Pitch Decks

Inspiration

The Vespa 150 TAP Truppe Aero Portate was an anti-tank scooter made in the 1950s from a Vespa scooter. Modifications from the civilian Vespa included a reinforced frame and a 75 mm (3.0 in) recoilless rifle mounted to the scooter.[1][2]

The scooters would be parachute-dropped in pairs, accompanied by a two-man team. The gun was carried on one scooter, while the ammunition was loaded on the other. Due to the lack of any kind of aiming devices the recoilless rifle was never designed to be fired from the scooter; the gun was mounted on a M1917 Browning machine gun tripod, which was also carried by the scooter, before being fired. However, in an emergency it could be fired while in the frame, and while the scooter was moving.[citation needed]

The "Bazooka Vespa" was relatively cheap.

Wikipedia Contributors. 2025. “Vespa 150 TAP.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. April 1, 2025.

Core Premise

Two teams of paratroopers, A and B, are dropped deep into enemy territory with four Bazooka Vespas. However, Team A and Team B are separated during the drop, and when they land, they realize a terrible mistake has been made: Team A has two gun Vespas, and Team B has two ammo Vespas. Now, the two teams must rendezvous, with Team A bluffing their way through enemy territory with only their ammo-less bazookas and sidearms to protect them, and Team B MacGyvering ways to use their bazooka-less shells. Finally, the two teams unite, and the four paratroopers fend off an enemy onslaught in a bonanza of Bazooka Vespa action.

Additional Ideas

An alternate history, far-future, or post-apocalyptic setting, where the writer can decide who the paratroopers are, who their enemies are, the conflict’s location, and the non-Bazooka Vespa equipment.

Blocking the bazooka’s back vent and firing from the frame, turning the Vespa into a rotating turret.

Blocking the front end of the bazooka and firing from the frame to use it as a nitro booster. 

Team A’s journey to the rendezvous is written as a tense spy thriller.

Team B’s journey is written as a buddy-cop adventure.

Before the final action scene, the paratroopers take control of a munitions dump, but with only two gun Vespas, most of the ammunition is useless to them. Even worse, the enemy plans to attack a local municipality in a matter of days. Luckily, the municipality is full of scooters. The paratroopers help the locals to modify their civilian scooters into anti-tank scooters, and with the town’s resources, Team B modifies their reinforced-frame scooter into an engine of overwhelming destructive force. The paratroopers lead the locals into battle to defend their homes, and together, they gloriously defeat the enemy. The paratroopers ride off into the sunset, secure in the knowledge that the heroic people they leave behind will forever be ANTI-TANK SCOOTER WARRIORS.

Special thanks to Anders Lokensgard for co-creating this concept.

Find the pitch deck on AO3 here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/66734164/chapters/172187188

Inspiration

Wikipedia Contributors. “Beauty and the Beast” Wikimedia Foundation, last modified February 11, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty_and_the_Beast.

Core Premise

Retelling “Beauty and the Beast” as a road-trip story.

Belle has never left her hometown in the rural American South. The Beast is confined to a junkyard on the edge of town by the townspeople’s fear and the county sheriff’s hatred. When Belle’s brother Maurice steals something from the Beast’s junkyard, Belle offers to drive the Beast to the other side of the country in exchange for Maurice’s freedom. Belle and the Beast’s relationship starts off tense, and Belle briefly leaves him on the side of the highway, but she comes back for him. They start to bond, and Belle mods her truck so the Beast can drive it with his cursed body. 

When Maurice gets arrested again, the Beast lets Belle go back to her hometown to help, leaving him alone and hundreds of miles away from her. His love for Belle drives him to re-create her mods on a new truck and drive it back to where their journey began. He arrives just in time to help Belle defeat the sheriff. Belle, moved by his selflessness, confesses her love to him. The townspeople who trust her accept him as part of the community. The Beast’s curse is broken. They Live Happily Ever After.

Additional Ideas

Belle doesn’t have to be a Southern American: she can be from anywhere with a strong car-modding and road-trip culture.

