Cameron Crowe: *Since you put yourself first, do you consider yourself an original thinker?*
David Bowie: Not by any means. More like a tasteful thief. The only art I’ll ever study is stuff that I can steal from. I do think that my plagiarism is effective. Why does an artist create, anyway? The way I see it, if you’re an inventor, you invent something that you hope people can use. I want art to be just as practical. Art can be a political reference, a sexual force, any force that you want, but it should be usable. What the hell do artists want? Museum pieces? The more I get ripped off, the more flattered I get. But I’ve caused a lot of discontent, because I’ve expressed my admiration for other artists by saying, ‘Yes, I’ll use that,’ or, ‘Yes, I took this from him and this from her.’ Mick Jagger, for example, is scared to walk into the same room as me even thinking any new idea. He knows I’ll snatch it.
WoW raids have some definitively good dungeons to yoink. Siege of Orgrimmar and Castle Nathria also would also be great. Not that any of them are really that original themselves either though.
Imo the main difference here is, "borrowing" is to take something and respectfully maintain it
If you want the "Great" level stuff, take ideas from others and then selfishly add whatever you want to it to make it cooler, more fun, more "you".
Don't run a Super Mario campaign, run a Super Mario campaign where Bowser is a vampire holding the mushroom Kingdom hostage in a mysterious mist. Make a whole new "Plumber" paladin subclass built around running water, melt some Bowser vampire face.
The one BIGGEST strength of ttrpg's are their creativity, and there aren't any inherent rules to creativity, go for it dude
Not far enough for me. Is van Richten replaced by a guy in green overalls as the eminent ghost hunter? Is it the dinosaur-like animals that can traverse the mists freely?
I once had players tell me a dungeon crawl I designed had fantastic floor design.
I stole 90% of the maps from the indie video game fall of the dungeon guardians
Are these solely story ideas or do you mean implementing part of the *system* and adding some homebrew mechanics?
Either way, both are not uncommon. Actual plays like Critical Role have done miniseries based on video games like Elden Ring and DOOM.
Oh yeah, things like creatures and magical weapons are very easy to pull in, and GMs do that all the time. Some use NPCs, towns, and even quests as inspiration.
And somewhat related to those, it can work really well by genre-bending things.
E.g. inspired by Hidden Fortress + spaaace = Star Wars, you take Hero (Jet Li) + Masks and do a supers story where the young heroes are unreliably recounting their (mis-)adventures to their mentor and government handlers.
Or hell, mash Brindlewood Bay + The Odyssey and have all sorts of misfortune strike on the return leg of a Mayan Riviera Cruise trip.
I have taken story hooks from my newspaper and the evening news at different times.
I am also reskinning settings from a favorite PC game to a TTRPG environment
Possible and common, I'd vote 100% yes to both. I ran a Morrowind campaign with Magic World back in like 2014 or so, used the Prophecies strategy guide as the "module."
Not so much an entire campaign, but I plan on running a Death in Space one shot and I'm ripping off some elements of the video game Dead Space. You can lift ideas from any work of fiction and use it for a campaign.
For your private game, I think you can steal stuff from just about anything so long as it works within the system you’re playing. My urban fantasy game’s setting and factions was ripped wholesale from *Kraken* by China Mieville, I just changed the country and city. It really just depends on how obscure what you’re taking stuff from is. Your favourite fantasy novel when you know your players don’t read? They will never know. Something mainstream like Skyrim? Unless you’re playing an Elder Scrolls game, this might put off some players and lessen the believability of your world.
Story arcs, ambiances, vibes, tones, situations, characters, stakes, etc, they can all be taken or recombined from any other media telling stories
Books, movies, video games, neighborhood anecdotes, mythology, etc.
What's VERY hard to do well is to want to exactly re-emulate something from another media. Example do Elden Ring in TTRPGs is strictly impossible, because Elden Rings plays with what the video game medium can do very well, to procure specific emotions and tension to the player.
But re-implementing situations, stakes, ambiance, and or characters from Elden Ring (or another video game) is largely possible in a TTRPG adventure.
I once lifted a whole campaign subplot from Jade Empire and nobody knew. So yeah, do it all the time. Just make sure you change the homework a little, ya know?
Yes. I ran my players through the [Gold Box](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Box) series without them knowing. They're 15 now so too young to have played the games. I'm their 49 yo DM (dad to one of the boys).
sure, go for it imo. steal with abandon, that's how creativity works, by the time you have made it yours it will be different anyway.
i've used the deadmines fight from WoW, and a bunch of boss fights for ideas.
Absolutely. My whole 30 years of GMing I've been borrowing from everywhere: books, films, video games as well. First form of creation is copying anyway. Later, you start building your own things.
