By: Maryanne Cullinan (Culliope)
Are you a game master feeling a bit uninspired? It’s a lot of creative energy to concoct a whole world, a plot, and all of the characters who live in that world. For GMs, that creative energy is well spent and rewarding. However, for the forever GM, or even someone like me who rotates in and out of GMing in an established group, sometimes it feels like I’ve shown most of my tricks in the many other campaigns we have done over the years.
Of course, published campaigns can be really awesome and if you are feeling like you need a new way to think about your favorite game, grabbing a high quality published adventure can really bring a new perspective to gameplay. However, searching for a published adventure, buying it, reading through it to understand it well, then deciding if it is a good fit for my party is a big ask for my busy schedule, when TTRPG world creation lives rent free in my brain. If you are like me, your TTRPG brain is percolating along on the back burner all of the time, whether you mean for it to or not. So, what’s a busy GM on the go to do to get new inspiration?
Reskinning
Reskinning is the term given to using the prebuilt stats of one creature/monster, but calling it something else in the plot of the TTRPG. If I come up with the idea for a hellish tentacle creature in the underworld, I might give it the stats of a Giant Octopus, but add fire. Or when my party went through an oversized garden, there were no prebuilt stat blocks for giant awakened pea plants, but an Awakened Tree had the same kinds of stats I was looking for. Here is a great little article about reskinning creatures, if you are interested.
What does that have to do with getting inspiration for your plot? Researchers suggest there are only seven types of stories: overcoming the monster, rags to riches, the quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, and rebirth. (Check out this article for more info). So, why not reskin a storyline you already know and love? The McElroy brothers do a great job of this in their The Adventure Zone Versus Dracula arc and some of their live shows such as TAZ vs. Moby Dick and TAZ vs. The Great Gatsby. This arc is one of my favorite ones that they have ever done. It’s funny, thoughtful and unexpected, which is pretty great after all these years of the podcast! It goes to show that the inspiration and confines of predetermined plot points and/or characters can do wonders for creativity.
Getting Mythological
I am a big fan of Greek mythology. It has just the right combination of creepy, titillating, magical and adventuresome that got my imagination going as a child, and still does. Furthermore, Greek myths are great story starters for TTRPG campaigns!
My latest campaign is based on the story of Sisyphus (spoiler alert- not a great guy!) Sisyphus hated his brother, so he seduced his niece and had two children with her to get the throne away from him. When his niece/wife found out about his treachery, she killed their two children. Then he had her trapped in the tower of the castle and married her sister. This sister was way more pro-Sisyphus than her sibling, and they had a long and happy life together, minus the ex in the tower.
Eventually Sisyphus dies, but before he does, he tells his wife not to bury him or give him any of the normal rituals a king deserves. He goes to the underworld, and cries to Persephone that his wife is disrespectful and terrible and convinces her to let him go up to give her a piece of his mind. Of course, he never comes back and lives longer. Then, when Thanatos, god of gentle death, goes to collect him himself, he tricks Thanatos into putting on the newly invented handcuffs that Hephaestus had just given our boy Than. He sticks Thanatos under his bed in a basket and no one can die. Finally, Hades and Ares figure out where Thanatos has gotten to and go collect Sisyphus. This is why Sisyphus has to roll that boulder.
In our version, the party comes into a lovely idyllic town and gets hired to dispose of a body as disrespectfully as possible by the queen. They had lots of ideas as to where the king was, and if it was his body they were disposing of, but soon after, the king returns from “vacation” and hires them to be his guards. This allows access to the ex in the tower, servants gossiping about the sudden demise of the old king, and a big confrontation when a mysterious stranger demands the king come with him. It isn’t until a bit later when they realize that suddenly no one is dying, no matter how injured or sick they are, and start to put clues together to find the stranger and return cosmic order. Reskinning this myth has allowed me to think about how to put the story beats together in a new way, and made my creative juices flow as I fill in the blanks left in the story and rework it to an adventure with my party as the main characters.
If you only have a passing acquaintance with Greek mythology, or are having a hard time dredging up high school ELA class, here are some ideas of stories that can get you started. I especially find the stories of some of the women of Greek mythology very compelling, rich and less well-known. I appreciate how many of these stories have an aspect of having to choose which side to be on – there aren’t a lot of clear heroes or villains, it’s complicated. But these characters can easily be renamed and flavored slightly differently to fit into your campaign.
Some Examples:
You might have heard of Icarus, the boy who flew too close to the sun. The bigger story is of his father Daedelus, the incredible inventor who made his wings. It includes: inventing a giant cow automaton as a sex toy for a queen (yes, really), killing his beloved nephew in jealousy for being too smart, and bring trapped in a tower while he created the labyrinth for the minotaur. It is is completely wild and ready to be made into a TTRPG campaign.
The Story of Medusa. Medusa is an isolated priestess of Athena who is (un?)willingly seduced by Poseidon and pays the price in a tete-a-tete battle between her goddess Athena and Poseidon. Athena transforms her (and her sisters) into horrific monsters with snake hair and a petrifying ray for eyes, then puts out the call for heroes to come kill her. Athena holds a grudge. Do you kill Medusa? Save her? Revenge her? Who is really the villain in this story?
At the beginning of The Iliad, Achilles refuses to allow himself or his men to participate in the siege of Troy because he feels slighted by Agamenmnon. Convincing Achilles to fight (or leave!) would make for a fun and unexpected set of social encounters. At the end of the book, Hermes helps Priam, the old king of Troy, sneak through enemy lines to throw himself on the mercy of Achilles, begging for a break in the war to collect and bury his dead son Hector. If the party plays the part of Hermes, or Priam for that matter, they can wrestle with being stealthy, beingconvincing and with the bigger concepts around the fragility of war and peace.
Check out the stories of Medea or Clytemnestra – women who were pushed to do terrible things by the men they loved. Whose side are you on?
And of course there is Polyphemus, the giant cyclops of The Odyssey, who traps Odysseus and his men in a cave, slowly eating them each day until Ulysses plots an escape. This is an encounter with stakes, drama and a built in timer as NPCs get eaten each day.
Becoming inspired by Greek mythology, or any other classic stories, is a way to expand your own thinking about what a TTRPG campaign can look like and to tap into themes and characters that have lasted centuries already. Sometimes your party will catch on, which is part of the fun. Giving a nod to a classic myth, movie or novel is a fun and easy way to connect with concepts and schema that your party already has, giving you the chance to forward or subvert the tropes and characters they know and love. Greek mythology is full of weird monsters, imperfect gods and flawed heroes and villains. Let it inspire you to take your campaign in new directions and see if your parties become epic heroes or tragic figures themselves.
About the Author
Maryanne Cullinan is a middle school teacher, PhD in Education and Academic RPG Researcher. She multi classes as cleric/bard/cat herder. She is the co-founder of Tabletop.Edu and GamingThe System(s) Collective. You can check out some of her work on http://www.culliopescauldron.com/, at http://www.tabletopedu.org/ or say hello @culliope on Discord
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