Epic and fantastic! I want to get better at coming up with this kind of stuff. (Minus actually killing the characters, of course.) How do you “think outside the box” and bring in the truly fantastic, as a GM or player?
http://www.tabletitans.com/tales/post/theres-something-wrong-here
http://www.tabletitans.com/tales/post/theres-something-wrong-here
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My players love the imagery that I come up with. Giant robots buried underground, the leftovers of a lost civilization; crows with the face of an old man bursting from a corrupted tree of life that spews ink and smoke; a gaping, acid-dripping maw replacing the roof of a cave that used to be an underground village…
To come up with stuff like that, mostly I just learned to see. Drawing from life is a really great way to expand your visual vocabulary and teach you to notice the details in things. What that does is, it expands your frame of reference for synthesizing fantastic images and situations into something novel and exciting. From there, it’s just a matter of being put on the spot and mashing shit together. I’ll generally have an image in my head before play of what this situation looks like on the surface, then when I make my hard moves I’ll peel back the surface elements, improvising details as I go along.
Draw maps, leave blanks and fill those blanks with a creative visual vocabulary.
Also, pay attention to good writing, song lyrics, and your own dreams. Movies pretty much define our common visual language these days, and have standardized/genericized descriptive imagery to an unfortunate degree.
I think I realized at some point that games (and the stories they generated) were more fantastic when I was 11 and declined in imagination very slowly the older I grew. Pushing 40 now, I’ve come to realize that you can hang on to that “anything can happen” mentality but it takes a bit of practice if you nearly let it die as I did. As adults it’s too easy to get sucked into the “game” and out of the “story,” so to speak. Granted, some game systems are at least partially to blame for that and thank you yet again to Sage Kobold for reminding me of what actually matters at the table. Now, what appears to be rough, pointed stone jutting from the ground is easily the tip of a horn which adorns the head of a long buried and dormant dragon. It doesn’t matter how it breathes or what stats it has. What matters is that, at some point, that thing is going to rise up, a mountain of earth that suddenly bursts, beginning with the pointed stone – clogs of dirt and grass falling away to reveal this massive beast just outside an old city full of people who once carved their names into that rock. That quaint piece of scenery for generations is quite suddenly a real page in history. At any rate, nurture that kid-like imagination is what I say.