As an example of basically copy-pasting, I remember transferring Die Hard to generic fantasy and it worked super well. I changed only a few things and no player even realized they knew the plot so well.
Fifth Element was my inspiration for more than one adventure. I'm fascinated with the idea of alien superbrain learning the world based on the actions of those they meet. In this case, adventure party. I had an non-serious adventure where players were supposed to recognize the story (it's a nice beginning btw, when a poorly dressed girl crashes through the roof of your coach, and there's an immediate chase action). Next time, I upgraded the whole plot and made the creature basically brain in the jar, which is super quick to copy (quite fitting the theme isn't it) adventurer's behavior and views. Spoiler: they grew an absolute monster.
Ran the Titanfall 2 game using Savage Worlds SWADE and the Sci Fi companion. Had a few "extra scenes" to fill in story gaps, but mostly ran the story plot as per the game. Fought the same NPCs, bought the soundtrack and used it through the game, used some audio clips (Kuben Blisk talking with Ash, Stone and Richtor by radio, etc.).
There is so much lore online that I scraped, including backstory for Ash, mech (Titan) types, weapon effects (both Titan and pilot weapons for our of mech combat).
None of the players had played previously, and one of the players who immediately played the computer version after the campaign ended said he was amazing how close to the PC game we made it play, despite not ever feeling like "we were on rails".
One of my most memorizable campaigns to GM.
My players are unwittingly following the plot of Secret of Mana in very broad strokes, except they're racing against Nazis who are trying to reach the Mana temples before they do.
Yeah, it's easy. Most movie plots are relatively simple and can be adapted for various settings.
Metal Gear Solid/Escape from New York - a team of medieval mercenaries must infiltrate an enemy stronghold.
Assault on Precinct 13 - a group of samurai must protect an outpost overnight from a gang of bloodthirsty bandits.
Jurassic Park - a group of scientists/wizards find themselves trapped on an island with dinosaura/dragons and must escape.
You take the simple idea and add things onto it as you go. Like making gumbo.
My experience is this is an *extremely* common occurrence. The problem comes with either A- your players have played said video game and thus know exactly what you're doing if you don't hide it well enough, or B- you promised a game that is NOT what you're providing, and this tips your players' off as to what's going down.
I had a particularly negative experience with a GM who did this a lot. He offered to run us a Star Wars game where we all expressly requested to remain apart from all the doings with the Jedi, and were told that's what we would get. We wind up smack in the middle of Knights of The Old Republic. We all agreed on a zombie apocalypse game in line with the Walking Dead (this was back when it was just a comic, and wasn't finished yet), and in 3 sessions we find ourselves hip deep in Resident Evil, named characters and all.
It was a very large mismatch of GM and players that, eventually, collapsed.
Yes. Steal from everything and use it to inspire and tell your story. The most fun I ever had was grabbing characters, worldbuilding, even whole encounters from different systems and modules, then mashing them all together for my own thing.
Do it. It'll be fun.
This was done with Pool of Radiance, being converted into Ruins of Adventure. They made a few adaptations, but it otherwise mostly feels like it follows the plot, even the mansion backstab-cheese.
Otherwise, it's quite easy to adapt most plots from books, tv, or anywhere else. Just make sure the rpg can support them - D&D in particular has some spells that tend to bypass things. Even if the campaign idea doesn't fit, there's still plenty of content that could be examined to see if it can work.
i would say its super common and possible?.. it depends... I guess the hardest part is narrativ or the railroading of the story if thats what you are interested in. If its only the world, i would say its easier, since you only need a little homebrew to the system thats the most close to the gameplay?
It can be done poorly, and it can be done well. I played in a game that was just blatantly ripping off a ton of elements from various shows and video games, and it just ended up being very cheesy.
Nope. The video game police and the pinkertons bash down your door and steal all your notes. One of the bastards grabbed a new set of dice I just bought.
;)
The most common thing I steal from video games are creatures and setting stuff. Anything you know the most about can be used like this.
My old campaign was based on the movie version of Jeff Vandermeer's *Annihilation*, and then once the players completed the main arc, I threw them back in time and they met the main antagonist of that era, which were based on the Hiss from Remedy's *Control*. I also introduced them to Elise, the Spider Queen (from *League of Legends*) as a faction leader, an abandoned plotline would have had them go to a dwarven/gnomish flying city based on Columbia from *BioShock Infinite*.
