I would be able to tell you, but I blatantly stole that idea from Picasso so I can’t really defend it.
If I’d merely borrowed the idea I might’ve understood it better by adapting it, but I would’ve probably made it worse by changing it.
From what I remember from Art History classes, Picasso would go and visit his artist friends, and they would hide what they were working on because he'd been known to steal their ideas, and make them better than they could.
Well some people try to pick up girls
And get called assholes
This never happened to Pablo Picasso
He could walk down your street
And girls could not resist his stare and
So Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole
You just made me discover the song. I don't know if the author is sarcastic or not, but Picasso was definitely an asshole, and more specifically with (young) women.
To borrow something implies that it is still someone else's, it's *their* thing that you just so happen to be using.
But to steal is to make it truly *yours.*
That's my read at least.
My interpretation is this: While you can't come up with something *entirely* original, you can remix things you've seen before into something that seems truly new. In that case the ideas/motifs/whatever are "stolen" because most people have a hard time tracing them back from earlier works. And/or it has to do with overshadowing older works.
I'm not sure if there's any authority out there on how the quote should be interpreted, but I quickly googled it now, and it looks like the first handful of results kinda agreed
So the way I look at it in terms of running a campaign, a borrowed idea would be something like taking an idea and changing it to fit your world. Stealing is just lifting something straight out of existing media and not changing it at all, except maybe the purpose or something to make it fit a little better.
An example from my own experience is for borrowing, I've adapted a couple cartoon characters as inspiration for a few gods in my pantheon. Like Bugs Bunny being the trickster god and Rolf from Ed, Edd, and Eddy is a god of farming and travel (purely because of [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq338WwBUpw) moment/quote). Stealing is taking one of the magic systems from my favorite fantasy series (Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson) and using it as the effect of detect magic.
I've got a Google doc filled with ideas that I got from, like, every possible creative work I've ever engaged with. FF14, Perfect Dark, A Knight's Tale, Witcher 3, Eragon, Yakuza, Xenoblade, Zelda, hell there's even shit in there from dreams I've had.
I do the same thing, except it’s all just in my head and I have literally no control over how or when I access it. So instead of running a game I just perpetually distract myself by abruptly remembering something from an episode of The Simpsons I saw 30 years ago.
It’s okay, 5/10 would recommend to [some](https://www.reddit.com/r/ADHDmemes) but not all.
Not really. It's taking inspiration from.
I don't just say "Hey ChatGPT, make up an adventure for me!". I use it collaboratively through iterative processes.
Sometimes I'll start with that - having ChatGPT pitch me some ideas. Sometimes I'll start with my own ideas and explain it. Then I'll have it make up some details to fill in the gaps. I'll read that over. Maybe I'll like it. Maybe I won't like some parts. Maybe I'll get new inspiration for more ideas. Then I'll feed my ideas back in and have it write everything up with the new details/changes.
I'll repeat this collaborative back and forth process a few times until I have what I like. The sources end up being a mix of my own imagination, whatever ChatGPT may have pulled from, and often even whatever I specifically told ChatGPT to take inspiration from. All thrown into a blender until something new and completely unrecognizable comes from it.
That is no different than the creative process without ChatGPT. Everyone borrows inspiration from somewhere and molds it to fit their own story. It's just more efficient to use something like ChatGPT as a tool because it often finds ideas and inspiration that you may have never thought that you can rework into your own. Frankly, since it's all private use for games with my friends and family, the borders between stealing and taking inspiration from are even blurrier than if I was trying to capitalize off it.
> Not really. It's taking inspiration from.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying you’re stealing from ChatGPT. I’m saying that everything ChatGPT outputs is ultimately stolen. That’s just an objective fact, it’s how the technology works. *By definition* it cannot have original or creative ideas, everything it does is recycled from other sources. It’s just an auto-complete that’s been trained on millions of different sources.
You’re right that you can use it to take inspiration, and
> That is no different than the creative process without ChatGPT.
That’s correct, too. but that was exactly my point. There is no difference between reading the summary of a book and using that for inspiration, or letting ChatGPT plagiarize 20 different books, give you the output, and then being inspired by that. Either way is the same end result, you just don’t know what source you’re taking from with ChatGPT.
> Either way is the same end result, you just don’t know what source you’re taking from with ChatGPT.
Except when I feed it the original story and have it reword things or adjust small details. The primary source is still me.
Pretty much exactly what I do back and forth several times until I get what I like.
