Since Fate is a toolkit of an RPG, the kinds of games that folks run can vary wildly. Where do you find inspiration for your games/scenes/world/more?
The two places I mine for creative inspiration are Wikipedia and Atlas Obscura. The real world is so weird and bizarre that I have no problem finding inspiration.
Wikipedia for folktales and history. Google Earth if I’m doing something modern-day and want to identify real locations. A Facebook group called Science for Sci-Fi Roleplaying Games that has interesting posts.
The biggest source for inspiration for my long-running campaign is my players. They built the world, based VERY loosely on Tang-era China, Korea, and Japan, with some fantasy thrown in.
Other sources of inspiration: Atomic Robo Comics, of course!
As we are playing Dresden Files which lends itself EXTREMELY WELL to finding weird little bits of truth that can be easily converted into compelling adventures. You can always find used travel guides cheap online that are packed full of ideas. One of my favorites is the “Weird” series. (e.g., Weird Louisiana) We are currently using New Orleans as our setting, and there is no end to ghost stories, murder mysteries, monster sightings, legends, folklore…
Most of the Fate games have been sci fi due to circumstance that the other games my table plays are fantasy so FATE gets used as a “change of pace” rpg. I’ve run a Venture City campaign, which as time went on I started pulling ideas from a lot of comics I’ve read as well as sci fi thriller novels and the like.
I also ran a modified Mindjammer campaign after that, and I pulled a lot of inspiration from actual astrophysics and scientific concepts. Reading through what some scientists speculate about dark matter, the fermi paradox, etc, was really interesting. I also liberally pulled from popular sci fi tropes. Ironically, when I had written the setting/framework, I was originally imagining a Mass Effect style tone, but when my players took the wheel, it ended up more in something like Farscape territory (which is still great, mind you, and I rolled with it accordingly).
In my case, my world was just the spawn of my ideas as a new to-be-GM.
After half a year of D&D experience in a West Marches server, I was slowly getting more and more into becoming a DM there, but I didn’t like the server due to drama. I journeyed through some more servers and worlds and exchanged information and watched videos and etc.
And in December, when I felt ready, I started outlining this world inspired by ideas that I had, some of which were directly tied to what I did not like in my previous environments.
The reason I’m mentioning that is because it directly ties to how I got to Fate in the first place.
I started changing systems left and right to fit this roleplay-heavy and consequence-heavy, internally realistic game, and D&D just isn’t quite meant for that. So one day I started asking about what systems people would use for something like this - and I got redirected to Fate.
So far we’re trying it out, so it’s not set in stone that it’ll be Fate, but as far as we read it, it felt like it can fit with the world.
TL:DR The inspiration for my world partially came from avoiding aspects I’ve disliked. And I already had the idea before we moved onto Fate.
I “borrow” from other works of fiction, literature, cinema, music, heck other RPGs I steal from alot generally I’ll watch something and think “that’ll be cool in Fate” and BOOM it’s in my game, that’s how my Fallout writeups and Fallout game came about