What's your DM Gimmick?

[DungeonmasterCal]

I thought this had to be Grandma-friendly... if not...then I'll add the following brothel names that I've used and re-used:

The Gold Piece, The Eager Beaver, and the Weeping (the sign is a crying rooster).

 

[Pbartender]

Are there certain elements that always appear in your games, sort of inside jokes with your players or just stuff you like to do? Are they the sort of things your players not only expect, but would very well be dissappointed if you DIDN'T do?

The Rotgut Salloon.

Roe beer.

And Crazy Zeke, who is an awful lot like Mrs. Smedley, if only she looked and sounded more like Burgess Meredith.

 

[DonTadow]

Are there certain elements that always appear in your games, sort of inside jokes with your players or just stuff you like to do? Are they the sort of things your players not only expect, but would very well be dissappointed if you DIDN'T do?

Well, with me, the big one is kobolds. There will always be a kobold NPC that appears early in the campaign, and it will develop a crush on one of the PCs. The funny part is the party will ALWAYS adopt the darn thing, to the point where they are willing to share XP with it so it can gain levels! I've actually tried to just have them wander off, to have the party go looking for their kobold.

After that, it's Mrs. Smedley. Mrs. Smedley is a really annoying, old librarian that aggravated the crap out of the part in the first game I ever ran. So Mrs. Smedley makes a cameo in every game, normally trying the patience of the party at a point where they need information quickly. She has it, but drags her feet giving it to them.

Omaro the half-orc whom accidently slept with a kobold is in every campaign I run. Also Jonathan Sparrow is another reoccuring character. He's a time pirate traveling the planes in search of riches and wenches.

 

[linnorm]

I've always got a reference to green dragons in my games.

Way back in my first campaign the characters were traveling through a forest. I decided to roll for a random encounter and got a green dragon. I thought it'd be funny to put in and it proceeded to wipe out the party. (What can I say, we were 15.) Fortunately, there was a high-level mage traveling with the party who was able to disintegrate the dragon's head and take the group to get resurrected. This is also why the song 'Chromatic Death' has been banned from the in-game play list. I've been trying to live this incident down since.

This encounter made such an impression on the three of us that, aside from the in-game references, I've gotten them both green dragon related gifts and one of my friends even bought a green dragon head to mount on his wall.

 

[Flyspeck23]

Seems to be popular to have recurring taverns. Mine is called "World's End" (named after the Sandman comic book and a pub in London). Sometimes I even start the campaign there.
And no, it's not a "normal" tavern...

Another gimmick is monsters with class levels. I use them alot.

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.

Whoa - consider it stolen! That'd make a cool mini-campaign when we need to take a break from our current Eberron campaign.

 

[fiddlerjones]

I always have an NPC paladin named Sir Valentine who is trying to join some elite order or another but is inhibited by the fact that he's sleeping with the local ruler's wife. The party usually gets involved (to varying degrees) in his quest for redemption.

It's not a gimmick yet, but it will be: starting in the campaign I'm running now, dwarves have New York accents.

 

[NCSUCodeMonkey]

One of my favorites is to have the PCs relive history, or foreshadow the future, by having them play different characters in a dream sequence. Sometimes the characters are statistically the same, sometimes they are different, and sometimes there are no stats at all. I stole the idea from Monte Cook's Dead Gods (he uses it twice in the book, I think).

NCSUCodeMonkey

 

[Wombat]

I have three things that keep coming back...

#1 -- there is always a tavern or bar called The Blue Parrot and usually one called The Frog & Peach (thank you, Peter & Dudley).

#2 -- undead make great enemies -- no one has a reason to like them!

#3 -- Moral Dilemnas. This is something my players anticipate, worry about, and ultimately relish. I place them in a position where there is no clear cut Right and Wrong, a situation where, no matter what they do, they will make some people very angry and others very happy, even if they like the people they are making angry and loath those who will become happy. The notion is that life is full of tough and often rancid choices -- even the characters learn to deal with them and move on from there.

 

[swordsmasher]

In d20 modern, at the beginning of each session, I have Blade the daywalker mess up one of the pc's Lambhourgini (spelling) Diablo. I mean seriously mess it up. lol

In d&d the pc's discovered that all the higher level dieties live in a small Trailer park on the astral plane, and all they want to do is eat pork chips, drink beer, and watch CSI reruns on thier dish network. lol

to get them to raise one of the pc's from the dead, i had the pc's go into the lower planes to steal Azmodius' new Hypertronic 4000 dish and reciever so the Trailer park gods could get UPN. As it turned out, they forgot the remote, so the pc was returned to life without a right arm.

 

[Kid Socrates]

I have a few.

The Dismembered Lamb is a recurring tavern name, usually in seedy port towns.

An NPC named Trash Talker. His catchphrase is, to be frank, "I did your mom, how about that?" He's always an information broker. He originally was a PC of a friend of mine back in a Vampire game seven years ago, and in every game since then, he's been an NPC in mine, as a Nosferatu in the World of Darkness, to a chain-smoking moogle in my Final Fantasy game (MogNet is the Moogle Information Network).

The biggest thing is music, themes for PCs, battles, NPCs, cities, events, speeches, you name it. 120 files in the soundtrack so far.