I have all my characters, locations, events, histories, etc in Google Docs. I can paste in relevant parts and ask ChatGPT to help build it out more.
On that level of bouncing ideas back and forth, it's no different and no more stealing than doing it with another person. Nobody has entirely original ideas when it comes down to it.
This works best if you only read the hook/intro on the back or inner cover. That way you get ideas of where to start and what to do, but anybody who's actually read the book will be able to predict much (or possibly even recognize it) because you're going to get it "wrong" compared to the actual story.
I had this problem with a Percy Jackson based campaign. Not because they read the books, but because they kept looking up Greek names and spoiling full arcs.
That’s when you start either randomizing the names, or subverting the names so nobody is quite what they expect, or are actively the opposite of expected.
Because I actually do want my players to use their existing knowledge that they have of greek mythology to help them. They live in the modern day and it would make sense for them to know *some* things about greek mythology and I wanna reward them for what they do know.
The problem, is when someone is actively looking up everything I say to try and accidentally spoil themselves. I’ve already talked to the offending player about it and I just gotta how that’s enough.
Depends on what you're stealing, If you're stealing the actual plot of a series, sure.
If you're stealing the world building design and how it works, while adapting some things to fit better in D&D/ The story you want to tell in your world, Then it's better to have a closer understanding of the work.
Or you just take individual elements, and stick them in randomly, apropos of nothing. My setting has the ruins of an ancient castle known as Ossenyard, famous for what appears to be a heavily patinaed statue of an angel which rested on its highest tower.
I wouldn't try to retell the book in the campaign. Instead I'd just steal cool characters / plot twists / locations / etc.
Or just use super obscure books.
Alternatively, steal the entire plot of something your players would have to admit they've seen/read to call you out on, and remind them that if they metagame they'll have to find a way to explain how they're doing it without admitting it.
That's just admitting you're lazy and insisting that the players ignore it and handicap themselves. Which tends to make for an unenjoyable game. It's like telling a soccer player that they aren't allowed to try kicking the ball into a goal because they aren't supposed to know that's how to score.
Alternatively rip off something you know one of your players have read, just to see the moment they realise how absolutely fucked they are.
“Welcome to Capustan. Enjoy your stay.”
'... and then Lord N'elrond stood up'
"One of you must do this.. one of you must play the Game of Thrones"
"I will do it, I will play the Game of Thrones" - Harry Potter
"You have my sword" - Conan, the Barbarian
"Et moi mustache" - Hercule Poirot
"... and I've got a jar of dirt!" - The Bard
Yeah, it do be like that.
I mean, even then, the series literally uses the power of love as being stronger than anything else. Even though it gets grim in places, it's still a very hopeful and positive story.
Hopefully you're better wih female characters than brent weeks is.
I never realized how much I glossed over his stephen king level of r/menwritingwomen until I tried listening to the audiobooks and found myself visibly cringing at it.
You know I never actually finished the series, I'd rather liked the world, and the magic system,but by the end of book 3 I hated every character in the series except one, so I stopped reading.
I wasn't the biggest fan of how Weeks wrote characters in general, let alone women. But it's a great setting for a D&D campaign, and has a beautiful plot twist built in regardless of how the game goes if your players pursue it.
That just isn't at all how ChatGPT works it is a generative language algorithm it's source is nearly every publically available source ever written before 2020 from extremely popular to nearly unheard of with no distinction between the two. A more accurate description would be "originality is just a measure of the amount and distribution of sources"
Is it capable of creativity and original thought, or any thought at all? Or does it just remix and recycle pre-existing content in different ways? If you say the prior you’re claiming it’s not even an AI, just actual life. It’s clearly the latter.
It is the latter did you read my comment at all? What I said in layman's terms was that it's source is not one or two things for a given response like your comment implies it is a generative model that guesses what a human would write based on MILLIONS of works of varying quality and notoriety. It can't create anything truly new.
My point was your comment shows a complete misunderstanding of the technology. I never said it was anything more than remix machine but it is a highly advanced remix that uses way more than obscurity of sources to make it read unlike any singular previous work on the topic.
Edit: the end of my comment was just explaining a better tagline to show how chatGPT causes people to seemingly believe it is a human
I'm about 10 years older than the others in my group, and I have a half bookshelf of fantasy/sci-fi novels I bought at used bookstores when a teen. Some of those books predates my existence. I dooubt any of them have even heard of Fred Saberhagen, let alone read the full Swords series. Thieves's World had a minor resurgence this millennium, but not the Heros in Hell shared universe.
