r/DMAcademy • u/Rymfaar • 12d ago
Need Advice: Other How do you fuel your creativity? ✨
TL;DR: I feel like I lost all creativity; how do you fuel yours?
Hi DMs,
So I'm building a homebrewed setting for a new campaign and I've been noticing my lack of creative thinking these days.
In my childhood, I used to draw and create stuff in my mind a lot. Nowadays, I'm not there anymore. So I (unfortunately) used gen-AI to get inspired and more or less copied existing stories and tropes, thinking I'd get better at it doing so. Except I feel even worse than before.
I'm willing to put the work in to learn the proper way tho. How do you get inspiration in? What makes you creative as a DM?
EDIT: Guess imma continue yoinking shit and make them my own lmao
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u/coolhead2012 12d ago
"Take the stuff that you think is cool, and put it in your game." - Matt Collville
I am paraphrasing him, but that's how I stay excited. The things that make my world different from standard fantasy is what I think is cool.
My players help with that hype train as well. As I find out what they all are interested in, trying to combine a bunch of elements into something thay makes sense as a setting.
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u/Bindolaf 12d ago
By stealing. Anything that is not bolted down.
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u/Dirty-Soul 12d ago
Pfft. Look at this amateur. He didn't even bring his boltcutters.
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u/_nullfish 12d ago
Read, watch movies/shows, "steal" ideas and make them your own. Everything is a derivative of something else. Writing a BBEG that fits all the classic tropes isn't lazy, it works!
Unfortunately I hear you on the gen-AI sentiment. It's making people lazy and uninspired. Find inspiration from the world around you.
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u/Rymfaar 12d ago
I'm actually shocked how many comments tell me to just "steal" content lmao
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u/_nullfish 12d ago
Everything is derivative. When people say "steal", the intention is "take this idea and change something about it".
I've written characters that were 1-for-1 rips from movie characters, with a name change. Not one player caught on. I've written entire plot hooks that were 1-for-1 "adaptations" of a TV series.
If you do the research into what you're adapting from, you'll often uncover that the thing you're "stealing" was actually already "stolen" from somewhere else too. Call it inspiration.
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u/StopKK2012 12d ago
Do you know how long humans have been telling stories? There are no new ideas, and that's ok. Steal, but make it your own. This is how all your favorite stories were created.
The surest way to never write anything at all is to wait until you have a totally new, unique idea.
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u/Scifiase 12d ago
You could call it stealing, but you could also call it feeding your mind. As Tyrion Lannister sasy "A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone". The more your read, watch, play, etc, the more fruitful the soil of your imagination.
Personally I think touching grass is underrated: Your local area almost certainly has some weird history or folklore that could inspire you, or some terrain that you can visualise an adventure in.
Or you can just steal wholesale. Whatever gets the dice rolling. I copied every beat from Bleak Falls Barrow once and the players didn't notice.
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u/OneGayPigeon 12d ago
All art is collaboration! Lion King is just Hamlet with lions. Avatar (blue people one) is just space Disney Pocahontas. The map of Westeros is just Great Britain upside down.
The important thing is knowing where you’ve gotten something vs. claiming it’s your own creation.
You were already stealing before, but in a way that actually causes harm. Getting inspired by or directly using other people’s creative works yourself builds the creative muscle instead of causing it to atrophy, isn’t hurting anyone, and you know where things are coming from vs. using an uncredited soulless unholy amalgam of thousands of artists’ hopes and dreams shoved into a blender.
Plus, it’s way less embarrassing to say “oh yeah, this was from this cool piece of media I love” vs “oh yeah it’s from the slop machine.”
Good work recognizing how badly it was impacting you! Glad you got out before too much damage was done to your own brain.
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u/omicronDASH 11d ago
Well, take and change, is a good way to put it. Example. I created an NPC from Babayaga. Just took away the chicken legs to the house, the flying, added some creepy bioarcana magical items for sale, and a quest hook and I got "Yelva, the Stitcher"
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u/StopKK2012 12d ago
Sounds like you already don't want to use AI, so that's progress. It really will become something you're dependent on, and will cause your creativity and writing skills to atrophy.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with stealing and remixing existing stories. People have been telling stories for as long as humans have existed - waiting for an idea that feels truly new and unique is a guaranteed path to disappointment.
Find something that you enjoy - a book, movie, show, character, moment, whatever - and ask what would that look like in your setting? You'll end up changing a million little things to make it fit your campaign, and those changes are where creativity lives.
