Free Idea Dumping Ground

@hcobb: That was actually the inspiration. I had to wonder why a high school developed Goku Uniforms, not the government; and why the Men in Black hadn't shown up and confiscated them. In a lot of anime, it seems like the school owns the town, not the other way. I got to thinking; "heh. What if it really worked like that..."

edited 27th May '15 4:01:13 AM by dvorak

Macquarie University revokes degrees for students caught buying essays in MyMaster cheating racket

tl;dr - some kids bought term papers and the university in Australia revoked their degrees.

Just pitching some ideas here:

• A superhero who Teen Genius is gets exposed for cheating. Did the hero not care for college? Brilliant, but Lazy? Or is the hero faking the genius part?

• A character's cheating from many years ago is exposed when the essay mill is shut down. The character has done a lot of good and/or earned a legimate master's degree with hard work. This mistake threatens the character's career and invokes Clear My Name.

• An immortal used an essay mill because he/she/it has a very distinctive writing style. Needing a new indentiy, not wanting to risk exposure and having other things to do, the immortal purchased a thesis from an essay mill. Then the essay mill gets exposed and the immortal's degree is revoked. The thesis was so good the facility looks into the immortal's c.v. and discovers that things just don't add up. Is the dean of students ready to face the real truth?

A premise for an open-world game: a morally-ambiguous MegaCorp is developing an assortment of high-tech equipment and weaponry. One day, a large stockpile of prototype gear is stolen (a warehouse raided, or a shipment intercepted) by anonymous perpetrators, who then distribute the gear at random to the public. The setting becomes a City of Adventure overnight as all sorts of people (including the player character) find laser blades and plasma cannons and deflector shields dropped off at their doorstep, with no further instructions other than "go nuts".

The MegaCorp, looking to prevent the city from descending into chaos (and more importantly, salvage their own PR), decides that the best way to contain the leak is to track down anyone who's obtained their tech, and hire them to take each other out. Anything goes: a bounty is paid for any "techie" neutralized, and it's less-than-subtly implied that once all is said and done, the last techie standing will receive a very large reward. Let the games begin.

That actually sounds like an excellent premise for a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena.

EDIT: Or, yeah, an open-world game.

edited 30th May '15 6:53:02 PM by AwSamWeston

That sounds awesome! You should do it, totally do it! Take up programming, hire programmers, do whatever and just do it!

A series where a growing group of heroes travel a fantasy world collecting 7 Magic MacGuffin in order to banish a dragon from their world.

edited 5th Oct '15 5:58:25 PM by HydraGem

Something along the lines of a Magical Girl anime, with the twist that our protagonist is actually an effeminate looking but masculine personality boy who is not at all happy about this, thank you very much...

An actress is hired to play a country singer who had a tragic death. She researches the role only to find that she's now talking to the ghost of the country singer.

After a stiff drink and some proof that yes she can talk to the dead, the ghost agrees to help her "get into character" as it were if she agrees to finish the album the country singer was working on when she died.

However a Stalker with a Crush isn't too happy that some hollywood "bimbo starlet" is playing his beloved star. The record company wants to cash in on the movie and wants to make changes to the movie. Can the actress finish the movie and help a ghost find peace and dodge the loony fan and greedy execs?

A game mechanic for an MMO where if a character dies, they don't just respawn: they have to create a brand new character with new stats, name, identity, ext. Their dead body is wherever they died and they have 24 hours to find their body and reclaim their loot. Nobody else can loot the dead body, however, after 24 hours, that dead body reanimates and becomes an enemy NPC with all the stats, abilities, and items it had when died. Whoever can defeat the enemy can then loot the body.

I like it. Would be good for a Rogue Like game too...

Huh, you know, it does!

A Dungeon Maintenance sim with Stress Management as a resource. Inspired by A Day In Draculas Life.

I think there's a similar mechanic in RuneScape, minus the "create a new character" part. The time limit is also shorter.