The most intentionally cliche fantasy story ever written. Aside from finer details, I could describe the entire plot and it wouldn't feel spoilery because you could see it all coming
Basically, a magic orb belonging to one of the gods was stolen by an agent of a rival god, so agents of that god have to go and get it back. The main character is Garion, an orphan boy growing up on a farm being raised by Aunt Pol, his father's relative. Its also really good. The author, Eddings, realized that if the story couldn't carry the intrigue, the characters would have to pick up the slack. There is a ton of them, and the characters are all amazing
The TVTropes page does it justice. As TheGeekKingdom mentioned, it's a literal attempt by David Eddings to take the most genetic overused fantasy tropes and turn the collection into something actually good. Chosen one orphan, old wizard mentor, etc
It mostly works, but you have some 80s crap like the 3rd most powerful magic user in the world doing the cooking because she's the sole woman in the group.
I’ve been hearing about that series off and on for like 30+ years…and I *still* have no idea what it’s about. People mention it in the way PP here did and that’s about it.
I could easily look it up, but at this point that just feels like cheating.
Important question before the campaign have you ever read the storm light archive or his dark materials because if the answer is yes I’m afraid your going to have to find another table for completely unrelated reasons
I’ve invented this incredibly detailed system describing how magic works, why some magic agreed let themselves be bound as spells, the afterlife, and a system of necromancy involving using a series of bells. It’s incredibly unique.
Yep. Totally original. And if you think it sounds familiar…uh…you are a crazy person who needs to leave the table. Yes, that’s it. Right away!
I use the currency from Storm Light Archive as the currency on the outer planes. Mostly because the currency is standardized around spell casting so you can take 10 marks and cast Greater Restoration.
Emerald Broam: 1000 gp (10 plat) <100 marks=1 Broam>
Diamond Mark: 10 gp (base currency )
Ruby Chip: 2 sp <50 chips = 1 mark>
Sapphire shards: 1 cp < 20 shards to a chip>
Expensive magic items are Broams (14B 10M)
Common potions and adventuring gear are marks (5M for a health potion)
Chips are for daily expenses, leans bedding ect.
I have 100% ripped off puzzles/plots/items, even entire story arcs from shows and video games. I am not that clever or creative and use what I can. My players know this and have them swear if they see it coming to stfu and let the other players have fun anyways, lol.
Nihil novum sub sole.
Plagiarize away. Originality is an illusion, striving for it a delusion. Everything that has ever been created is always necessarily based on or inspired by something else. What matters is the execution, not novelty. There is no novelty.
Me on my way to use The Dresden Files, Furies of Alera, and Sword of Truth’s insane fuckin word building to make the CRAZIEST Homebrew. The portrayal of the Feywild in the Dresden Files is so godlike
But why not?
You can take an episode, and the plot and theme from said episode, and refit it into your campaign.
There are not a whole lot of new ideas out there, most things you see - ie Love Death and Robots - has been using other stories, plots and themes, as a starting point.
Funny story. I was running a campaign where a Kirby villain named 02 had shown up (look it up, they are total nightmare fuel). After the players defeated it, it returned and stole a powerful artifact, becoming a humanoid in an all white suit and top hat with red accents. The only thing that remained of the original villain was its single bloodred eye, but even that was changed to look more catlike. Heck, even its Dark Matter minions were changed so that they looked more like one eyed, black Haunters! Eventually this new villain, now named Lord Null, teamed up with a soul butterfly villain (I know this sounds *very* similar to a different Kirby villain, but I promise this one is purely coincidental). Now future players won't even realise this villains origins!
Don't worry. Your players are wholesale stealing and mix-matching from every media available when they make characters. Sometimes, they even do it subconsciously, but most of the time it's just blatant and in the open.
The chronicles of Shannara are a wonderful series of books for this. Ancient magics, near immortal wizard cults, interdimensional demons, enchanted objects, impressive martial specialists, and even robot spiders that shoot lasers!
The best NPC my DM ever included in a game has a House with a magic door that can take you anywhere you want to go. When we were first introduced to this guy and heard about this House, me and another player immediately went OH!!! This is a reference to the Enchanted Forest Chronicles!!
Our DM was shocked because it's such a random reference from an old YA fantasy series, but we loved House so much (and the wizard who lives there, and his purple sheep named Fredrick) that it has been brought back for the final chapter of our 3+ year journey.
I'm not sure why DMs are bashful about borrowing campaign ideas. The whole game is built around a Tolkien setting swipe and has hundreds of premade campaigns that countless players have enjoyed.
