Ever weirded yourself out?

[painandgreed]

In an adventure I'm working on, a mountain village is taken over by a large band of orcs and half-orcs right before the passes are closed by snow and when they leave they take a rich merchant's (who was not there) wife and child with them. The PCs are hired to track them down and bring back the wife and child by the merchant. A description of what went on is via a diary is read by the players. At first everything seemed not too bad as although they had killed the local militia, cleric, and lord, they didn't bother everybody else in the valley except to take their livestock away for food. in fact, the orcs even gave out the lord's (non-meat) food store tot he commoners so it was a fat winter. As the winter progresses, they run out of livestock and it describes the orcs rape and literal butchery of the village. n the end they leave with the remaining villagers in chains for a distant humanoid city where they will be sold as slaves. It is supposed to read like a horror story and sometimes I think I might be going a little too far, but I like to present my evil NPCs as EVIL. More evil that I would let my evil PCs play as I would ixnay PC actions that duplicted what I have some of my NPC evil clerics do (beastiality, necrophilia, torture, murder, and cannibalism but not always in that order)

 

[Savage Wombat]

Gee, all I had to do to creep my players out was have a nasty old man leer at the party's wizard (a 15 year old wild mage) and say "Hello, little girl, would you like some candy?"

There was talk of lynching, but they needed information.

 

[der_kluge]

I was in the process of describing to the GMs the steps I intended to take to put my plan into motion when it suddenly occured to me that, when I would be done, I'd have a dozen dead bodies and a dozen spare souls lying around. It occured to me that I could profit from the leftovers by raising their bodies as zombies (for use as personal servants) and selling their immortal souls to a wraithly reaper from the underworld for future favours.

This reminds me a game my friend is playing. It's an online game called Eve, and basically you fly around in a spaceship shooting other people, and making money. I played the beta with him briefly, and the economy in that game is purely player-driven (for the most part). So, not knowing exactly what I was doing, I put in a "buy" order for something called "bio-mass". Turns out, "bio-mass" is what you get when you kill people, a.k.a., corpses! So, I was putting out requests to purchase corpses, without even knowing it. And because of my actions, it seems highly likely that people were getting killed by those wishing to fill my order.

That still cracks me up to this day.

 

[Shemeska]

Absolutely. I've written some stuff from the point of a yugoloth in my Planescape campaign that I'm frankly astonished to have written, it's that vile. It's also one of the few things that I cannot conceivably put in my storyhour. Trust me on this.

Getting into a character's head can help you write better and have more expressive and emersive games, but a clear distance between in and out of character is obviously required. Frankly if I hadn't been surprised at some of the stuff I'd written, I'd feel worried about my mental health.

 

[Mercule]

I've found that since I've become a father that my capacity for plots that involve evil and children is much diminished. I now cringe at the prospect of harm coming to kids even in an imaginary fictional world. I never ran all that many of those plots in the first place but now I'm pretty much out of that business entirely.

Ditto on the fatherhood thing. In fact, I've found that my games have become less dark, in general, since becoming a father.

I'm sure I'm still capable of including the offences in a game without feeling too bad, but they've advanced to another level of vile. A level I've not felt the need to use in several years.

 

[Mercule]

Heh. It's even worse when you're playing a character without any humanity at all.

Agreed. About the same timeframe as my wife's encounter with the Tzimisce, I had an opportunity to play a vampire in a game. We needed to extract information and I had the skills to do it physically, but not through diplomacy. My GM decided he wanted to roleplay the interrogation and was deliberately eschewing dice -- I'm sure because he thought I'd be diplomatic like most of my characters are, and he knew the NPC was too fanatic to be talked out of the info.

I started out saying, "I torture him", but the GM didn't go for that, so I had to narrate the ordeal. What he didn't realize was that I knew two people in high school who had each written term papers on torture, and competed with each other in doing so -- and I got to hear every detail they put in. Well, I got the info from the NPC. And I've never been asked about torture again.

Shortly after that was when I decided graphic descriptions weren't always a good thing.

 

[Rel]

Shortly after that was when I decided graphic descriptions weren't always a good thing.

I had that point driven home by a sexual encounter between a male character (played by a male) and a prostitute (and girlfriend of a crimelord) portrayed by me as the GM.

Now we just cut to the phrase, "And a good time was had by all!"

And we don't look each other in the eyes much anymore.

 

[frankthedm]

Vicissitude + small children. Enough said.

No, no! Tell me more! That sounds sooooo delicious! My Freak Legion players would just eat that up!



When a player takes 20 searching a body, either A. the character looses sanity or B. if the system has no rules for it, the PLAYERS must recieve a description that costs them sanity.

 

[shilsen]

Nope. I'm a cynic and I believe in free will. Which translates to me believing that human beings have no inherent leanings towards good or evil but can choose to place themselves somewhere on the continuum. And I have the potential to be as good as the saintliest person who ever lived (who probably wouldn't fit my personal definitions of good, but that's another story...) and as evil as the most depraved individual in history. I simply choose not to exercise my potential for evil in real life. So when I am completely, utterly, scarily vile in designing something for my D&D game, I'm just exercising my infinite potential in a harmless manner and it doesn't bother me.

 

[Mercule]

No, no! Tell me more! That sounds sooooo delicious! My Freak Legion players would just eat that up!

It basically involved the Tzimisce slowly turning the boy into a still-living pitcher (granted, a large one) that would fill it's own bowl with blood, which was then used in the Vaulderie. Part of the horror, I think, was the graphic description of the moulding process.