I had one idea for my dwarves that I probably won't end up using. Dwarven kingdoms were actually covers for cloning bays set up in mountains. Long ago, long before any recorded history of the world was a Precursor civilization that decided to make a civilization of clones. Maybe it was a lead up to more cloning that would've been done if they hadn't vanished. Maybe it was the inclinations of one ancient mad scientist who wanted quasi-immortality. Maybe they knew that they would vanish, and there was going to be more people put into the system memory, but someone deleted the others. Or they vanished before they could input one guy, and the current template was just the first guy in line, or he was the beta version.

Whatever the reason, a short Scotsmen with an alcohol problem, greed, and a penchant for axes cloned himself in secret bases in the mountains that have survived until present day. It was meant to be a parody of why all dwarves are the same, why dwarves act the way they do, and how a One-Gender Race can reproduce. It was also to explain why there aren't any half dwarves running around, despite their tendency to drunk, party, and hit on anything. Since dwarves are pretty much human (just one specific human over and over again), any offspring would be a Half-Human Hybrid.

I also had a different one where the dwarves are more like ants. The ones we see are actually infertile females. The few actual males stay home all day and impregnate a grotesquely inhuman queen. The whole race is completely inhuman, and their bearded Scotsmen personas was simply the kinds of people they met (like a human stereotype) and they shapeshifted into that form to interact and trade with humans.

As much as I like both of these, I haven't thought of any story to go with them, and so far the stories I have concocted that feature dwarves require them to have standard females, and the ability to breed the old fashioned way.

edited 13th Jun '15 8:23:31 AM by washington213

I'm one of those writers that keeps getting more and more ideas until I have too many to realistically do anything with, so I suppose it wouldn't hurt to drop off a few here.

An idea I had recently is a story where, years after the existence of monsters and magic was revealed to the world, an aspiring artificer goes to a college for supernatural studies, and ends up getting a succubus for a roommate. The series would ideally be a Fantastic Comedy Slice of Life focusing on college life in a world where supernatural goings on are a part of everyday life.

Here's a plot device for the more aviation-inclined tropers.

The Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25 Foxbat fighter is cheap, plentiful, still pretty powerful, but ageing badly. It's got some very nice features for all that: most relevantly, a sprint speed of Mach 3.2 (if you don't mind cooking the engines—you can sustain Mach 2.5 until your fuel runs out), an impressive fuel capacity, and an innovative-for-its-day Peleng navigational system that allowed a ground controller hundreds of kilometers away to steer the plane. In theory, in an interceptor or bombing configuration, you just needed the pilot to land the thing; everything else, even weapons release, was handled by the Peleng ground system.

Any number of minor countries own MiG-25s. Big countries like India and Russia have retired theirs and would be willing to sell them pretty cheaply. Peleng was sophisticated for the 1970s, but today, with a GPS and a computer-controlled system, you could duplicate its performance in a small, cheap package that could easily fit in a trailer or a cargo plane.

Or to put it another way: if you didn't care about landing it, you have a relatively inexpensive Mach 3.2-capable long-range (because it doesn't need to carry the fuel to come home) one-use drone that can be used as a bomber, a cruise missile, or a very realistic-behaving decoy—or even a UCAV.

edited 14th Jun '15 12:06:28 AM by SabresEdge

A sort of inversion of 208; a roguelike where you play as a haunted sword that takes over whoever tries to claim it. You start out as a Death Knight; the person whose soul is bound to the blade. When a monster kills you, you lose all your levels and skills that are race-dependant, but gain the stats and skills of the poor schmuck who just picked it up (and retain all the death knight spells you bought with skill points).

A TV series about a superhero RPG. The hook is that none of the player archetypes mix at all with each other.

Cast:

The GM/narrator - Tries to state things as they are but gets into arguments with the players.

Leader/Smart Guy - Philip Marlowe style PI. Even though he claims to have no superpowers, the others wince every episode or two when he fails a saving throw against his uber stats. (Happens all the time to the rest of them who have put all their character points into powers.)

The Chick - His tweeny RL sister who's doing the Magical Girl Queenliness Test. Her character is slumming on Earth at the residence of her RL brother's character, and failing to pass as an Earth girl. Every few episodes she'll try to move one of her many powers from her Obvious, Accessible Focus to her character and the GM will point out that she hasn't saved up enough character points to buy off the limitation.

