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My brain coming up with mechanics: (smart) Patrick from Spongebob Squarepants looking through a microscope, taking some notes
My brain coming up with story and characters: (dumb) Patrick that accidentally nailed a board to his head
I know copying/adapting an already existing story/character isn’t unheard of, but my goldfish memory can never remember any
For me, the story and characters are the fun bit, and I stick to the mechanics as they already exist for the most part. But the names… I struggle naming one character. Naming large numbers of characters in a way that feels cohesive is hell.
I used to share the struggle with names, until I started to learn Dutch and realized that I can just use common non-English names.
No more Bob the Blacksmith, Tom the Wizard Shop Dude, Jane the Horse-Mechanic; now there’s a bunch of Noor, Sem, Yara, Mees, Saar, Bram, Lotte, Luca, Felix, Mia, Lia, Gerrit, Hendrika, Inaya, Mael, Manon…
I’m mostly using local names (Polish in my case), because they’re easier to remember
Use a setting with robots/androids; that way you can use/reuse model numbers like in Star Wars. Or go Destiny-style and use a common name/callsign followed by a number.
I always panic when it comes to names. Thus why Shmemeji, the bitch slapping bard came to be.
If your adventures are headed to a city have a lot of names prepared
Same. I hate AI but I feel like using it to generate names is fairly ok? Literally can’t be wrong and not really stealing content/work from anyone when used for this.
If Fantasy Name Generator isn’t doing it for me, then AI is definitely not going to cut it.
I actually had a way harder time adapting a story vs coming up with my own. I took a premade adventure that didn’t really have a “story”, just a bunch of quests the PCs could do to level up before fighting the big bad, and tried to make an actual arc out of it. It was really rough, and some of the quests you could tell were reeeally stretching it.
Came up with an idea for a bad guy. Looked up some lore to see where this guy may have come from, what type of being he may be, etc, and from there came up with a pretty cool back story, a couple of assistants/ underlings, and one or two plot hooks. It’s nowhere near done but it’s already way more interesting with more room to explore than the “easy peasy rearrange stuff” module I attempted.
Pull a page out of Disney’s book: dead parents.
In what way could this character have lost his parents in this universe? Vary the emotional damage to fit the theme you want (you can even have the character’s parents die in a stupid way if you want the story to be somewhat humorous)
Create a villain (or hero) to have committed that act—or use factions you already thought of—and voilà you have a character revenge arc set up.
You can repeat this with basically any universe, and it still feels fresh if you just keep changing a few things around.
Did it happen recently to this person or a long time ago? Maybe change it to be a different family member or a friend. Maybe this was a massacre where there are multiple survivors seeking revenge. Maybe instead of seeking revenge they are really just trying to hide because whatever villain took their loved ones is hunting for them still.
Hell you can even push the entire thing into the past, turn the revenge arc into the lore of the world if the completion of that revenge arc would have had a large impact. Then the main quest could be trying to undo what has been done, or trying to stop another group from trying to undo what has been done. You could even obscure the actual events and make legends that all are loosely based around the truth but contradict each other so your characters need to uncover what really happened. (Cultures like having myths that make them seem better than they actually were)
When you need random characters to play roles in the plot, its often fun to just pick a random race/culture/class in your world and then say “how could a person from this group have ended up where I need them to be and with the skills I need them to have?”
Nice, bookmarked
I know I love a character if I end up building a world around them. Which in the case of my cat, I’m absolutely doing.
