30 Years of Weird - Strangest Campaigns Ever

[The Green Adam]

2007 marks my 30th year participating in this grand and glorious hobby (obsession/addition/madness/love). To that end I've been going down memory lane and reminiscing about many of my previous campaigns. What follows is my list of the top 5 strangest, most unusual and most unforgettable campaigns I've ever run or played in. Please do an old dawg a solid and post your list.

Here goes...

Metamorphosis Alpha Dawn
Gamma World-Metamorphosis Alpha-Star Frontiers
We were running a game of Gamma World with a mixed group of humans, mutants and a robot when after about 15 sessions we found out we weren't on Earth at all. The whole thing was taking place inside the Starship Warden from Metamorphosis Alpha. We soon learned the ship was on course to crash into a star and when we found a way to stop it, the GM was stuck for what to do next. I took over as GM and we learned that the ship was launched in the 25th century. It was now the 35th and the universe outside the ship was that of Star Frontiers. Our vessel was rescued and our group became special agents of Star Law.

The Meaning of Life
Skyrealms of Jorune
Following the death of an alien high priest, 7 people, Humans and aliens, undertake a quest to place his body in an ancient tomb 7 days travel aways. In the process they are going to discover the meaning of Life.Each and everyone of them thinks he learns it but dies soon after. In the end, one of them sacrifices himself so that last survivor can return home alive with the knowledge. Run over the course of 7 days real time.

The Wizard of Oz - End of the Rainbow
Homebrew based on R. Talsorian Games Fusion System
A musical! I'm serious. During the Battle of Midway in the Second World War, a fighter pilot flies through an explosion and ends up in the skies over Oz. While our hero tries to reach the Emerald City and return home, Nightmares chase him and his friends to learn the secret of travel to the real world. Men in Black in our world investigate the disappearence of the pilot and his plane and find connections to the aging Kansas grandmother Dorothy Gale.

The Legend of Boot Hill
Housebrew modification of Boot Hill and AD&D
A Singing Cowboy (who actually sung), a Masked Hero, a Native American Shaman, a mysterious red garbed Stranger (possible undead) and a Half-Mexican, Half-African Bandit ride into the sunset after battling Steam-powered robots, Haunted Trains, super-human Masterminds and a clone of Billy the Kid. Oh yeah.

The Irregulars
Champions
The mightest heroes on Earth...Captain Incredible, Tomorrow Man, Earth Angel...these aren't those guys. Not even close. Meet the world's worst superheroes...Tin Man (who can change his skin into Tin!), The Operator (who can mentally contact any telephone), Petshop Boy (a teen who can become any domestic animal under 100 lbs.), Suds (a man made of living soap) and many more. These brave but outclassed men and women fight the forces of even as...The Irregulars! We will triumph because no matter how much they stink...evil stinks worse!

More thoughts, memories and cool stories in the coming days. Thanks for your time and don't forget to share.

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The Green Adam

[rowport]

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Seriously, all those games sound *fantastic*! I especially like the Sci-Fi Medley.

[Evilhalfling]

You Been Served - 2nd ed D&D
2 bards with kits, a priest of the god of dance, and an illusionist
started at 1st level, having been run out of town with tar and feathers.
the town was sacked by humanoids, and the party decides to have an impromtu contest of singing and dancing in the middle of the forest. being chased by more monsters, they chase a kobold around instead, 2 characters dove into a kobold lair - and were killed by nasty traps. Next week we played something else.


Ninja Turtles. - really is a serious game possible?
With a team of ninja rhinos.
or pigeon EMT with stolen Helicopter
or Post-Apocalypse Disney Biker Gang. 2 mice, dog, duck

Dark and Stormy Night -3.0 convention game
a poorly equipped dysfunctional noble family (lvl 4-7) explore a haunted house.
menaced by inhabitants stolen from the Rocky Horror Movie. (Sans Rocky)
I ran it twice, once the villains were recognized, once not. Fun both times.