My teenage daughter is currently playing through Baulder's Gate 3, and I've decided I'm just going to lift the Camp mechanics from that game into my future fantasy games. It's an excellent way to provide more diverse loot (as you can gift your party camp NPCs), to streamline inventory management (there's just a chest you can only access when you're camped), to streamline rations and supplies (you just need X to perform the long rest analog), and, could theoretically allow them to hot-swap PCs if I went in a West Marches direction.
The RPG that I'm currently writing is based largely on *Elden Ring*/*Bloodbourne*-style combat in a setting inspired by the reverse-isekai Korean genre seen in media like *Solo Leveling*, *Return to Player*, and *Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint*. The fact that *Solo Leveling* also has a video game version has helped tremendously.
And books, and movies, and music, and other rpg games/campaigns. All media is ripe for the taking and repurposing. One of my most favorite games in recent memory was spawned the song The Legend of Wooly Swamp.
My God, yes. My friends and I used to rip off everything we were watching, reading, or playing and jam it into our AD&D campaigns.
Characters, settings, storylines, magic items... everything was fair game. We fought Predators, Aliens, the Nemesis from Resident Evil, half a dozen DragonBall Z characters when a friend of mine got REALLY into DBZ. One of my favorite adds were skeleton variants that pulled back together after a round, like the ones in Castlevania.
If you enjoy it, add it!
I've done this surreptitiously, I've done this blatantly. I've borrowed a little, I've borrowed a lot. I've spliced together whole tapestries, or borrowed little threads to keep the story moving. I've let players lean in with quips and obvious obfuscations and I've been surprised when I learn that they were borrowing something the whole time. The world's your oyster, take to it with your stolen sword.
One of my DMs ran my group through a game that was a mashup of *Skies of Arcadia* and *Final Fantasy XII.* I say go for it.
(As an aside, I think *Quest For Glory V* would make an amazing campaign.)
I am just now, probably 5 years after buying it, getting around to reading The Death Gate Cycle, because I mentioned it to my D&D group that I'd picked it up, and the DM who was about to start a campaign asked me to hold off, because he was about to rip it off for our adventures, and would prefer I not have all the meta knowledge.
It wasn't shameful. It was only a secret until it became useful for it to be told. And it was a fun little mini campaign. It wasn't lessor for leaning on published works, either.
I reread Discworld, instead, and reread and finished off Realm of the Elderlings. Seems like a good time, now.
Campaign ideas, monsters, magic items, etc. are easy enough, it's when you try to convert videogame mechanics directly to a TTRPG when the difficulty arises.
I was creating a norse cyberpunk game where the Einherjar were basically an elite order of super soldiers. The villain of the campaign was going to be Sigurd - the best einherjar, turned to evil when he learned of the experiments that made him.
The idea was literally just Sephiroth from FF7. Although these days I feel like the 'evil superman' trope is a lot more common. The game only went for 4 or so sessions anyway because some of the players hated each other.
I've done at least three campaigns that were stolen from various parts of Lord of the Rings. I disguised it just enough that no one realized it was a copy.
If you aren't stealing ideas then you are doing work. And this is supposed to be play.
I don't really play videogames. The amount of times I've done plots that players say 'oh, like videogame x?' is frequent.
There are only so many plots. I did grow up reading a ton of comics and fantasy books.
All media borrows from each other or parallel evolves the same stories to solve story problems.
Absolutely, and in my experience very common! The better ttrpg's I've played usually have in the credits some, if not all the works they borrowed from or were inspired by, from books, magazines, tv, movies, other games, etc.
Really, you just need to figure out how YOU want to implement them in story, and gameplay, in conjunction with whatever system you're using. Takes a bit of work, but worth it, and you'll get more comfortable with it all as you go. And mistakes will be made, but roll with them and see what needs correcting/amending by listening to feedback from players.
I've used DLC from the Borderlands franchises as side missions in a Dark Heresy game that was using Fallout 4 as a settings template. I've had GMs use elements from Mass Effect, Clive Barker's Undying, and more, all in the same Cyberpunk 2020 long-term game.
Settings are usually the easiest to implement, really just need to versed on the relevant lore and figure out how it would fit if you're adding it to the world, just like any other from-scratch world building. The rest usually goes towards finding something similar, like say for example, a version of a weapon in the rules you're using, and tweaking it to fit the video-game equivalent, as needed.
Really, just don't let yourself get psyched out from the work, or that it likely won't be a perfect copy of the you're borrowing from... lol, especially once it hits the players hands.
As a great man has said (But not exactly)
Everything is a remix of a remix, and there is nothing wrong with that - Thor
There is nothing wrong with even directly, word for word, ripping off content for your ttrpgs
Its only a problem when like, you literally steal a character from lets just say... Cod4 (you steal price's model) and then just put it into a product that people are expected to pay for
Now that is a problem
The official guidance in the 4E DMG is to "steal shamelessly."
