Today's #RPGaDay2016 prompt is: Your best source of inspiration for RPGs.
I'm not sure I can narrow it down to just one source. Anything and everything sparks ideas for settings or creatures or whatever. The source is the entirety of experienced art and life that bubbles around in my brain. I'm not sure I'd want to prioritize, say, books over TV shows, or wikipedia over a half-inaccurate childhood memory.
That said, I find that sources vary in their ability to inspire ideas versus being useful research sources. I am -heavily- influenced by pop culture, especially TV and comics, when it comes to the ideas that just pop into my head when I'm improvising. When I'm prepping for a session, however, I lean more on genre fiction and non-fiction reference (like pop history books or wikipedia or the world-building stackexchange).
Gathering sources and experiencing culture widely is something I deliberately do, though. Ideas don't come from a vacuum--you need a solid bedrock to excavate from. When I'm working on something I like to come up with my own Appendix N, as much for myself as to communicate the genre conventions to my players.
Here's one I've been working on for Xenoarchaeology, a hard sci-fi, no FTL, near solar-system setting centred around a jumpgate and space-Earth tensions:
- the Belters in Larry Niven's Known Space books
- Firefly
- Classic Traveller
- Cowboy Bebop
- Stephen Baxter's Manifold: Time
- Elite and Freelancer
- Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy
- Lucasarts game The Dig
- Ben Bova's Grand Tour and Asteroid Wars books
- the film Moon
- Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space
- EVE Online
- the Planetes anime and manga
- the Mars One project
- asteroid mining companies Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries
- the first Alien movie
- Stargate
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