CATS! the Apocalypse werewolf & bastet rules from whitewolf
housecats suddenly given human & Hybrid forms.
Tomcat, Witches Cat, Angry Female, Fat Cat, Playful Kitten, Scardey Cat, Lap Slut
- Chased by Men-in-Black, Threatened by werewolves who were playing in a park.
watching them steal the [animal control] van from the men in black, and use 3 different people to drive it was one of my best moments as DM. The fat cat [player] deciding he was the godfather, was just icing on the cake.

[Ed_Laprade]

A GURPS game in which two of the players had characters with the Split Personality disadvantage! Each personality only knew one of the other personality of the other SP character. And they pulled it off. The two best players its been my privledge to play with.

A 1E game where the characters were an entertainment troupe of spies! (Well, we thought we were working for the king. Turns out our spymaster was delusional. Actually, the players all knew that, but the characters didn't.) Same group both times.

[Warren Okuma]

1) Gasaraki 2112.
BESM (For characters)/Mechwarrior (For tactical combat) The PC's were rolled up for the first colonial war between earth and mars. Then they tripled the skills purchased, added some veteran stuff, special forces skills, and had their stats divided by a third, round up. Then they had some skills to add to buy things like shuffleboard, gate ball (croquet), etc...

Yup, they were retired Mecha pilots in a elderly "Freedom Care Facility." Everyone had dreams of giant bugs coming though the rifts and making humans extinct. Fifty years of peace, meant that the military was full of bureaucrats, not warriors, severely cut back and have a lot of bad habits (such as union mandated coffee breaks). So they had to recruit other grizzled vets to defend the world...

2) Time travelling dimension hopping spacemen.
It was Traveller. Gurps Traveller. They had a starship called the Menagerie (re-named the Aeon Eagle). It had the front of a scout, the back of a free trader, engines salvaged from a close escort, a coupla windows of a far trader, and turrets from a mercenary cruiser. The engine was rigged to jump if tampered. The PC's tampered with the engine on planet and generated a jump field on planet.

Then the real campaign started. Each of them had three buttons in their mind which jumped them to random planes of existence. An IRIS Assassin, a super hacker (ex-SuSag merchant/tech), a Imperial Special Forces Marine Officer, and a Scout explored the multiverse.

3) IOU
Gurps Illuminati universe with discworld type magic.

4) Reverse Dungeon.
Four level 300 characters ported into your dimension and killed all evil creatures. All. Then they went off to play Exalted. You are the last operators of the last dungeon

"The Far Away Tall Hill"
Module S Series
For 4 to 8 characters of levels 1 to 2
- closed for repairs
by appointment only

Yup, you must recruit the last nutral creatures and stock that dungeon. A half orc commoner, a dwarf fighter, and a kobold adept took up the challenge.

5) Martial Arts Traveller

The death dragon is coming. The hero's must prepare for a duel to decide the fate of the universe... marital artists in Traveller using the Champions system. They first had to find their sacred weapons...

[The Green Adam]

Awesome stuff! Keep it coming, the weirder the better. My faves so far are the Split Personality game, GURPS IOU concept and the Reverse Dungeon.

Oh I forgot one...

Once Upon The End of Time
Homebrew modification of R. Talsorian's Interlock System
The first adventure opens with all the player characters dead along with the main villain and an army of his minions. Over the next few seconds, one player gets up, absorbs a blast of energy that raises the villain and then the campaign moves backward in time with each PC raising and drawing back their attacks. Each session was a few days to several months before the previous one. While it played like a Scifi Action/Adventure game, it was really a mystery. The villian was one of the PCs from a parallel timeline. The key was figuring out which player and how to prevent the alternate timeline from coming about in the first place.
The last adventure had the players joining the Time Patrol and being confronted on their first mission by their older more experienced selves who were out to stop the villain's creation.

Heh, I got a million of 'em.

[Merkuri]

Originally Posted by The Green Adam

Once Upon The End of Time

Wow, that one sounded cool, but honestly I can't imagine being able to pull together something like that to make it work. Kudos to you!

Was it inspired by the movie Memento, by any chance. One of my favorites.

