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Message: <blockquote data-quote="overgeeked" data-source="post: 8250167" data-attributes="member: 86653">You’re the DM. You can do anything you want. You just have to be creative with it.Sure you could. Invent a town where they figured out how to domesticate oozes. The oozes follow people around town like pets. If you want to give it a horror twist something goes wrong and the oozes revert to their instincts and you have a D&D Blob movie. Or make the oozes semi-intelligent or better and they have a plan, even if a basic one. Like any episode of Doctor Who where the Daleks convince some dumb group of humans they’re there to help. Things go wrong.I suspect like anything you’d get one shot at the “wow...that’s cool” response before you’d hit diminishing returns. Just like every other monster in the game. After 3-4 your players would be yawning. “Oh, gee, another warren of kobolds...yawn.” Track that out after nearly 40 years of playing and plop a kobold warren in front of them and you’re somehow surprised everyone’s grabbing their phones between turns.Only if you design them that way. Towns have an ecology just like a dungeon. Towns certainly can be filled with monsters. Either proper D&D-style monsters or human monsters. Cultists, worshippers of dark gods, cannibals, any variery of nasty human you want. The benefit of a town is that the players and characters don’t generally expect danger in a sleepy sea-side town. But Innsmouth. And they don’t expect danger at the summer festival. But Midsommar.Towns have whatever purpose you give them. There’s no rule that towns have to be safe.You said you liked and missed the weird, so why not go weird with your towns?Make the dragon the mayor. In disguise or not. Let the characters slowly figure that out. You’ve suddenly got something interesting to do. Make a kobold lawyer or a bullywug judge. Hell, make a beholder sheriff.Do something different. Something weird. At least that would be interesting.You’re the DM. You can do whatever you want. You’re only limited by your imagination.Subverting expectations is the best place to be. Giving players exactly what they expect, especially after they’ve played for decades, is boring. “Oh, gee, another mostly linear dungeon with lots of oozes and kobolds and traps...yawn.” Subverting expectations is what wakes up the players. “What do you mean there’s a troll in town? And the people aren’t running screaming? WTF is going on?” That’s interesting. That’s a mystery to solve.Sure, why not? The only thing stopping you is your imagination.I’m glad that gets your juices flowing. That’s awesome.I see that map and nearly pass out from boredom. That map will be filled with dozens of the same monsters in basically the same set up as they have been for the last 40 years. Your players with have to murder their way through a series of increasingly difficult monsters. Just as expected. They will face traps. Just as expected. They will have secret doors and portals that bypass content if found. Just as expected. They will learn of animosities between the factions and be able to play them off each other. Just as expected. Skip all the boring stuff and get to the good stuff. The new and different. You stock it with the same monsters and same traps and samey sameness for 75 rooms and tuck two rooms with new and novel encounters, I’ll still be bored to death long before we get to those two interesting rooms...if we ever even get to those two interesting rooms.That’s not me attacking you, that’s me being bored to death with dungeons. They’re all the same. Five guys got together over 40 years ago and had a few good ideas. After all this time later and we’re still just regurgitating them with minor variations at best.People can talk about mythic connections all they want. Until someone puts out a properly mythic dungeon, it’s still 2d6 goblins in room 4 repeated hundreds of times. That’s the trouble with making myth and magic mundane...it becomes mundane.</blockquote>

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