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| GMs, how do you get your inspiration for your campaigns? | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jan 24 2017, 11:34 PM (1,796 Views) | |
| The Black Glove | Jan 26 2017, 11:41 AM Post #11 |
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A Man Of Heart
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Sure thing. I'll gather my notes and send you a PM when I get off work. |
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| Marhatus | Jan 26 2017, 01:12 PM Post #12 |
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Avid Lurker
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For the first campaign I ran, I had a bit of an idea of the origin of the region, but that was it. I tried looking up "most beautiful places" and most of the photos I found involved mountains or cliffs, so I made those things central to the region. I also put in analogues for the Salar de Uyuni and Redwood Forest, since I think those places are super cool. I also wanted to include dual-type gyms in the region, so I probably based a few locations off of ideas I had for gyms (The iceberg in the north was an ice/ghost gym where the leader's pokemon would try to trap yours under the ice, Manlius is a town full of bodybuilders with a fire/fighting gym inside of a volcano, etc). You can find the map here. The second campaign I started was all from an idea about invasive species of pokemon and a region where battling is illegal. I took a lot of inspiration from real-life invasive species and pokemon that are similar to them. For this one, I mostly just put areas in the region that I had plot ideas for, plus a few more in spaces that seemed too empty. I also wrote up a bunch of factions with different goals (plus some with overlapping goals but different methodologies) and made them players in the region. You can find the info that the players had access to about this region here. Although we played a good ~15 sessions, the players only visited a couple of areas, so I probably could have run this game without focusing so much on the rest of the region, instead keeping the focus to the different factions at work. Right now I'm running a game in Sinnoh and it's been a lot of fun. In the beginning I was reluctant to run a game in a canon region because it seemed less exciting. I really enjoy the exploration aspect of most games, so I thought a game in a region that the players already knew would be missing something. But we've been having a lot of fun. I let my players go anywhere on the map, even off of the routes, and have some maps in reserve for when they do so. It's been a lot easier to run in a region that already has flavor for all of the towns, important people, etc. This leaves me more time to focus on other aspects of the game, like making NPC's or local-area maps. There's nothing wrong with making use of what's already out there. Edited by Marhatus, Jan 26 2017, 01:13 PM.
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| Dark Shadow | Jan 26 2017, 02:02 PM Post #13 |
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Reploid
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That's something that I can second. If you aren't sure about things, doing a canon region is nice, because the building blocks are there. You just add plot, and maybe change a few things up to make them stand out. If you can create a detailed region of your own, all the power to you, but sometimes it's nice to be able to easily look up on a map what might be there when the PCs go off the path you think they will. |
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| TimerThyme | Jan 28 2017, 06:42 AM Post #14 |
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OverGMing
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Also this : 100 Pokmeon Plot Hooks |
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| Goliathus | Jan 28 2017, 08:46 AM Post #15 |
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Pokémon Trainer
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For a vanilla setting, I personally try to think a lot of "what ifs" or find holes (in my personal opinion) in the official setting of Pokemon and come up with alternative solutions. For instance, I find the Pokemon league have way too little "show time with audience" like all gym battles are private, trainers fight with trainers alone in the wild and so on. So in my setting I have the association hosting battle tournaments every month and people to be able to watch these events a lot in a year. Closer to a a legit sport with a lot of games per year instead of just one Pokemon league finale a year for the audience. I then think about what if human in Pokeverse would have a closer education system to Earth, mainly because I am not a fan of teenager trainer and would like players to start out a bit older. I then develop a closer-to-modern-Earth elementary -> secondary -> tertiary education system with specialized school for Pokemon trainer and so on. I also think about criminal and law structure in the Pokeverse because I am not a fan of a setting that Pokemon trainer has to double duty as police force to take down a criminal syndicate. Then, I make up how social service like police and fire fighters work within my setting, how do they get their Pokemon, which school they should attend to and so on. Then I think about Pokemon relationship with human, how they act with each others, cross-species relationship, biome distribution, so forth and so on. Then, it eventually becomes a "Pokemon world in Goliathus' view" which has some significant differences from the vanilla setting but still a Pokeverse setting. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more exotic ideas, I think of how to put Pokemon in different settings. For instance, I want to GM something with Blessed and the Damned in it and I want a sci-fi and a fantasy setting. Also trying to do something with utopoan and dystopian. I then brainstorm what kind of setting I like and how to put those concept into it. What I come up in the end are two ideas. For the sci-fi setting, I borrowed the Babel setting found in the sci-fi supplment book and make it soft-science and kind of Shadowrun-ish by adding fantasy element. It will be a dystopian setting, the riches are in control and the average people suffer. In this science-reliance world, people have detached themselves completely from nature. The Gods are angry. Players will be a part of a resisting cult looking to rebel and they are tasked to summon the Legendaries into the world and erase the city of Babel from PokeEarth. For the fantasy setting, I have a dungeon-crawling game. Pokemon guardians are placed on various dangerous places and they are guarding something that the human need(Don't want to spoil too much on things I have not run yet). The players are tasked by the adventurer's guilds to go deep and retrieve those precious things. The world starts out on an utopian states, human live happily with Pokemon, weapons and warriors are getting useless in the world without any conflict. But that all changes when the guardians are killed, Gods has something to do with it and the world slowly turn into a chaotic mess. Can the players survive the new world and bring peace to it once again? Or something along that vibe. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Anyway, if you don't have an idea, just go with a vanilla gym crawl game. I have seen many players wanting to play this as this is why most people started playing Pokemon, just like people are expecting to explore dungeons and slaying dragons when playing D&D despite you can come up with all sort of interesting ideas with that setting too. All the fancy ideas are good and so but a vanilla idea always work. Edited by Goliathus, Jan 28 2017, 08:47 AM.
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| Grissom | Feb 15 2017, 05:42 PM Post #16 |
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Pokémon Trainer
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Before I start, I should preface by saying my actual experience as a GM is very limited. However, I have come up with a number of what i consider to be decent ideas, so I'm willing to throw my hat into this ring. A lot of the classic stuff like 'what if' questions have already been covered. Another thing I like to do is explore questions that the game raises but fails to answer. For example: 'What are the Tapu? Where did they come from? Are there more?' 'What, exactly, is Z power? What can it do?' 'What are Arceus's plates? What would happen if one of them broke?' Take interesting concepts from the source material and walk a bit further with them. Ask questions about them and then create answers and see if an interesting scenario could form around those answers. |
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5:23 PM Jul 10
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Pokéball created by Sarah & Delirium of the ZNR





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5:23 PM Jul 10