The fun thing about being loosely inspired by songs is, usually, none of your players will ever get the references.
Replying to @hiscursedness@mastodon.art
For example, the setting of "Home" from The Book of Mirrors - a totalitarian, insular city floating through the air on giant engines nobody knows how to build anymore - is inspired by two lines from the chorus of The Midnight's Brooklyn:
Floating empire
held up by fraying wire
That's all you need to spin off a full world and disastrous situation for the players. Just overthink a somewhat evocative sentence.
Replying to @hiscursedness@mastodon.art
This verse also defined a bunch of plot beats I anticipated people hitting:
I never placed too much faith in the stars
I never placed too much faith in my heart
But the siren call of the chandelier city
And inch by inch, we're breaking apart
As we're rising through the dark
From the sky, I bet the lights look pretty
Replying to @hiscursedness@mastodon.art
Then in Binary Siren, well I got the name from their other song "Neon Medusa" (which, funnily enough actually describes a Siren and a Minotaur but never a Medusa), but the character of the binary siren herself was more inspired by the song "Good In Red", a call to action to literally slay the devils keeping a girl down.
The party never even spoke to the siren though lol so that didn't matter :D
Replying to @hiscursedness@mastodon.art
Another technique I recommend, I call The Kojima.
Take a phrase you like, and then look up every possible synonym and stretch every meaning you can get out of it. Take all those concepts and throw them in the session.
It's called the Kojima because literally everything in Death Stranding is some wordplay on "Strand" "Death" or "Bridge"
There were 3 binary sirens in Binary Siren: the casino (a lure), the psion (a literal siren), and the warning (a klaxon - a two-tone alarm aka binary siren)