Belle doesn’t have to be a woman, and the Beast doesn’t have to be a man.

Maurice was a class troublemaker when he and Belle were kids, but now that they’re adults, he’s become a chronic petty thief and vandal. Belle does her best to keep him out of trouble and clean up his messes, but every time she helps him, he acts more reckless, destructive, and entitled to her support.

Belle is restless in her hometown and curious about the outside world, but she feels obligated to stay close to her family because they could need her help at any moment.

The county sheriff in Belle and Maurice’s hometown personally hates both Maurice and the Beast. When Maurice trespasses on the Beast’s land and steals something from him, the sheriff finally has a chance to send him to a state prison.

Belle is called to the police station when Maurice is arrested. She meets the reclusive Beast for the first time and learns that he’s been desperate to leave the town for years. She realizes that he can’t leave, despite his junkyard full of cars and car parts, because he can’t drive a car with his cursed body. She makes a deal with the sheriff: he’ll drop the charges against Maurice, and she’ll take the Beast somewhere far away.

Belle offers to take the Beast anywhere he wants to go. Knowing that building a relationship with her could be his last chance to break his curse, he chooses the farthest destination he can think of and improvises a story about an extended family waiting for him there.

Initially, the Beast acts like he’s entitled to Belle’s help. He realizes he needs her when she leaves him on the side of the road, and he forces himself to act more humbly after she comes back for him. As he spends more time with her, his grudging politeness grows into a deep, genuine respect.

When Belle meets the Beast, she’s frightened by his appearance. Her worst suspicions are confirmed when he gleefully encourages the sheriff to send Maurice to prison. She realizes that the Beast is as human as she is as they travel together, and it’s easy for her to treat him as her friend after he apologizes for how he treated her and Maurice.

The Beast doesn’t want the road trip to end before Belle breaks his curse; Belle doesn’t want the trip to end because she doesn’t want to lose her excuse for exploring the world outside her hometown.

The first time Belle leaves the Beast behind, her desire to reunite him with his family drives her to come back for him. As she asks him more questions about his supposed family, he makes up more and more elaborate stories about them, and he learns two things: first, telling her about his “family” encourages her to treat him more sympathetically and tell her about her own life, bringing them closer, and second, talking to her about them lets him live in a fantasy where he has an ideal, loving family who misses him and doesn’t care about his curse. When Maurice is arrested again, she’s torn between going back to help him and finishing her journey with the Beast. At first, she decides to drive the Beast the rest of the way to his destination, then turn around and go back to her hometown. The Beast can only convince her to go straight back to Maurice by coming clean: he tells her that he has no family waiting for him, and he chose their destination at random.

The Beast’s design could be based on a cryptid from the area where Belle lives. He could be a not-deer: from a distance, he looks like a deer; when you get closer, you realize he isn’t a deer; when he stands up on his hind legs, you realize he never was.

Alternatively, the Beast’s design could be based on Garfield.

Find the pitch deck on AO3 here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/79836451?view_adult=true

Inspiration

When the wealth that belonged to men had been carried out of Veii, then they began to remove the gods’ gifts and the gods themselves but did so more in the manner of worshipers than plunderers. Young men were chosen from the whole army and were assigned the task of bringing Juno Regina to Rome. After ritually cleansing their bodies, they reverently entered the temple wearing white robes. At first they were in awe of approaching her with their hands, because according to Etruscan ritual only a priest from a certain family was accustomed to touching this statue. Then one of them, either under divine inspiration or in youthful jest, said, “Juno, do you want to go to Rome?” At this, all the others cried out that the goddess had nodded her assent. An addition was later made to the tale that a voice was also heard to say that she was willing. 

At any rate, we hear that she was moved from her place almost effortlessly with poles, as if she were following, and that she was light and easy to transport. She was carried, undamaged, to the Aventine, her eternal home where the prayers of the dictator had summoned her, and where Camillus later dedicated the temple that he had vowed.

