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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Haltherrion" data-source="post: 5334957" data-attributes="member: 18253">As others have noted, it's hard to gussy up the commonplace. Making a magic missile sound cool is possible the first time you try to do it but after the fifth time the ref dresses up the description of a common spell, it gets ludicrous. Reminds me of a game long long ago where the referee had us find an item in a secret compartment. We spent 30 minutes examining this fist size, brown object only to eventually discover it was a potato. It was an interesting exercise. Up until the moment we realized it was a potato, we were quite intrigued and interested. Afterwards, we were quite annoyed. I'd have to count it as a failure although perhaps the ref considers it a success. Regarding creating a sense of awe in FRPs in general, this is not as difficult. It generally requires an unusual underlying idea coupled with a description that properly places it as quite amazing (generally in comparison to something more mundane). The concepts that seem to work best are either things that are awesome due to their scale (a tower a mile high with some unique reason for being there, a flying castle of prodigious proportions) or awesome due to the fear or disgust they evoke. On the latter side, I recall two things that a friend created years ago that had high in-game awe factor. It's honestly hard to evauate my own awesome ideas because as the creator, I don't get that visceral response. <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A little one but still memorable and at the time, it had its own little 'awe' factor: a water breathing affect that requirede someone to eat the gills of a creature, the only gills being available were a rotting creature (and somehow this was also a play on words for Galbraithe, Gilbreathe but I can't recall how that was worked into it.) I still remember my PC refusing to do out of in and out of character disgust.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A bigger one that a campaign was partly built around: demonic hounds that howled before attacking and pulled a deaths' skull from their knees that had literally had a drop-dead affect. (The skull was based on a particular figure that had skull knee caps).</li> </ul>The first one leveraged something that was just creepy to some players. The second one coupled descriptives (the howling, the actual painted figures) with a very dangerous effect which was demonstrated early on with irrevocable PC deaths.</blockquote>

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