Okay, this thread is kinda like "Take-a-Penny, Give-a-Penny", only it is with your random creativity thoughts you might have.  These are the thoughts were you think to yourself, "well, that's interesting, I might use it one day," and you then tuck it away in the back of your mind.

Whereupon you might forget it.  Or you think it's really not that great.  Or you'll write it down, but you have no time to use it (be it for a song, a picture, a story, whatever).

But this thread is more than just that.  It is also for those of you who are suffering from some kind of creative blank.  You want to come up with something interesting, but you can't think of anything interesting.

So... that's what's this thread is for.

Come in with a creative thought, jot it down here.  Come in seeking something to get your creativity juices flowing, take a thought.

So here's a few thoughts to feed your muse:


• An anthill looks a lot like a volcano.  The only difference is that ants come out of an anthill, while magma come out of a volcano.  So imagine a volcano the size of an anthill that vomits out magma from time to time and can set the forest ablaze.  Imagine a volcano that belches out billions upon billions of red ants, rapacious and ravenous and intent on committing rapine upon the forest.  Or maybe the volcano spits out giant ants made of magma, a hive mind collective with the power of molten earth at its call.  And why only magma volcanoes - some volcanoes produce ash plunges.  Could these not also be giant swarms of black insects, enough to darken the sky for days and bring starvation and even a bitter chill to the land?  Why stop at volcanoes - earthquakes could be activity caused by giant ants, or termites, or burrowing beetles.  Could other natural phenomena be explained away by supernatural insects of some kind?  What kind of world would this be?  Would there be cities underground from the remains of conquered termite nests, or grand honeycomb capitals from the spoils of victory in the Great Bee War?

•  Ships sail the ocean blue, water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.  Or sometimes people call outer space the "great ocean", and what vessels are out there are ships too.  In Return of the Jedi, you had Jabba and his gang turn the sand dunes of the desert planet of Tatooine into an ocean of sand.  What other oceans can there be from natural biomes?  Could you have an ocean from jungles?  It would be easier to do it with tropical rain forests, with their higher canopy and thicker vegetation.  The "ships" could be some kind of light vessel that rests on the leaves of extremely strong leaves that move in the wind like waves at sea.  Deadly venomous snakes are the sea serpents, but it would be more difficult to get whales and the like.  Perhaps carnivorous plants could be another type of sea monster.  Maybe a monsoon rain forest would be a little better, with its more spaced out vegetation allowing larger animals to evolve.  It doesn't take too much imagination to think of the Asian elephant taking the role of the whale in the days of whaling.  Maybe mutated into something even larger, possibly more akin to one of the larger dinosaurs, and you could even make it an albino of nasty temperament and fate, thus making an alien (fantasy) version of Moby Dick.

• There was a news story about a sunken ship with the nom de plume "Black Swan" - a company went public on the basis of finding this sunken vessels and recovering their treasures.  Could something like that happen in another setting?

• What kind of spider would hatch from a chicken's egg?

• "Terhaar.  What kind of place is Terhaar?  Even the name sounds dreadful."


(Okay, that's enough.  Toss out some ideas, let people know if you liked one of those ideas and wanted to use them.  I know I've got too many floating around for me to use...)

"I resumed my listening."

What is the person hearing?  Why were they interrupted?  

This thread can also function as a way to cleanse your mind of all the distractions before you go about your writing.  See, at the moment of writing this, my mind is filled with all kinds of distractions when what I want to do is think about my story, Moon-Crossed.

So let me get some of those thoughts out and see what happens...

Actually, these are not the thoughts I have been having that are getting in my way, as they are creative thoughts.

• They were called the Immortals, but that was a bit of a misnomer, since they were only two-million-years-old, give or take a hundred thousand.  Civilizations have come and go, but that was nothing - it was the species turnover that interested them.  Two million years might seem like a long time, but for them, it was barely started.  History was a thing of amusement, a "remember that time when..." and they really did not care about the lives of all the individuals around them, like ants.  In one hundred years, who would care?  Usually it didn't take even that.  Years and years would pass, and they would simply stay where they were and watch the world change, the rise and fall of the oceans as Ice Ages came and went.

• It started with the raid on the matriarchy tribe, an absolute smash.  For a people who prized women above men, a glorified male culture successfully assaulting their people and forcing many of them into slavery was insult to injury.  So they made their revenge simple and cutting.  No longer would any of them be able to sire females.  At first, for a male-dominated, male-triumphant group, this seemed wonderful at first.  Only men, none of those weak women who were so easy to dominate.  But as one generation passed and a new one took the reins of leadership, the people noticed that without women, they had no way of getting more sons.  They went out raiding again, and they were successful, but it was too far.  Whereas before it was just a matter of taking women like they would take any other bounty, now it was more desperate, a need to take women to continue their own people.  Within their own culture, women became prized commodities and fights would regularly break-out over them.  They forced themselves on their captives and bred again, but the work of women was now falling to them, and gender-divided as they were, they were ill-prepared.  There was not enough women, which meant fewer and fewer sons, and still no daughters.  To have a daughter was both a possibility for great celebration and a time of fear, for if all women were to be treated as such commodities, what future would ever awake such a luckless girl?  And still, their numbers declined.

I finally figured out where I'd heard that before! It was on a Magic card. I can't even remember what it did, except that I'm pretty sure it was black.

I am coming up with these things all the damn time. I have been told several times that I have a knack for crafting fluff and flavor for games that I've never even seen the sourcebooks to. I can't ever do anything more with them, I just don't have the creative staying power to flesh it out. But they're so fun I have to share them, in the hopes somebody else will pick them up and run with them.

I hope I'm not the only person this happens to. I don't want this thread to be the garbage I necro every two months. >_>

Anyway, while I was puttering around on wiki a bit ago, I came up with a wonderful start to a horror game such as UA or modern-setting CoC.
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On May 16, 1984, Andy Kaufman apparently died of kidney failure due to a rare type of lung cancer. He said for years before that he'd always wanted to fake his death and come back twenty years later. Opinions have been somewhat divided on the truth, with the waters muddied by a few people close to Kaufman, such as his girlfriend at the time of his death, who claimed to have shaved his head to fake hair loss from the treatment, either admitting or inventing their part in the possible hoax. Furthermore there is the screenplay he was working on at the time about a character who faked his death by lung cancer: whether this serves as evidence for or against the hoax theory depends on one's outlook. On the twentieth anniversary of his death, Kaufman's surviving friends held a "Welcome Home Andy" party. As of two months ago, he is three years late.

Your mission as paranormal investigators is to find out what really happened to Andy Kaufman. The only lead you have is a hastily scribbled note found on the body, in turn found on Bob Zmuda's doorstep early in the morning two weeks ago, of one of the Philippino "psychic surgeons" who treated Andy close to the time of his "death."

"His body still lives. I could not save the rest."

That sounds a lot like Kashyyk, actually. Ever play Knights of the Old Republic?

PS: This is a triple post because Beldaran is a nice person.