D&D General How Weird Do You Like Your D&D

[Incenjucar]

Venture Brothers. Wacky but sincere.

I ran a six year long campaign that started with a scene with vampire mermaids and an angel pirate captain. There was the time the party snuck into a drug den by stealthing through a room where two giff were having a snog. The big bad before the real big bad ended up the Silver Sweeper after being driven mad, coated in ur-metal, given a broom, and taken over with a psychic minion subclass. I could go on.

 

[billd91]

Depends on the campaign. Some campaigns I like the weirdness more than others. It really helps when the players are roughly of the same mind. It's not so good when you want a relatively straight campaign but have one player who always brings the weirdness.

 

[Clint_L]

I currently use a version Exandria as my world, which is a more or less traditional fantasy setting, but I focus on areas that aren't much in the actual play shows, and add an extra dose of Lovecraftian horror.

 

[Clint_L]

Depends on the campaign. Some campaigns I like the weirdness more than others. It really helps when the players are roughly of the same mind. It's not so good when you want a relatively straight campaign but have one player who always brings the weirdness.

Yeah, we could have a whole thread on that one player who you love as a friend and can be very fun, but also is basically doing a whole different campaign.

 

[overgeeked]

On a scale of 1 to 10…How weird do you like your D&D?

Mine goes to 11.

Seriously. I love weird D&D. The weirder the better. That’s one of the many, many things I miss about old-school D&D. It’s the main draw of various OSR games like Old-School Essentials and Dungeon Crawl Classics. Sprinkle in a bit of WFRP chaos and corruption and chef’s kiss. Love me some Appendix N, pulp fantasy, sword & sorcery, science-fantasy, Philip K. Dick new wave sci-fi…mix it up and go wander through the mélange for awhile.

 

[jgsugden]

I want the DM to be interested in the setting and the players to appreciate the game. That can cover a huge spectrum of gaming experiences of widely differing levels of weirdness.

I've played in cartoonish Paranoia games. I've played in D&D where we were bumbling goblins trying to sneak into an opera to steal something we clearly did not understand. I've played in a Supes game where my character's heroic power was being able to do a Groundhog Day of the last 10 seconds (I could repeat my turn if I did not like how it turned out) and I used it to just break the DM's brain.

I've also played in a political conspiracy game where the PCs spent many sessions on intrigue and espionage between combats. I've played in games where everything was moral grey and it was a struggle to choose what we wanted to do with our capabilities because everything was some shade of wrong - including inaction. I've played in games where the decisions we made would change the course of a campaign world that had existed for decades.

All of those were outstanding. I am very adaptable. I just want something that everyone is enthusiastic about playing.

 

[Fanaelialae]

I don't think a scale is how I even think about it.

I like non-standard Fatansty, non-medieval stuff, A gorilla with a pair of punt guns grafted to its shoulders is my kind of weird.

Literally anything from the Far Realms, trying her to use tentacles and slimy to be creepy while just being nonsensical (things exploding into horse-sized ticks) is not.

IMO, nonsensical is often conflated for weirdness, but they're not really the same.

Weirdness may not function according to the principles you're used to, but it should have its own internally consistent principles. They can oftentimes be reasoned out through sufficient observation. Whereas nonsense has no principles (beyond maybe whatever the DM feels like at the moment).

 

[overgeeked]

To paraphrase Syndrome, if everything is weird then nothing is weird. Or at least it feels less weird.

Exactly this. It loses the shine if everything’s always weird. Certain people, places, or things cranking up the weird are great. Lots of disparate weird stuff, great. Everything everywhere all at once? Great movie, but not good for the level of weird in the game.

 

[James Gasik]

I generally try to avoid super weirdness, though I am constantly trying to evoke a sense of wonder in my players. What I tend to do is isolate the weirdness to places where it makes sense to exist, like the time my players ventured into the Feywild to rescue the daughter of a Gnome merchant and an entire town which had been absorbed into that realm.

While there, they encountered rampant wild magic, sunlight that didn't burn vampires, goblin snow ninjas, Father Winter leaving them presents, and a Pheldagrif.

But this wasn't something they'd normally encounter in the game world, obviously.

 

[CleverNickName]

How weird do I like my D&D? Here's a piece of artwork that inspired me to develop a whole new campaign:

Medusa pirates, orc druids riding dinosaurs, tallships with eldritch cannons, swashbuckling sorcerers...hell yes. The artwork is from M:tG's Ixalan set, and I borrowed a lot of elements from Tribality Games's "Seas of Vodari" campaign to flesh it all out.

So yeah. Pretty weird.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Someone else used the Pheladgrif in D&D!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

How weird do I like my D&D? Here's a piece of artwork that inspired me to develop a whole new campaign:
View attachment 268535Medusa pirates riding dinosaurs and eldritch cannons.

Oh now I have to steal this for the eventual "space astral pirates" story my players will adventure through.

(Edit: Don't worry, there will also be githyanki space pirates and other things. That much has already been established. But a medusa pirate-queen going up against the githyanki? That's too good to pass up.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't think a scale is how I even think about it.

I like non-standard Fatansty, non-medieval stuff, A gorilla with a pair of punt guns grafted to its shoulders is my kind of weird.

Literally anything from the Far Realms, trying her to use tentacles and slimy to be creepy while just being nonsensical (things exploding into horse-sized ticks) is not.

