I mean old B movies, dead flash games, Scifi original movies, half-forgotten horror flicks, out of print novels, ect? Personally, my standard orcs and goblins are entirely cribbed from Battle of Wesnoth's depiction of goblins being actual 'orc runts' and half orcs being orcs with the muscle mass of a goblin.
I don't know how obscure my inspirations are compared to the other sources of inspiration, because I don't pay attention to how popular things are. If I see something cool, I engage with it however I can, regardless of how many other people know about it, and I might draw inspirations ranging anywhere from one or two concepts to entire power systems/energy sources.
This will trigger the morons on this board.
EverQuest, it’s obscure by now. Specifically lifting the Iksar faction and cazic Thule.
Also Walther Moers books, nobody outside of the germanosphere knows his stuff.
I do the same, specifically taking inspo from lots of cities and various memorable NPCs. I will always have a Lucan D'lere and Mayong Mistmoore analog somewhere. Qeynos and Freeport will forever live in my games, and various other dungeons and pieces of lore throughout the world.
this but with a different dying mmo, Mabinogi (specifically its older content)
it helps that they also are stealing from irish myth and shakespeare
Everything is remixes. If it gets you to older myth, even better.
Similar situation with Slaine, great comic, got really neat ideas to steal
I have a similar relationship with Adventure Quest, not from the npc angle but for providing the base for the in-universe elemental magical forces and how forms of life are easily altered by them.
I think the sort of 'every monster is a kind of mutant influenced by outside fundamental forces leaking into the universe' thing the setting had going on influenced a lot of my own settings as well, it's pretty novel looking back on it.
Early 2000s, but for me it was Baten Kaitos and the Tellus Fire Emblem games, both for NPC ideas.
Speaking of books, I don't know how obscure you could consider it, but a lot of "modern Paladin" archtypes for games I run in our own time period but with magic or the supernatural like WoD, I lift the idea of a Knight of the Word from Terry Brooks' Word/Void trilogy. Those bestowed the role of knight errant carrying an inscribed, pitch black runic staff that appears mundane to everyone else and is the symbol of their office and source of strength hunt down demons in secret throughout our world, befriend others with abilities they don't understand or who've been in contact with things they can't explain, and eradicate evil behind the scenes with few ever being the wiser.
It was over 20 years ago I read that series and the idea has stuck with me the entire time, I don't know if it just landed at just the right point in my life or there's something endearing to the concept.
Jabberwocky.
Dominions.
Elaborate?
I literally just lift monsters and cultures from the game and sprinkle in some slightly altered real life myths/stories. My players think I'm a genius storyteller and I should write books instead of adventures.
I don't have the heart to tell them it's all stolen ideas.
I don't feel guilty about stealing ideas, but I do think it's interesting when you're cribbing from, say, a 70s B-movie that your players collectively would never watch. Almost all of my quick and easy CoC one-shots have been based on films featured on Elvira and MST3K and stuff like Harold Lamb short stories.
He's "stealing" from Dominions, mind you Dominions aren't exactly shy about stealing themselves, they straight up lifted Illithids and Aboleths from D&D
Don't feel guilty mate, its what everyboyd does, even tolkien, Dominions only makes so much fun to steal because it has its own takes in myths from all over the world.
I had my party fight a telkhine once.
What dominions is best for us showing you obscure parts of ancient myth already perfectly digested to be used in a fantasy game. That’s imo what makes it such a great source of inspiration.
There’s things where I don’t immediately have an idea how to make it work in the context of a ttrpg, dominions often has me covered
I more or less completely lifted MA Agartha for my setting, I love the weird axolotyl-men and their enchanted statues.
I make maps and make them match setting based on interesting looking emergent situations from turn based strategy games.
Conquest of Elysium is the main one for me. I'm planning on ripping off the monkey maharaja with their traditionalist monkey gurus and the deranged demon apes with deceiving magic as warring jungle factions (as well as their fantasy Hinduism) once players get to the jungle.
