Inspiration for Dungeon Masters

Another piece that leans heavily on visual elements, here is an embed of the video, with the transcript below:

Part of the reason I made this channel is to inspire people to have some great D&D games. And while I've got a list of ideas for videos, I was feeling like I really wanted to talk about inspiration itself. Not the in-game mechanic, but that real world spark that fires off and gets your imaginative gears spinning. So I'm going to do something a little different in this one, I'm going to try to help you get your creative juices flowing.

If you are in the right mindset, inspiration for your Dungeons and Dragons game is everywhere. In books, movies, shows, comics, podcasts, all sorts of media, sure. I love drawing on myths and legends, but there is plenty here in the real world to draw on.

If you are having difficulty making wilderness encounters and overland travel interesting, go take a walk outside. I think a lot of the common complaints about this side of the game come from our imaginations being stifled by too much time indoors. One, the act of going out for a walk by itself is going to get you into a more creative head-space. You'd be amazed what a little gentle exercise and some fresh air can do for your mindset. Even if you are in the middle of a city, find a park, go down to the water, even just walk around a neighborhood that has some trees. Get in touch with the natural world, spend a day hiking, or a night camping, and I bet you'll come back with some great ideas for your next adventure. If that's not an option, for whatever reason, go for a drive, or watch a nature documentary, there is some great stuff out there. Or you could grab the encounter tables I'm making. I'll put a link to the tier 1 forest below, big thanks to everyone who's already checked it out, I appreciate it. There's more on the way.

Maybe you can tell I love the great outdoors in real life and in my games, but Dungeons have always been at the heart of D&D. So let's talk about some places that could easily be the inspiration for your next delve, or even a whole campaign.

This is Kings Park Psychiatric center. I grew up about ten miles from here, but it was shut down when I was a kid. First built at the end of the 1800s, at it's peak in the 1950s there were over 10,000 people here in over 100 buildings, plus the staff. It was practically it's own town. Giant abandoned insane asylum is hard to top for spooky locations. Growing up there were plenty of ghost stories, plus the usual tales of devil worshipers and nazis doing weird shit inside. But we drove over there one night in high school.

Now I'd love to lie to you and tell you otherwise, say we had a great adventure here, but once we got there I could not bring myself to go inside. I was the first to chicken out, but I think my friends were secretly relieved, because no one else braved the abandoned mental hospital that night either. I'm not sure I have ever been so creeped out in my life. There was just this overwhelming sense of dread and human suffering that suffused everything. Kings Park was around in the era of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, and they performed shock therapy and lobotomies here when that was considered cutting edge science. Now we look back in horror, but back then, and it was really not so long ago, that was society doing its best to take care of people.

Remember that when you go to design a dungeon, some of these places were built by institutions trying their best to do good. The inventor of the lobotomy won a Nobel Peace Prize, which is named after the guy who invented dynamite. Alfred Noble thought his invention might end war because it would make it too horrific. It didn't work out that way though. Why is the Big Bad Evil Guy of your campaign building a doomsday device? To save the world of course.

Old hospitals, sanitariums, prisons, religious institutions, even malls and vacation destinations, leave it alone for long enough and it becomes a great potential adventure site. But maybe you don't have an abandoned psychiatric hospital up the block, or you do but don't feel like doing some light trespassing, there are plenty of places like abandoned porn on Reddit to find images of urban decay. You can go down the rabbit hole without ever leaving the comforts of your how. That's what I did with the catacombs under Paris recently.

The next time you think your dungeon idea is a little too much, consider this macabre tableau beneath the romantic city of lights. This is what a necromancer's lair must look like, at least if they were really successful. Or the palace of a conquering Hobgoblin King.

The story goes a few hundred years ago Parisian cemeteries were overflowing to the point that it became a public health concern. The last straw was supposedly when a wall in a restaurant's basement collapsed and corpses fell out into what I presume was a storeroom filled with wine and baguettes. So the powers that be decided enough was enough, took a look around, and realized there were these old abandoned mines under the city from centuries ago. Cemeteries were exhumed at night, to not upset the populace, and the remains were reintered in the mines that spread like a labyrinth beneath the streets and buildings. The bones of nearly six million people are down there, and now it's a tourist destination. That's always a good recipe for making an adventure location, building layers of history. First it was this, then later these guys came in and used it this way, and now this is happening.

