I couldn’t decide which image to use to illustrate this article, so I’m giving you both of them!

It’s one of the easiest techniques to follow – you simply copy a character or a plotline from some other source, be it Television, a Movie, or a literary source. If you’re particular clever, you might go so far as to rename the character.

There are a number of reasons why a GM might be attracted to this. The character or story might be a personal favorite, or it might just seem absolutely perfect for the campaign’s current needs. Or there might be an irresistible pun or witticism involved.

Resist that urge.

What most people don’t realize is that such derivative interpretations fall flat seven times in ten – and explode in your face most of the rest of the time.

Not convinced? Okay, let’s run through why this happens. Then I’ll show you how to pull the fangs of this particular dragon.

Irresistible Humor

A joke of any sort is transitory. If you’re lucky, it might still be funny the second or third time. Sooner or later, though, it will become a millstone around the neck of the character or situation introduced purely for the comedic value of the media/literary in-joke, dragging your campaign down with it.

Tribute Characters

There’s a reason why a character appeals, and it’s rare to actually capture that with the character; the reason they are beloved is because of the situations they find themselves in, and how the character reacts to those situations, and how the character interacts with the other characters around him. Usually, these are carefully crafted to show the character in his ‘best’ light.

So when you clone the character, what happens? He finds himself in different situations, requiring a different reaction; he finds himself surrounded by other characters, and so the interactions with those characters are different. In a nutshell, the context doesn’t translate with the character, leaving him looking like a pale imitation of the original instead of the vibrant homage that you expected.

Cloned Plotlines

A plot develops as a consequence of the stimulus of the characters engaged in it. Different characters will react differently, have different capabilities and different priorities. In particular, the PCs are not going to the same as the protagonists in the source material.

Quite often, the plot requires characters to overlook the one correct explanation for what is going on, to experience particular lapses in logic, or to make particular assumptions that shape their thought processes and actions. None of these are likely to be replicated by the PCs, and so the plot will evolve in a different direction to the original. Long before you get to the parts of the source that motivated you to create the derivative plot, it’s on a completely different course.

Making matters worse, you have often been so busy adapting and collating the plot that you expect to occur that you haven’t done prep for what actually happens, forcing you to scramble to react to the situation. And when you do that, your first instinct is to try and force the plot “back into shape”. The tracks are laid and the PCs forced aboard the plot train before you know it, all in the most blatant form possible.

Or, if you have avoided these pitfalls, you run afoul of the fact that plots are designed for particular characters – and your characters are different. The coalescence of this reality is that your plot is unlikely to suit your characters as well as the lovingly polished narrative in the source – and that leaves your efforts less satisfying than the original was.

Clone plotlines are one pit-trap after another for the GM to fall into.

The right way to do it

There are solutions to all these problems, a right way to do it that either solves or avoids these problems, and a number of others that I haven’t mentioned.

The right way to incorporate a joke or witticism

Have you ever noticed that people are more prone to laugh at a joke if they have already been laughing? It’s the difference between a “cold room” and a room that’s been “warmed up”.

The other time that humor is most likely to hit the mark is when it’s a relief, a release.

So tell your joke as an aside, use it as mood inspiration, and let the players and yourself find your own joke amongst in-game events. But either soften the ground up in advance with other humor, or go in the exact opposite direction.

Throw a little slapstick at an NPC. Tell a joke or two. Show a humerous cartoon or meme around. Make your target audience receptive, then use your joke as a launchpad. “My first thought was to make Darwin Orwell a character like [name] for the joke value – can you imagine what he would say/do if he were in this situation?” – then tell your joke.

This gets the ‘audience’ receptive, incorporates the humor that you wanted to use, and gets full value for it – without contaminating your in-game situation.

The right way to make a homage to a favorite character

At the very end of 2015 (I can hardly believe it was so long ago), I offered details of a villain named Mortus, who was a homage to the comics version of Marvel’s Thanos, a character that has been lurking about the Marvel Cinematic Universe for a while now, and who is set to figure prominently in the forthcoming Avengers: Infinity War.

Having railed against derivative characters, how could I countenance such a creation, let alone laud it as a success?

First, because this wasn’t a cheap knock-off, or second-rate pale shadow of the original; instead, I took the central concepts of the original character and constructed a new character that embodied those key themes in a new context.

