Q&A sessions. I’m mostly against comparing novelists and other narrative-creators to DMs and game designers, but in this instance there are parallels.
So where do they come from? You can get some ideas from your players, as long as you’re careful to do it in a way that separates the planning DM from the adjudicating DM. But for all but the most purely improvisational games – and the resolutely GM-less ones – the DM needs to generate quite a lot of ideas before the players ever come to the table.
Ideas are everywhere. Other games, other media, news stories, dreams, random combinations of unrelated words. Ideas are easy. Premises are easy. The difficult part is turning those inherently amorphous starting points into actionable tools.
Inspired by a few sources, particularly the spark tables in Electric Bastionland, I’ve settled on a process for turning a premise into actionable themes. I’m thinking primarily about developing a new campaign in a TTRPG, but a lot of the same principles apply more generally to other open-ended, game-adjacent planning and creation efforts.
That said, I do not advocate this as a one-size-fits-all system. Idea generation and cultivation is highly personal. I expect that if anyone else finds this useful, they will modify it beyond recognition, devising their own tools for developing campaigns, settings, worlds, modules, or entirely new games.
Identify the Major Themes of the Game
This sounds obvious, but many people jump directly from a mere premise to creating content. It’s easy to skip an important intermediary step – unraveling the premise to find the themes that support it. This is much more a matter of deciding what the game is not than deciding what it is.
Science fiction games are a good example; this putative genre includes everything from gritty blue collar space truckers to sword-and-planet romance, and from space opera to physics textbook in action. Throwing a lot of sci-fi at the wall without clear themes will produce an incoherent setting and an indistinct game. It’s absolutely imperative to make choices, to decide what is (and especially what is not) central to the game.
So what are these themes? They’re just universal terms that define the world. At least a dozen words, and ideally closer to 20, like the Bastionland spark table, is good to start. I find half adjectives and half nouns a good mix. For the latter, abstract nouns or gnomic noun categories (“vehicle” rather than “motorcycle”) are best.
A random word generator or AI text generator can be helpful here, but usually only as a starting point or to provide “wrong” answers that can be corrected (because changing a “wrong” answer to a “right” answer is much easier than coming up with a correct answer out of thin air).
Compound the Themes
The setting comes alive not when a single theme appears on stage, but rather when two themes intertwine, dovetail, or clash violently.
If your list is pretty short, combine each of your words into two-word paired terms, with each pair appearing once. If the list is longer, don’t feel obligated to pair every possible combination; roll dice to pair up words and see where the list takes you. Any time you can introduce a little randomness into the process is beneficial, because it unlocks your oracular subconscious.
Take some deep breaths in a quiet environment and then go through each combination of words and just think about what images those combinations bring to mind. If you meditate, you can employ that tool here. If you don’t meditate, think of the state your brain is in when you have shower thoughts. Why do shower thoughts arise in the shower? Because for most people, it’s one of the few (waking) periods of the day when the brain is released to wander freely. Embrace that feeling. You want to unscrew the lid on your head halfway, just enough to let some air flow in both directions.
Evaluating the Results
Working through this process will commonly produce two results. The first result is interesting, and the second is really fascinating. The first is a meandering walk toward the expected or genre-vanilla result. Your space opera will include laser swords. Your fantasy world will have elves. Your gritty urban world will have a corrupt underbelly.
No surprise, right? But it’s still worthwhile to have “gotten there” on your own power. Validating a genre convection proves that you need it and that it deserves to be there. Every idea needs to be checked to confirm you’re not just gliding on assumptions.
The second result, the fascinating one, is when the process spits out something really unexpected. You may feel an immediate instinct to toss out the weird or incongruous result. Don’t do this. Instead, add it to the list and let it hang out. Keep it around for a while. Savor it. Remember, if you’re creating a genre-salient game-thing for players or consumers who are savvy in that genre, the fastest way to lose them is not to create something that doesn’t engage with their expectations of the genre, but rather to create something that relies on those expectations too much. We want – we need – our game to be surprising, even – especially – to people who know the game’s premise well.
If, after some time, you realize that a theme-pair really is too strange or confusing to use as-is, don’t throw it out entirely. Instead, consider the permutations. Is there something synonymous that is worth using? Antonymous? Is the combination’s meaning just obscure? Slang? Jargon? An acronym? Magic words? A brand name?
Remember, the players will probably never actually hear many of these word pairs in a session. These are working in the background. You don’t have to be self-conscious about it or worry about explaining it to someone. This is inside-voice stuff, for your use only.
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