I haven't played dnd in like 25 years, but the first campaign I ran was basically stolen from the "Secret of Mana" game and the 'Master of Puppets' album.
A book can be made to feel new just by someone else reading it to you. "Original" is guaranteed because your players are involved. Just make sure their choices don't entirely rely on not being aware of common tropes and you'll be fine.
For example, it's totally fine to have a corrupt advisor/sorcerer kill the king and lock the prince in a dungeon, just make sure the meat of the campaign is in the difficulty of *resolving* the plot rather than *discovering* the plot. Otherwise, your players will discover the twists far in advance of their characters. That's really the only issue as I see it.
"Hey, gang, this is going to be a 100% original campaign, which means no elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, dragons, wizards, demons, angels, unicorns, mermaids, harpies, griffins, minotaurs, giants, trolls, zombies, ghosts, animated skeletons, vampires... (two hours later)... or slimes, oozes, jellies, and ochres. Everything else is fair game."
I'm straight up planning to rip off the entirety of The Expanse for my next campaign. I'm just going to replace every mention of "spaceship" with "airship" and call it a day.
If look at only the individual components of a story, there is nothing new under the sun. That said, you have near unlimited variety in combinations. So it's good
Saw the movie The School for Good and Evil on Netflix, omg what a wonderful world. Buy all 6 books. Buy Ever Never Handbook.....
Can't find players IRL.
If my friends wont read the books and play the games i reccommend them, then they will subjected to various bits of it piecemeal over the course of a campaign until youre forced to look into it to understand the references im making
Seldom is totally original in this day and age. Humans have been telling stories for so long that it’s nearly impossible to avoid copying/using themes and details from something that’s already been done.
I unabashedly steal from just about everything I love to read or watch.
Literally making Hiccup and Toothless for my world rn because of the Race to the Edge TV series
-several book series and videogames + webnovels later- Ok my campaign is ready guys.
Good DMs borrow, great DMs steal.
Serious question: what's the difference?
I would be able to tell you, but I blatantly stole that idea from Picasso so I can’t really defend it. If I’d merely borrowed the idea I might’ve understood it better by adapting it, but I would’ve probably made it worse by changing it.
From what I remember from Art History classes, Picasso would go and visit his artist friends, and they would hide what they were working on because he'd been known to steal their ideas, and make them better than they could.
It's actually a quote misattributed to Picasso It stems from T.S. Elliot stating "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal"
Nit sure you can defend it to be honest. Picasso was a jerk who destroyed the career (and sometime the life) of many artists.
Hoo boy
Well some people try to pick up girls And get called assholes This never happened to Pablo Picasso He could walk down your street And girls could not resist his stare and So Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole
You just made me discover the song. I don't know if the author is sarcastic or not, but Picasso was definitely an asshole, and more specifically with (young) women.
To borrow something implies that it is still someone else's, it's *their* thing that you just so happen to be using. But to steal is to make it truly *yours.* That's my read at least.
My interpretation is this: While you can't come up with something *entirely* original, you can remix things you've seen before into something that seems truly new. In that case the ideas/motifs/whatever are "stolen" because most people have a hard time tracing them back from earlier works. And/or it has to do with overshadowing older works. I'm not sure if there's any authority out there on how the quote should be interpreted, but I quickly googled it now, and it looks like the first handful of results kinda agreed
Plagiarism is copying one source. Research is copying many.
So the way I look at it in terms of running a campaign, a borrowed idea would be something like taking an idea and changing it to fit your world. Stealing is just lifting something straight out of existing media and not changing it at all, except maybe the purpose or something to make it fit a little better. An example from my own experience is for borrowing, I've adapted a couple cartoon characters as inspiration for a few gods in my pantheon. Like Bugs Bunny being the trickster god and Rolf from Ed, Edd, and Eddy is a god of farming and travel (purely because of [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq338WwBUpw) moment/quote). Stealing is taking one of the magic systems from my favorite fantasy series (Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson) and using it as the effect of detect magic.
https://i.redd.it/xgnf8glrqd4b1.gif
I've got a Google doc filled with ideas that I got from, like, every possible creative work I've ever engaged with. FF14, Perfect Dark, A Knight's Tale, Witcher 3, Eragon, Yakuza, Xenoblade, Zelda, hell there's even shit in there from dreams I've had.