Very cozy answer, along CoE some of my major inspirations.
I also love to take inspiration of diverse Jrpgs (specially for monsters), and euro-comics.
Pretty nice.
You know how every stupid teenager pics a genre or specific piece of fiction and bases their personalities around it? For me it was late 90s/early 00s strategy RPGs. While there was some Final Fantasy Tactics and Ogre Battle/Tactic Ogre, but the well I keep going back to most is Brigandine and Growlanser.
My current campaign started out as me trying to make FFTAs comfy setting and battles work in ttrpgs via 4e,
It worked but it devolved from cute to Yugoslav politics in session 1 which is pretty fitting for those games anyway. From ffta to tactics ogre.
>pic related
Is how 5 years after the campaign started I finally got the idea to ape how the maps work in those games.
Super cheap to make too btw.
Based as frick, I got plenty of inspiration from Wesnoth myself, from using music and enemy portraits for tokens and/or designing enemies after them to ripping parts of descent to darkness into my campaign.
I ran four straight campaigns, with the same players, based on the Quest For Glory games (1-4) and got away with it scot free!
Using this and Blame! as inspiration for a game about players wondering around as mostly defective robots in a planetary wide compound. The AI that usually handles the maintenance of machines has become preoccupied with attempting to source materials outside of the galaxy and has allowed many of earth's structures to become decrepit and decayed.
All the players are basically running on back up protocols where they are compelled to find humans for further diagnostic and repair. But humans have been missing for hundreds of years - so players wander empty forgotten facilities finding other machines doing the same.
Or ones have gone completely insane and hostile from their lack of maintenance.
Steel ball run and spaghetti westerns
Shamanic Princess
Are historical primary sources obscure? Or Portuguese pagan festivals? Or Theosophical psychic microscopes? Xenogears? The first Universal Soldier movie?
>Or Portuguese pagan festivals? Or Theosophical psychic microscopes?
Explain some of those, as a Spaniard I'm interested.
My current project is inspired by Berzerk; not the manga/anime called Berserk, but the Atari 2600 game.
Rather than fighting robots, the PCs are prisoners in a megadungeon by an evil AI named "The Berzerk Server", that has latched itself onto the peaceful cyberworld Nexus.
The AI takes denizens of Nexus & harvests them for their code, data, & energy after working them to exhaustion in labor camps meant for mining ores & energy crystals; but that inspiration is somewhat less obscure.
The PCs begin with a base level of unarmed combat knowledge, & must single-out enemies & know when to run. The "martial arts" are inspired by many non-obscure titles:
>pushing rush attacks inspired by Wario
>jumping attacks inspired by Mario
>lifting and throwing, which is handled similarly to Doki Doki Panic or Disgaea
>surface-to-air striking attacks/slide attacks inspired by Gunstar Heroes
They'll run into various non-human allies:
>lancers, who fight alongside the team and can coordinate combo assault skills
>roadies, whom a hero may ride for greater mobility & special command skills
>scarabs, which are largely supportive and either augment a hero's abilities or distract/inhibit an enemy target
I'm going for a desert-dweller theme, inspired by desert culture stereotypes; the garb tends to be shawls like pic-related (but in a number of colors, sometimes with emblems/other decorative pieces), usually just with armor bracers & armored calf pieces, cloth sleeves, fingerless gloves, open socks and leggings, things like that. Also, I plan to have masks which offer a number of mechanical advantages too (which is unfortunately what Skyrim did & will be the most prominent first conclusion, but I want it to more be a reference to the mysticism surrounding masks in tribal cultures).
The segments and biomes of the prison (& contents therein) will be randomly generated room by room, referencing the now-ubiqitous roguelite genre.
So, not many obscure sources there, unfortunately.
Music from Newgrounds. The kind of music that was used in flash games back then.
Old Amiga games. For example, "Yo! Joe!". I loved the level design in such old games.