Livius, Titus. 9 BCE. The History of Rome. Translated by Valerie M. Warrior. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 

You can read the first ten books of J. R. Seeley’s translation of The History of Rome for free online here.

Core Premise

The setting is a Bronze Age world of small, independent villages built around the temples of their patron gods. These gods are physical beings that sign treaties with human communities, offering to use their reality-warping powers to answer prayers in exchange for worship.

A wandering assassin is hired to kill a target in an unfamiliar village. They succeed, but they’re captured and confronted by the village’s princess, who tells them that they killed its patron god. Now, the village is preparing for war: its leaders plan to conquer another village and claim its patron for themselves as a replacement for their dead god. The princess offers the assassin amnesty if they fight for her village of GOD REPLACERS.

Additional Ideas

The setting grounds the audience in modern irreverence and immerses it in alien ancient ethics.

The setting also allows the writer to explore how complex, driven women chose to lead their lives in harshly patriarchal societies.

A patron god can have any relationship to their village: they can be treated like a civil servant, a prisoner, or a beloved sports star.

Gods compete to become the patrons of desirable villages the same way that villages compete to claim useful or powerful gods as patrons.

Some gods choose not to become patron deities.

The princess’s village plans to conquer a succession of villages with non-combat-oriented deities and assemble their gods into a team that can take on a village protected by a powerful war god. (Optional subtitle: Pokédex of Divine Destruction)

The characters discover that the patron gods of several villages involved in the war are actually a single war god who signed each of their treaties under a different name. This war god engineered the conflict to consolidate the setting’s independent villages into a single, militarily powerful state, and to consolidate its gods into a pantheon with them as its ruler.

Find the pitch deck on AO3 here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/66822493/chapters/172444030

Inspiration

Wikipedia Contributors. “Haikyu!!” Wikimedia Foundation, last modified January 23, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haikyu!!

Reimer, Ted J. File:Word-math-graffiti-on-underpass.jpg, Wikimedia Foundation, last modified February 3, 2026. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Word-math-graffiti-on-underpass.jpg

Core Premise

Character A is a shy, withdrawn aspiring artist who has never had the opportunity or the confidence to share their work with the world. Character B is a brash delinquent with a talent for getting into places they’re not supposed to be. Against all odds, A and B become fast friends. B finds a purpose in helping A become a street artist by helping them get into places where they can paint murals, and A’s confidence grows as their art comes to life and reshapes their city.

Additional Ideas

A and B live in a city already covered in graffiti murals where unused but visible space is almost impossible to find. A has always believed there was literally no place for their art.

In the story’s opening, B defaces a mural trying to prove themself to their friends, but they immediately regret it. They realize they have a powerful desire to help someone create art instead of destroying it, and they push A to paint their first mural in spite of A’s reluctance.

Watching A paint gives B a new appreciation for the street art they’ve always tuned out, and they start to explore their city in search of new murals. At the same time, A learns to see other artists’ work as inspiring instead of discouraging.

At first, B feels self-conscious about spending time with A and helping them with their art, and they try to hide it from their delinquent friends. However, their friends don’t judge them as harshly as they’d feared. Gradually, B is able to share their budding love for street art with them, and some members of the group warm up to A. In a critical moment, B’s delinquent friends appear to help A and B, showing once and for all that they support the purpose B has found with A and that they accept A as one of their own.

Find the pitch deck on AO3 here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/79237266

Inspiration

“Gotham City.” 2022. Wikipedia. June 28, 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotham_City.

Wikipedia Contributors. 2019. “Saw (Franchise).” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. September 22, 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saw_(franchise).

Core Premise

Scientists at Gotham City’s tertiary educational institutions and research organizations struggle to secure funding. Luckily, the city has a parallel funding structure for mad scientists, created by and for supervillains. When Saw arrives in Gotham, he applies for funding for his next sociology project from the mad scientists' organization and receives a generous research grant. He hires assistants, and together, they get to work crafting an appropriately rigorous research paper for publication.