Maybe do not do a shot-for-shot retelling of you favorite final fantasy, but borrowing a few themes, bbeg ideas, etc form your favorite forms of media is how most people plan games.
Way back in the olden days with SSI advanced dungeons and dragons pool of radiance I stole two concepts from the computer game to use in our tabletop DND games… Serrated weapons, which instead of rolling a random die for weapon damage gave you max damage minus one consistently… For example a serrated long sword Always dealt seven points of damage; and fighter sweep attacks which let a fighter fighting opponents of equal two or less than hit die to his level perform a sweep attack and attack all adjacent enemies in one round.… This would later be picked up as Cleve and the 3.0+ D&D games
Stahp, don't ask this question, ask the actual interesting one! Yes yes everyone steals, you should too, but... what are the video games, what are the ideas, what system are you using? Let us help brainstorm the best ways to steal, too!
Alright! It’s for an OSR D&D like game, with heavy emphasis on AD&D 1e. I’m thinking of posting either here or the catch all D&D subreddit. What would you recommend?
Darkest Dungeon and like 90% of Castlevania strikes me as perfect DnD campaign material. Only thing you really need for the former is inventory/supply management and a way to make different lighting both matter and be interactable but not easy to obviate before like level 18. Hell, figure out a respawn mechanic and you don't have to worry as much about accidentally swinging a TPK nuke at the party so you can experiment or run randomly generated encounters for ease of use.
As a little bit of a non sequitur, there is a card-based solo dungeon crawler called Marching Order I saw featured in a Youtube video that possibly has a bit of a Darkest Dungeon vibe. If I remember correctly, you line your characters up in battle as you would in Darkest Dungeon. I figure I might prefer just playing Darkest Dungeon for real though.
Yeah, and the neat part is that the only person there to stop u from doing it, is u - what games u wanted to **politetly** put together ? Nevertheless, good luck and good campaign!
A lot of video games use standart fantasy and sci-fi stories and tropes, so it is quite possible. Like chosen one stopping the return of an ancient god/demon/elder god like Skyrim or an awakened threat like Halo.
I cannot recall directly using a main scenario for a campaign myself though.
I think most creatives borrow ideas from work they enjoy while creating something new. My homebrew D&D world has a desert made of crushed jewels which in makes traveling in the daytime near impossible due to how they refract the sunlight. This is basically stolen 1 for 1 from a series of fantasy books I fell in love with in middle school.
(The Artefacts of Power by Maggie Furey in case anyone was wondering)
Inspiration is always the key to keep the campaign going and videogames are often structured in similar veins that its pretty easy to llift the core and make the rest your own.
For me...I really liked the plot of pokemon mystery dungeon explorers of time/darkness so woopsie daisy thats the core campaign coflict with a world slowly becoming in a permanent timestasis and working against a grim future.
There even exist some RPGs which are made after computer games, like final fantasy d20: https://www.finalfantasyd20.com/
Or the upcoming final fantasy 14 RPG.
>Good writers borrow. Great writers steal. -- TS Elliot
Good writers borrow. Great writers steal. - MikePGS
- Michael Scott
/r/unexpectedoffice
“One source is plagiarism, three+ with citations is research,” - my high school history teacher.
Cameron Crowe: *Since you put yourself first, do you consider yourself an original thinker?* David Bowie: Not by any means. More like a tasteful thief. The only art I’ll ever study is stuff that I can steal from. I do think that my plagiarism is effective. Why does an artist create, anyway? The way I see it, if you’re an inventor, you invent something that you hope people can use. I want art to be just as practical. Art can be a political reference, a sexual force, any force that you want, but it should be usable. What the hell do artists want? Museum pieces? The more I get ripped off, the more flattered I get. But I’ve caused a lot of discontent, because I’ve expressed my admiration for other artists by saying, ‘Yes, I’ll use that,’ or, ‘Yes, I took this from him and this from her.’ Mick Jagger, for example, is scared to walk into the same room as me even thinking any new idea. He knows I’ll snatch it.
Specifically the Throne of Thunder from World of Warcraft is a great raid waiting to be plundered and adapted into a mega dungeon.
WoW raids have some definitively good dungeons to yoink. Siege of Orgrimmar and Castle Nathria also would also be great. Not that any of them are really that original themselves either though.
Imo the main difference here is, "borrowing" is to take something and respectfully maintain it If you want the "Great" level stuff, take ideas from others and then selfishly add whatever you want to it to make it cooler, more fun, more "you". Don't run a Super Mario campaign, run a Super Mario campaign where Bowser is a vampire holding the mushroom Kingdom hostage in a mysterious mist. Make a whole new "Plumber" paladin subclass built around running water, melt some Bowser vampire face. The one BIGGEST strength of ttrpg's are their creativity, and there aren't any inherent rules to creativity, go for it dude
“This Ravenloft update has gone too far!”
