Throw Everything At the Wall

I contributed this post to the Carnival found here.

Not too long ago I wrapped up a Spirit of the Century (SotC) game. It was a fun game with a fantastic group. Before we started the game, I sent out a list of game pitches and asked my players to vote on them. As Murphy demands the players choose the only game I did not have a plot for. I could not seem to get my creativity going and come up with an original plot. After staring at a sheet of paper with nothing more than the heading "A Totally Awesome SotC Plot" for some time, I finally gave up and decided to run an adventure found in the SotC book.

The story was a simple one, there is a science convention and the PCs are all invited. Then there is a murder or two and the PCs run around and solve it.

So the night of the game arrives, and I find myself sitting in the game room waiting for players to show up, and it hits me: Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. The players are at a science convention, it should be a mad science convention. Every doomsday device, robot, portal device and hyper-intelligent ape should be represented at the conference.

I had no plot ideas for any of these at the time. But the plot of the entire campaign evolved naturally and effortlessly from the half hour of twiddling my thumbs before the game. It just so happened that by the end of the campaign I had worked in every invention at the conference.