Stuck for ideas for your campaign or story?

It’s a week before your new campaign or session starts and you have nothing planned.
Not because you dont have players, but this time, you have no ideas.

Well here’s an idea that may help with that.

** Random Wiki Article **

This suggestion uses Wikipedia to give you a random article.

1 – Open your web browser
2 – Save this link en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
3 – Click on the link
4 – Whatever article you are given, you use as the basis for an idea
5 – If you are really struggling or the article is a stub/short page, then click again.
6 – ?????
7 – Profit

The point behind this is to use the article you are given as a starting point. If could be a town, or a artist, or even a work of fiction. You dont have to use the article in full but as a idea-seed-generator. You start asking question about the orginal idea and flesh out the details, making sure to adapt it to your campaign or story. Each answer can then raise further questions.

Here’s an example

Page given: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantino_Pandiani
Constantino Pandiani

To sum up the page, Pandiani was an italian sculptor who lived 1837 to 1922

How can we use this?

Looking at his page we see on last line of the article he made a bronze statue of a goat called Pukki.

Now what if this goat was in fact some kind of golem or magical statue, sent there to protect the zoo.

Q – Why was it sent there?
A – To protect or look after something at the zoo

Q – What is it protecting?
A – Something , a creature maybe, is buried at this location, on which the zoo was built later.

Q – Why a goat?
A – The creature has a fear of goats, which the builder knew about.

Q – Why didnt the builder go to he location?
A – He wasn’t able to get there due to a curse place on him, preventing him from stepping foot on the ground near the zoo.

Q – What happens if the creature awakens?
A – The goat-statue will animate and hold the creature in place, whilst alerting its master to what has occurred.

Now you can see and adventure forming.

The party is contacted by the creator of the goat-statue to go to the zoo and covertly check it out(as he is prevented from going there himself). When the party arrives they find out the zoo could be moved and that all decorations, including the goat, is about to be put into storage.
The twist is that servants of the slumbering creature have purchased the zoo under pretence of moving it so they can waken their masters slumber.

Can the party clear the zoo and prevent panic? Or will they restore the goat to is proper location? If they prevent the awakening then they have gained both a useful friend and a new enemy, which is always a good source of adventures.

This system will be used to generate the weekly “Campaign Chunk”, which after a few have been published on the blog will compiled and put into a PDF, with the plan being that each chunk will be one or 2 pages.