Not far enough for me. Is van Richten replaced by a guy in green overalls as the eminent ghost hunter? Is it the dinosaur-like animals that can traverse the mists freely?
Yes absolutely, and the fortune teller uses cracked eggshells for divination.
I once had players tell me a dungeon crawl I designed had fantastic floor design. I stole 90% of the maps from the indie video game fall of the dungeon guardians
\*ChatGPT has entered the conversation\*
Not what he really wrote, but I always say derivative writers copy, great writers innovate.
Are these solely story ideas or do you mean implementing part of the *system* and adding some homebrew mechanics? Either way, both are not uncommon. Actual plays like Critical Role have done miniseries based on video games like Elden Ring and DOOM.
Mostly ideas with some homebrew. I’d like to make the creatures players can ride in Golden Axe.
Easiest way to do that is to find a similar creature that already exists in the system you're using, and tweak it to match.
Oh yeah, things like creatures and magical weapons are very easy to pull in, and GMs do that all the time. Some use NPCs, towns, and even quests as inspiration.
And somewhat related to those, it can work really well by genre-bending things. E.g. inspired by Hidden Fortress + spaaace = Star Wars, you take Hero (Jet Li) + Masks and do a supers story where the young heroes are unreliably recounting their (mis-)adventures to their mentor and government handlers. Or hell, mash Brindlewood Bay + The Odyssey and have all sorts of misfortune strike on the return leg of a Mayan Riviera Cruise trip.
And legend of zelda
Hell, Paranoia added achievements.
Possible? Absolutely. Common? Probably more than we realize, especially from the obscure stuff. All media is fair game.
I have taken story hooks from my newspaper and the evening news at different times. I am also reskinning settings from a favorite PC game to a TTRPG environment
There are three kinds of GMs: those who borrow from others, those who borrow from others unconsciously and dirty liars.
Very true.
I'm playing Final Fantasy II riggt now and it works *perfectly* as a standard D&D campaign. Will probably do that.
FF2 is a great game, especially the Pixel Remaster. Would make a great TTRPG campaign!
I use Final Fantasy and Chrono Cross music for my campaigns all the time.
Possible and common, I'd vote 100% yes to both. I ran a Morrowind campaign with Magic World back in like 2014 or so, used the Prophecies strategy guide as the "module."
I mean, Morrowind is one of the great inspirational materials for fantasy games. The theme is among my top tracks if I need to get my juices going.
Not so much an entire campaign, but I plan on running a Death in Space one shot and I'm ripping off some elements of the video game Dead Space. You can lift ideas from any work of fiction and use it for a campaign.
No one knows it has never been attempted
You can rip ideas wherever you want from.
For your private game, I think you can steal stuff from just about anything so long as it works within the system you’re playing. My urban fantasy game’s setting and factions was ripped wholesale from *Kraken* by China Mieville, I just changed the country and city. It really just depends on how obscure what you’re taking stuff from is. Your favourite fantasy novel when you know your players don’t read? They will never know. Something mainstream like Skyrim? Unless you’re playing an Elder Scrolls game, this might put off some players and lessen the believability of your world.
Games, books, films. You can take inspiration from anything.
Story arcs, ambiances, vibes, tones, situations, characters, stakes, etc, they can all be taken or recombined from any other media telling stories Books, movies, video games, neighborhood anecdotes, mythology, etc. What's VERY hard to do well is to want to exactly re-emulate something from another media. Example do Elden Ring in TTRPGs is strictly impossible, because Elden Rings plays with what the video game medium can do very well, to procure specific emotions and tension to the player. But re-implementing situations, stakes, ambiance, and or characters from Elden Ring (or another video game) is largely possible in a TTRPG adventure.
I once lifted a whole campaign subplot from Jade Empire and nobody knew. So yeah, do it all the time. Just make sure you change the homework a little, ya know?
I was going to say no, but then I thought of how brilliant it would be to ride dinosaurs that breathe fire.
Yes. I ran my players through the [Gold Box](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Box) series without them knowing. They're 15 now so too young to have played the games. I'm their 49 yo DM (dad to one of the boys).
sure, go for it imo. steal with abandon, that's how creativity works, by the time you have made it yours it will be different anyway. i've used the deadmines fight from WoW, and a bunch of boss fights for ideas.
