Musical Inspiration Challenge 2! Part 1: Our Reintroduction

I really enjoyed the last one. The whole having to congeal randomness into a cohesive story and adventure was something that I found really personally engaging. I had considered that perhaps I was doing this again too quickly, and should pace myself more.

Then I decided it was my blog and that I should do stuff on my blog that I want to do.

As I said, my aim has always been to make a blog that if I stumbled across it, I’d want to read. And well, the musical inspiration thingie is something I’d want to read. So..

To remind you about the rules. The aim is a sort of challenge / thought experiment, where an adventure is designed based on random songs that come up on my iPod shuffle function.

I’m not going to tie myself to any particular setting, but will aim for Fantasy RPG stuff in general, as modern or sci-fi is too ‘easy’ to make work with the collection of music on my iPod.

As before, I’m allowing myself Mulligans on overly long purely instrumental tracks. Also no podcasts, comedy segments or long bits of dialogue. Also, since I realized they’re in there too, none of the movie quote files I have sprinkled around (as much as I’d like to reference Remo Williams).

Unlike before, 12 songs will be selected, and they will be slotted into the following categories as they are ‘rolled’ by my iPod shuffle.

A few more new rules. No duplicates from last time and no songs that are from the same album or artist (so no more power loads of Alan Parson's project).

1.)    The Hook. This represents the idea, or crux of the adventure. Like the first line in the summary.  I figured Hook sounded better than “inspiration for the adventure.”
2.)    The Antagonist. Adventures can have many opponents. It might be a person, organization, or the environment itself.
3.)    The aim of the conflict. Why is the antagonist doing what he is doing? Why is the hurricane dangerous, etc.
4.)    Why should the players care? This one is very important.
5.)    The theme of the ‘dungeon.’ Dungeon of course being used in the sense of the site for our adventure. 
6.)    The complication. This is the first of our two twists. This one is what makes our situation more complex, or less straight forward.

7.)    Encounter 1. 

8.)    Encounter 2.
9.)    Encounter 3. The Final Battle. All of these ‘encounters’ represent set piece encounters or engagements, that may or may not be combat.
10.) Reward. What do the players get for all of this trouble? What’s the carrot on the stick?
11.) I originally called this the second complication. I’d rather refer to it as the Gonzo. This is the weird element in the adventure that isn’t precisely tied to anything else but makes things a little stranger or more interesting.

And our new addition..

12.) The Development: This represents an idea for elements from this adventure that can lead into other subsequent adventures.