Where Did You Get The Idea For…?!

Never ask a creative person "Where do you get your ideas?" This drives them crazy. Ideas come from everywhere, each idea has a unique source. However, if you ask about a specific idea then you’ll probably hear a tale worth telling.

(WARNING:SPOILER ALERT!!! The following contains information about the game "Uberman’s Wake" which may be rerun. If you believe you may someday play this game you may not want to read this).

Two of the plots in my first game, "Uberman's Wake," came from the same silly notion.

I was sitting alone, brainstorming, and fiddling with a toy. I forget which toy, but it ran on batteries. I was working on a superhero game and I was thinking about my character’s "origins." I wanted an eclectic mix of comic book origins, and I didn’t have a character who was a gadgeteer. I struck me that if a superhero relied on a gadget for his power then he would have to worry about his batteries.

I laughed and tried to get back to plotting my game, but the idea of the superhero with dead batteries just wouldn’t go away.

So I had to write it, and Ball Lightning started the game with dead batteries.

This lead to the obvious question, "Why can’t he just change the batteries?" Obviously he wasn’t an engineer, and he couldn’t have built his gadget himself. Suppose he innocently found the thing after a fleeing thief dropped it. This lead to other characters; the thief who stole the device and the mad scientist who invented it. So a poor nebish finds the gadget, becomes one of the most powerful supers on Earth, then his batteries die. Someone offers to help him recharge the device, someone else wants to prevent this, and our hero doesn’t know whom to trust. We have an excellent little plot.

Another obvious question lead to another plot. "What does a superhero do when his batteries die?" Well, if you can’t change your batteries, you retire. This lead me to consider what other reasons a superhero might have for giving up and retiring. Because they were afraid. Because they had a run it with the law. Because they were old. Soon I had several character ideas, many with little sub-plots of their own. Now I needed to do something with all these retired superheroes.

I came up with a religious fanatic who considered superpowers gifts from God. He would be stalking all the retired supers; first he would offer them a chance to repent (return to crime fighting), then he would punish them for sin of squandering God’s gift.

Wow, now I had two main plots, plenty or subplots, and a whole bunch of new characters. It all started with a battery operated toy.I still think a superhero with dead batteries is a funny idea.

Where did you get your most interesting idea? Why not share the story with us? We’ll all learn something about the creative process. People might even stop asking us where we get our ideas.

Write to "Ideas" at ideas@thelarper.org and let us know where you got your idea.