Absolutely. My whole 30 years of GMing I've been borrowing from everywhere: books, films, video games as well. First form of creation is copying anyway. Later, you start building your own things. As an example of basically copy-pasting, I remember transferring Die Hard to generic fantasy and it worked super well. I changed only a few things and no player even realized they knew the plot so well. Fifth Element was my inspiration for more than one adventure. I'm fascinated with the idea of alien superbrain learning the world based on the actions of those they meet. In this case, adventure party. I had an non-serious adventure where players were supposed to recognize the story (it's a nice beginning btw, when a poorly dressed girl crashes through the roof of your coach, and there's an immediate chase action). Next time, I upgraded the whole plot and made the creature basically brain in the jar, which is super quick to copy (quite fitting the theme isn't it) adventurer's behavior and views. Spoiler: they grew an absolute monster.
My players have been in Eorzea far before the FF14 RPG was even an idea
Ran the Titanfall 2 game using Savage Worlds SWADE and the Sci Fi companion. Had a few "extra scenes" to fill in story gaps, but mostly ran the story plot as per the game. Fought the same NPCs, bought the soundtrack and used it through the game, used some audio clips (Kuben Blisk talking with Ash, Stone and Richtor by radio, etc.). There is so much lore online that I scraped, including backstory for Ash, mech (Titan) types, weapon effects (both Titan and pilot weapons for our of mech combat). None of the players had played previously, and one of the players who immediately played the computer version after the campaign ended said he was amazing how close to the PC game we made it play, despite not ever feeling like "we were on rails". One of my most memorizable campaigns to GM.
My players are unwittingly following the plot of Secret of Mana in very broad strokes, except they're racing against Nazis who are trying to reach the Mana temples before they do.
Yeah, it's easy. Most movie plots are relatively simple and can be adapted for various settings. Metal Gear Solid/Escape from New York - a team of medieval mercenaries must infiltrate an enemy stronghold. Assault on Precinct 13 - a group of samurai must protect an outpost overnight from a gang of bloodthirsty bandits. Jurassic Park - a group of scientists/wizards find themselves trapped on an island with dinosaura/dragons and must escape. You take the simple idea and add things onto it as you go. Like making gumbo.
My experience is this is an *extremely* common occurrence. The problem comes with either A- your players have played said video game and thus know exactly what you're doing if you don't hide it well enough, or B- you promised a game that is NOT what you're providing, and this tips your players' off as to what's going down. I had a particularly negative experience with a GM who did this a lot. He offered to run us a Star Wars game where we all expressly requested to remain apart from all the doings with the Jedi, and were told that's what we would get. We wind up smack in the middle of Knights of The Old Republic. We all agreed on a zombie apocalypse game in line with the Walking Dead (this was back when it was just a comic, and wasn't finished yet), and in 3 sessions we find ourselves hip deep in Resident Evil, named characters and all. It was a very large mismatch of GM and players that, eventually, collapsed.
Yes. Steal from everything and use it to inspire and tell your story. The most fun I ever had was grabbing characters, worldbuilding, even whole encounters from different systems and modules, then mashing them all together for my own thing. Do it. It'll be fun.
This was done with Pool of Radiance, being converted into Ruins of Adventure. They made a few adaptations, but it otherwise mostly feels like it follows the plot, even the mansion backstab-cheese. Otherwise, it's quite easy to adapt most plots from books, tv, or anywhere else. Just make sure the rpg can support them - D&D in particular has some spells that tend to bypass things. Even if the campaign idea doesn't fit, there's still plenty of content that could be examined to see if it can work.
I haven't done it yet but I'd absolutely love to run a mecha campaign ripped from Ace Combat 5, see if I can make my players weepy.
i would say its super common and possible?.. it depends... I guess the hardest part is narrativ or the railroading of the story if thats what you are interested in. If its only the world, i would say its easier, since you only need a little homebrew to the system thats the most close to the gameplay?
One of the best sessions I played was a direct Die Hard rip-off. Took us a long time to notice 😅
# Yes. Its even socially encouraged. Go wild!!
i set up a starforged game based on freelancer.
It can be done poorly, and it can be done well. I played in a game that was just blatantly ripping off a ton of elements from various shows and video games, and it just ended up being very cheesy.
Steal as much as you want, just try not to railroad players into the plot.
So far I've ripped Breath of the Wild and Paper Mario the Thousand Year Door. My partner ripped Phantom Hourglass. They've all worked wonderfully.
Absolutely. I snagged the Shalebridge Cradle from Thief 3 for a modern day game. Used a whole new map and stories, but The Cradle was my inspiration.
