The Story Idea Recipe

Today you will learn how to never run out of ideas for your stories. I will give you the tools for coming up with an endless amount of unique and exciting premises for adventures, locations, characters, and scenes. If you have ever stared at a blank page, unsure of where to begin, looking for an interesting idea but coming up empty - this lesson is for you.

By the end of this lesson, you'll have a library of story building blocks and a toolbox of creative techniques you can use anytime you need an idea.

What is a story idea?

Before we talk about how to come up with ideas, let's talk about what a story idea actually is.

Every story idea - whether it's a movie, a book, or a tabletop adventure - can be boiled down to a simple recipe:

In a [setting], the [hero] must achieve [objective] despite [opposition].

That's it. Those are the ingredients. Setting, hero, objective, opposition.

• In a magic school, a boy wizard must stop an evil sorcerer from obtaining the Philosopher's Stone.
• In a theme park populated with cloned dinosaurs, a group of scientists must escape from the dinosaurs who broke free from their enclosures.
• In a galaxy far, far away, a farm boy must destroy an evil emperor's planet-killing superweapon.
• In an Egypt-themed fantasy city, the heroes must recover a stolen amulet before cultists use it to resurrect the Scorpion King.

Once you see story ideas as a combination of ingredients, you can take them apart and put them back together in new ways. But we'll get to that in a moment.

For tabletop adventures, we focus on three of these ingredients: setting, objective, and opposition. Unlike in movies and books, you don't need to come up with a hero - the heroes of the story are your players.

So, our key ingredients are:

• Setting - where does the story take place?
• Objective - what goal will the heroes pursue? What problem must they solve?
• Opposition - what makes this objective difficult to accomplish? Who or what stands in the heroes' way?

These three things, combined into one sentence, is called a logline - the simplest possible description of your adventure idea. Creating your logline is the first milestone of this course. Over the next few lessons, you'll develop each of these ingredients and combine them into a logline for your adventure.

But first, you need ideas to work with. Where do they come from?

The wrong way

The reason most people struggle to come up with ideas is that they try to make them out of nothing. Staring at the blank page and trying to think of something. Waiting for inspiration to strike.

That almost never works. It's the slowest, most frustrating way to create anything, and the main cause of writer's block.

Lego blocks - the right way

Here's the mindset shift that makes everything easier: you don't have to invent ideas from scratch.

Every creative person who seems to have endless ideas isn't pulling them out of thin air. They have a mental library of ingredients they've collected over years of watching movies, reading books, and playing games - and when they need to create something, they have methods of changing these ingredients to make them unique, and recombining these ingredients in novel ways.

Think of it like playing with lego blocks. You're not sculpting clay from nothing. You're snapping existing pieces together in new ways.

And now that you know what these pieces are, you can look at any story, pick it apart into these ingredients, and start building your own mental library of lego blocks.

Picking apart stories

Here's how to do it. Pick a story you love - a movie, a TV show, a book, a game, anything. Then try to identify the key story ingredients and distill them into a logline:

• Where does the story take place? What's interesting about the world of the story? That's your setting.
• What does the main character want? What goal do they pursue throughout the story, what interesting problem are they trying to solve? That's your objective.
• What stands in the hero's way, who or what makes their objective difficult to achieve? That's your opposition.
• What are the coolest, most memorable characters?

Even in great stories, not every ingredient is maximally original. Harry Potter is a pretty typical main character. Lord of the Rings is basically a delivery quest. Inception is a reverse heist. Alien is a typical monster story, in space.

But most memorable stories have at least one story ingredient that's really strong, or combine the ingredients in unique ways. Once you learn how to see stories as combinations of key components, you can do that as well.

Make a list of your favorite stories. Think about ingredients that made these stories so memorable.

Think about settings. Hogwarts. The Matrix. Jurassic Park. The Fallout Wasteland.

Think about objectives. Destroy the Death Star. Escape a robot assassin from the future. Train a dragon.

Think about opposition. The T-1000. Voldemort. The shark in Jaws. The Xenomorph.

Think about characters. Walter White. Jack Sparrow. Ace Ventura.

These are your lego blocks. Start collecting them.

Recombining

Now here's the fun part. The combination of ingredients is often what makes a story interesting - not any single piece on its own.

• Inception is a heist in a dream.
• The Martian is a survival story on Mars.
• Finding Nemo is a rescue mission in an ocean.

What if you took ingredients from different stories and combined them in new ways?

• Take the setting from Harry Potter and the objective from Die Hard, and you have an adventure where the heroes must infiltrate a wizarding school to rescue the students who have been taken hostage by a group of vampires.
• Take the objective from Finding Nemo, combine it with the monster from Alien, and you have an adventure where the players need to help an alien monster rescue her baby kidnapped by the evil scientists.
• Take the setting from Mad Max and the objective from Speed, and you get an adventure where the heroes are stuck on a war rig barreling through the wasteland that will explode if it stops moving.
• Combine Jurassic Park and Shawshank Redemption, and you get an adventure where the players must help environmental activists to liberate terrible monsters from a zoo.
• Combine Romeo and Juliet and Ocean's Eleven, and you get a love-struck teenager who asks the players to help him commit a bank heist to impress the father of the girl he's in love with, a crime boss of a powerful mafia family.

