John writes:
I’m always eager to exploit other people and steal their ideas. I request a table of weird city encounters, as many as you feel like doing.
Weird City Encounters
Choose or roll 1d… uh.. 14?
| 1 | In Harley Square is fountain where some believe commune with dead relatives on special nights. In the fountain is Narys, shape-changing water nymph with ESP. |
| 2 | Messr. Pontius Meerlanker likes to take Fidelis, his dog (his touch has the same effects as a rust monster) for a stroll through crowded streets. |
| 3 | At the gate to the cemetery, a dozen brightly-colored parrots have learned to repeat a charm-person spell. Hundreds stare at them all day until dragged home by family. Others die staring up at their ledge. |
| 4 | Four bearded and shabby Masters of the Far-Reaching Conspiracy stand on a soapbox in the market and scream their secret plans to the world. Everything they say is well-known by many and is considered completely preposterous. |
| 5 | Esmerelda is a tall warrior woman will fight all comers in a back alley fight club. The warrior who defeats her gets to marry her. (She is a pennangalan). |
| 6 | This nameless shade is rarely seen but always heard playing a dulcimer and singing at market. He plays the dulcimer and sings the darkest secrets of a random passerby or party member. If spotted, he disappears. |
| 7 | Marco the Simpleton stabs the tree with his scissors, all day, every day. If he does not, the tree will burrow down and tunnel 100 yards toward the palace, then resurface. Eventually, it will kill the young prince. |
| 8 | Shad the Farrier will buy your old or injured horse. Under his stable is a secret room where he tries, unsuccessfully, to sew centaurs using the horses and those who pass out drunk in the alleys. |
| 9 | The travelling zoo has an albino ape that has been trained to sit and eat at the table, dress herself and paint. Paintings are often auctioned off. She hides cries for help in her paintings. Maybe you should help her. (She is a polymorphed little girl from an island of vicious spellcasting cannibals.) |
| 10 | Aphrodite the harlot beckons customers to follow her. She leads them to ever darker corners until they are… |
| 11 | Stump the Small is a human somewhere between the height of a dwarf and a halfling. He spies on dwarfs, gnomes, halflings and faeries. He is the best and he is expensive. He is wanted dead by many. |
| 12 | Elzeer, Orkney and Blount are the clothmeisters, powerful merchant patricians who must approve all textiles before they are brought to market or exported. They are giant weevils in disguise and will attempt to confiscate or steal any magical cloth or clothing the smell in the city. They eat it and gain powers. |
| 13 | Marzetz the Sommelier will offer to tell you, for a small fee, how appetizing your blood is to vampyres. (Roll 1d6. He is unerringly correct, but not a vampyre.) |
| 14 | The Eastgate Bat sometimes flies during the day. If he hangs from a streetlamp, archway or gate, none of the locals will pass it, less their souls be forfeit to the bat. Some approach him and leave offerings, hoping to buy back their loved one’s souls. |
Need something for an upcoming game? You can get in on this by posting here. For every request, I’ll donate $1 to a charity to be named soon (up to $150).
Finding the Weird
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.