What are your reoccurring DM Quirks?

[PapaQuackers]

Hey guys, I thought it'd be fun to talk about some of our DM quirks that have popped up over the years in our various games. If you don't have one that's OK, not everyone does. I just thought it'd be fun to give it a little chat.

I'll start it off by saying that every tavern all of my campaigns is always cat related in name, "The Cat's Paw, The Cat's Meow, Whiskers Pub" and etc. I don't know why this happened, it just did so I rolled with it.

In addition to that there's always at least one city in every one of my campaigns named after my cat Bast.

Lastly, in the tradition of Final Fantasy there is always one NPC named Trints Salvoris across all the games.

So what are yours?

[Maxilian]

In all my campaigns, if they are near a swamp, they will see an alligator like figure looking at them from far away (Reference to how my party killed a group of demons without much trouble but almost got TPK by a group of Crocodiles because they all decided to go different ways and the crocodiles had great rolls)

Also, there's an intelligent wolf that they have run into a couple of times named Dernot (This was actually one of my players pet on my first campaign as a DM, they all feel into the Astral Plane, and when they got out, they totally forgot of the poor wolf -so... many things happened to that poor wolf-)

[Regitnui]

I talk too much...

Otherwise, the running jokes so far are the cleric needing to be stopped when meeting new female NPCs, the half-orc monk being uglier than a dwarf, and the sorcerer being slow.

[Reathin]

Whenever my little brother is involved, I have background cameos from his two earliest characters, an Ogre and a Dwarf. Usually just drinking at the bar.

Sometimes the Unholy Ogre Wail is involved, which I perform by screaming while inhaling.

I also enjoy dungeons crafting and making them make some degree of sense if looked at in a 3D model.

[gfishfunk]

Even though my players NEVER catch it, I always look for some real life philosopher, political structure, or historic persons and use those for my NPCs and story structure.

I have a lawful neutral (moving towards lawful evil) group of paladins that are named after behavioralists. Also, their motto is the basic fascist motto of Italy during world war II, tweaked a bit.

I keep track of plot points as fallout style quests in roll20 (really just summarizing what happened last, and what people have asked the party to do OR what the party stated that they want to do), and I always use foreshadowing pun titles:
- How Many Liches Does it Take?
- The Life Necrotic With Steve Rissole
- Brave New World

All the quest titles give a reference to something that can be expected to happen. Too many Liches, for example. Steve Rissole turned out to be undead and had to be put down. Brave New World is a reference to the famous novel, the development of a faux-utopia, and the party encounters various twisted magically developed abominations titled Alphas, Beta, Gammas, Deltas, Epsilons.

EDIT: Also, almost without fail, there are always a NPC duo that assists the party named Vicks and Wedge.

[Ruslan]

There is always a bad guy named Victor. Always.

[WereRabbitz]

A Ranger named Locke will make at least Cameo appearance in every campaign I run. Sometimes it's just bumping into him, other times i've used him to pull the party out of a mess.

I have a deep love of twist endings.

I have a soft spot for kind hearted necromancers.

[DireSickFish]

Owlbears man Owlbears. Every campaign I DM is going to have them show up at some point or another. They make such good monsters and can be thrown in anywhere really. Fantastical enough to go "Oh yeah we're playing D&D" but not as crazy as stumbling over Dragons all the time. They're also fairly iconic to D&D, and I don't think they come from any mythology.

[DracoKnight]

I use my own wild magic table and it has 500+ effects on it. Some of which are very bad (random party member loses their legs, or the nearest star goes supernova), entertaining (the Doctor shows up, or Jack Sparrow pulls up in the Magic School Bus, or Deadpool shows up), or beneficial (everyone in the party gains the benefits of a long rest, x magic item appears).

Another thing I do is on that wild magic table, I have the player roll a d20. 1-10, their roll on the table will be bad/neutral for the party on a roll of 11-20 it will be neutral/good for the party.