You can even take just a single element from a story you love, and adapt it to the genre and setting of your game.

• Take Honey I Shrunk the Kids, adapt it to the fantasy world, and you get an adventure where an evil witch shrinks the players, who now must cross her enormous hut to reach the enlarging potion on the top shelf.
• Adapt Alien, and the heroes must stop the cruel power-hungry emperor who tries to build himself an army by breeding dangerous Xenomorph-like monsters.

Bottom-up ideas

Sometimes your idea starts from a very specific fragment - you want your players to fight a certain monster, visit a certain location, find a specific magical artifact. That's a great starting point too. Expand the fragment and see which of the core ingredients it leads you to.

• I want my players to attend the King's feast:
  • Objective: They learn that someone has poisoned the food.
  • Setting twist: The cooked boar has left a ghost who is determined to ruin the feast.
• I have a cool swamp battle-map:
  • Setting: The Swamplands of No Return.
  • Opposition: Swamp Witch who holds a Terrible Secret.
• I want my players to find the Scroll of Sweet Slithering Snakes:
  • Opposition: It is being held by a brilliant, powerful, and extremely paranoid wizard.
  • Setting: It has been lost in the Basilisk's lair.

Modification methods

But we don't just stop there. We can modify the story ingredients themselves to make unique and original versions of them.

Here are four methods for twisting the tropes and ideas you have collected into something fresh. You can use these to take any familiar or generic idea and make it surprising and original.

The first one is to reverse the idea. Take a key aspect of the idea and do the opposite. Take a fantasy cliche, "the heroes must rescue the princess from the dragon". Reverse it and you get "rescue the dragon from the princess". Now you have an adventure where the heroes must help a child dragon to rescue his mom who has been captured by a cruel princess to fight in a coliseum for her entertainment. Take the character you like, and flip their core personality trait. Evil Hermione, shy Batman, lovable Joker. Reverse the setting, like Men in Black, and you get a world where aliens roam free and humans are hiding among them.

The second method is to exaggerate the idea. Take something to the extreme. Instead of a werewolf hiding in a village, everyone in the village is a werewolf. Every single person. Instead of delivering a ring to the volcano, the heroes must deliver a galleon transporting an entire dragon's hoard. Instead of a haunted house, the entire city is haunted.

The third method is to replace a part of the idea with something unexpected. Swap one element for something from a completely different genre. Typical train heist - but on a zeppelin. Magic school, but for superheroes. Walter White, but he's trading forbidden potions.

And the fourth method is to combine ideas that don't belong together. Zombies on the Titanic. School for robots. Dragon accountant. Dark Lord on a vacation.

These methods are stackable. You can reverse an idea, then exaggerate the result, then combine it with something else. And they work on everything - not just your overall premise, but characters, settings, individual challenges. Whenever something feels generic or expected, just use one of these methods.

And these four are just the beginning. In the next lesson we'll look at Story Source's twist cards, which give you a full deck of modification methods you can draw from whenever you need to twist an idea into something fresh.

Bonus tip: pick a genre

Intentional constraints dramatically simplify the creative process. If you're feeling overwhelmed by the endless possibilities, narrow down the type of adventure you want to create before you begin brainstorming:

• Lighthearted comedy-heist
• Post-apocalyptic fantasy
• Intense spy thriller
• Gritty western
• Sci-fi horror

Knowing the genre tells you which lego blocks to reach for, and makes every choice that follows easier.

Start building your library

So your goal for today is to start building your library of ideas, which you will use as raw materials when you create your adventure.

Make a list of your favorite stories. Pick them apart into adventure ingredients. Try recombining and modifying them to create novel ideas. Then go take the action steps, and come back for the next lesson, where I'll show you a tool that generates these building blocks for you.

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Action Steps

• Start building your library of adventure ingredients. List 10 of your favorite stories - movies, TV shows, books, video games, anything. For each one, identify the ingredients: what's the objective? The setting? The opposition? The coolest character? Write them down.
• Recombine. Pick ingredients from different stories on your list and try snapping them together into adventure ideas.
• Modify. Take your favorite ideas and try applying the modification methods. Reverse something. Exaggerate something. Replace an element with something unexpected. Combine two unrelated ideas.
• Using any of these methods, write down 10 new ideas, even rough ones.
• Share your ideas in Discord - post your list of ideas in the #share-your-ideas channel. Look at what other people posted, and leave feedback on someone else's ideas. See if you can build on their ideas, combine them with something, or take them in an unexpected direction.