Additional Ideas

One of Saw’s assistants is a Gotham University PhD candidate in sociology. They have an agreement with their nominal doctoral advisor that they’ll prepare their dissertation based on the research they do with Saw. The other assistant is a postdoc from outside Gotham who aspires to become a supervillain.

The quest for an acceptably large sample size precipitates a massive hostage crisis.

Saw is conflicted about receiving funding as a sociologist and not as an artist.

The leaders of the mad scientists' organization are at loggerheads about whether to fund villainous humanities research. An application to fund a new translation of the Necronomicon has been stuck in the pipeline for months.

The mad scientists’ funding structure draws in an eclectic mix of aspiring supervillains and normal scientists who couldn’t fund their research any other way. Grant applications include traditional supervillain schemes, scientific inquiries like Saw’s that can only be pursued by unconventional means, and normal scientific research with unethical elements stapled on solely to secure funding from the mad scientists’ organization, such as Gotham University’s application for a new scanning tunneling microscope, which a professor submitted as a proposal to explore how improvements to scanning tunneling microscope technology over the last forty years have affected the instrument’s ability to torture small animals.

The mad scientists’ funding structure is buckling under the weight of its anti-ethics policy, which awards additional points to grant applications that attempt to deceive the board, such as Gotham University’s application to fund the scanning tunneling microscope. The organization’s debate over introducing conventional ethical guidelines, such as an honesty requirement, has turned violent.

Researchers from outside Gotham routinely farm out unconventional research to groups in Gotham funded by the mad scientists' organization.

Publishing unethical research conducted in Gotham specifically is a hot-button issue in the national scientific community, since so many conventional scientists working in Gotham have no choice but to accept funding from the mad scientists' organization and so many unconventional scientists from prestigious institutions in other parts of the country conduct unethical research in Gotham.

Gotham’s native ecosystem of scientific journals has an unusual range of ethical standards.

Special thanks to Anders Lokensgard for co-creating this concept.

Find the pitch deck on AO3 here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/67273162/chapters/173768152

Inspiration

Wikipedia Contributors, “Succubus,” Wikimedia Foundation, last modified December 25, 2025, 21:12, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Succubus.

Wikipedia Contributors, “Incubus,” Wikimedia Foundation, last modified January 28, 2026, 21:31, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubus.

Core Premise

The universe is divided between the Earth and the spirit world.

A soul is the ability to physically interact with the particular world that it belongs to. A human’s soul is part of the Earth; a spirit’s soul is part of the spirit world. A human being’s earthbound soul can only directly interact with the Earth; a spirit’s astral soul can only directly interact with the spirit world. Double-souled beings possess both an earthbound and an astral soul, and they can physically interact with both worlds.

A mind is the ability to perceive and communicate with other minds. Some humans and spirits can release their minds from their souls and travel between other conscious beings’ minds, regardless of whether those beings’ souls are earthbound, astral, or both.

A demon transfers energy from the human world to the spirit world by converting earthbound energy (kinetic, chemical, electric, etc.) into astral energy. An angel transfers energy from the spirit world to the human world by converting astral energy to earthbound energy.

Succubi are plants. Their souls are astral, not earthbound, and every succubus begins its life as a bud on a tree in the spirit world. The tree provides the buds with astral energy until they reach maturity and fly away. At the end of their lives, succubi return to the tree to die, and the tree consumes their bodies.

Mature succubi sustain themselves by consuming the energy they drain from human souls. When a succubus hunts, it releases its mind from its soul and floats through the stream of human consciousness, projecting a lure into the minds it passes through. The lure is an abstract concept created by the succubus to attract human prey. For example, a lure could be the image of a beautiful woman, and humans in the succubus’s wake might see her in their peripheral vision, in crowds, in reflections, or their dreams.

The lure will hook the first human who thinks of it intentionally. If someone has a dream about the woman, but they forget about it, the succubus won’t feed on them. However, if they dream about her and then purposefully think about her again the next night, the lure will open a connection between their mind and the succubus’s. Through this connection, the succubus will sense what the human finds attractive and use it to make the lure more appealing.