You'd probably appreciate the very excellent The Gardens of Ynn supplement. (For clarity, I get nothing out of these links. I just really liked the author's work.) I gussied it up a bit, extended it in ways appropriate for my campaign and such, but it definitely scratches itches like "this is weird and not just goofy-nonsensical, this is disturbing without being crass or simplistically gross."

One of my favorite additions that I made was the "Organ"ic Art display. The Sidhe (Arabized as "Shi" for my campaign) somehow created a series of sculptures which each feature a single (except the kidneys and the lungs, which were each a pair), perfectly healthy, perfectly functional humanoid organ, floating inside an impregnable glass-like tube seemingly full of water (or a liquid resembling water.) These organs had to have been present there, without maintenance or even cleaning, for centuries without dying or altering in any perceptible way, yet the heart continues to pump even today. (Careful examination reveals that the organs were probably engineered, as they're a little too aesthetically idealized to be real organs--and, more importantly, they don't seem to have come from the same species of being, instead having been chosen from different species to make a more pleasing artistic arrangement, rather than for being anatomically consistent.)

The players found it precisely the level of "really, really creepy, but not actually horrifying" that I was angling for.

 

[Vaalingrade]

"this is weird and not just goofy-nonsensical, this is disturbing without being crass or simplistically gross."

Possibly not; I'm not into disturbing so much as 'buckwild'.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Possibly not; I'm not into disturbing so much as 'buckwild'.

That's fair. Overall, the Gardens of Ynn is a not-super-nice place to be, but definitely has some "buckwild" stuff in it without devolving into mere nonsense.

 

[James Gasik]

I've run into some weird over the years in the wild. Castle Amber. Or WG7, which invokes PTSD from many older players.

And Dungeon! adventures, which always had some oddness going on. This one in particular takes the cake for me:

An old hermit and his singing mushroom band. Yeah. That's a thing.

 

[Scribe]

0: More aggressively "normal" than actual people's lives. This is the zone of things like the weird obsession with enforcing racism, sexism, religious oppression, and other IRL stuff that, yes, it really did exist but is really not fun and unnecessary in a fantasy setting.
1: Actually like most ordinary lives, the "quiet desperation" angle. Very few people want to play at this level mostly because very little of consequence happens to the vast majority of people here.
2-3: Special extensions beyond ordinary drudgery stuff. The people who live in a border town that sees a lot of comings and goings, or who work in a noble's mansion and thus hear all sorts of scandalous things. That kind of stuff--beyond mundane, but only just.
4-5: Actually fantastical, but at a distance removed. You know the local priest can do some magical stuff, your great-grandmother left the family that "cookbook" and her husband's (now dusty and ill-maintained) sword she claimed was magical. That kind of thing.
6-7: The fantastical is blended into the everyday. This means there is still an everyday to blend into, but it's hard to sharply separate the everyday stuff from the fantastical stuff. On the lower end, this resembles 2-3 but with supernatural things in addition to merely mundane-but-outlier things. On the high end, it's the home of many standard YA fantasy novels (e.g. the Old Kingdom books by Garth Nix), or Eberron.
8-9: The fantastical has largely supplanted the everyday. "Weird" things are a regular occurrence, magic is almost everywhere. Harry Potter is probably on the low end of this, while arguably Lovecraftian horror tends toward the high end, where reality itself is a thin fictional coat of paint over the madness-inducing truth of reality.
10: There is only the fantastical, and it strains hard against the boundaries of what is even remotely conceivable, let alone plausible.
11: You have gone beyond the impossible and made even "fantastical" inadequate to describe the kind of experiences or events that occur. Congratulations for breaking the system.

Given context like this, probably in that 4-6 range.

 

[Ancalagon]

Anyone loving "weird" D&D should check out UVG (ultraviolet grassland). Now THAT has weird stuff in it.

a few examples

• the near moon (you can reach it with a suitably tall ladder)
• The procelain princes: People who have managed to distribute their conciousness in several bodies, making them quasi immortal
• The Forest of Meat

The Ultra Violet Grasslands and the Black City

Softcover Version is currently sold out! PDFs only! "Fair hero, the end, the end alone awaits all travelers and at the end...was the journey all in vain? All journeys end in vanity. In vanity." - Mused the Grand Observer at the end of time. Welcome to The Ultraviolet Grasslands, the roleplaying...

www.exaltedfuneral.com

 

[Mad_Jack]

We fought giant rubber chickens once.

Back in 3.5, there was one paranoid player who convinced themselves that the party was being followed through the dungeon and kept insisting on making Spot checks every turn.

And spectacularly failed several of them in a row.

So later on, I had the party get ambushed from behind by the Spots that he had failed to spot.


Also, I am totally going to use the new OneD&D rules to somehow cobble together a pheldagrif character out of a Giff/Dragonborn hybrid.

 

[Xamnam]

Anyone loving "weird" D&D should check out UVG (ultraviolet grassland). Now THAT has weird stuff in it.

a few examples

• the near moon (you can reach it with a suitably tall ladder)
• The procelain princes: People who have managed to distribute their conciousness in several bodies, making them quasi immortal
• The Forest of Meat

The Ultra Violet Grasslands and the Black City

Softcover Version is currently sold out! PDFs only! "Fair hero, the end, the end alone awaits all travelers and at the end...was the journey all in vain? All journeys end in vanity. In vanity." - Mused the Grand Observer at the end of time. Welcome to The Ultraviolet Grasslands, the roleplaying...

www.exaltedfuneral.com

It's wonderful. Any given page is wild with inspiration.