[Maxilian]

I use my own wild magic table and it has 500+ effects on it. Some of which are very bad (random party member loses their legs, or the nearest star goes supernova), entertaining (the Doctor shows up, or Jack Sparrow pulls up in the Magic School Bus, or Deadpool shows up), or beneficial (everyone in the party gains the benefits of a long rest, x magic item appears).

I don't play much Sorcerer, but i think that may be a problem if you got a high lvl Sorcerer... also...

the nearest star goes supernova

So.... WK? (World Kill? :P), i mean... the sun will go supernova, everyone is going to die (unless a god do something and having in mind that they normally have no power in the material plane)....

[DracoKnight]

I don't play much Sorcerer, but i think that may be a problem if you got a high lvl Sorcerer... also...

the nearest star goes supernova

So.... WK? (World Kill? :P), i mean... the sun will go supernova, everyone is going to die (unless a god do something and having in mind that they normally have no power in the material plane)....

I DM a homebrew world where the gods are very active. But besides that, the ONE time that someone's rolled this, they had a wondrous figurine that they hadn't been able to figure out how to use. I was going to have them quest to figure it out, but they needed it right then, as it was a spelljammer ship. The campaign turned into a space adventure where they discovered the current world we're adventuring on.

[Maxilian]

I DM a homebrew world where the gods are very active. But besides that, the ONE time that someone's rolled this, they had a wondrous figurine that they hadn't been able to figure out how to use. I was going to have them quest to figure it out, but they needed it right then, as it was a spelljammer ship. The campaign turned into a space adventure where they discovered the current world we're adventuring on.

Ok, they only had to destroy a whole world in the process! :P

[lunaticfringe]

I'm just too awesome, sexy, & right all the time..

But seriously
I like to use Charismatic villains, who are usually helping an underprivileged group. Ex. There was an elf sorceress who operated an orphanage for abandoned Tiefling children with disabilities & unfortunate appearances. Nothing nefarious was going on, she just felt for them and wanted to help.

Weird inventions can be found scattered around the world with the same Maker's Mark. In Westport in my Faerun there is a machine that, if you insert a silver piece & gold piece; it will smash the gold piece into a pendant with the symbol of your God. If you don't worship a god it returns the coins unaltered.

I have an Emperor of "Major City" recurring npc who is a total rip off of Christopher Moore's fictionalized & funny Emperor of San Francisco character.

Celestials are really really dumb. Again an idea taken from Christopher Moore specifically the book The Stupidest Angel.

There is a 1% chance (natural 1 on a d100 RNG) that while on a ship at sea during a storm that the party will be sucked into the Gyre. A a planet sized cursed demiplane that was the home base of a now dead God of Piracy & Storms. Hasn't happened yet but it will & it will be glorious.

[odigity]

In all my campaigns, if they are near a swamp, they will see an alligator like figure looking at them from far away (Reference to how my party killed a group of demons without much trouble but almost got TPK by a group of Crocodiles because they all decided to go different ways and the crocodiles had great rolls)

Is one of the characters in the party a pirate with a hook for an arm?


Owlbears man Owlbears. Every campaign I DM is going to have them show up at some point or another. They make such good monsters and can be thrown in anywhere really. Fantastical enough to go "Oh yeah we're playing D&D" but not as crazy as stumbling over Dragons all the time. They're also fairly iconic to D&D, and I don't think they come from any mythology.

Owelbears are to D&D as cats are to the internet.

[DracoKnight]

Ok, they only had to destroy a whole world in the process! :P

Eh...it was the Forgotten Realms - I wasn't too beat up about it.

[Waffle_Iron]

Owlbears man Owlbears. Every campaign I DM is going to have them show up at some point or another. They make such good monsters and can be thrown in anywhere really. Fantastical enough to go "Oh yeah we're playing D&D" but not as crazy as stumbling over Dragons all the time. They're also fairly iconic to D&D, and I don't think they come from any mythology.