Next, the adventure in which he appeared was one designed to highlight this new character. He did things that the original source character would not have done because the source character had completely different motives and ambitions. In terms of personality, the two were as different as dumplings and steel girders, and the adventure served to showcase the character who was actually in-play, and not the one that had inspired him.

The best homages are those which permit you to do something original, and which let the new character evolve in his own direction.

Compare Thanos with Mortus in detail, and understand the process that created one from the inspiration provided by the other.

The right way to draw inspiration from a situation or plotline

There is a novel of the thriller genre called ‘The President’s Plane Is Missing‘ by Robert J. Serling. There is another, ‘The Red President‘ (link is to the Amazon page for the book which has more and better reviews than anywhere else).

At one point in the last Zenith-3 campaign – about nine years ago, I guess – I attempted to combine these into a single adventure, with the plane crash merely a cover to conceal what was being done to the President.

In theory, it should have worked. In practice, it was a near-disaster, with the PCs exposing one plot hole after another, most of them stemming from the fact that they did not follow the script that the protagonists in the novels worked from. They thought of things sooner, and thought of options that the novel didn’t mention.

In the end, the plan was so riddled with holes that to salvage credibility for the bigger picture, I had to make this a plot by a crazed zealot within the KGB who usurped official resources for his own ends, rather than a state-sanctioned operation. And get out of it as quickly as possible.

So my criticism of derived plots stems from first-hand misadventure. Sometimes, things work out to a better outcome than this experience, but you can never be sure of that outcome until after you have nailed your colors to the mast.

But I learned from that experience, and from a couple of more successful attempts. The key is to select the one or two central premises, settings, or scenes that capture the appeal of the source material, translate them into your genre if necessary, and build a new adventure around them, throwing away everything else, which embeds these sources of inspiration into the context of your campaign and characters.

If that sounds an awful lot like the approach recommended for characters, it should. That’s because it works.

By way of example, let’s take a story that most people will recognize, Star Wars, and start adapting it to a D&D/Pathfinder setting.

The central plot of Star Wars has two elements: “Farmboy against an Evil Empire” and “Farmboy discovers unsuspected mystic powers”. We can work with both of those, but first we have to confront a major issue: our Farmboy isn’t the star of the show, the PCs are. At best, he will be a prominent NPC.

I am rejecting out-of-hand the idea of making “The Farmboy” one of the PCs for a long list of reasons, including (but not limited to):

• It isn’t something the player intended for his character;
• It adds an ongoing thread to the campaign rather than the standalone adventure we were aiming for;
• It unfairly singles out one PC over the others; and
• It takes control of the narrative out of the hands of the GM and places it in the hands of a player, who may not be on-board with it.

However, if there’s a PC who fits the cliche – high charisma, young, etc – it might be amusing to have someone mistake him for the Farmboy. In fact, that might be a good way to first put the plotline on the PCs radar. Something to bear in mind as I proceed.

The question of how the PCs will fit into this situation will fundamentally shape the plotline. But I have to admit that right now, nothing is coming to mind.

So let’s move on to the next element – the Evil Empire, which poses a whole new set of challenges. Empires are big; they tend to dominate the political landscape in every direction. It doesn’t make sense for one to suddenly be revealed that the PCs have never heard of before. To be able to integrate it into an existing campaign without having it dominate that campaign from that point forward, we need to scale it down while remaining true to the premise of “one against the odds” – and knowing the we will need to violate that premise when the PCs become involved.

In fact, let’s scale it all the way down to become a tiny hole-in-the-wall kingdom, the sort of forgotten political relic that might be omitted from maps. But in a younger age, it was in fact the seat of a mighty Empire. We could further suggest that centuries after the greater political structure fell, it was annexed by a neighboring ‘upstart’ kingdom, though it retained enough power and influence internally to be granted an unprecedented level of independence. This guarantees that it won’t be shown on any modern maps, and will be forgotten by all but the scholars and the locals. But it also means that they have a few artifacts and historical remnants of the power of the Old Empire.

So, what happened to it, to cause it’s fall? And why is it now considered an Evil Empire? There are lots of possible answers, but one lept immediately to my mind, and it’s representative of the point that I’ve been trying to make in this section.