The Big Guy - Uber munchkin superman ripoff. He'll always say how his character is simply immune to whatever weapon the villains are using, until the GM points out that the weapon isn't pointed at his character.

The Lancer - Video game style super martial artist. Always try to pull off his coolest moves, especially when not appropriate.

The usual plot is that the PI will be investigating a mystery when one of the others drops in and uses their superpowers to short circuit the case, and then the plot goes off the rails for the rest of the episode.

Inspired by a conversation with Wysp, watching Artix's LP of FF-XIII.

Imagine a story—probably an RPG campaign—that's fairly standard fantasy fare. The main characters level up, discover that the ruler of the country is the Big Bad Evil Overlord , goes after him, engage him in battle, he goes down easily once but then engages his One-Winged Angel form...

...and proceed to absolutely wipe the party's asses. Perhaps a lone survivor or two lives to scamper away; the hero, naturally, is not one of them.

But this turns out to be the villain's ultimate downfall, because it turns out the villain can't un-transform. And while it might give him a lot of physical power, this comes at the cost of whatever secret he's hiding coming out, the loss of his political authority, and his country's descent into revolt and civil war.

So Act II begins: the next generation of heroes steps up to run the insurgency and bring about the villain's final downfall. Because as strong as he is, he is one man: no match for a united country, if someone can bring it about...

(I think my egalitarian streak tends to ruin my enjoyment of Final Fantasy and related games. I don't care what kind of hero you call yourself, you go down to SMG bullets as easily as the mooks you're fighting.)

I have a something:

Cloning a person allows for the clone to have access to all of their template's (i.e. the person they were cloned from) magical powers and skills. However the clones have a short lifespan. An exception was made when a mother tried to clone her deceased daughter, who was about five at the time. Thing is, the clone does not have a short lifespan, but in fact has the soul of an angel melded with the clone's soul, and therefore has a long lifespan. And the deceased daughter is technically still alive in that the soul created another body for herself. When the two meet, the clone siphons off the magical abilities from her template.

It's a something.

A horror game similar to Dead Space. However, every enemy regenerates.

An "antagonist" for a fantasy setting, the Dust: a curse gone horribly wrong, sweeping along the land like a plague and causing everything affected by it to slowly wither into Dust. Essentially, a magical equivalent to Grey Goo.

edited 14th Aug '15 9:24:15 PM by Blueeyedrat

Twist Bat Girl to this:

Faceless Goons of the criminally insane supervillians all fold to Faux Action Girl's wimpy punches. This is because they're all undercover cops and recognize her as being the police commissioner's daughter. The supervillian then drops her into a death trap (his goons have prepared) which has an obvious flaw to anybody actually in the trap. With his goons defeated and his scheme undone he surrenders to her.

She hands the criminal over to the police, and then they check on their buddies who are all fine except for one she did a knee strike on. (Ouch!)

In the second issue her secret origin is revealed. She was a really dumb child, but the widower had to take care of his force, so they adopted her as their mascot. Then one of them came up with a "Make a wish" type scenario so she could be a superhero for a day. In a Girls' Gone Horribly Right moment they discover a crime fighting Idiot Savant who cracks the big case with Bat Deduction.

He always knew he would be killed by a man in uniform, but he could never have guessed that it would be Captain Crunch.

Here goes nothing.

• An Omniscient Council of Vagueness warps reality using the body of a dead teenage girl that was pregnant of her own brother, turning the world in a typical medieval fantasy, with they as the tyrannical rulers. The only people that remember the old world is a psychic girl, her pet crow and the above mentioned brother, because the crow was on his shoulder in the moment reality was warped.

• Seven Virtuous and Seven Sinful Humans play a Tournament to The Death. If the sinners win, The Beast of Seven Heads of the Apocalypse awakens and destroys Earth, turning the winner either into the Whore of Babylon or The Antichrist. If The Virtuous Win, Jesus descends from the sky and asks "it is time?"

A Turn-Based Strategy with battles being a Shoot 'Em Up for the attacking player and a Tower Defense for the defending player.