All of the earthbound energy the human expends in actively thinking about the lure is transmuted into astral energy and consumed by the succubus. The more the human thinks about the lure, the more strongly it will connect their mind to the succubus’s, and the more clearly the succubus will be able to observe the human’s mind. The human prey is trapped in an escalating cycle of obsession as the lure burrows deeper into their mind. In the late stages of the hunt, the human loses the ability to do anything but think about the lure: all of the energy they could have used to break the obsessive loop has already been consumed by the succubus. They die of thirst, hunger, or exposure.

Incubi are mammals. An incubus is double-souled, with an astral and an earthbound soul, and an incubus can be born either to a pair of incubi or to an incubus and a human. Incubi appear mostly identical to humans, but their bodies are as present and tangible in the spirit world as they are on Earth. They sustain their earthbound souls like humans and their astral souls like succubi. A young incubus consumes astral energy by drinking sap from the succubus tree. Mature incubi hunt similarly to succubi, but they drain energy that humans use to think about their earthbound souls, not abstract lures. When an incubus dies, their earthbound body decomposes like a human’s, while their astral body’s remaining energy dissipates across the spirit world.

Devils are demons of species that drain earthbound energy from human beings and who have chosen to feed on humans selectively, according to a code that defines which humans deserve to have their energy drained and by how much. A devil order is a group of devils bound by a single code. Most modern devil orders’ codes prescribe draining energy only from humans who have acted immorally. Most modern incubi are devils; most succubi are not.

Additional Ideas

There are worlds besides Earth and the spirit world.

Incubus lifespans range from one hundred fifty to two hundred years, and succubus lifespans range from less than two months to over three thousand years.

A full-grown succubus flower ranges from forty to sixty feet in length.

Incubi could shift back and forth between Earth and the spirit world, or the two realities could be superimposed, with the incubi equally present in both at all times. Incubi and other double-souled beings could also act as anchor points between Earth and the spirit world, and the relative positions of the two worlds could shift around them.

Most incubi live in towns that resemble Earth’s cities, villages, and subdivisions, but which are built in the spirit world using its endemic technologies and are home to minority populations of other demon species.

A story set in this world could be a coming-of-age story centered on a group of young incubi growing up in the spirit world. Some of their parents could be incubus couples living in the spirit world, some could be incubi who spend most of their time on Earth, and some could be incubus-human couples. Some of the young incubi could be struggling to choose between devil orders, while others question whether they have the right to enforce any order’s code on humanity. Each member of the group has a unique perspective on humanity and succubi, the two species they share their souls with: the humans they resemble but feed on, and the succubi whose needs they share but who they may find frighteningly alien.

It could be possible for human souls to travel to the spirit world, potentially as an effect of becoming pregnant with a double-souled child. Some humans could live in incubus cities in the spirit world, and some could live in parts of the spirit world isolated from incubus society. Some human characters could lead double lives on Earth and in the spirit world, and some could leave Earth permanently. If becoming pregnant with a double-souled being lets a human soul enter the spirit world, some humans could conceive incubi specifically so they can travel between the worlds, and others could develop the ability with no warning.

Another potential plot hook could center on Character A, a human whose soul begins to bleed into the spirit world after unknowingly becoming pregnant with an incubus. People who look subtly off appear in crowds; they notice buildings they can only see from one side of the street; when they walk past windows, they see people walking behind them, but when they turn around, no one is there. Their visions escalate until they learn they’re pregnant with a double-souled child. As their pregnancy progresses, it becomes easier for them to explore the spirit world and interact with the beings who live there, but they also become more aware of the implications of raising a child who will need to spend much of their childhood in the spirit world and who will grow up to feed on human souls. Any religious objections A might have to aborting the incubus could be played for drama or comedy. (Optional subtitle: Pregnancy Isekai.)

Find the pitch deck on AO3 here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/79193881