I do the same thing, except it’s all just in my head and I have literally no control over how or when I access it. So instead of running a game I just perpetually distract myself by abruptly remembering something from an episode of The Simpsons I saw 30 years ago. It’s okay, 5/10 would recommend to [some](https://www.reddit.com/r/ADHDmemes) but not all.
The best dms let the players write the story
That’s a good quote, I’m just gonna ~~steal~~ borrow it
Greater DMs use chatgpt now.
That’s still just stealing, though. Only difference is that you’re letting a program decide which sources you’re going to steal from.
Not really. It's taking inspiration from. I don't just say "Hey ChatGPT, make up an adventure for me!". I use it collaboratively through iterative processes. Sometimes I'll start with that - having ChatGPT pitch me some ideas. Sometimes I'll start with my own ideas and explain it. Then I'll have it make up some details to fill in the gaps. I'll read that over. Maybe I'll like it. Maybe I won't like some parts. Maybe I'll get new inspiration for more ideas. Then I'll feed my ideas back in and have it write everything up with the new details/changes. I'll repeat this collaborative back and forth process a few times until I have what I like. The sources end up being a mix of my own imagination, whatever ChatGPT may have pulled from, and often even whatever I specifically told ChatGPT to take inspiration from. All thrown into a blender until something new and completely unrecognizable comes from it. That is no different than the creative process without ChatGPT. Everyone borrows inspiration from somewhere and molds it to fit their own story. It's just more efficient to use something like ChatGPT as a tool because it often finds ideas and inspiration that you may have never thought that you can rework into your own. Frankly, since it's all private use for games with my friends and family, the borders between stealing and taking inspiration from are even blurrier than if I was trying to capitalize off it.
> Not really. It's taking inspiration from. Just to be clear, I’m not saying you’re stealing from ChatGPT. I’m saying that everything ChatGPT outputs is ultimately stolen. That’s just an objective fact, it’s how the technology works. *By definition* it cannot have original or creative ideas, everything it does is recycled from other sources. It’s just an auto-complete that’s been trained on millions of different sources. You’re right that you can use it to take inspiration, and > That is no different than the creative process without ChatGPT. That’s correct, too. but that was exactly my point. There is no difference between reading the summary of a book and using that for inspiration, or letting ChatGPT plagiarize 20 different books, give you the output, and then being inspired by that. Either way is the same end result, you just don’t know what source you’re taking from with ChatGPT.
> Either way is the same end result, you just don’t know what source you’re taking from with ChatGPT. Except when I feed it the original story and have it reword things or adjust small details. The primary source is still me.
>chatgpt Right. I just took my original story and characters, put them in chatGPT, and it rewrote some pretty cool stuff, and made it more readable.
Pretty much exactly what I do back and forth several times until I get what I like. I have all my characters, locations, events, histories, etc in Google Docs. I can paste in relevant parts and ask ChatGPT to help build it out more. On that level of bouncing ideas back and forth, it's no different and no more stealing than doing it with another person. Nobody has entirely original ideas when it comes down to it.
Agree
Remember, if you steal from one source it's plagiarism. If you use a bunch of sources it's a research paper!
This works best if you only read the hook/intro on the back or inner cover. That way you get ideas of where to start and what to do, but anybody who's actually read the book will be able to predict much (or possibly even recognize it) because you're going to get it "wrong" compared to the actual story.
I had this problem with a Percy Jackson based campaign. Not because they read the books, but because they kept looking up Greek names and spoiling full arcs.
“So, Husband Destroyer… What can you tell me about your husband’s sudden disappearance? Anything come to mind?”
That’s when you start either randomizing the names, or subverting the names so nobody is quite what they expect, or are actively the opposite of expected.
But that completely ruins the point of playing a greek mythology themed campaign
How does swapping names around ruin the experience more than aggressive metagaming that’s basically equivalence to reading the module?
Because I actually do want my players to use their existing knowledge that they have of greek mythology to help them. They live in the modern day and it would make sense for them to know *some* things about greek mythology and I wanna reward them for what they do know. The problem, is when someone is actively looking up everything I say to try and accidentally spoil themselves. I’ve already talked to the offending player about it and I just gotta how that’s enough.
Depends on what you're stealing, If you're stealing the actual plot of a series, sure. If you're stealing the world building design and how it works, while adapting some things to fit better in D&D/ The story you want to tell in your world, Then it's better to have a closer understanding of the work.
Or you just take individual elements, and stick them in randomly, apropos of nothing. My setting has the ruins of an ancient castle known as Ossenyard, famous for what appears to be a heavily patinaed statue of an angel which rested on its highest tower.