Imagine your party is sitting in the tavern, because we all know good adventures start in the tavern. The proprietor comes up to the adventurers to enlist their help because a hole just opened in the basement revealing an archway that says “Halt! This is the empire of the dead.”

Now the Parisians of the 1700s got the idea for the catacombs from the Romans, who'd done it over a thousand years earlier. Need a good reason to send adventurers down into the catacombs? Check out these bejeweled skeletons the Romans have down there. That's another feature of history to keep in mind for your world building: there's always more of it. It seems like everyone simultaneously sees themselves as the most advanced people to ever come along, while pining after some lost golden age. It's there in Tolkein, with the magic of the elves fading after millennia and the dwarven kingdoms lost and buried. But it's in real life too, with much of Europe looking back at Rome, and Rome looking back at Greece, and everybody looking back at Egypt.

There's this fact that always gives me this sense of historical vertigo: Cleopatra, who we think of as an ancient Egyptian, is actually closer in time to us today, than she was to the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza. She was around 2,000 years ago, the pyramid went up about 2,500 years before that. Crazy.

The pyramid is truly a marvel. It was the tallest human-made thing on the planet until the Eiffel Tower went up a little over 100 years ago. And we're just looking at the eroded bones of the pyramid, in it's prime this thing was clad in smooth white with a (probably not, but maybe) golden capstone. Some find it so hard to justify that there's a ton of people who believe aliens came down to build it, because no way did people do that. There's still some mystery in how they accomplished such precision. People have been wondering how they built it, and what traps and treasures might lay hidden inside, for over four thousand years.

What are the wonders of you D&D world? You don't need to start with seven, one will do it. Some place that has been plundered and repurposed time and again over centuries and millennia, and still may hold undiscovered secrets. Things don't have to be so in your face though, they can be hiding in plain sight. This grassy hill in China was hiding an army of over 8,000 terra cotta soldiers guarding an emporer's tomb. Stat out a clay construct and unleash them on your world.

Or check out this place in Turkey the locals called Potbelly Hill. It turned out Gobekli Tepe was the site of buried megalithic stone architecture dating back around 12,000 years. Maybe not the most impressive thing I've put on your screen, but by far the oldest. So old in fact, that we had to reexamine our ideas of history because we didn't think people back in 9,500 BC were remotely capable of doing something like this.

I have to make an effort to wrap my head around time scales like this, but when I do it always fills me with awe. So much time, when people could have done so much, who knows what's out there undiscovered. The next time you see a hill, take a moment and wonder what might be hidden underneath. Maybe something much older still.

These cave paintings from Spain are some of the oldest art we know about. We've dated this back 65,000 years. 65,000 years. That is so much time, but that's not the crazy part. Humans didn't paint this. Homo Sapiens wouldn't reach Europe for another 20,000 years when this art first adorned these cave walls. A different species did this. Neanderthal's made this.

These are Neanderthal hands. Other intelligent races, other “humanoids” is not as fantastic an idea as it seems. Homo Floresiensis or hobbit people, Homo Erectus, Denisovans, there were other things like us, making tools, weapons, and jewelry long before we got here. Our ancestors met some of them. More than met. I'll tell you a secret, I've got a little Neanderthal DNA in me.

Let's go even deeper in time, around 300 million years deeper. But also back to me as a kid growing up on Long Island. This is a horseshoe crab. I was terrified the first time I saw one of these washed up on the beach as a child. They're perfectly harmless, but you want a new idea for a monster just look at this thing. It's more closely related to spiders and scorpions than crabs, but it turns out this thing is a living fossil, older than the dinosaurs. They also have copper based blood instead of iron so it's blue. It is incredibly valuable in the pharmaceutical industry, and was actually key in producing the Covid vaccine. Thankfully there's a synthetic version in the works, so we can stop being alien abduction vampires to these strange creatures. That's way weirder than most adventure ideas I've seen.

I could keep going, I could make a whole channel like this. Our world is fantastical, and in any direction you look you can find inspiration for your D&D game. You want magic? Radio waves, the microwaves that cook your food and make your cellphone work, X-rays that let us look inside of people, that's all just the same stuff as the light we see. Just different frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum. Wizardry is all around us. The machine you are watching this on is basically a collection of rocks we pulled from the depths of the earth, poured a little bit of lightning into and taught to think for us.

Bring some wonders of the real world into your D&D game and bring some of that wonder back with you into the rest of your life. Get out there, have fun, be kind, and I'll see you next time.