I’ll begin by telling you what I’m not saying.
Don’t plagiarize.
Don’t use bootleg RPG materials.
The TTRPG industry is already small. Creators and authors already get very little income from it–and very little recognition. So don’t rip them off! If we don’t support the industry and the people behind it, it will disappear.
So what do I mean by “steal stuff”? As a Dungeon Master for a local game group, most of us are not looking to publish adventures. If you’re not publishing something, it’s not plagiarism. So there’s a lot that you can loot and pillage from others to make your game memorable, fun, and engaging. Here are the top three things that I regularly steal for my games:
Steal Plot Hooks and Story Elements
As a Dungeon Master, you’re a creator. You are putting ideas and imagery into the world through group storytelling. Output demands input. If you’re going to consistently create new things without getting stale and repetitious, you need to increase your input. How?
Watch movies and TV shows.
Read books.
Read adventure modules or listen to RPG live-plays.
Often, when I’m beginning a new RPG campaign, I’ll select a series of movies to watch that might inspire me. When I was preparing for 5e’s Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, I watched The Thing. For my mafia-inspired Star Wars campaign, I watched several mafia documentaries, as well as The Irishman. And as I’m watching, I’m looking for plot lines, NPCs, bad guys, settings, and twists that inspire me. Sometimes I flatly rip them off! But as long as I’m not selling it as my own idea, that’s fine.
Now, books are more of a commitment. If you don’t know how to get a good reading habit established, I blogged about it nine years ago (!). Regardless, reading regularly is simply a good habit for anybody who’s regularly putting ideas out into the world. In general, it litters your imagination with ideas, imagery, and inspiration that will (consciously or subconsciously) color your storytelling.
Now what about adventures? If you’re a new Dungeon Master, let me alleviate a nagging feeling that I used to have: you don’t have to run adventure modules (1) exactly as they’re written or (2) without omitting parts. In fact, you can read an entire adventure module and only take one small chunk of it. In the original days of the hobby, it was expected that published adventures and dungeons would be slotted into your own home game. That requires adjustment and editing. Just because a 2025 adventure comes packaged with an entire planet setting and two hundred pages of prose doesn’t mean you can’t still snatch pieces and parts out as needed. You don’t have to run the whole thing! The same can be applied to RPG live-plays. If you enjoy listening, go ahead. And when you hear a puzzle, trap, or plot device that you enjoy, steal it! It’s there for you to use! Borrow from all these sources liberally, if it helps your game! But also…
Steal Rules
This is an idea you’ll find promoted in OSR and old-school gaming circles. In short, every game is asking to be hacked. Homebrewing rules is one thing, but I’m talking about wholesale lifting a rule from one game and putting it into another. So here’s some questions to ask:
How can mechanics/rules help or hinder the game you want to run?
What are your favorite things about your favorite game system?
How can you import those things into another game system?
In my most recent session of Edge Studio’s Star Wars RPG, I used Shadowdark‘s initiative system as players went through a derelict space station designed using Cairn’s dungeon generation process. The result? I got exactly the feeling and effect that I would want. The feedback that I got from the players was that they enjoyed the difference in tone and experience, compared to past Star Wars games. Now, I don’t intend to use Shadowdark initiative forever. But for this session, it struck the right nerve.
No RPG ruleset is sacrosanct. All of these things are tools in your toolbox to use, in an effort toward having fun with the players. That means there’s even value to reading RPG books that you have no intention of running! Read it, be inspired by different ideas, and leverage them however might be useful. Steal story ideas. Steal rules. And finally…
Steal Players’ Ideas
This is a strategy you learn fairly early on, as you’re DMing. As I hear players strategizing and plotting, often they come up with better ideas than I have. They think of more unique villain motivations. They think of cooler ways to solve puzzles and defeat the enemy. Their horrified expectations are usually way more devious than what I have planned. So, if you hear them say something wild, inspirational, or cool, just change your plan. Go with what they say! And you don’t even have to tell them that you stole their idea.
My most recent Pirate Borg campaign was a puzzle-and-trap-heavy island crawl, in search of relics to unlock a massive treasure. Of all my traps and puzzles, there was only one with a clearly planned solution. I just wanted the players to come up with something intelligent or cool. Granted, I rarely gave them their first attempt. They had to work at it. But I wanted them to poke and prod at the world a bit, use the tools at their disposal, and engage their brains. Once it seemed a reasonable attempt–maybe they rolled a die to see if it worked–they figured it out! It’s shocking how much that seemed to resonate with the players.
In the end, you want to have fun. But you will have the most fun if players are having fun. So listen to their ideas, their assumptions, their desires. If you lean into those things, it will not only make your job easier, but it will help them to have fun too.
How about you? What have you borrowed from others that has proven helpful in your games? Sound off in the comments below…
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