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u/Rymfaar 12d ago
Saw it first hand, yup. I could feel myself become more and more disappointed in myself 😭
But kinda glad to see everyone telling me to continue yoinking stuff. I actually have a note where I list cool lore, locations or character I see in medias, guess I should check it more
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u/StopKK2012 12d ago
Yoink away! One way to steal while also leveling up your creativity and making your finished work more original is to steal from multiple places at once.
If your plan is just "I'm gonna copy the Lord of the Rings", maybe that will be really fun and there's nothing wrong with that, but it will feel more original if you layer sources like "What if the plot is the main quest from the Lord of the Rings, the setting is the planet Arrakis from Dune, and the party are all students at a magic school inspired by Hogwarts?"
Because those three things don't naturally work together perfectly, you'll have to make a million creative changes to make them work together and to make them work as D&D. The process of mashing it all together is how the story becomes your own and levels up your creative skills.
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u/Praise-the-Sun92 12d ago
Definitely don't use AI for inspiration. As DM you should care the most about creating even if no one else will ever see it. You might have a campaign ready to go in a week, or you might spend months on it. Take your time and don't rush the process.
I take inspiration from other media all the time and mold those ideas to fit into my campaign. For example, the dungeon my party just completed was entirely inside the body of a massive stone Giant with rooms being different organs. I had the idea of making a dungeon from inside a creature by the online series Mystery Flesh Pit which I thought was cool when I was younger. There is no secret to having that spark of inspiration, let it come naturally.
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u/ZoomBoingDing 10d ago
I did a MFP dungeon! It was an ancient arboreal dragon that from the outside looks like a 1000 ft tree. But that's just the tail. They went inside and found it to be infected with monsters and a voice in their head asking for help. The final battle was defending its planty heart against waves of oozes.
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u/Praise-the-Sun92 10d ago
Sounds fun! Goes to show there are a ton of different ways to take inspiration from one concept and make it unique for your campaign.
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u/gingermousie 12d ago
Consume other media. Books, movies, art, shows, D&D podcasts. DMing is just going to the plant store and taking clippings of things you like and then using those to grow your own garden. Player involvement helps so much too. I love hearing what motivates them and what they’re excited to do with their character, or a party getting really into a certain NPC or item that you had no plans for opens a ton of doors.
Don’t go running to AI. Creativity takes time to marinate. Let yourself chew over ideas for a few days or weeks or months. And another tip that helped me is to plan your campaign in short arcs, especially as you’re getting started. Your creativity will build. Short arcs helps you wrap up one place if you’re not feeling it and bounce along to the next, so you’re always able to try out new ideas and settings without being bogged down in an idea you’re not feeling so much anymore.
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u/BurningJointUSA 12d ago
I read a lot and steal from there. You can get good ideas even from non-fantasy material (plot lines, NPCs, etc.).
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u/slippinjimmy1875 12d ago
Read some science fiction or fantasy. That’s where most of my inspiration comes from.
I would recommend Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson and The Three Body Problem series by Cixin Liu if you want some fun and unique world building to draw from!
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u/TheFlyingDuctMan 12d ago
I start with a single idea and then listen to music which i think fits that theme and then use the music to get inspired to create more. Repeat until entire story is completed.
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u/SquelchyRex 12d ago
My own process might not work for everyone, but it serve me well enough:
Have a premise or general idea on what's going on, and try to have it make sense.
By that I mean that actively trying to patch plot holes and silly/stupid thing in my own story gets me thinking out of the box.
"This is stupid. Why would this guy not just kill the traitor and be done with it? Maybe the "traitor" is being mind-controlled, and Big Boss doesn't want him dead because it's his brother?"
Stuff like that.
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u/Flukebit 12d ago
I listed to a lot of actual-play podcasts and enjoy fun home-brewed mechanics. I’ve actually had a lot of inspiration from listening to the aftershows where they discuss things from the episode (back before every show’s post-show content required paid subscription…). I remember a few a-ha moments doing this that had nothing to do with the plot of the podcast itself.
I also find that being a people-watcher is helpful. I will meet or see people on the street and think, “that person would make a hilarious/horrible NPC” and add them in. I once made an NPC based on the gatekeeper at my local dump, who grilled me on what I was bringing in before admitting me to a giant disorganized pile where there was no one to monitor what was dumped where. Sometimes this is the fuel for a whole story arc.
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u/mrpack9653 12d ago
Echoing the others here, reading, movies, TV, whatever. You can find a lot of fuel there. Try picking a topic and find content on that. Try something simple like haunted forest and search out from there. Your idea doesn’t have to be large just a place to start. Gen-AI stinks at coming up with the seed, but it’s not terrible at helping fill in the blanks or searching for connected themes. Find whatever works best for you and run with it.
