Adventure ideas...

[chuckthedog]

Hello all. Besides the pregenerated adventures on this site, where do maost people get ideas for their adventures/campaigns? ANy of you willing to share ideas that worked really well? Thanks in advance.

[RadLilim]

I'm not sure where others come up with their ideas, but I get a lot provided to me by the InNomine Mailing List. They usually require some tweaking for my uses, but the collaboration there is impressive.

[milliken]

The Line Editor has been known to find potential IN ideas in supermarket tabloid headlines and similar publications.

And then there's Moe, on the mailing list. I have no idea what plane of reality (or the Marches) he lives on....

---Walter

[ScaredofScissors]

All sorts of places. Sometimes I steal ideas from In Nomine websites (there's lots of great fanfic and logs of campaigns about), sometimes I take ideas from the adventure seeds in various Superiors books or even other RPGs, sometimes I raid the newspaper for items of a religious nature, sometimes I even make up my own...

...the MoNut Donut conspiracy...
...a whole campaign about ERD, Inc.'s (Evil Real Estate Development) attempts to destroy an (admittedly troubled) urban community and replace it with high rise condos and upscale shops...
...a mission to try and save a Soldier who's a vigilante and claims (more or less correctly) that God asked him to do it...

[Archangel Beth]

Dreams. I have weird dreams and promptly figure out ways to use them. You can actually find a number of the results in Pyramid...

[Padre]

I have the opposit eproblem - I can't stop thinking of ideas. I have In Nomine ADD.

The whole setting is just so rich with conflicting agendas and ideologies, mysteries to be investigated, moral issues to angst over, I wonder if it might run itself.

[Padre]

My fanboyish gibbering aside, here's a technique that might work.

Get a blank piece of paper, and write on it any/all of the following:

- The names of at least two randomly chosen Superiors
- At least two common concrete nouns (book, table)
- At least two common abstract nouns (fear, ignorance, hope)
- At least one phrase describing a location ("a hospital", "San Fransisco")
- and so on

Don't think about this bit too much, just pick stuff at random.

Now, draw lines between the words, and along the lines make notes saying how those two are related. Build a web.

Add the PCs as another box. Draw lines from them, and annotate based on your knowledge/experience of their characters and their history, if any.

Hopefully, you have now have an established system of tensions. Tension is the key to all drama and narrative. Examine some of the more promising linkages.

Finally, pick one or more of the concepts in the web to be the hook, twist or first cause that brings things into action. Consider how a change in, introduction or removal of this concept would affect the web.

We have a story.

[alexondria]

Movies and books are also great sources,
As for ideas that worked well, my last campaign was initialy an angelic campaign w/ a couple of people playing demonic ncps to add to the tension- the npcs had one or 2 things that they had to go by but other than that they could do as they saw fit for the characters. Then we finaly got to the concept of the campaign which was that Heaven and Hell were very much alike and very much centerred on winning the war at any cost- including human lives- the entire how big a sacrafice for the greater good is too big a sacrafice thing- basicaly over the course of the campaign the ethereals became a large player in the war, the pc's were put in a possition to loose faith in what Heaven had become and forced to ether abbandon it or find a way to make it what it should be (they made it what it should be) that was a lot of fun to run and the players seemed to have a very good time as well.

[William]

I get most of my adventure ideas while reading the news and seeing other real-life people, places, and events. Real life is far more interesting than anything I could make up. For example, my current game is inspired by the Houston pedestrian tunnel system, a quirky little feature of the city I read about some time ago and thought would make an interesting place to set a game. Tweak to fit my current setting, populate with the necessary beings, and Bob's your uncle.

In today's Houston Chronicle there is a human interest piece about La Pascualita, a bizarrely lifelike mannequin in a storefront in Chihuahua, Mexico. Local legend has it that it is the store owner's actual daughter, killed suddenly on her wedding day by accident and embalmed to put in the front of his store. At least one miracle has been attributed to it, though it has no religious significance to Catholicism. A French magician, perhaps lovelorn, is said to arrive at random intervals in the dead of night and bring it to life temporarily. I could build about three different kinds of In Nomine games around this legend. . .

[EDG]

Anywhere and everywhere. I have unabashed Nerd Attention Deficit Disorder (and chronic Repetitive Information Injury), and this puts me in contact with all kinds of new and interesting (or old and interesting) ideas - and all the while, I'm thinking about how what I'm reading or hearing could fit into an adventure or campaign. Among the adventures I've written or had in progress, I've borrowed from children's movies (Adventure Pizza: Giant Robot!), my own phobias (Creatures of the Night: Anamiae), anime (the work-in-progress pastiche Adventures of the Mini-Lilim, and The City of Lost Memories, among others), sports stadiums (What's In A Name?), and Disney theme parks (my current project).

One of the websites that I find particularly inspiring - YMMV, of course - is The Urban Legends Reference Pages. In particular, their Random feature is a fantastic boon; just skip through a few and let the stories sift through your head. Here are a few examples off the top of my head (I didn't come up with any of these ahead of time):

• Was Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschchev denied permission to visit Disneyland? - The situation between Heaven and Hell roughly corresponds to the détente between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War. You could escalate this similarity in your campaign; suppose that an Archangel is visiting Horde-owned territory on a goodwill visit, but is denied access to one of the Horde's most well-known and popular recreational areas on what looks like a trumped-up excuse. When the Archangel orders some of his entourage - the PCs, naturally - to find out what his Demon Prince host is hiding, hijinks ensue. (And who knows - maybe the Demon Prince really is hiding missile silos beneath the racquetball courts...)

• A miraculous car that gets 200 miles to the gallon is reclaimed by the factory and never seen again after its owner calls to congratulate the manufacturers about its fabulous performance. - Jean forbids allowing humans to have access to Divine technology before they develop it on their own - but an angel of Lightning, in a deep Role, has been killed, and his Jeanite supercar left to his mortal and unaware widow, who sells it before Jean's angels can get to it. The GM can decide what characteristics the car has - but whatever they are, the PCs could be the angels sent to re-acquire the car, the mortals who've bought the car and are wondering why these people seem to want it back so badly, or the demons who see a golden opportunity to get their hands on some Heavenly technology... (For added fun, you can combine this with The $50 Porsche: when the widow lists the supercar at an absurdly low price in the classified ads, suddenly even more groups are trying to get it - including some who don't even know what the car can do...)

• "There's room for one more" - A rogue Malakite of Destiny née Dreams, with the Choir attunements of both, is wandering the Marches, looking for humans who are due to die soon and stepping into their dreamscapes to warn them. Yves, the Archangel of Destiny, has sent a group of angels to bring him back to the fold; meanwhile, a group of demons, seizing on the Malakite's behavior, are trying to drive him farther into madness by tracking down the humans he warns and killing them anyway.

I hope this helps!