[wingsandsword]

(Not the real names of these campaigns, by the way)

Seven Years on the Inside. . .
It began as a normal AD&D 2e campaign in 1997. We were told up front that it would take seven years to complete, but it would be broken up into seven distinct one-year plot arcs (which would serve as natural stopping points for players to leave or enter the game). It seemed like a normal enough D&D world, but there were some odd things about it, and before the end of the first game we had figured out an awful lot. It was set on the inside of a Dyson's Sphere, and it was set in the distant future, around the year 4,000 A.D. Magic was rediscovered in the 21st century, leading to a second renaissance, as space exploration began augmented by magic. Demihumans and most monsters were created by genetic engineering. Eventually, a project to use magic to augment technology to make a Dyson's Sphere functional, and a massive Dyson's Sphere is constructed to serve as a nearly limitless home for mankind. . .but something went wrong when they were migrating inside and civilization regressed backward in technology and when the campaign is beginning it's equivalent to the early renaissance.

However, the God of Creation in that setting is Lawful Evil and his virtually immortal high priest learned what his real alignment is (he fools everybody into thinking it's Lawful Neutral), concludes creation itself is corrupt, and wants to destroy the entire universe as fundamentally flawed so a more pure universe can be created afterwards. He's engaged on a plan that will take millennia to destroy all creation and slay all the gods to return the universe to total oblivion so that it will be pure again. The first six plot arcs are parts of an ancient prophecy about a series of champions that will thwart him throughout the ages and protect humanity, and the seventh is when those champions and their allies come together to slay him, but also purify creation as well.

It was played through over all seven years (It converted to 3e when it came out, and later to 3.5.)

Historic Final Fantasy. . .
It began as a semi-historic game set during the third Crusade in 1189 A.D., very low magic (only one PC spellcaster, and that was a Bard). For about the first half of the game it was low magic and gritty. A single troll could be the focus of an entire adventure, as rumors of it abound and typical foes were more like saracens, wolves, bears, and bandits. Then, on the eve of a major battle, a true Wizard Teleports in and takes the PC's to a hidden keep in the Himalayas, revealing that there is an order of Wizards that is trying to prevent magic itself from fading, and that the Crusades are symptoms of a greater disease of hatred affecting all humanity that is poisoning the source of magic itself. So, with the help of an airship and its dwarven pilot, the PC's begin exploring the world and the elemental planes looking for relics that will help them fight the coming storm. Eventually they prevent magic from dying, but they have set the course of civilization to prefer magic over technology, (and they incidentally converted the world from 2e to 3e, since the campaign was running when 3rd edition came out).

The World of Insufficient Light / a.k.a. Vampiric Superheroes
A Vampire/Original World of Darkness LARP I was in for years. It started out as a basic Vampire LARP with maybe a dozen players. It got more popular, as word spread around campus about it, over time it got maybe 50+ players. The ST's were also pressured into allowing lots, and lots, of stuff. So, before too long we had Werewolf PC's infiltrating the Vampiric Elysium, Vampires with loads of Wraith allies, some Awakened Mages as recurring NPC's, Mediums/Psychics/Hedge Mage Ghoul PC's, and every "I'm special too" splat of vampires were there (Salubri, True Brujah, Cappadocian, ect.) Somehow, despite being filled with 8th Generation Ancillae True Brujah combat monsters with Potence 5, Fortitude 5, Protean 5, and Temporis 5, my lowly 11th Generation Neonate Tremere with Movement of the Mind 4 and Biothaumaturgy 2 was the only PC to survive from the first session to the last (The LARP ended with Gehenna, where the ST's rewarded me for surviving so long with a high Humanity by letting him read from the Book of the Red Sign and become mortal again)

Masquerade breaches were routine and massive, and handwaved away with implausible deus ex machinas. A typical one would be an incredibly powerful Revenant is out to kill the vampires who killed him. Vampires decide on a showdown when they spot him on main street (fortunately this wasn't actually played out on a main street, but a back alley of campus), and whip out heavy machine guns and rocket launchers. Then somebody drives a truck bomb filled with ANFO into the revenant. The revenant is untouched, but the building he was standing behind is in rubble. Vampires are picking up cars and throwing them like Frisbees at him, and the revenant is shrugging off damage that would incapacitate a tank. Eventually they do enough levels of damage to make him retreat. So, to deal with a square block of downtown being levelled in a running firefight that looked like something out of a comic book, they spend a few points of Media influence to plant a story about a truck crashing downtown, hitting a gas line and causing a gas main explosion and the truck was carrying loads of LSD so everything everybody saw was just a hallucination. . .really!