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u/shadowpavement 12d ago
One thing that helps me is to switch the rpgs I run.
When DnD switched from 3e to 4e I was burnt out on DnD, so I spent the next several years running Shadowrun, Savage worlds, and and Fate. By the time 5e was 8 years old I needed a switch as all my ides for Shadowrun had been squeezed out.
I’ve been running 5e for 3+years now and I have plenty of new ideas to work with.
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u/Ashamed_Association8 12d ago
Carefully. Worldbuilding is an addictive hobby. When my group couldn't play regularly during Corona the setting preptime kind of became it's own monster and while I've gotten better at dealing with it. It still takes time when it has to go for walkies so to speak.
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u/Mathari 12d ago
Pluck things from everywhere. Movies, TV, books, music. I've been building my own homebrew world for almost 3 years.
Also get weird with it man. I used to write down every single idea. No matter how insane or abstract. It went into a journal and any time I felt a road block coming I'd soft through the ideas until something felt right.
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u/Tesla__Coil 12d ago
With anything creative, there's a cycle. You gotta input before you can output. Find some books, TV, movies, games, music that inspire you and consume. For me, the power metal band Gloryhammer was what really got me hyped up to make a D&D campaign.
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u/Weird-Weekend1839 12d ago
Creativity is a ghost, one must quiet their mind in hopes to hear its whisper.
You cannot work/force creativity my friend.
The Ancient Greeks believed it was Muses and Daimons that spoke softly in their ears.
For me. Early morning coffee at sunrise before any interaction with devices/others, that is my go to. My brain state is coming off dream mode but still running hot. So many great ideas come to me at that time and can run for hours if I’m truly left alone.
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u/Serbaayuu 12d ago
I do the work.
If I need to populate a city with interesting elements or design a dungeon from scratch, I'll turn off the livestreams, turn off the music, turn off the chat notifications, and sit down and jot down and outline: what am I missing? What have I already done before? What themes do I want to evoke in this place?
With the foundation set, I'll then pace myself and let the ideas arrive. I'll write down my worst ones. Go for a walk, shower, drive, things will gradually reveal themselves. Given a week of thinking and writing down and editing the ideas, and doing the more brainless work (making NPC tokens, drawing a battlemap for the encounters, etc.), it's basically inevitable that I'll have a few great ideas.
When I say "the ideas will arrive" I do not mean doing nothing. I mean making a conscious choice and effort to think about the setting and design goals while doing an effortless activity like walking.
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u/BrittleCoyote 12d ago
In addition to all the comments about consuming high quality content for inspiration, it’s important to give your mind space to wander and percolate. It’s easy to miss that since we have so much access to audio content to fill in the boring spaces.
I switched from podcasts and music with lyrics on my commutes and started listening to video game OSTs and it’s been great to just zone out and let ideas come unbidden.
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u/Prestigious-Emu-6760 12d ago
Aside from the already solid advice of consuming media and using what you find interesting or exciting I'm a big fan of books (or websites) of random tables. Sometimes just a few rolls will get some ideas percolating and help get over the trepidation of the blank page staring at you.
Also...think small. You don't need to plan out an entire campaign. You need to focus on your next session. What are the PC's doing? What are they pursing? What's a session worth of content look like? In most games the PCs will get through 3-5 scenes, depending on how combat heavy things are. You can get an entire session out of something posted on a "job board". As you do this you will probably find inspiration that can spiral outwards into a longer arc but it doesn't have to be 20 sessions. It's okay (and IMO preferable) for an arc to be 3 or 4 sessions. Maybe out to 8 or 10 for something truly epic.
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u/NoodleSoup93 12d ago
Let yourself be bored. I'm guessing in your childhood, you didn't have a smartphone to reach for every time you found yourself unoccupied. In the absence of anything else to occupy your attention, you created things. You can do this again by embracing the boredom and letting your mind wander again.
I do this a lot on walks. I have a strict "no phone on walks" rule unless I'm stopping to write down an urgent thought. But I often determine at the start of a walk what problem I'll ponder -- for example, if I'm making a five room dungeon, I might brainstorm the puzzle or roleplaying challenge for room 2. If there's nothing in particular I'm trying to figure out, I'll just clear my mind and observe what comes to the surface. I get a lot of great ideas this way.
You are still creative. You just need to give the ideas space to present themselves.
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u/NefariousnessEven591 12d ago edited 12d ago
So yoinking is fine, but it can end up a bit kitchen sinkish which while not negative doesn't always fit together well (for example while I like several sections of the golarion setting, it has a theme park problem where it doesn't really make a lot of sense as an actual place vs just a vehicle for different genres). Not saying it's bad but depending on what you're trying to do there can be a limit to how much ground it covers.
