As I mentioned before, I am working on a long-term project in which I build my own campaign for Dungeons & Dragons, based on input by my players. It is going to be pirate-themed campaign, with adventures happening on the coast, on ships, and underwater. So now I need to populate the campaign with adventures and encounters. And I am using all sorts of sources of inspiration.

The easiest source of inspiration is published adventures with the same theme. From Pathfinder's Skulls & Shackles, D&D3.5's Savage Tide, to last year's Ghosts of Saltmarsh, campaigns and adventures with a pirate or nautical theme are aplenty. Sources like Adventure Lookup help to find individual adventures. The advantage is that the source already comes with suggestions on how to turn a cool idea into an actual D&D encounter. Using non-roleplaying sources, like watching Pirates of the Caribbean, often leaves you with cool scenes that aren't easy to translate into a roleplaying encounter.

A bit more work, but very useful, is starting with the monsters. D&D Beyond allows to filter monsters by environment, so it easy to find all underwater and coastal monsters. Sort by challenge rating, and you quickly get some structure, from low level lizardfolk to top level kraken. In my case, it isn't only the description of a monster that is interesting. I also participated in a Kickstarter Depths of the Savage Atoll, which provided me with STL files for D&D miniatures with a nautical theme. Some of the figurines are quite cool, and so I am going to use them, even if they aren't D&D standard monsters, like for example the shark men.

I still need to see how all of the sources of inspiration will come together to form a campaign, but I already have a lot of the bits and pieces.