Current mood:	cheerful
Current music:	Disneyland - It's A Small World

Where do you get adventure ideas?
(Cross-posted from the SJGames forums.)

Anywhere and everywhere. I have unabashed Nerd Attention Deficit Disorder (and chronic Repetitive Information Injury), and this puts me in contact with all kinds of new and interesting (or old and interesting) ideas - and all the while, I'm thinking about how what I'm reading or hearing could fit into an adventure or campaign. Among the adventures I've written or had in progress, I've borrowed from children's movies (Adventure Pizza: Giant Robot!), my own phobias (Creatures of the Night: Anamiae), anime (the work-in-progress pastiche Adventures of the Mini-Lilim, and The City of Lost Memories, among others), sports stadiums (What's In A Name?), and Disney theme parks (my current project).

One of the websites that I find particularly inspiring - YMMV, of course - is The Urban Legends Reference Pages. In particular, their Random feature is a fantastic boon; just skip through a few and let the stories sift through your head. Here are a few examples off the top of my head (I didn't come up with any of these ahead of time):

• Was Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschchev denied permission to visit Disneyland? - The situation between Heaven and Hell roughly corresponds to the détente between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War. You could escalate this similarity in your campaign; suppose that an Archangel is visiting Horde-owned territory on a goodwill visit, but is denied access to one of the Horde's most well-known and popular recreational areas on what looks like a trumped-up excuse. When the Archangel orders some of his entourage - the PCs, naturally - to find out what his Demon Prince host is hiding, hijinks ensue. (And who knows - maybe the Demon Prince really is hiding missile silos beneath the racquetball courts...)



• A miraculous car that gets 200 miles to the gallon is reclaimed by the factory and never seen again after its owner calls to congratulate the manufacturers about its fabulous performance. - Jean forbids allowing humans to have access to Divine technology before they develop it on their own - but an angel of Lightning, in a deep Role, has been killed, and his Jeanite supercar left to his mortal and unaware widow, who sells it before Jean's angels can get to it. The GM can decide what characteristics the car has - but whatever they are, the PCs could be the angels sent to re-acquire the car, the mortals who've bought the car and are wondering why these people seem to want it back so badly, or the demons who see a golden opportunity to get their hands on some Heavenly technology... (For added fun, you can combine this with The $50 Porsche: when the widow lists the supercar at an absurdly low price in the classified ads, suddenly even more groups are trying to get it - including some who don't even know what the car can do...)



• "There's room for one more" - A rogue Malakite of Destiny née Dreams, with the Choir attunements of both, is wandering the Marches, looking for humans who are due to die soon and stepping into their dreamscapes to warn them. Yves, the Archangel of Destiny, has sent a group of angels to bring him back to the fold; meanwhile, a group of demons, seizing on the Malakite's behavior, are trying to drive him farther into madness by tracking down the humans he warns and killing them anyway.