So I’ve been writing up some fluff for my 5e campaign and decided to look through my old notebooks. I couldn’t help but notice how many ideas I had reused throughout my many different campaigns and one shots over the years and came to conclusion that I clearly used to like reusing the same few ideas, anybody else do this? If so what ideas and tropes do you like to reuse?
Reusing ideas and tropes in your games
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A time traveller. Not time travel, but the idea of a time traveller pulling the strings from the background.
In many ways, I often have a puppet master behind it all. Shit, at one point I toyed around with a puppet master who controlled the puppet masters of all my individual campaigns for a new game where each player brought back a single character from any of those campaigns, crossed timelines, and join forces for an epic hallway fight scene to end all hallway fight scenes.
It hasn’t happened. Yet.
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“Luke, I am your father.”
I love to tie my antagonists to the PCs, even more so when the PCs have no idea, leading to a dramatic reveal.
All of my games are about uncovering a conspiracy. Uncovering the truth about the game’s reality is a great payoff.
It even works in Only War “So it turns out the Ork Warboss was behind the Waaaaaagh!”
“Excellent detective work Private Dingleberry, now fix bayonets.”
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I’m a lousy planner. “I don’t plan, I improve”. Poor life philosophy, but works pretty well in an ICU setting.
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Both as a player and a GM, I love to follow or use lost or forgotten gods. Useful as adventure hooks if there is a cleric in the party. “You receive a vision of a temple for your god Zestronid lost in the western swamps”. It never feels right that it is a lost temple to Torm; an organized church would have resolved the lost temple decades ago.
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I really need to look at the dates on these threads now that I am digging into the forums.
Don’t stress it. I accidentally necro’d a thread much older than this a few weeks back. All input is welcome. 
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I second that- post in any thread you find interesting - not everyone posts in the first go round.
I for one tend to like to throw in time travel, the villainous brother, and “chaos” magic items that teleport the players from place to place.
Oh - and prophetic dreams!!!
Can’t play d&d without a prophetic dream!
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