Easter Eggs

[Nilbog]

One for the DM's I guess, do you insert any eater eggs or little themes in your campaigns just to see if your players pick up on them?

Being a massive Transformers fan I always try and sneak a reference to them into my campaigns, the previous campaign there was a warforged pirate called Broadside, the current campaign the NPC wizard the group encounter on a recurring basis is Kranix

 

[John Dallman]

Not deliberately. I tend to find some themes appear in my campaigns anyway. This seems to be something to do with using the same brain for running all of them.

 

[sithholocron]

Yup, I use meta easter eggs all the time in my games.

I also use a lot of movie scenes as easter eggs as well. I especially love Pulp Fiction easter eggs in my game.

 

[Umbran]

One for the DM's I guess, do you insert any eater eggs or little themes in your campaigns just to see if your players pick up on them?

No. I make references because they please me. They are not there to test if the players will notice.

 

[Dioltach]

No. I make references because they please me. They are not there to test if the players will notice.

Me too. They're my private joke moments. If my players catch them, great. Sometimes they do, mostly they don't.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

All the time - I will often include references and throwbacks to past campaigns, sometimes ones that the group played through, sometimes ones from another group. They're easter eggs, sure, but also my attempt to show the continuity of the world, that it is a living, vibrant place.

 

[Umbran]

Me too. They're my private joke moments. If my players catch them, great. Sometimes they do, mostly they don't.

Heck, even on the player side...

Over a decade back, I was making a character for a campaign larp. I had determined his mechanical role (field engineer and scientist, mostly). I had set up his basic personality. But they also wanted a pretty detailed background story, and I didn't really have one. So, the night before the due date, I took King Arthur, filed the serial numbers off, and used its basic plotline. I changed the names, (so, Mordred became "Morty", Guenevere became "Ginny" and such). And for reasons, everyone called him "Cody", but the given name he never used any more was Caleb Drake (referencing Excalibur and Pendragon).

For me, this was busywork, a checkbox item I made fun for myself - I didn't expect it to even be read, much less recognized for what it was. From my perspective, in that past story Arthur went to Avalon, and it ended. This was a new story.

I played for two years with nobody noticing a thing.

The third year, someone noticed (because my wife told them) and things got really weird.

 

[aramis erak]

One for the DM's I guess, do you insert any eater eggs or little themes in your campaigns just to see if your players pick up on them?

Being a massive Transformers fan I always try and sneak a reference to them into my campaigns, the previous campaign there was a warforged pirate called Broadside, the current campaign the NPC wizard the group encounter on a recurring basis is Kranix

I used the names of the cast of Hogan's Heroes as the names of the NPCs they rescued from a T2K POW camp.

The player who might have recognized it had to drop the week I wrote it up.

 

[Grogg of the North]

I ran a game where the owner of the magic shop (essentially a second hand store) would share a story of how she acquired a certain item and who it came from. I used it as a chance to reference everyone's past characters. It got a lot of smiles and one player was really happy when I referenced his original fighter from when we first started playing.