Laurell K. Hamilton's World of Darkness Saw/Cube
I've started several threads talking about this campaign. The GM is a big Laurell K. Hamilton fan and had never GM'ed before (to tie this all together, she was the PC Vampire with the Wraith minions I mentioned and she NPC'd Lilith in the Gehenna plotline of the above-mentioned LARP). The campaign begins with a group of assorted starting mundane humans in the World of Darkness (an Iraq War vet who was a Navy Corpsman, a Chinese Herbalist from San Francisco, a Los Angeles Assistant District Attorney, and a Medical student from Virginia) all being called to a will reading at a huge manor in rural Maine. There we find we're the only living, non-supernatural relatives of some vampiric elder that has been missing for decades and now presumed dead. We get his entire multi-billion dollar estate, and his various vampiric and lycanthropic relatives are furious at this and nearly start a supernatural WWIII as we're spirited out of there by the Ghouls of our deceased ancestor.

However, one of these relatives owned a special "labyrinth" which he would torment us with. He has us captured and thrown into a massive maze/dungeon beneath Sicily. It is at least three miles on each side and 1000 feet tall, with 4 levels (some rooms are up to 200 feet tall in places with 50 foot pits) and the layout of the floors changes every few hours. The only way out is to go through various puzzles and morality traps (akin to the Saw movies) with him watching.

We manage to escape (not by the way he wanted us to get out, instead it's a deus ex machina of my PC Awakening as a mage and being able to teleport us all out), and we find ourselves hated worldwide by vampiric, lycanthropic and mage politics (and apparently mages and werewolves swear fealty to their local vampiric princes, and mortal politicians do too but they keep it secret).

[Kestrel]

Originally Posted by The Green Adam

The Wizard of Oz - End of the Rainbow
Homebrew based on R. Talsorian Games Fusion System
A musical! I'm serious. During the Battle of Midway in the Second World War, a fighter pilot flies through an explosion and ends up in the skies over Oz. While our hero tries to reach the Emerald City and return home, Nightmares chase him and his friends to learn the secret of travel to the real world. Men in Black in our world investigate the disappearence of the pilot and his plane and find connections to the aging Kansas grandmother Dorothy Gale.

I read a short story once that was similar to this. Where a fighter pilot went over the rainbow and the stuff he brought with him had a profound effect on the Land of Oz. (Only read it once though, so barely remember it.)

Great ideas.

[Henry]

I'll post two - and both were from the same DM:

1) Eternia
D&D 3E Rules
In a realm where He-man, the Thundercats, the Smurfs, and Pac-man co-existed, Skeletor's legions threatened to take Castle Greyskull and run roughshod over the Paclin people (Pac-man's people, who basically took the place of hobbits in this world) while breaking the Eternian continent to his will. Our party was comprised of a Smurf Wizard, a Paclin priest, an Avian (Think Bird-man), and two Thunderans, who had banded together to stop the threat.

2)The Paranutritional Plane of Sugar
D&D 3.5e Rules
In a world where all the native flora and much of the native fauna is made from some form of Sugar or sweetbread, six adventurers struggled to survive, find food and nutrition, and most importantly, find a way out of that sugary hell. The place was riddled with gates, surely enough -- it's how most things accidentally found their way there -- but finding a gate to any one of our respective homes was the hard part...

[meomwt]

The Paranoia Difference
After reading The Difference Engine, I set a Paranoia game in a Victorian England ruled by The Engine, complete with Bobbies, SteamBots and Secret Societies.

I must see if I still have the notes for it one day.