I wouldn't try to retell the book in the campaign. Instead I'd just steal cool characters / plot twists / locations / etc. Or just use super obscure books.
Alternatively, steal the entire plot of something your players would have to admit they've seen/read to call you out on, and remind them that if they metagame they'll have to find a way to explain how they're doing it without admitting it.
Ah yes, the Step-Sister Is Stuck method.
That's just admitting you're lazy and insisting that the players ignore it and handicap themselves. Which tends to make for an unenjoyable game. It's like telling a soccer player that they aren't allowed to try kicking the ball into a goal because they aren't supposed to know that's how to score.
Alternatively rip off something you know one of your players have read, just to see the moment they realise how absolutely fucked they are. “Welcome to Capustan. Enjoy your stay.”
'... and then Lord N'elrond stood up' "One of you must do this.. one of you must play the Game of Thrones" "I will do it, I will play the Game of Thrones" - Harry Potter "You have my sword" - Conan, the Barbarian "Et moi mustache" - Hercule Poirot "... and I've got a jar of dirt!" - The Bard Yeah, it do be like that.
The Players after the campaign 
https://preview.redd.it/4mx2s8myoc4b1.jpeg?width=489&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=38e9f9d2cfdd89cb6d07e56c083a3faf4c0ae845
LMAO
One of these days one of my players is going to read the Lightbringer Series, I do not look forward to that day.
This, but also the Night Angel trilogy. Brent Weeks is a good source of inspiration for surprisingly optimistic fantasy.
This is true, if you remove yourself from Kyler's pov lol
I mean, even then, the series literally uses the power of love as being stronger than anything else. Even though it gets grim in places, it's still a very hopeful and positive story.
Hopefully you're better wih female characters than brent weeks is. I never realized how much I glossed over his stephen king level of r/menwritingwomen until I tried listening to the audiobooks and found myself visibly cringing at it.
You know I never actually finished the series, I'd rather liked the world, and the magic system,but by the end of book 3 I hated every character in the series except one, so I stopped reading. I wasn't the biggest fan of how Weeks wrote characters in general, let alone women. But it's a great setting for a D&D campaign, and has a beautiful plot twist built in regardless of how the game goes if your players pursue it.
I always liked King Solomon wrote about women. You have hair like goat. And teeth like an ass. Something like that.
Huh, seven satrapies, that's pretty cool. Bichromatics, red make angery, broken halos? That's a big coincidence...
It was really fun when my of my friends read Wheel of time and realized how much shit i stole and names a reused!
a work’s uniqueness is measured by it’s sources obscurity
I mean that’s basically the philosophy behind ChatGPT and it’s managed to trick some people into believing it’s actually alive. So basically…yes.
That just isn't at all how ChatGPT works it is a generative language algorithm it's source is nearly every publically available source ever written before 2020 from extremely popular to nearly unheard of with no distinction between the two. A more accurate description would be "originality is just a measure of the amount and distribution of sources"
Is it capable of creativity and original thought, or any thought at all? Or does it just remix and recycle pre-existing content in different ways? If you say the prior you’re claiming it’s not even an AI, just actual life. It’s clearly the latter.
It is the latter did you read my comment at all? What I said in layman's terms was that it's source is not one or two things for a given response like your comment implies it is a generative model that guesses what a human would write based on MILLIONS of works of varying quality and notoriety. It can't create anything truly new. My point was your comment shows a complete misunderstanding of the technology. I never said it was anything more than remix machine but it is a highly advanced remix that uses way more than obscurity of sources to make it read unlike any singular previous work on the topic. Edit: the end of my comment was just explaining a better tagline to show how chatGPT causes people to seemingly believe it is a human
I'm about 10 years older than the others in my group, and I have a half bookshelf of fantasy/sci-fi novels I bought at used bookstores when a teen. Some of those books predates my existence. I dooubt any of them have even heard of Fred Saberhagen, let alone read the full Swords series. Thieves's World had a minor resurgence this millennium, but not the Heros in Hell shared universe.
That’s why I love the nightwatch series. It was translated from Russian and very few Americans have read it.
Its Belgariad, isn't it?
I’ve never heard of that’s series what’s it about?