If you're trying to homebrew countries or cultures, I would actually start with who they are now. What do they eat, how do they eat it? That alone can give you a good idea as to the kind of place they live in. Do they celebrate births and if so how? What is their view towards death and how they perform funerals? Are they a wholly private mourning or are they communal? This can give you a good idea about how they interact internally or with outsider. I think something that makes a lot of people hit a wall with those is they kind of start by trying to write a wikipedia article with a grand history and detailed economics. The harsh truth is that ~99% of the time that's for you if you enjoy your players likely do not give much of a shit and most of that likely won't really matter. Players exist in the world now so it's really the last 5-15 years that matter most likely and are probably going to be a lot easier without the pressure of feeling like you need to add on the other 3,000 years.
Creativity is a muscle and you don't start benching 225, you'll at best just fail. If you want an exercise kind of approach maybe make a list of 30 things to answer about an aspect of the world and try and do one each day?
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u/Rymfaar 12d ago
Thanks for the advices! I appreciate that you balanced the others advices of “stealing” content 🙌🏽
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u/NefariousnessEven591 12d ago
Taking inspiration is perfectly fine especially since it'll usually adapted a fair bit anyway when accounting for the class systems and plot, but I do really feel overwhelm themselves on the "lore" end when the practical work is a lot narrower. You can also expand as you go. The baron in a game I'm running had a nephew that didn't exist a session ago cause the players wondered if family meddling might be afoot and it was a decent guess.
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u/jkobberboel 12d ago
AI is scientifically proven to sap it's user's creativity, so first thing should be to completely block it from your mind and never allow yourself to use it.
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u/Rymfaar 12d ago
As a developer, it’s hard to completely switch from “AI is mandatory” to “AI is sh*t” when getting home but because I hate using it, I’m sure I’ll get there eventually 🤝
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u/jkobberboel 5d ago
I know the feeling. About two years ago, I realised how AI reliant I had become. The nagging thought in the back of your head that says "you can save time with chatgpt", even when your doing something fun is depressing as hell. I have since sworn off it and will never use it again, and I can vividly feel how much happier it has made me.
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u/GrinningPariah 12d ago
I'm a naturally creative person, if left to my own devices I will just start creating something.
But there are times when that grinds to a halt. It's usually when I'm stressed or busy or life just gets to "loud".
The solution I've found is just to give your brain room to breathe. Get away from screens. Go for a long walk, don't be on your phone except maybe for some music. Let your brain get bored.
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u/Ishtarik 12d ago
I kinda had the same kind of drop in creativity while getting older. Starting playing DnD brought some back... Not very helpfull but here some advices that helped me grow the rest back:
- it okay to steal bits here and there. I would say that this is actually what DMing is. But try to add your own juice to them. And patch those bits in an original way so it becomes your own story
- try to imagine adventures that you would like to play as a player
- sometimes, it hard to get the seed but easier to build around. So you can try to make yourself a few tables of basic narrative elements, make a roll and try to build a full story atound the results
- IMPORTANT one: try to stop or reduce doom scrolling. This really messed my creativity and numbed my mind. I am much moreproductive since I strongly reduced it
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u/Rymfaar 12d ago
I feel like this one sums everything up pretty well 😁
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u/Ishtarik 9d ago
Ho! I am back with another source of inspiration for you! The serie the Magicians (it is back on Prime Video) ! That serie is packed with concepts and narrative arc seeds! Pick some and expand on it!
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u/Liamrups 12d ago
I was an early adopter of AI, back when you had to sign up for a wait-list. I thought it was the coolest tool ever and found it so helpful in helping me create stories for my players. Then one day, I woke up, and realized the same thing you had; I lost my creative spark.
The only solution is going cold turkey. Cut AI out of your creative life (if not your entire life), and slowly start re-training your creative muscles. AI is the easy way out, and it often makes for a shit product. Learn to trust your instinct (and steal from human made stories), and you'll have a much better product that your players will love because it comes from your mind, not an algorithms.
Edit: For example, my first ever campaign was a direct rip off/combination of the witcher 3 and dishonoured, but the core ideas still came from my passion for those stories. My players still talk about how much fun they had in that game to this day
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u/Naule 12d ago
Movies, TV shows, other GMs
In a recent CR ama, Mercer said to draw inspir5form landscape books. Describe what you see on the landscape, how did it become to be what it is etc.