Perhaps they grew powerful enough to invade one of the circles of Hell, smug in their moral certitude and drunk on power. It became the height of fashion for the aristocracy to display their power by parading captured devils on leashes wherever they went. The devils seemed so totally cowed that they endured this without protest, a point not lost on the Empire’s neighbors and subjects. But all the while, the Devils were whispering in the ears of that aristocracy, and the aristocracy become cruel, despotic, jealous, and protective of privilege.

Seemingly overnight, internal conflicts sprang up like weeds, great family going to war with great family, and the Empire shredded itself to pieces, becoming a long-forgotten footnote of history.

This does a number of things for the GM. It raises the stakes of what the Old Empire’s leftovers could represent, power-wise, though they no longer have the numbers to dominate. Should anyone with more might and ambition uncover their secrets – even just some of them – a mighty army might become a nigh-invincible military force. Certainly, within their domain, trouble and bloodshed would be around every corner, just waiting to be unleashed. The remnants of several of the old Great Houses would linger, still despotic and intent on pursuing petty rivalries and long-forgotten insults. Civil Wars between this family and that would be an annual recreation, and alliances would come and go like the tides. Betrayal and scheming would be second nature.

All of which makes it seem pretty evil as a place, and helps explain why the Kingdom which has (nominally) conquered it keeps the place at arm’s length whenever possible, rather than getting entangled in their endless rivalries and feuds.

We’re still looking for a way to get the PCs involved, but this characterization of the Empire not only provides a foundation for our Farmboy having unsuspected powers, it suggests that there might be some legacy artifact from long ago that the PCs need in order to deal with a more modern evil. It all also speaks to Priests and Elite troops have strange and exotic weapons – effectively translating Darth Vader and Lightsabers in the in-game context. But we don’t want such powerful weapons running riot through the campaign, so make them dependent on some forgotten power source within what’s left of the Empire – go beyond it’s borders, and they stop working. In fact, the area in which they work would be the practical definition of the “Imperial Boundaries” – cross this line and you enter a world of hurt, but it’s all bottled up and the secrets have been lost.

At this point, the plot is beginning to take shape. Part 1: The PCs are confronted with some Evil, discover a Devilish connection, find the Devil in question to have overwhelming power, but learn of a potential weapon against him or her in an isolated and long-forgotten corner of an old Kingdom. Part 2: Rumors, Myths, and Legends delivered en route as they search for the old Kingdom prepare them for what they will face. As their quest unfolds, they become entangled in one plot after another as various factions attempt to use them for their own ends. Part 3: Finally, they get a lead on what might be the artifact they seek, in the keeping of the lost heir to another of the great houses – our Farmboy. It turns out not to be what they wanted, but it awakens his inherited powers and he sets out to rescue his childhood sweetheart, who was sold to another of the great families to settle a debt between them. The PCs can either aid the Farmboy or not, as they see fit, but either way, his quest will further complicate theirs. Part Four: In the course of his Personal Quest, the Farmboy learns the location of the item the PCs are looking for, and promises it to them in exchange for their aid in rescuing his Princess from the citadel in which she is held. They succeed, get their reward, and in Part 5, use it to undo the Evil that sent them on this quest in the first place.

A nice touch would be to relate the original Evil to the War in some fashion, making the whole thing more self-contained and internally-referential. We would need a seer or scholar of some sort to set the PCs on the path.

This certainly has the right “epic qualities” to be a homage to Star Wars, and I’ve even been able to stir in some direct references – the elite forces and the “Lightsabers”, and make them critical elements in sustaining the credibility of the situation rather than undermining it. We can even have a Darth Vader -analogue for the High Priest of the Family (led by a Moff Tarkin -analogue) who have the Princess, and the Citadel can obviously be a tip of the hat to the Death Star – it just needs a big weapon on top that forces an approach using stealth and guile!

But, at the same time, this has a completely different plot, one that’s integrated fully with the genre, game setting, and milieu. It’s an in-context homage to Star Wars, not an attempt to simply retell the Star Wars story in a fantasy setting. It has plenty of scope for the PCs to steer the plotline as they see fit. And finally, it transforms familiarity with the source material into an asset, rather than a liability.

It avoids all the pitfalls of a derivative storyline to deliver something that tips it’s (metaphoric) hat to the source material while delivering something unique and appropriate to the genre.

And it shows the right way to take an external plot and add it to your own RPG stew.