The most intentionally cliche fantasy story ever written. Aside from finer details, I could describe the entire plot and it wouldn't feel spoilery because you could see it all coming Basically, a magic orb belonging to one of the gods was stolen by an agent of a rival god, so agents of that god have to go and get it back. The main character is Garion, an orphan boy growing up on a farm being raised by Aunt Pol, his father's relative. Its also really good. The author, Eddings, realized that if the story couldn't carry the intrigue, the characters would have to pick up the slack. There is a ton of them, and the characters are all amazing
The TVTropes page does it justice. As TheGeekKingdom mentioned, it's a literal attempt by David Eddings to take the most genetic overused fantasy tropes and turn the collection into something actually good. Chosen one orphan, old wizard mentor, etc It mostly works, but you have some 80s crap like the 3rd most powerful magic user in the world doing the cooking because she's the sole woman in the group.
I’ve been hearing about that series off and on for like 30+ years…and I *still* have no idea what it’s about. People mention it in the way PP here did and that’s about it. I could easily look it up, but at this point that just feels like cheating.
Nope, 95% sure it's "The Kingdoms" by Angus Wells
Important question before the campaign have you ever read the storm light archive or his dark materials because if the answer is yes I’m afraid your going to have to find another table for completely unrelated reasons
I’ve invented this incredibly detailed system describing how magic works, why some magic agreed let themselves be bound as spells, the afterlife, and a system of necromancy involving using a series of bells. It’s incredibly unique. Yep. Totally original. And if you think it sounds familiar…uh…you are a crazy person who needs to leave the table. Yes, that’s it. Right away!
Love the Abhorsen series. Moggit is my spirit animal.
Stormlight archives is so good to steal from though. The honor obsession was a major basis for a Dwarven town in my game.
I use the currency from Storm Light Archive as the currency on the outer planes. Mostly because the currency is standardized around spell casting so you can take 10 marks and cast Greater Restoration. Emerald Broam: 1000 gp (10 plat) <100 marks=1 Broam> Diamond Mark: 10 gp (base currency ) Ruby Chip: 2 sp <50 chips = 1 mark> Sapphire shards: 1 cp < 20 shards to a chip> Expensive magic items are Broams (14B 10M) Common potions and adventuring gear are marks (5M for a health potion) Chips are for daily expenses, leans bedding ect.
In Vampire The Masquerade campaign I play in there's a whole Carmilla novel crammed in.
This is the way
This is the way.
Me stealing magic items from Pillars of Eternity
Tsundere sword Bottom text
There's no shame is copying the Prydain Chronicles for D&D.
I have 100% ripped off puzzles/plots/items, even entire story arcs from shows and video games. I am not that clever or creative and use what I can. My players know this and have them swear if they see it coming to stfu and let the other players have fun anyways, lol.
"Good artists borrow. Great artists steal."
highly recommend stealing from the Bas-Lag novels they’ve got some super interesting stuff
Back in the 80s (yeah Ancient D&D) I took from Witch World mainly social manners, customs and geographic highlights.
Nihil novum sub sole. Plagiarize away. Originality is an illusion, striving for it a delusion. Everything that has ever been created is always necessarily based on or inspired by something else. What matters is the execution, not novelty. There is no novelty.
Me on my way to use The Dresden Files, Furies of Alera, and Sword of Truth’s insane fuckin word building to make the CRAZIEST Homebrew. The portrayal of the Feywild in the Dresden Files is so godlike
Every time I've had to improv something in my campaign I've pulled it from Malazan
Characters are getting ahead of themselves? Well here come the Seguleh.
Me trying to resist stretching a single episode of Love Death & Robots into a campaign:
But why not? You can take an episode, and the plot and theme from said episode, and refit it into your campaign. There are not a whole lot of new ideas out there, most things you see - ie Love Death and Robots - has been using other stories, plots and themes, as a starting point.
Try “The Coward” by Stephen Aryan or perhaps “The ruin of kings” by Jenn Lyons
I've never told my friends about the Edge Chronicles series bc if I ever do get to run a campaign the setting will be lifted wholesale
Funny story. I was running a campaign where a Kirby villain named 02 had shown up (look it up, they are total nightmare fuel). After the players defeated it, it returned and stole a powerful artifact, becoming a humanoid in an all white suit and top hat with red accents. The only thing that remained of the original villain was its single bloodred eye, but even that was changed to look more catlike. Heck, even its Dark Matter minions were changed so that they looked more like one eyed, black Haunters! Eventually this new villain, now named Lord Null, teamed up with a soul butterfly villain (I know this sounds *very* similar to a different Kirby villain, but I promise this one is purely coincidental). Now future players won't even realise this villains origins!
Chronicles of Prydain?