I use owlbears so often, I've got notes on their whole life cycle. I've also used a number of variants, and could populate a quarter of the MM with them alone.

:)

Glad I'm not the only one.

[DracoKnight]

I will throw my name in with people who love using owlbears :smallbiggrin:

[Stan]

Yep. Owlbears are cute.

I always end up creating very complicated plots with hidden layers. I set out to make a simple dungeon crawl and there ends up rivalries and sad histories among the monsters. Then the patron will be undead but have pure love towards some other NPC. Rooms will have hidden features like a timestop closet, toilets that shoot deadly cleaning beams once a day, and traps on traps. There'll be villains who are just trying to find a way to walk away from the dungeon with sad poems in the back of their spellbook. Of course, the outside world will have hidden conspiracies, wars about to start, and cheaters on cooking shows.

The net result is that players are usually a bit confused and never really figure out what was going on in the dungeon.

[DireSickFish]

I also have a lot of my badguys trying to tempt the players over to their side. I want to give my players choice. But it's not really much of a choice if I know they're going to be goodie goodies and offer it to them anyway.

[Naanomi]

I almost always have an old quest giver secretly be a villain

And I didn't notice until players pointed it out, but having 'innocent powerful naked people' (arch-fey, prehistorically ancient vampires, avatar of elemental spirits) is something I put in a lot for some reason

[JackPhoenix]

My plots often have vast conspiracies, sometimes multiple, which may or may not be contradictory, running behind the scenes, that I have all planned out, but players will propably never learn about. Of course, I mostly run Eberron where huge ancient conspiracies behind almost any event are part of the setting.

As forever GM, I often insert characters I'd like to play as NPCs. Not as DMPC's (well...except for my first game ever), almost never important to the plot, often only for a single scene. But they have full character sheet writeups, even if I don't expect to need their actual stats.

[R.Shackleford]

I have a few...


1: If people are learning the game, the first fight is a boss fight. I describe how they got to this point and how they are about to charge the boss.

They get all their stuff to learn with and I can have some fun with it.

2: Going BIG or dynamic. You aren't getting run of the mill stuff with me. I'll throw you into a siege of a castle with a mission to find your king and get him out as the first session.

I'll put you in the Elemental plane of air, falling, and having creatures attacking you. You need to dodge floating islands and other things while battling enemies.

3: There is no pure good and no pure evil bullcrap stereotypes. The players will question themselves at least once.

[mgshamster]

EDIT: Also, almost without fail, there are always a NPC duo that assists the party named Vicks and Wedge.

Our groups secondary GM always introduces an NPC duo named Biggs and Wedge. :)

Sometimes they're allies. Sometimes minor adversaries. Sometimes just random people we meet on the road. Sometimes it's planned and sometimes not. But they always show up.

[MeeposFire]

I have a tendency to roll a LOT. Just to keep the players on edge. They see me roll and they get ready to flinch and most of the time it means nothing (though at times I have something silly happen like ooo you found a cat). Of course if they look like they are no longer paying attention I make sure to have something happen soon.


There was a vampire from an Eberron campaign that pops again and again now since the players liked him so much (and he is from a published adventure). There is also a tendency to have kobolds popping up as PCs and NPCs (sometimes as outright villains but not as much as you might think).

[JumboWheat01]

My DM also makes sure that cheese is involved in some way. And no, not mechanical cheese. Actual, edible cheese. As the entire group (myself include,) loves cheese, we almost look forward to accidentally stumbling into a cheese cupboard.

