Let's Get Weird!

[Reynard]

What out of place, strange, weird elements have you introduced (or experienced the introduction of) into an otherwise "normal" game?

Note: no relating tales of weird campaigns. I am talking about games that were ostensibly played "straight" and then something weird, off kilter,out of genre, etc... happens.

I do this a lot, but my favorite from recent games was a Doom Trooper assault team breaking into a Descent into Avernus campaign. Literally just guys in power armor with beam weapons diving into Hell and the PCs having to deal with it.

How about you?

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

Well, the much-feared psychedelephant has been known to make an appearance (but usually only one) in rather a lot of my campaigns over the years, including three of the five editions of D&D, two different editions of Gamma World, a showing in Nexus the Infinite City, a sighting in Milwaukee during an early Vampire the Masquerade session, Villains & Vigilantes, Ghostbusters, Pandemonium, and probably something I'm forgetting as well. It used to be kind of a signature custom monster for me, but I haven't used it in quite a while and the current reasonably system-agnostic write-up is relatively new. One of my GMs borrowed it from me in LBB Traveller back in the day (don't take recreational drugs from a Hiver, seriously, don't), and another old crony used it in an Eclipse phase game, but I wasn't playing that one, just heard about it afterward.

I suppose Ghostbusters and Pandemonium might qualify as weird campaigns by their very nature, but it was still pretty out-of-the-norm even in those. Well, maybe not as much in Pandemonium. Atlas Games' shining gem (just look at the creative team) and still OOP. Really wish they'd do new edition of that one. Or at least offer the original as a pdf.

 

[Wolfpack48]

The adventure where the PCs needed to enlist the help of hated trolls to rid their town of the more hated Lunars. It was basically attach the fuse and then let everything blow.

 

[overgeeked]

That’s the kind of gaming I live and breathe.

My latest kick is animate objects. The lock you’re picking is upset at the impropriety of a random stranger sticking a lock pick into it. The door refuses to open because you’re rudely pounding on it. The tree in the nearby grove is really a nascent god.

 

[Umbran]

What out of place, strange, weird elements have you introduced (or experienced the introduction of) into an otherwise "normal" game?

"Normal." Riiight.

How about you?

The thing that comes to mind isn't from D&D...

In the climatic battle of a Deadlands campaign, I had General George Armstrong Custer (Retired) coming at the PCs on the back of a 30' tall war mastodon.

 

[Reynard]

The thing that comes to mind isn't from D&D...

This is in General for a reason.

In the climatic battle of a Deadlands campaign, I had General George Armstrong Custer (Retired) coming at the PCs on the back of a 30' tall war mastodon.

Niiiice!

 

[jdrakeh]

In a distant, not so far, post-apocalyptic future George W. Bush led a colony of gene-spliced goatmen from atop his talking horse, armed with twin six shooters in a war against the lizard men.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Oh, lets see... How about the world in my d6 Space campaign where only the women survived cold sleep, so they had to uplift their pets to make companions. It took the players quite a while to figure out that something was not quite right here!

 

[p_johnston]

So a couple of campaigns ago i was running Vampire the Masquerade. At one point one of the characters caught a mountain lion in a trap and didnt have any weapons to knock it out/kill it. So they used the lion as a speed bag beating it unconscious over several rounds.

 

[Reynard]

I once designed a dungeon as a research station for a advanced planar species investigating a pretty typical D&D world. There were all sorts of magictech whatsits in the place, but the most fun was the room sized reality warping computer that was a reskinned Deck of Many Things.