Paranoia Chinee Empire
Another GM ran Paranoia whilst he had 'flu. We were captured by the Chinee Empire who had infiltrated Alpha Complex and transported to the Moon. The game ended after an ill-advised use of a tactical nuclear hand-grenade the registered mutant pyrotechnic had.

Twilight 2000 - The Costa Rican Mission
Using Twilight 2000 rules, we were a group of mercenaries dropped into a South American Jungle. After a series of misadventures involving a large machine gun and no ammo belts, and general incompetance, the mission was attacked by a T. Rex which was killed with a rocket launcher. As was the guy holding the rocket launcher, IIRC.

[s.j. bagley]

one of the strangest games i was involved with began as a 'buck rogers: xxvc' game that ended up in ravenloft.
another one was a 'call of cthulhu' game in which the party was transported through time to zothique.

[The Green Adam]

Originally Posted by meomwt

The Paranoia Difference
After reading The Difference Engine, I set a Paranoia game in a Victorian England ruled by The Engine, complete with Bobbies, SteamBots and Secret Societies.

I must see if I still have the notes for it one day.

Nice! I've always been a Paranoia fan. I can just imagine the ads for the movie, "Go see The Paranoia Difference - A very Orwellian Comedy!"

lol

[crazy_monkey1956]

Here's my contribution...

The Movie Projector of Doom featuring rules and characters by Mage: The Ascension

It all started out relatively sanely. Our Mages, taking a break from fighting the usual Magey bad guys, start hearing about strange murders near the downtown movie theatre. The first victim is sliced and diced ala Freddy Krueger, the next is smothered in marshamallow goo. Turns out the theatre had played Nightmare on Elm Street and Ghostbusters the two nights previous and Aliens was up next. Before that could happen, we stop the mad mage unleashing this things and confiscate his neat little toy, a movie projector that bring its images to life. Then I took over as Storyteller and that's when things got really crazy. The mages are relaxing at the theatre when the projector starts up, playing Star Wars-Return of the Jedi and another mad-mage reverses the projector such that the PCs are sucked into it. They go movie-hopping, accidentally dragging characters from various universes with them. Star Wars to The Lion King to Predator to Gargoyles and finally back to Star Wars. One PC decides to try to use her magic to control their dimension hops and botches. Unicron arrives in orbit and starts sucking up the sands of Tattoine and Jabba's sail barge...and yeah, I was goofy back then.

Multi-Movie-Madness 2: The Sequel featuring rules and characters by A&D 2nd Edition with sprinklings of Rifts and World of Darkness

Most of this campaign, a PBeM that was more story than game, which allowed me to allow characters from multiple systems, was relatively sane. However, one character, exploring an ancient miles long dragon shaped ship drifting through space, happens upon a magical version of a holodeck that had been used by the original crew to stage gladiatorial battles. Turns out the crew were Earth-based and the PC became trapped in the arena after accidentally activating it. He chose the Batman scenario, hoping to utilize the caped crusader's resources to figure out how to escape the arena. He was thrown into the role of Batman, but his main foes were Cyberdyne Industries and Daystrom Institute. Turns out the arena's setting files had been corrupted by centuries of neglect and the poor PC thus found himself fighting the Terminator, rescuing the crew of ST: Voyager after their ship is taken over by Lore's brain, and other wacky adventures.

[Ulrick]

The Gamer Playing AD&D 2e by Himself

I'll call this player Matt, though that isn't his real name.

One day, I was walking past Matt's dorm room and saw that his door was open. I glanced in and said "hi" to be polite. I was going to a D&D game that Matt didn't know about because the DM of that game thought Matt was weird.

He sat at his desk with a bunch of character sheets before him, a notebook, handfuls of dice, and the 1e Dieties and Demigods sourcebook. He'd roll the dice. Makes some notes in the notebook and the character sheets. Roll the dice. Make notes. Ad infinitum.

"What are you doing?" I said.

"I'm playing D&D," he said. "I've got twenty 30th level characters and they are on a quest to kill all of the gods."

It couldn't help but stand and watch for a few minutes. It was like a car accident. I couldn't help but slow down and look.