[pwykersotz]

I asked one of my players what my quirks were (since spontaneous self-analysis is hard!), and he IM'd me this:



you are overly critical of making your players feel bad
you have a massive lack of romance in your games.
men and women don't really get treated different
you don't have a lot of prejudice and it throws people off sometimes
you have a fancy for the dramatic scenes
you have a bad habit of beating yourself up over stories you don't think are exciting enough
you like freedom of choice, so you don't mind how we try to fix things which a lot of gm's don't like


I don't know if they're more quirks or style, but that's what came to his mind. It's kind of weird to hear about the social stuff. I never really considered that people expect to see it. I do know that I avoid romance purposefully though. I'm okay with two NPC's displaying affection, but I really don't want to play the romantic partner of anyone at my table. I just can't get past the fact that I'm either wooing or being wooed by another guy (or woman who isn't my fiance).

Then I thought of another one. At some point I generally turn a party member against the others via the bad guy. Sometimes it's through simple persuasion (not the skill) and other times it's through a domination effect. And it usually ends up being the same party member too.

[PapaQuackers]

I asked one of my players what my quirks were (since spontaneous self-analysis is hard!), and he IM'd me this:



I don't know if they're more quirks or style, but that's what came to his mind. It's kind of weird to hear about the social stuff. I never really considered that people expect to see it. I do know that I avoid romance purposefully though. I'm okay with two NPC's displaying affection, but I really don't want to play the romantic partner of anyone at my table. I just can't get past the fact that I'm either wooing or being wooed by another guy (or woman who isn't my fiance).

Then I thought of another one. At some point I generally turn a party member against the others via the bad guy. Sometimes it's through simple persuasion (not the skill) and other times it's through a domination effect. And it usually ends up being the same party member too.

I never ever ever ever ever incorporate romance into my D&D games. It's really just an unconscious bias I suppose. I've been in a 6 year relationship with my Fiance so I'm not opposed to romance obviously, I just don't think it adds anything to D&D campaigns usually.

[Magic Myrmidon]

I dunno if I have quirks, exactly. But I'm one of the few DMs I know who actually enjoys high-level, high power stuff. Recently (in Legend, which is meant for this kinda stuff, but still), the players killed an entire army of about 100 soldiers from the future in about 12 seconds. I'd like to say that it makes more sense in context, but I'm not sure it does.

I like the same thing in D&D, and like to encourage player optimization, and using their abilities to the fullest. At least, I try.

[R.Shackleford]

I never ever ever ever ever incorporate romance into my D&D games. It's really just an unconscious bias I suppose. I've been in a 6 year relationship with my Fiance so I'm not opposed to romance obviously, I just don't think it adds anything to D&D campaigns usually.

I wouldn't add it on the PC side of things because I've seen enough D&D games end with two (or more) people hooking up.

However basing an adventurer or mission around romantic ideas? One where the PCs are on the outside looking in? Can be fun :).

Had a geas/quest put on a player once by a witch who was being made fun of... They had to find her true love. The evil cleric wouldn't cast remove curse on the PC because "I may worship an evil deity but even I'm not heartless enough to stop true love!"

(Bunch of sappy love stuff in the game... The witch ended up married to a farmer!)

Oh 3e, how you were awesome.

[Sir cryosin]

This is something about me as a player at the table we have a # (#Dustin life matters) and joke about what number the new character is. I like playing the heavy armor great sword swing dude. I like to be in the action. But my DM uses swarms of monsters and I'm usely the only frontliner. Or a pc kills my pc. Everyone we have a new player I am a pointed to help them because I can create a character with in 10 mins or less. Oh and I had a red neck cowboy ranger in CoS and when the Dm said the a gate made a rusty squeaking nice I said " you putting lard on that with fix the squeaking." And now every time something squeaks I say in a red-neck southern accent that. Oh and my DM seam to put my characters in weird awkward almost sexually situations. Like we were interrogating someone but wasn't getting anything so I gave them a love potion. After getting some answers walked back to the inn trying to get what we really need ended up getting knocked out and woke up strapped to a table with a ball gag in mouth. Then we were in charge of guarding nobles and the one I had to guard was a half-orc female I was on my best behavior do what she asked but she had no modesty changing right in front and always looking.
As for DM quirks I use a Scottish accent a lot.

