You’ve talked to your players, and you’ve gotten your note taking medium of choice all sorted and ready. Despite understanding the scope of the adventure you’re about to undertake, you still feel some unease and hesitancy. Questions fill your mind: “Has this been done before? “Am I just going to rip off someone else’s work without realizing it?” “Should I be worried about plagiarism?”
The short answers are “Yes”, “probably” and “No*”. In fact, I’m willing to bet that most of you reading this already knew the answer. If you didn’t, welcome to the hobby. I’ll address those concerns at the end of the post. For now, I’ll explain the why and the how of this for overhauling your adventure.
Overhauling an adventure, regardless of scope, is a large undertaking. Trying to be original with everything is an exhausting endeavor. You’re already taking someone else’s work and remixing it, so why stop there? It way more efficient to see if someone has already done the work you intend to do.
That is not to say you shouldn’t change the things you steal for your game. You should absolutely put a new coat a paint on it while kit bashing it with something else. But where should you steal ideas from?
Short answer: everywhere.
Long answer: everything, everywhere, all at once.
Seriously.
First place you can look are message boards about the adventure you’re overhauling. The more people active on there, the better your chances are of finding something you can use.
Reddit, for all its flaws, works well for this if you can catch and filter some of the redditor bias that may come with it. The Storm King’s Thunder (SKT) subreddit has been incredibly helpful (for the most part) in my own journey for fleshing out things that were left vague as well as being directed to slot-in adventures to help flesh out the pacing and story. You never know when a random comment will contain that one thought that helps tie things together for you.
Blogs & Personal Websites
Another place you can go to are other people’s blogs or websites that cover their own attempts to adjust or “fix” a published adventure. These are going to be like message boards in terms of content, but instead of many people providing what is usually general advice and tips, it’s just one author who is likely going into incredible detail at each step of the way as a resource for anyone else running the adventure.
One example is a website which is dedicated to an individual and their own RPG experiences and musings. They also happen to have a sizeable (though incomplete as of this writing) section for remixing SKT which was a huge help in addressing some of the plot and pacing issues I’d noticed in the base adventure.
Pop Culture & Fandoms
Somewhere else you can steal from is from your favorite shows, movies, books, comics, etc. Think a character in the adventure could be improved by being a bit more like Elric Alphonse from Fullmetal Alchemist? Do it. Think that one plot twist in chapter 5 of the adventure should play out more like the one from The Sixth Sense? Do it. Really like the details of that one tree in The Lord of Rings? Well, if you want to bring that tree into the game, then do it.
Unlike making up your own adventure and being able to build around those elements, it can be a bit more challenging to implement them into an overhaul due to having to find places where things can fit.
But not much more if you’re smart about it.
My recommendation: go for bits and pieces instead of large chunks. If you’re worried about your players calling out your references, don’t be. They’ll likely miss half and not say anything much about the others. These are TTRPG players, after all. But if your players are particularly astute and like to feel smart for spotting the references, figure out where your media preferences diverge and use the ones they will not have even read or watched at all. This could limit your pool considerably, but you should be safe from those moments if that matters to you.
You, Yourself, and Yours
The last and best place I can think of to steal from is none other than yourself. If you’ve been playing or running games for a while, you have plenty of character backstories, plot threads, and other memorable moments from other games to draw on. If you’ve run games before, you may have a backlog of unused ideas, NPCs, locations, or whole adventure arcs. This venture is the perfect opportunity to bring those ideas back or finally give them their moment in the spotlight.
Either way, stealing from yourself is the absolute best way to truly make the overhauled adventure your own. Although if you were doing this to get out of your own personal adventuring ruts, bear in mind that those ruts will be an issue regardless of if you steal from yourself or not. Just be mindful of them as you overhaul the adventure.
Do Original Ideas Still Exist?
Now then, for those of you worried about taking things from other sources and potential plagiarism, we’re assuming here that this is for a private game you’re doing. We’re also assuming you aren’t publishing this (it’s an overhaul of an existing adventure after all), this is just for your table whether it be a physical, virtual, or metaphorical one.
It’s important to understand that nothing is truly original in our hobby. The Mono-myth, the Hero’s Journey, Everything is Journey to the West, etc, all stories are fundamentally the same to an extent. We just find novel ways of telling those stories. When you hear the age-old GM advice about stealing from everyone, it’s assuming this. This is all fair use, and no one is going to come after you or be offended you used something someone else made in your own personal game.
That said, if for some reason you are live-streaming your game or recording and publishing your sessions, it would be a good idea to familiarize yourself with the Sommerton Scale in regards to ads, intros, outros, and attribution, but you shouldn’t need to worry about it for the game itself, but it’s always safe to do your research. You worries were valid but unfounded in this specific context.
Now we’re ready to move on to more detailed topics. Next time we’ll be addressing tone as part of the overhauling process: why and when to change or adjust it and how to go about that.
Stay safe.
Have fun.
Your story matters.