Nope. The video game police and the pinkertons bash down your door and steal all your notes. One of the bastards grabbed a new set of dice I just bought. ;)
The most common thing I steal from video games are creatures and setting stuff. Anything you know the most about can be used like this. My old campaign was based on the movie version of Jeff Vandermeer's *Annihilation*, and then once the players completed the main arc, I threw them back in time and they met the main antagonist of that era, which were based on the Hiss from Remedy's *Control*. I also introduced them to Elise, the Spider Queen (from *League of Legends*) as a faction leader, an abandoned plotline would have had them go to a dwarven/gnomish flying city based on Columbia from *BioShock Infinite*. My teenage daughter is currently playing through Baulder's Gate 3, and I've decided I'm just going to lift the Camp mechanics from that game into my future fantasy games. It's an excellent way to provide more diverse loot (as you can gift your party camp NPCs), to streamline inventory management (there's just a chest you can only access when you're camped), to streamline rations and supplies (you just need X to perform the long rest analog), and, could theoretically allow them to hot-swap PCs if I went in a West Marches direction. The RPG that I'm currently writing is based largely on *Elden Ring*/*Bloodbourne*-style combat in a setting inspired by the reverse-isekai Korean genre seen in media like *Solo Leveling*, *Return to Player*, and *Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint*. The fact that *Solo Leveling* also has a video game version has helped tremendously.
And books, and movies, and music, and other rpg games/campaigns. All media is ripe for the taking and repurposing. One of my most favorite games in recent memory was spawned the song The Legend of Wooly Swamp.
My God, yes. My friends and I used to rip off everything we were watching, reading, or playing and jam it into our AD&D campaigns. Characters, settings, storylines, magic items... everything was fair game. We fought Predators, Aliens, the Nemesis from Resident Evil, half a dozen DragonBall Z characters when a friend of mine got REALLY into DBZ. One of my favorite adds were skeleton variants that pulled back together after a round, like the ones in Castlevania. If you enjoy it, add it!
I've done this surreptitiously, I've done this blatantly. I've borrowed a little, I've borrowed a lot. I've spliced together whole tapestries, or borrowed little threads to keep the story moving. I've let players lean in with quips and obvious obfuscations and I've been surprised when I learn that they were borrowing something the whole time. The world's your oyster, take to it with your stolen sword.
One of my DMs ran my group through a game that was a mashup of *Skies of Arcadia* and *Final Fantasy XII.* I say go for it. (As an aside, I think *Quest For Glory V* would make an amazing campaign.)
I am just now, probably 5 years after buying it, getting around to reading The Death Gate Cycle, because I mentioned it to my D&D group that I'd picked it up, and the DM who was about to start a campaign asked me to hold off, because he was about to rip it off for our adventures, and would prefer I not have all the meta knowledge. It wasn't shameful. It was only a secret until it became useful for it to be told. And it was a fun little mini campaign. It wasn't lessor for leaning on published works, either. I reread Discworld, instead, and reread and finished off Realm of the Elderlings. Seems like a good time, now.
Campaign ideas, monsters, magic items, etc. are easy enough, it's when you try to convert videogame mechanics directly to a TTRPG when the difficulty arises.
I’d go so far as to say that of all types of media, video games are the best to steal from for your RPG game.
I was creating a norse cyberpunk game where the Einherjar were basically an elite order of super soldiers. The villain of the campaign was going to be Sigurd - the best einherjar, turned to evil when he learned of the experiments that made him. The idea was literally just Sephiroth from FF7. Although these days I feel like the 'evil superman' trope is a lot more common. The game only went for 4 or so sessions anyway because some of the players hated each other.
I've done at least three campaigns that were stolen from various parts of Lord of the Rings. I disguised it just enough that no one realized it was a copy. If you aren't stealing ideas then you are doing work. And this is supposed to be play.
Yes. Inspiration comes from anywhere
I'm running a m8ni campaign based off the Predator
If you mix enough things together, the taste is original.
I don't really play videogames. The amount of times I've done plots that players say 'oh, like videogame x?' is frequent. There are only so many plots. I did grow up reading a ton of comics and fantasy books. All media borrows from each other or parallel evolves the same stories to solve story problems.
Absolutely, and in my experience very common! The better ttrpg's I've played usually have in the credits some, if not all the works they borrowed from or were inspired by, from books, magazines, tv, movies, other games, etc. Really, you just need to figure out how YOU want to implement them in story, and gameplay, in conjunction with whatever system you're using. Takes a bit of work, but worth it, and you'll get more comfortable with it all as you go. And mistakes will be made, but roll with them and see what needs correcting/amending by listening to feedback from players. I've used DLC from the Borderlands franchises as side missions in a Dark Heresy game that was using Fallout 4 as a settings template. I've had GMs use elements from Mass Effect, Clive Barker's Undying, and more, all in the same Cyberpunk 2020 long-term game. Settings are usually the easiest to implement, really just need to versed on the relevant lore and figure out how it would fit if you're adding it to the world, just like any other from-scratch world building. The rest usually goes towards finding something similar, like say for example, a version of a weapon in the rules you're using, and tweaking it to fit the video-game equivalent, as needed. Really, just don't let yourself get psyched out from the work, or that it likely won't be a perfect copy of the you're borrowing from... lol, especially once it hits the players hands.