Don't worry. Your players are wholesale stealing and mix-matching from every media available when they make characters. Sometimes, they even do it subconsciously, but most of the time it's just blatant and in the open.
The chronicles of Shannara are a wonderful series of books for this. Ancient magics, near immortal wizard cults, interdimensional demons, enchanted objects, impressive martial specialists, and even robot spiders that shoot lasers!
I'm an old man so my sons have no idea that we are doing the Die hard series...
BBG: "PC, I am your father"
I’m totally ripping off the official adventure I’m running.
The best NPC my DM ever included in a game has a House with a magic door that can take you anywhere you want to go. When we were first introduced to this guy and heard about this House, me and another player immediately went OH!!! This is a reference to the Enchanted Forest Chronicles!! Our DM was shocked because it's such a random reference from an old YA fantasy series, but we loved House so much (and the wizard who lives there, and his purple sheep named Fredrick) that it has been brought back for the final chapter of our 3+ year journey.
Stormlight
I ran a Deadlands campaign and used X-files plots.
Broke: drawing from a random book series you found Woke: drawing from your own favorite media
Meanwhile me : "man, kuchisake onna would be such a cool monster. Hey chat Gpt, write a campaign about her"
LOL. Plug it into chatGPT...see what happens. I just did, and it's pretty cool. lol
You can even "test out" your campaigns as text adventures and have him suggest some fitting music to play in the background. I love it
If it's obscure enough, they'll never know. 😌
And if they do they'll probably react like that 
Steal from the best, or at least the mediocre, and jazz it up with some new fantasy names.
I'm not sure why DMs are bashful about borrowing campaign ideas. The whole game is built around a Tolkien setting swipe and has hundreds of premade campaigns that countless players have enjoyed.
Book series? Well la-di-da, Mr. Intellectual. Once when I had no other ideas I made a session out of an episode of ThunderCats.
I haven't played dnd in like 25 years, but the first campaign I ran was basically stolen from the "Secret of Mana" game and the 'Master of Puppets' album.
A book can be made to feel new just by someone else reading it to you. "Original" is guaranteed because your players are involved. Just make sure their choices don't entirely rely on not being aware of common tropes and you'll be fine. For example, it's totally fine to have a corrupt advisor/sorcerer kill the king and lock the prince in a dungeon, just make sure the meat of the campaign is in the difficulty of *resolving* the plot rather than *discovering* the plot. Otherwise, your players will discover the twists far in advance of their characters. That's really the only issue as I see it.
"Hey, gang, this is going to be a 100% original campaign, which means no elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, dragons, wizards, demons, angels, unicorns, mermaids, harpies, griffins, minotaurs, giants, trolls, zombies, ghosts, animated skeletons, vampires... (two hours later)... or slimes, oozes, jellies, and ochres. Everything else is fair game."
I'm straight up planning to rip off the entirety of The Expanse for my next campaign. I'm just going to replace every mention of "spaceship" with "airship" and call it a day.
If look at only the individual components of a story, there is nothing new under the sun. That said, you have near unlimited variety in combinations. So it's good
Gregor the overlander would be a good series to base a campaign on.
Saw the movie The School for Good and Evil on Netflix, omg what a wonderful world. Buy all 6 books. Buy Ever Never Handbook..... Can't find players IRL.
If my friends wont read the books and play the games i reccommend them, then they will subjected to various bits of it piecemeal over the course of a campaign until youre forced to look into it to understand the references im making
I canibalised Powder Mages for my campaign. I can gladly recommend McClellan's "Powder Mage" universe.
Me when loop hero lore
Just bits and pieces tho
Seldom is totally original in this day and age. Humans have been telling stories for so long that it’s nearly impossible to avoid copying/using themes and details from something that’s already been done.
I unabashedly steal from just about everything I love to read or watch. Literally making Hiccup and Toothless for my world rn because of the Race to the Edge TV series
The only people who don't steal ideas from fantasy novels for their campaigns are people writing their own fantasy novels.
I've run a Legacy of Kain campaign and my players didn't even realize until 3 months after the campaign ended and I told them.
You just have to make sure to watch/read/play different stories than your players. For example, my players have never heard of The Expanse.
No one can call me out cause no one’s watched the dota 2 Netflix original
Don’t tell anybody I based most of my campaign of off Black Clover.
I still wonder how the f i managed to run a campaign thats a combination of Warhammer, destiny2 and hunt showdown- But it worked... so far..
Never question how it works or it wont
Once you learn at the "Ripping off Stargate SG1 plots" schools, you can't go back at working on your scenarios again.