[Kafkonia]

Originally Posted by Ulrick

The Gamer Playing AD&D 2e by Himself

That doesn't sound that weird.... does it?

[crazy_monkey1956]

I used to play the solo adventure in the red-box basic D&D over and over again. Then again, I was an only child...

[sniffles]

Originally Posted by The Green Adam

The Irregulars
Champions
The mightest heroes on Earth...Captain Incredible, Tomorrow Man, Earth Angel...these aren't those guys. Not even close. Meet the world's worst superheroes...Tin Man (who can change his skin into Tin!), The Operator (who can mentally contact any telephone), Petshop Boy (a teen who can become any domestic animal under 100 lbs.), Suds (a man made of living soap) and many more. These brave but outclassed men and women fight the forces of even as...The Irregulars! We will triumph because no matter how much they stink...evil stinks worse!


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The Green Adam

This sounds a bit familiar.

'Mystery Men'
Champions/Risus

In Campaign City, the top gun of the superhero world is Captain Paragon. But his brother Captain Amazing has gone missing in Champion City and Captain Paragon must take his place. Who will protect the citizens of Campaign City now?

Enter The Additionals! Led by entrepreneur and advertising icon Jack, the team forms to defend the city against the likes of Young Casanova Frankenstein (son of Champion City's villain), the Baker's Dozen, and the feuding Calzone and Panini families.

Our intrepid heroes are: Jack, a Jack-of-all-trades with an enormous spherical head, complete with tiny conical hat that never falls off; Java Joe, a hardboiled detective who's never without a cup of Joe in his hand; Ninja Princess, a mafia princess who's never without her book of Super Secret Sneaky Ninja Tricks and her handy stunt double; Gadget, whose myriad inventions are intended never to hurt anyone but somehow manage to anyway; and the Spectacular Squirrel, who acquired his powers from a radioactive squirrel bite.

The team is usually accompanied by teen sidekick Gamma Girl, the youngest daughter of retired superhero Radioactive Man; and occasionally by the eager but rarely helpful (and frequently naked) Kid Dinosaur.

[The Green Adam]

Not so much weird, but another of my no-one-said-I-couldn't-so-I-did campaigns...

Star Trek: Fedifensor
Star Trek, The Role Playing Game by FASA

After months of running a Star Trek campaign (set during the TOS motion pictures), the player of the first officer PC got a job working on our game day. In a big farewell blowout adventure, the PC becomes captain of his own ship and takes off at the end on his own missions.

About 2 weeks later, I talk to Dave, the player of the first officer turned captain. Turns out he had begun running a Star Trek campaign of his own. Dave's younger brother played his former character and the campaign followed the adventures of his new ship in the same area of space as my campaign. We stayed in touch, traded notes and soon it was clear to any player of either campaign that the continuity of the two games were shared.

A few months go by and Dave and I are at the local Pizza place when a good friend of ours walked in. We hadn't seen Rich in forever. He had joined the navy and was back for a while it seemed. Asking us if we still gamed we told him about our Trek games. He flipped out. A huge fan of Star Trek and a big gamer he wanted in but neither game met with his schedule. Using our campaigns as a basis, we helped Rich develop his own to run with a few friends and navy buddies. Then it hit me...all three campaigns were in the same sector of space.

It all culminated a few months after that. Rumours and side adventures in all three campaigns led to the belief that a species of energy beings were possessing people throughout the Federation and the Klingon Empire. Everything led up to a potential take over of our sector headquaters, Starbase Templar.

What happened next became legend in our gaming circles for years afterward (dramatic, no? ). Three GMs, 17 players, three Starships...a 24 hour gaming session that featured a battle between the forces of the alien invasion and the PC vessels. In the end, 4 PCs were killed, including the former first officer turned captain, Dave's old character, who sacrificed himself and destroyed his own vessel to eliminate the dimensional portal the aliens were using to enter our reality.

We boldly gamed where no one had gamed before!

[rowport]

Originally Posted by Ulrick

The Gamer Playing AD&D 2e by Himself

That just sounds like low-tech Everquest to me.

(And just as boring.)