One more and I'll stop. For the last couple weeks, I've been talking up Twitter accounts that are of particular value to GameMasters who want to get adventure idea for their games. The last two were picture-based - makes for nice blog posts - but let's try something different. How about The QI Elves (@qikipedia), the Twitter stream of the popular British show, Q.I.? It's basically a platform for strange and unusual trivia... Did I say strange? Well strange is a great place to start when you're dealing with RPGs that take place in the known world, whether it's time travel SF like Doctor Who, contemporary horror like Chill, urban fantasy like Unknown Armies. And it does feature images on occasion. Let's look at a few tweets for story hooks...
Ok ok, at least one picture. The tallest structure in Prague, the Zizkov Tower, has 10 giant babies crawling up and down it, which is creepy as hell, and a great image for a sci-fi horror adventure in the Doctor Who mold. Cute monsters that turn out to be terrifying once they show their tiny tiny hands... Don't forget to look above you!
A lot of Q.I. factoids add flavor to a time period, but some can actually be used to drive a historical plot. Here the crucial clue finally allows a PC with the barbering skill to do his thing! But seriously, how IS the tyrant king getting his messages across? Can the PCs figure it out before his spies and saboteurs can get their own razors and act out his schemes?
A neat bit of flavor that can lead to a humorous sequence when the Player Characters, charged with securing nukes, find security so lax. Perhaps it's too late, and an enterprising bike thief has already made off with dangerous plutonium. It's all about making recent history look rather naive, so set the climax in a plane on board which the stuff was easily smuggled.
The first flower grown in space… (Photo: Scott Kelly, astronaut on the International Space Station) The flower makes for an unusual artifact, especially if being in space gave it strange properties. Perhaps it was contacted by a vegetable alien species that unlocked its intelligence, but is the flower grateful for the astronauts' nurturing, or plotting against Earth itself?
What if CO2 was, in fact, the medium through which a poltergeist-like entity moves? How could we ever be safe from a creature that hides in trees during the day and can enter your lungs? What if it gained the power to possess living beings? Is that what happens when vines, animals, people "run wild"?
Anyway, just a few ideas for your games, and plenty more where that came from. Roll on!
Anyway, just a few ideas for your games, and plenty more where that came from. Roll on!
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