Do you like ParagonX9? I fricking love just about everything they made.
I couldn't remember, but I am listening to it right now and it's rad. "Chaos Fantasy" reminds me of "Turrican 2" so much!
Do you know the "hzlancer" music from NG?
I haven't heard of hzlancer, but I'll make a note to look them up later!
My fricking feels, dude.
>the year is 2008
>your mom allows you to have a sleepover with you buddies
>you just got castle crashers on Xbox and you all are gonna spend the night playing it
>mom is ordering pizza
>you are wathcing super Mario Z on new grounds while you wait for their parents to drop them off
>life is good
Sounds comfy AF - I was in college doing stats instead.
Did you at least make it big and end up working at a quant fund making oodles of cash?
Speaking of newgrounds, there were a lot of stereotypically 'goth' flash videos lost to the sands of time that I took thematic inspiration from, generally just to try and nail spooky vibes.
Metal Max.
My current pet project is very heavily influenced by bloodborne, with a large dose of monster hunter and hellboy. Not particularly obscure.
But I do pull quite a lot from the monster blood tattoo trilogy. A nice set of books from a D.M. Cornish that started as a private worldbuilding brainworm he was convinced to write a story in. Only ever met one other person that's read any of it. Some anon in a past thread. Lots of great little ideas to grab.
>But I do pull quite a lot from the monster blood tattoo trilogy.
Perhaps that anon is I, I love the Monster blood books, the way is so verbose, the different kinds of monster hunters, the monsters, the alchemy, the feel of the setting... I also cribe a lot of the later for my own setting (along hunting animals ideal for monsters, but I have more tipical ones along the truly weird, from dog ghost sniffers, corpse finder, to orc/goblin hunters).
I stole a lot of worldbuilding ideas from a wiki for an unreleased My Little Pony fanfiction
Wesnoth's funny because all of its races are interesting for what they are (I really liked the Drakes a lot for how novel they seemed) and there was a lot lot of interesting add-ons to parse through.
If it's the one that involved a specific semi-famous big map, I can't blame you, it's funny that the wiki itself is down so that neat magic system is lost to the winds of time.
None of my players are even familiar with the most entry level lore of Warhammer, so my BBEG is named after a couple minor chaos characters and one of his minions is named Sevatar. BBEG is also a playwright on the side and his plays are named after my favorite metal albums
I love trash Fantasy novels. Brent Weeks writes some of the best trashy borderline bad shonen anime tier fantasy novels. From his Lightbringer books o stole the idea for the main villain the " Colored King". His visual design mostly with his body being made out of different color materials but in my game he was an Eldritch space monster/ god of the of Aboleths that wanted to corrupt the world with his multi color chaos taint magic bullshit. And given the way the Lightbringer books end I can firmly say my ending for him was a million times better than Weeks.
I homebrewed up a system for RPG's set in Yavaun from War Wind ages ago. I wonder if I still have my notes for it. Excuse me, I need to go putter in the attic for a while.
I wouldn't call it obscure, but I started cribbing stuff from Goosebumps books for my Hunter: the Vigil games and my players seem to be none the wiser.
I'm constantly surprised by what playoids catch and what they don't. Like some weeks I might get called out for nodding to an 80's made-for-tv movie or 90's PC game, other weeks they're zombies who are barely capable of reacting to stimuli.
I DM for my wife and a female work friend. I got halfway through Rapture from Bioshock as a Ravenloft Domain before they realized it was from Bioshock.
Neither one of them ever played it, but they knew the name and nothing else. They got the Ayn Rand -> Andrew Ryan thing before they figured out it was all from Bioshock.
Graham Hanwiener
Lord of the Rings. It's a fascinating little book series about adventure and heroism written by a quaint old British man.
I looked into it, it looks pretty cringe, elves, dwarves, orcs? Super creative man. His only "unique" worldbuilding element is the "hobbits", who are clearly just reskinned halflings. It's just a D&D book with the numbers filed off.