What's your DM Gimmick?

[BroccoliRage]

Each game i run starts off with "submitted for your approval".. and ends with "stay tuned, true beleivers..."

i have a notebook full of npc's and one i like in particular is a ranger based on steve irwin the croc hunter, who instead of avoiding dangerous animals he's spotted goes up and antagonizes them. he often acts as a forest or jungle guide.

in T'lan Republic, a society i based off of rome, there is a festival in which they bveat the hell out of the city watch, chase them out of town, then bring them back in a get them drunk, reenacting a revolution in tlan's history.

My dwarves are nordic, my elves are very secretive, my desert people are wise, my halflings tend to be irish. my orcs arent typical stupid bastards, they are highly organized, very skilled in tactics, and have their own empire with a rigid caste system.

i have a goblin who keeps harassing my dwarven PC after a failed goblin raid. typically a rock gets thrown and hits the dwarf and the dwarf begins shouting curses, all of which receive replies like "thats what she said! Whooooo!"

one time i had a palladdin who always shined his armor. eventually acrow kept flying overhead and shrieked "look out below!" or "bombs away!" and then, splat! pointless polishing. when the palladdin got fed up and began killing off the crows he was confronted (at about crow #130) by a ranger who had been raising talking crows and wondering why he couldnt find them...

 

[S. Baldrick]

I'm not sure if this qualifies as a gimmick but one re-occuring theme in my campaings has been my friend Chris's character almost always ends up getting eaten by a gelantinous cube. It was like three seperate campaigns in a roll. For Christmas a few years ago, he gave a skeleton mini that was incased in a clear cube as kind of an inside joke. I have it on my mantle above my fire place.

 

[Shadowslayer]

Mine is my pet NPC. His name is Shadowslayer, a half elven Ranger/Guide/Boatman. (and in the old FR days, a Harper) Shadowslayer never plays a major role, but usually turns up in every campaign sooner or later, usually as a guide.

 

[FATDRAGONGAMES]

All of our campaigns have featured Kobald NPCs that annoy the players or harass them to all ends. We also always have a "Fat Dragon Inn" for each campaign (liked it so much I named my company after it!). In 25+ years, my players have done some pretty bizarre things to kobalds...

 

[BroccoliRage]

my characters are currently dungeon-crawling in castle greyskull from the old he-man cartoon. next theyll be facing down a lich on a mountain where a snake cult has formed, and this lich rides a panther....all in search of the snake cult of yig...

the great part is they still havent picked up on where all this is from.

 

[JustKim]

A small, molasses-haired woman named Kylie with a backpack full of holy/unholy symbols and a thick journal full of notes on various religions. Before she can become a Cleric Kylie wants to find the "best" deity, and this quest often leads her to interview PC divine casters. I use her to question PCs about their religion, and as a mobile source of information about other religions.

 

[Valesin]

Hags. Even before the addition of the coolest Hag ever, the Dusk Hag, I have always had hags involved to some extent in all my plots.

And rapiers. My party distrusts everyone with a rapier, even though half of them favor the rapier. No matter how many super-good NPCs I include who wield rapiers they will never be trusted.

 

[BlueBlackRed]

My gimmick is a story.
I reveal little bits of the main and side stories here and there.
And it's usually not a railroading story. Just something to guide the players in the right direction. If they ignore it, the story will continue and they'll here about the results later.

Kind of like Lost, but not as annoying.

 

[Corsair]

Looks like the kobold NPCs are common.

Meet Shorttooth. With the advent of 3rd edition and the simple rules for making classed monsters, one of my first experiments (for a one shot 15th level game) Was shorttooth, a kobold sorcerer/archmage. He wore a top hat (hat of disguise) which instead of disguising him as a non-kobold, he simply used to make his otherwise boring adventuring gear look like a stage magicians long-tailed tuxedo and cape.

Since that original incarnation, shorttooth has shown up in numerous forms. He's been a cowardly 2 hp kobold hiding in a barrell, he's been a mid-level kobold bard, chieftain of a small kobold tribe which the players had to negotiate with. In a SWd20 game, he was never seen, but he was reputed to be a "small deadly reptillian pirate". Only two of my five players had ever played in one of my DnD games, so the other three couldn't understand why those two were laughing.

Shorttooth rarely has a direct influence on the plot line unless the players specifically go out of their way to get him involved, but he is always there.

 

[babomb]

Well, in my old group, we had the Verbing Orcs. That is, every town had a tavern or inn -- or once, a circus -- with a name of the form [Verb ending in -ing] Orc. It started, I think, when the party travelled to the hometown of one of the PCs. I let the player of said PC make up some stuff about the town. One of them was that there was a tavern called the Singing Orc. It was the secret hideout of the thieves' guild, and there was an orc who sang quite badly, apparently to discourage anyone from getting too nosy. Then there was a Jumping Orc Inn, run by a half-orc who half-jumped. There was also a Chandelier-Swinging Orc and the Flying Orc Circus, along with some others I don't recall.