Hail Adventurers! I've been 'out-of-it', trying to come-up with some fresh game ideas for the group, but I can't seem to get into the swing of things again. Any ideas of what might inspire this old ranger?
For me just about anything inspires me. Books, movies, music (it may disturb my players to know that I am inspired by Weird Al and often write campaigns while listening to his music). Sometimes I'll just be thinking and suddenly I'll think of something and it will become a campaign. Definitley movies though. Try Weird Al's UHF. This can really disturb players when they find out where your inspiration came from.
I too get ideas from various sources. In the last campaign I had a character that I got inspired to create when watching Troy. I wanted someone big and strong enough to wield a maul in one hand and use a tower shield in the other. Made him half giant to accomplish this. From there I made his brother who was half drow. The other half for both of them was human. As I made the 2 I ended up making them very Raistlin and Caramon style. Later I introduced the concept of a “true language” that I totally stole from reading Eragon. I can’t remember what else I “stole” from various other sources and complied them into my own game. Like I’m still not sure where I got the idea to have a group of “Old Elves” that lived on their own island in self-seclusion from the rest of the world after their empire had imploded from Civil War. Speaking of Civil War, I gave them tech from the American Civil War era. And made all of their mages wild mages.
As a DM, a great source of inspiration can be characters and their backgrounds/innate plot hooks. Do a search for "D&D Online (Not the MMO): The Show Must Go On!" It's the thread where characters were discussed for my play-by-post game that's running here on Paizo. I asked for characters with interesting pasts and plot hooks that I could work with; perhaps you can mine ideas from it, or at least thoughts about what to ask your players to come up with for you to build off of. Half of my plans for the play-by-post, Northwind Sun, revolve around character plots and development.