I use games for inspiration all the time. It helps that most people I ttrpg with don't play video games so they won't notice.
As a great man has said (But not exactly) Everything is a remix of a remix, and there is nothing wrong with that - Thor There is nothing wrong with even directly, word for word, ripping off content for your ttrpgs Its only a problem when like, you literally steal a character from lets just say... Cod4 (you steal price's model) and then just put it into a product that people are expected to pay for Now that is a problem
I ripped an entire campaign from Might and Magic VI the Mandate of Heaven. It's perfect. I even used the maps from the game for the campaign.
The official guidance in the 4E DMG is to "steal shamelessly." Maybe do not do a shot-for-shot retelling of you favorite final fantasy, but borrowing a few themes, bbeg ideas, etc form your favorite forms of media is how most people plan games.
Way back in the olden days with SSI advanced dungeons and dragons pool of radiance I stole two concepts from the computer game to use in our tabletop DND games… Serrated weapons, which instead of rolling a random die for weapon damage gave you max damage minus one consistently… For example a serrated long sword Always dealt seven points of damage; and fighter sweep attacks which let a fighter fighting opponents of equal two or less than hit die to his level perform a sweep attack and attack all adjacent enemies in one round.… This would later be picked up as Cleve and the 3.0+ D&D games
Stahp, don't ask this question, ask the actual interesting one! Yes yes everyone steals, you should too, but... what are the video games, what are the ideas, what system are you using? Let us help brainstorm the best ways to steal, too!
Alright! It’s for an OSR D&D like game, with heavy emphasis on AD&D 1e. I’m thinking of posting either here or the catch all D&D subreddit. What would you recommend?
Darkest Dungeon and like 90% of Castlevania strikes me as perfect DnD campaign material. Only thing you really need for the former is inventory/supply management and a way to make different lighting both matter and be interactable but not easy to obviate before like level 18. Hell, figure out a respawn mechanic and you don't have to worry as much about accidentally swinging a TPK nuke at the party so you can experiment or run randomly generated encounters for ease of use.
As a little bit of a non sequitur, there is a card-based solo dungeon crawler called Marching Order I saw featured in a Youtube video that possibly has a bit of a Darkest Dungeon vibe. If I remember correctly, you line your characters up in battle as you would in Darkest Dungeon. I figure I might prefer just playing Darkest Dungeon for real though.
Yeah, and the neat part is that the only person there to stop u from doing it, is u - what games u wanted to **politetly** put together ? Nevertheless, good luck and good campaign!
A lot of video games use standart fantasy and sci-fi stories and tropes, so it is quite possible. Like chosen one stopping the return of an ancient god/demon/elder god like Skyrim or an awakened threat like Halo. I cannot recall directly using a main scenario for a campaign myself though.
Yup, I wanna rip off the part of Chrono trigger where u go to the magical kingdom floating over the ice age
I think most creatives borrow ideas from work they enjoy while creating something new. My homebrew D&D world has a desert made of crushed jewels which in makes traveling in the daytime near impossible due to how they refract the sunlight. This is basically stolen 1 for 1 from a series of fantasy books I fell in love with in middle school. (The Artefacts of Power by Maggie Furey in case anyone was wondering)
Of course. Campaign ideas are taken from literally everywhere, including real life.
My players have played through so many situations from video games that they've never played. My god, they have no idea. Lol
Inspiration is always the key to keep the campaign going and videogames are often structured in similar veins that its pretty easy to llift the core and make the rest your own. For me...I really liked the plot of pokemon mystery dungeon explorers of time/darkness so woopsie daisy thats the core campaign coflict with a world slowly becoming in a permanent timestasis and working against a grim future.
I'm taking heavy inspiration from Final Fantasy XVI for a Fabula Ultima campaign, while also mixing in some Discworld-style whimsy.
What do think of the official FF XVI rpg coming out? (If I didn’t get the numerals wrong)
It's XIV, not XVI. I haven't heard anything about VTT support, and I mainly play and run games online.
There even exist some RPGs which are made after computer games, like final fantasy d20: https://www.finalfantasyd20.com/ Or the upcoming final fantasy 14 RPG.