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Like It? Steal It!


"Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have laboured hard for." - Socrates

In all seriousness, the idea of stealing from someone else's work is one that seems...sleazy at first. It feels dirty to just take someone else's burst of brilliance and use it for ourselves-except we do it all the time. Have you ever made a joke that you heard or saw in a movie that your friends hadn't seen? You stole that joke. Have you ever answered the phone with *shudder* "Wasssssuuuuuppp??!!" You've stolen someone else's material. Almost every human interaction is peppered with intellectual property lifted from an experience or previous interaction, whether intentional or not. And I am here to tell you that stealing is okay. Let me rephrase: Stealing someone's idea(s) to use in your own Dungeons and Dragons campaign that you do not profit monetarily from is okay. Do you love the Ringwraiths from "The Lord of the Rings?" Use them. Do you do a perfect impersonation of Scar from "The Lion King?" Make a Rakshasa with a grudge and go ham. Bonus points if you give them a Hyena familiar that sounds a lot like Whoopie Goldberg.

The point of this post is to tell you that using ideas that have already been proven is perfectly fine. Want to hear a secret? Dwarves probably shouldn't have Scottish accents. It worked so well in World of Warcraft, Warhammer, and Peter Jackson's LotR, though, that it's become the default for many Dungeon Masters and game designers. It just works. It's the same story with Elves. Why are they English? Elves are more alien than any other race, and their manner of speech should reflect that. Yet, someone somewhere decided to give an Elf an English accent, and here we are! In fact, Halflings in Dungeons and Dragons were lifted straight from Tolkien's works!

I know what most people will think: "Well, I can come up with my own stuff, I don't need to steal from other people". That's awesome! Do it! You could be the next great fantasy innovator! Or, more likely, you'll end up like me, scratching your head after reading a campaign idea you wrote a week ago, thinking that awesome story you made actually sounds a lot like "Avatar: The Last Airbender." It's okay if it does. That show was amazing, and lifting ideas from it is not against any rules as long as you are not profiting from it. Ideas are made to be shared, and great ideas doubly so. Sometimes, of course, terrible ideas get shared, and you end up with "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" or "Fifty Shades of Stockholm Syndrome," but that's beside the point.

So write your stories. Watch movies, read books, listen to podcasts, and take the elements you like from all of those things and make them your own. If you really want to amaze your players, find an older set of fantasy novels and use some of their ideas. Better yet, find an older fantasy novel and combine it in some way with a newer one. That way, your players might think they recognize where you're going with this, until the story makes a hard turn into, for them, unexplored territory. What follows is an example I just made up, and yes, you can feel free to steal it!

In Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series, men who can wield magic, or "channel," are driven mad by the source of their magic due to an age-old curse placed upon it. So, all male channelers are rounded up and stripped of their magic before they can be driven mad. Take this idea of magic causing madness and combine it with our earlier example of Ringwraiths from "The Lord of the Rings." The Ringwraiths, or whatever you choose to call them in your story, are a family of male wizards who were driven mad eons ago due to a curse placed upon their ancestors. This curse stipulated that any of this particular bloodline who use magic would be driven insane by it and forced to wander the earth endlessly. The particulars of the madness are at your discretion, but if you really want to play it out, the "Ringwraiths" could be searching for a powerful artifact that they believe will lift their curse. Let your players find this information. Let them figure out that they can, possibly, cure these tormented souls of their affliction by removing the curse from them.

Now you've created a conflict and given your players multiple ways to resolve it. NPCs are born, quests are embarked upon, artifacts are retrieved, and new allies are possibly made. Or your players will straight up murder the cursed wizards and you have an epic battle instead! There are so many ways you could play with these ideas and entwine seemingly disparate sources to create amazing stories that your players will talk about long after the story is finished. And that, my friends, is what it's all about.

I hope this was in some way helpful for anyone struggling to come up with story ideas for their own campaign. Until next time, keep it friendly, folks.

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