A couple of years ago in my Discord server, we had a fun discussion that ended up with a couple of plot generator sheets being created. I was reminded of them recently and thought I’d share! All you need is some imagination, a standard* set of dice, and voila, instant plot!
Now, you can easily make up your own, too. These were all things we were throwing at the wall in that conversation, or I came up with offhand.
You’ll note in the fantasy sheet you’ll want to roll your D8 twice, to create a hero and a villain. The Science Fiction sheet is structured a little differently in this iteration.
For instance, I rolled using this sheet and got a fantasy plot. An urban setting, the hero is a bear (shifter), and the villain is Baba Yaga. The hero is motivated by spite for their detractors, the tech level is Plasma Rays, and the climax is winning the battle. At the end, the hero discovers they are expecting a child. Yay!
For the science fiction plot, I got a parent, who is an explorer. The motivation is spite, the inciting incident is a child is lots. The climax is getting a better spaceship, and at the end, the cat is saved! Yay! Talking to my husband about this one, we decided the child is the hero, he runs away with his beloved cat-thing, and the parent winds up getting a spaceship which will accommodate the whole family and allow the cat-thing to travel with them.
This could be very useful if you want to come up with a story, don’t see a prompt you like at MOTE, and if you don’t have dice, well, there is an app for that. These are mostly going to be short story plots. You would want more try-fail sequences for anything longer than that, but you could totally build that into the worksheet (which results might be very amusing, or almost impossible to plot congruently in a story) or just extrapolate from the incitement towards the climactic point.
Have fun! I’d love to see some of the plots you roll up and think you could write!
*standard Dungeons and Dragons dice: D4, D6, D8, D10, D12, and a D20
Mad Genius Club 
6 responses to “A Plot, a Plot!”
As much as my dice dislike me, I shudder a little to imagine what plot would ensue! 😉
Bwahahaha! I have a set of dice within reach. “Oh, how old is this character?” “Which person in this group is going to die?”
Sometimes I think it’s a way to actually get the back brain to give me a clue! “Oh, that’s too young!” or “No, no! Not HIM!”
It beats staring blankly at the screen.
I have SO MANY CHARTS for setting up plots and games and just random stuff for the between times of the actual plot. My kids are always, “You should publish these.” Which would be great, except that most of them are custom, so I’d have to publish the monster/race/world manual to go with them, so now we are talking a whole RPG source book(s)…so, that’s a nope.
But, some random charts for a now and again issue can be super useful. If noting else than to have something to nope and get the rebel brain going on something else instead.
I think you posted the SF one twice.
Entirely possible.
thank you!
The ‘Character Descriptor’ category is sadly lacking in options. How about Engineer/Inventor? Musician or actor? Electrician or plumber? Factory worker? Farmer? A farmer could be particularly interesting; farmers tend to have madly diverse skill sets. Most of them maintain and repair their own farm equipment. Driving a tractor for hours on end also provides a lot of time for thinking.