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

[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.