Inversion: Spur Creativity by opposite thinking

German mathematician Carl Jacobi explained that to better understand a principe, you should invert it.

If you have a seed of an idea, even just a combat encounter, but are feeling stuck, you may discover some fantastic ideas by turning your existing thoughts inside out.

Take a quest idea, NPC issue, or combat encounter and look at it backwards, or invert it, and see where it leads.

Weak session idea:

The player characters are robbed in the night by a stealthy gang of thieves.

Inverted idea:

A gang of thieves attempts to rob the player characters during a long rest, but fails terribly. It becomes apparent to the PCs that these would-be robbers are terrible at thieving.

This is an interesting nugget, but doesn’t give us much to go on. Let’s continue our thinking to flesh out the encounter.

Why are they terrible at thieving?

• The would-be robbers are embarrassed to be caught. If questioned, they tell the players they were cursed with clumsiness by an evil wizard they stole from last week. Now their thieves guild is doomed, unless the players can help them. They will repay the players with loot from their guild, and they are also free to take whatever they want from the wizard… once she’s dead.

• They beg the players for mercy, saying they aren’t thieves but rather they were forced to try and rob them by a previous enemy of the party, who is looking for a particular item one of the characters is carrying. If they don’t return with the item, the enemy will burn their entire winter food store.

• The robbers are vampiric thralls who have been away from their masters for too long and are suffering with reduced abilities including stealth as a result. They are trying to amass unique treasure to get back on their masters’ good side. The party can find and kill (or befriend?) the vampire by giving a valuable item to the thralls, then following them through the woods back to the vampire’s lair.