Most interesting sub-mechanic?

[thejc]

I remember during the 2e Ad&d days of Dungeon they had a module in which the party was polymorphed(? for lack of a better term) into orcs in order to infiltrate their nation and strike from within(there was a much more specific goal but I am at a loss for it). In the meanwhile you had to avoid doing "orcish" things. If you did you gained a point. There was an undisclosed number and if you reached that then it would be impossible to turn you back to your original race, you became an orc.

Whats the most interesting/fun sub-mechanic you've come across or introduced?

Also reminds me of the noteriety score from the City of Skulls module....

 

[FoxWander]

I recall one adventure (Dungeon magazine, I believe) which actually had a "save game" function in the form of an Amulet of Fate which was given to the party. The outcome of the adventure relied heavily on being able to negotiate a deal between a dragon and the town it was attacking, or something like that. Anyway, it was something the party was highly likely to screw up- thus a limited-charge magic item which allowed them to set a "save point" which they would all jump back to if they said a command word or all got killed- but they would remember how things had gone and could do it better next time. I think the adventure was designed to give you a bigger reward the less you relied on the amulet to get through it. Never played or ran the adventure, but it was certainly an interesting mechanic- and with a plausible explanation for it's existence.

Another fun adventure (one of my favorites anyway) was "Chandranther's Bane" from a rather early Dungeon magazine. In the adventure the party spends the night in an abandoned inn with a large garden out back. During the night the get shrunk down by a stolen minor-artifact so small that your game miniatures become one-to-one scale representations for your character. The bulk of the game is about finding out what happened, then finding and destroying the artifact to fix it-- all the while dealing with a vastly different perspective. Anyway- the interesting mechanic bit was that if a magic-user casts "Find Familiar" (1E game) during the adventure there was a table for getting one of the regular garden denizens for a familiar- mostly insects and such. However, because of the way the artifact shrunk you and your equipment (tied in with "life-force" and how "connected" you are to an object), if you succeed in the adventure and get un-shrunk, your new insect familiar would scale up with you! That doesn't mean a whole lot now with improved familiars and all, but back in the day it was pretty interesting to have a "giant" ant for a familiar.

 

[kitsune9]

In my current campaign, the raw infusion of chaos is something known as Taint. It's black, very cold to the touch (sometimes it will do cold damage) and radiates evil. Handle enough of it and you'll mutate and eventually shift to chaotic evil. I kind of ripped the idea of warpstone from Warhammer FRP. Not only that, I use the mutations out of the book Tome of Corruption for the Warhammer FRP 2e game in my Pathfinder game. Should the PC's build up 10 Taint points, they are forever tainted and cannot be cured.

 

[El Mahdi]

Kind of like the Taint mechanic Kitsune described, there's a similar mechanic in the adventure Labrynth of Madness.

***Spoiler Alert***

Due to an evil Yuan-Ti taint permeating the Labrynth. Any Hit Point healing causes wounds to be healed as normal, but they heal with a scaly effect. Each time you're healed, you get a little more scaly. Eventually, if you suffer and are healed of enough damage, the PC becomes a Yuan-Ti themself.

Happy Times!