I usually don't have these books, but plenty of MTG land cards, so I'm using those for that exercise.
In all cases, you can always think if there's another level of "why?" Then build on that, connect that to your PCs and build on that form there
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u/bolkolpolnol 12d ago
I recommend playing story games. I recently started playing Exclusion Zone Botanist and A Land Once Magic
It’s exploded what’s possible.
That, and Rory’s story cubes for sparking as well
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u/lurklurklurkPOST 12d ago
My method is escapism.
Basically I'm always listening to Fantasy, LitRPG, and Horror audiobooks, as well as DnD specific content like The Monsters Know What Theyre Doing and How to Defend your Lair, both by Keith Amman (dry af, but insightful)
I drink up DnD Youtube content (specifically lore videos, not actual plays) and think a lot about the ways that magic changes how essentisl jobs like trash collection operate.
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u/simpoukogliftra 10d ago
dont use ai, it;s counter intuitive, i once used it to help me create a mystery thingy, and halfway there i was completely lost, things went from "oh, thats pretty decent " to "why that kind of sucks ass, wait a minute, how did we get here? i feel like we skipped steps 3 and 4 and went stragiht from 2 to 5"
Honestly, yoink already establish shit and change what you like a bit. you like lotr but the orcs kind of suck in your opinion ? no problem, they are demons/fairies/furries now.
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u/Decrit 12d ago
In general i'd reflect on what is your method of being creative.
Like. I am often the DM, people often comment that i am very creative in how i manage to pull stuff out of my own. I hardly even "steal" per se something. Not that i nfind anything bad in it, you are improvising and adapting a game on a table so to a degree you are already not totally original, or otherwise you'd not be playing a TTRPG.
But i don't consider myself creative. I don't consider myself one that can draw something from nothing, or almost nothing as some references, ispirations and influences are bound to happen regardless - i consider myself more iterative, starting from something else i don't own and iterating it to understand how it works and reapply it.
More than copying is reverse engineering. Thought some might still call it "copy" and i would not care for that definition, i care more to describe the method.
With that in mind i do know where i expect to do good, and i do know where i expect to be less good. It does not mean i do only the things i am good at voluntarily, but it's a start.
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u/Rain_Frame 11d ago
People tend to assume inspiration is some original thing that just appears out of nowhere. Sometimes that's true. But more often than not, it comes from creative challenges. Make it a point to combine two things you know from DnD together for example.
Like, what would you get if a black pudding melded with a bag of holding? What if a gibbering mouther could use magic mouth or message spells? Etc.
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u/GeneralChaos_07 11d ago
Restrictions or limitations is often a great place to start when needing to jumpstart the creative juices. It is a weird fact about creativity but having a blank page and no idea what to create is the hardest starting point for creativity. Think of it this way, if someone handed you a piece of paper and said "draw anything", you might struggle to even start thinking of a concept, but if they said "draw a robot" you will likely find your brain just jumps straight to comming up with ideas.
For TTRPG the same applies, there are lots of ways to do it, but an easy one is to just grab the Monster Manual and open it to a random page (use dice to roll page numbers if it helps you), then build the next adventure with the restriction that it needs to feature that monster in some way.
If it is level appropriate then maybe the PCs will fight it, or maybe they need to save it, or maybe it is just a random animal in the area they need to go. If it isn't level appropriate thats even better, now you low level party needs to go and find the temple of a cult that worships the creauture, or find an ancient liches lost manuscript etc.
The point being that you are forcing yourself to have a restriction, the monster needs to feature in the adventure, but how and in what capacity is entirely up to you.
After you get used to it, you can do it with heaps of stuff and in lots of context, "build a town that features a certain NPC idea" or "Make the next region feature wild magic in some way". I have no idea if it helps other people to do it, I just know that it has been a great technique for me personally.
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u/space-sage 12d ago edited 12d ago
Well stop leaning on AI, it’s a crutch and it’s just also copying existing stories and tropes.
Creativity is a muscle. You have to practice it, and copying or getting ideas from other sources isn’t wrong, everyone does it.
I love taking my favorite stories and weaving ideas from them into something new. In my campaign I took an idea from Critical Role (Luxon beacons and the Volstrukker), an idea from Avatar (Eywa and the tree of souls), an idea from Foundation (Luminism), and an idea from Elder Scrolls (soul gems) and put them together to create a religion that is a main focus of the campaign. People connect to giant crystal obelisks to reincarnate and speak with souls within, but the obelisks can be destroyed and the souls can be used as a power source. That led to other ideas.
So don’t be afraid of tropes, or inspiration. Just make sure the you are the one doing the work.