Songs:
The Meteors: "My Daddy is a Vampire" - was a game uncovering a sad family story about a Heortling poet whose mercenary Humakti father had gone bad.
Screaming Jay Hawkins; "Alligator Wine" - Used Screamin' as the basis of a shaman with a recipe for magical wine, and some sort of evil scheme.
Books:
Ghastly Beyond Belief, Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of Quotations, by Neil Giman and Kim Newman - was source material for a Zorak Zoran Death lord episode, and inspiration for a lot of dialogue.
Game Mechanics:
I've used game mechanics as the basis of episodes and whole campaigns. I wanted to have some character development rules/previous experience rules (for Runequest 3) that were consistent with each other, and with other things in the RQ3 world. For example, could anyone become a Sword of Humakt usiing only "previous experinece". Obviously not - so I modiified the rules and made it a bit of a game (inspired also by Traveller previous experience). The campaign then becam, amongst other things, a playtest for those rules. How do the player characters spend their time, practising, training, worship, work, dealing with people. etc.
On a smaller scale, I used to go through the Cults Book, and see what effects I could get with the Divine Magic. How fast could a Lokarnos Merchant go with 10 points of Hie Wagon? How many people could be involved in an Ulerian Ecstatic Communion and how many magic points could they expend (quite a lot!, with Mindlink). Some of these were then used in games. I realise now I was almost attempting to break the rules system, but it is a comlpiment to the writers of RQ that it was not gamebreaking in most cases.
The Stafford Library and other History of Glorantha essays: If you go through these books and picks out sentences that could be the basis of an adventure, or a whole campaign, you'll end up with a lot of sentences, or elements that you can use.
Judge Dredd:
I used the singing head episode cross fertilised with Dutch tulip mania and the Scintillating Bush Runners of Ytarian in a episode in 2nd Age Pavis.
Dickens:
My Morocanth speak, and act, as if they were characters in a Dickens novel.
"This is all very well Respected Elder, and very proper, so far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough."
"Now, what I want is fat. Teach these boys and girls nothing but fat. Fat alone is wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. Stick to fat,Sir."
Famous Speeches:
I had some fun adapting famous speeches to Gloranthan leaders - Winston Churchill became Delecti with a rousing speech against the threat of Wahaism. Martin Luther King became Varajia Nopor explaining his dream of draconism. More colour than actual scenarios.
Nostrodamus:
These prophecies are really easy to translate into Gloranthan ones, and the beauty of them is that they can be interpreted to mean lots of things leaving the Players to make up a plot for you with their interpretations. Here are a few:
>From the West shall come the Lion Claw
To vex Waha and the Sons of Storm Bull,
Accompanied by the Wyrms' Friends,
Eiritha shall tremble and the grasslands shall be empty
Between two mountains the great ones shall meet,
They shall forsake their great enmity,
Eiritha and Paragua shall be crushed by Magasta,
To put their plague in execution at Feroda.
The Pure, by anger, shall spread internal strife, And make against the King a great conspiracy, Secret enemies shall they put in the mine, And raise the old ones against them by sedition.
Ruin shall happen to the Sea People that will be terrible, Their great cities shall be tainted, a pestilent deed; They shall plunder the sky and the earth and violate their temples. And two rivers shall be red with running blood.
I should note that I used the tagline idea from The Dying Earth in my Hero Wars games, with characters gaining a sentence that they could exclaim instead of Hero Points. The tagline then gave them the same bonus as a Hero Point. These taglines gave me an idea of what the character wanted to do (since they were written in advance of the situation). They were often taken from literature, or popular culture.
Keith
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