what easter eggs are in your homebrew?

[messy]

many are familiar with the easter eggs in various game books (a carrot is the material component for darkvision, xagyg is gary gygax's last name backwards... sorta, etc.).

here are a few easter eggs i've incorporated into my homebrew:

• there is a castle called "great stoney."

• there is a long-dead, legendary wizard named "ral-partha."

• a prominent npc's name is an anagram of my (real life) name.

so, what easter eggs are in your game?

 

[messy]

oops, wrong forum. can someone move this to "general?"

 

[Nagol]

The PCs followed up on the legend of a lost city.

It turns out it was known as Smargadus, or "City of Emerald", in the ancient tongue. Followup investigation included details that the city was the capital of a nation of small demi-humans, gnomes and halflings mostly. The political structure was a Mageocracy with 4 sorceresses in charge of provinces and a Wizard overlord. Of course, the country was named Oz.

The PCs haven't found it yet, but they keep talking about it.

 

[ThatGuyThere]

It turns out it was known as Smargadus, or "City of Emerald", in the ancient tongue.

This is awful. Simply awful. It's bad, and you should feel bad.[/publically]

Smargadus, eh? ...hmm, I know a couple of my game-worlds that would fit on...[/insidevoice]

 

[MatthewJHanson]

The PCs had to seek out advice from a giant turtle living in the swamp who was allergic to humans.

 

[Tamlyn]

Our group has been together roughly 12 years and the first 10 was all a single campaign. When the first DM had to bow out 2 years ago, I took over with a new campaign. So I stole heavily.

A demi-god from the first campaign was mentioned briefly in a library book in the new one. An NPC paladin was introduced using the last name of the previous campaign's PC paladin. Etc...

So far, the players only recognized the demi-god easter egg. The rest simply amuse me.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I pitched a game as d&d lost, and most people figured out pretty quickly that the island was in ravon loft... But it was 8 games in before the mummy domain lord, shifter allies, lizard men Gnolls and monkey man henchmen made sense... It was awesome


[sblock] thunder cats [/sblock]

 

[kitsune9]

Never considered this messy. I think maybe in my next campaign, I'll put some Easter Eggs in there. I'll have to come up with some stuff that I think my players will catch, but they are a bit....varied....in their tastes, so an Easter Egg to one is a lost reference to others.

 

[BraveSirKevin]

As Quest for Glory, the old Sierra game, was my introduction to roleplaying I've often included references to that in all the adventures I've written, and I often pay tribute to it in a lot of the artwork I've done for DnD stuff, and more than a few of my rogue minis are painted with brown trousers and a green vest, though only one of them has a mop of blonde hair!

In this dungeon set there is a fountain tile that was inspired by the fountain in shapeir in QFG2, and in this set, there is a bookshelf with the "blackbird" that showed up in every game in that series. The bird is of course The Maltese Falcon, from the movie of the same name

That's kinda recursive I suppose, cos Quest for Glory itself is loaded with subtle and less subtle homages to various things like the Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Dinosaurs, the 3 Stooges and so on.

 

[RangerWickett]

The main villain of ZEITGEIST is named after my father. No, don't read anything into that.

The emperor of War of the Burning Sky was named after Piratecat's character in Sagiro's storyhour here. That storyhour also had a flying carpet called Burning Sky.

My PCs in my last campaign never realized that the regional map was basically Texas.