Brazen Wolfe Tabletop

Obtaining Inspiration for Characters

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Now obtaining inspiration for characters isn’t that hard and its very similar to how I obtain inspiration for adventures when I am stuck. The world we interact with these days is so fast and filled with creativity that you don’t have to look too far to find something that could inspire. Movies, anime’s, TV shows, board games, books and comics, art, music, nature… the list goes on and on and for me inspiration for characters comes from three main sources.

1. Anime, Movies and TV shows

Ok you could argue that this is three things but hear me out. I don’t get a lot of time between work, my family and the blog so I generally have to choose one of the above three to indulge in one night a week. Yup. Once a week. So for me inspiration could strike from simply watching an anime and asking the question. “That was cool, how would that work in D&D?”. If you try and pin a class or move set against a anime character you can quickly find that you start identifying similar moves. For example, Sasuke or Kakashi using Chidori could simply be Shocking grasp. Their fast speed, stealth and ability to blink around the battlefield could be fey powers (Arch-fey warlock) but most likely is monk (way of the shadows), and their ability to do a few ninjitsu well, but not all of them while blending in complex fighting techniques and assassination style combat would fill in the other class to be fighter (eldritch knight) and rogue (assassin – I guess).

By identifying move sets from a favourite character you could build a D&D character that functions very much like them. Certain supplements out there already blend some of this together into a neat package by if you’re only using core rules then multiclassing becomes interesting.

2. Music

Now I have done 30 minute adventure challenges before where the adventure was prompted from a song that was randomly selected. Provocative music could give players the right imagery to create a character from nothing. One of my all time favourite songs, Shepherd of Fire, has inspired big bad, significant NPCs, demigods and even PCs for me. Strong emotional images in the song evokes a being cursed to serve a greater purpose or being.

Someone who could hold back an army if needed or be that army. This gives me cleric (as they are strong and backed by a deity) or even warlock (fiend or even undead patrons) who acts as a key piece in the game of chess that their patron or deity plays. More mainstream songs I find difficult to create these trigger points in which characters are born but even pop songs can generate enough of a creative spark to create a character. Bards who are pacifists who charm or enthral people, armies, a whole full tavern to make them forget their woes could sing “Happy” by Pharell Williams.

3. Books

Now a pretty obvious one. Dungeons and Dragons and most other TTRPGs are governed by books. So it only makes sense that inspiration for characters can come from fiction or even non-fictional places. Most Fictional books have a protagonist of the story in which you can gain inspiration from in a heart beat. They normally act a certain way using familiar move sets or patterns which you can identify and relate to D&D or a TTRPG rule system.

The secondary or support characters can provide this inspiration too and I find myself creating more, hypothetical, characters from support characters from novels I read compared to the main protagonist. I think this is because their story goes largely unwritten. There is elements you can take and fill in to create something that feels like its your own. The main character normally has entire story boards based on just them, let alone books, so they don’t feel like they can be played any other way.

Some of the most fun characters I have created were based off a hybrid of the main character and a support character, like Cheerwell maker in the Shadows of the Apt series when blended with other support character to have a tanky front line gnome who uses inventions to describe her battle manoeuvres and spell casting.

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