Sometimes you can hit a point where you're so wrapped up in "it must be proper" that it can seem hard to find inspiration. I'd encourage you to broaden your horizons and look outward, because sometimes the craziest stuff is literally just around the corner.
I'm not even going to get into weirdo conspiracy theory stuff which is absolutely rife with bonkers bizarro ideas, but looking at things which characters in your games or stories would find fascinating, or might be set-dressing for a dungeon like "there are pipes running up the walls and along the ceiling", and adding (or in the above case, just observing) strangeness to them. It follows that anyone building pipes would want to be able to differentiate what's in each one, and its direction of flow, but the way that they label these might be clear, occluded, or unconventional altogether. A water drop and an arrow might be obviously water, but what about what the water drop is red, or green? What about when it's a skull with lightning bolts, or a green snowflake? If the dungeon is a mad warlock's laboratory or something, the labels might be exciting or terrifying, but try to work out how that would even work. Where is the thing coming from? What does it go to ("giant mad science machines" is a good answer)? What does the extraction method involve? And in the pictured example, I have no answers. Do you know how rare it is for Google to say "no matches found" in 2020? Which all leads me unavoidably to the conclusion that my local shopping centre must be harbouring a coven of warlocks with an insane machine powered by ground-up babies! Not really, but it could definitely make for some interesting storytelling! Also posted on Game Masters Stash on 26 September 2020. Comments are closed.
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AuthorI'm Luke. He/him pronouns. Archives
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