• Home
  • About
  • TABLES!
  • Gods
  • Monsters
  • Reader Requested Content
Rolang's Creeping Doom

Finding the Weird

January 19, 2011 11:22 pm / Leave a Comment / Chris
Print Friendly Version of this pagePrint Get a PDF version of this webpagePDF

OK, so I was catching up with all of last week’s OSR discussions and discover Zak’s fantastic post that I am sure you have all read by now. I think it’s a fantastic distillation of what I’m going for in the future. Not as aggressively as some, but nonetheless…

I don’t have a long post in me about it yet. But I will recount a situation where I felt I’d found the weird around a gaming table.

I ran Death Frost Doom last August for a bunch of old school gamers from the New York Red Box. A great bunch of guys, btw.

Without spoiling DFD, I can say that there is a place in the game where things behave very strangely but do not seem to use magic in the sense that people have come to understand it. It’s quite a shocking moment for the players, who have a lot ahead of them at that point. One of my players was convinced that he’d run into an illusion of some sort and kept trying to disbelieve and then doing things that would let me justify him disbelieving. And they had no effect.

I can’t speak for that player 100 percent, it did seem to knock them back a bit that something wasn’t behaving by the logic of AD&D/OD&D that we’d been accustomed to for quite a long time. Most of the party seemed intrigued, but they were also very cautious at that point.

I don’t think it frustrated anyone or made the game less fun–in fact it seemed to make it more fun. We are at a point where the rules have been around for so long that situations that suspend them put players into that “weird” valley.

Taking people out of their comfort zone without completely abandoning the rules might be another path to the weird.

Share

Related posts:

  1. Review – Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Role-Playing Boxed Set A recent issue of Fight On!, dedicated to Paul Jaquays, quotes his classic Judges Guild adventure, The Caverns of Thracia: “Nothing seems to...
YARPP
Posted in: campaign window dressing, commentary, legacy D&D / Tagged: death frost doom, weird

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Post Navigation

← Previous Post
Next Post →
Creative Commons License
This work by Rolang's Creeping Doom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Norse elves tables story-arc swords and wizardry npcs clerics Greek humor zombie rules urban table art spells death frost doom halflings poison classical mundane dcc content hydra rethinking magic items ettin classes lotfp wf rpg Metropolitan Museum familiar religion Freamon meta monsters Medusa magic-users kids gods bring it santicore vornheim nerdnyc recess undead labyrinth lord

Recent Posts

  • Santicore 2015
  • DCC Magic Items to playtest
  • Side Hustle – Bandits and a Wizard
  • Simple pleasures are the best
  • One Day Left to Get in on Santicore 2015

What People Said

  • Emmy on LotFP Illusionist Class: Please Help Me Kick the Tires
  • Chris on Side Hustle – Bandits and a Wizard
  • Powder Miner on Random God Generator
  • Len Brennan on The RPG Hydra
  • Chris on Random Hermit Generator

Suggested Reading

  • Ancient Vaults & Eldritch Secrets
  • Blog of Holding
  • Dreams of Mythic Fantasy
  • Giblet Blizzard
  • Grognardia
  • Jeff's Gameblog
  • Lamentations of the Flame Princess
  • Lord Kilgore
  • Old Guard Gaming Accoutrements
  • Planet Algol
  • Playing D&D with Porn Stars
  • Sea of Stars
  • Swords & Wizardry
  • Swords and Dorkery
  • The Mule Abides
  • The Society of Torch, Pole and Rope
© Copyright 2021 - Rolang's Creeping Doom
Infinity Theme by DesignCoral / WordPress