[j_spencer93]

A reoccurring Tavern known as the Broken Cutlass, who's bartender is Hercules (leftover from an old campaign). It has a notice board that talks, and several characters from literature can be found her.
A being known as Vari'ishtar who appearing to know everything and meddle in affairs but never actually threaten the world.
A sacred bison (3.5 campaign leftover from an online encounter generator that kicked their butts)
A powerful psionic child known as Elza.
Koinzell a psionic sword wielder has come and gone a few times.

OH my biggest one. A black tower that spews a miasma into the air that is slowly decaying the land. It is trapped to hell and back (some places literally) and is kind of a planar nexus.
Oh and if you make a wish, you better word it perfectly.

[TundraBuccaneer]

they are more a group things then my own but:
* All realtor's are necromancers. This started when someone made a necromancer character and just said yea like you know all necromancers are realtor's so I'm going to sell every evil lair.
* When ever we need the name of a random npc in a new town its Pip every town has one and he can have every job. He will also frequently change jobs.

[SillyPopeNachos]

Some of mine:
1) every boss NPC has a secret weakness to an item that is common and easily accessible at level 1.
2) I run Hobgoblins like Klingons as presented in DS9.
3) I absolutely adore traps that don't do damage, but may just humiliate characters (like making them fall on their butts, a pie in the face, etc.)

[JumboWheat01]

Some of mine:
1) every boss NPC has a secret weakness to an item that is common and easily accessible at level 1.
Is it soap? Please say it's soap.
"So help me, Evil Overlord, if you don't surrender, I will give you a bath!"
"Gods no! Anything but that! I surrender! I surrender!"


3) I absolutely adore traps that don't do damage, but may just humiliate characters (like making them fall on their butts, a pie in the face, etc.)
Those are the best kinds of traps.

[Xetheral]

In my games, lantern archons always make an appearance at some point. I play them as dimwitted, gullible, inexhaustible six-year-olds with an insatiable need to be helpful. Usually the PCs just find some irrelevant quest to send them on ("Ok, you want to help? Fetch us a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.") to get them out of the way (at least until they return with a book on legumes to clarify that they've got the correct plant in mind, before beginning planting).

In the current campaign, though, one PC managed to convince the half-dozen lantern archons she'd rescued that another PC had a drinking problem, and hilarity ensued (lantern archons believe strongly in the power of positive reinforcement and constant encouragement). Even more hilarity ensued when the set-upon PC convinced them that the best way to help him get past his drinking problem was to help him sing drinking songs.

Another quirk of mine... Speak with Animals never seems to go quite the way the player imagines. The animals are almost invariably obsessed with food, and if you feed them it gets worse. (If you want to talk about something other than acorns at my table, squirrels aren't the best ones to approach.)

[SillyPopeNachos]

Is it soap? Please say it's soap.
"So help me, Evil Overlord, if you don't surrender, I will give you a bath!"
"Gods no! Anything but that! I surrender! I surrender!"
Stealing this not only as a new NPC boss weakness, but also as my sig.

[Nemenia]

There is almost always going to be a character from Neil Gaiman's Sandman show up, or a cameo referencing them, in my campaigns. Such as their items, or followers.

[MasterMercury]

Saying...
"You're arrow/spell punches a hole in the zombie. But, it's a zombie. So it doesn't care."
I say it at least once per encounter with undead, or elementals, or anything without functional anatomy.

Also, always Owlbears. In my first campaign, a player cast fly on one as another jumped on its back. The owlbear flew off with the player into the sunset. Now, there is often a flying magical owlbear with a halfling on its back. Owlbears are great

[j_spencer93]

Not a DM quirk, but i have a player who has the habit of asking guards if they took an arrow to the knee. Apparently his village is riddled with adventure's who have and are now guards.

[pwykersotz]

Not a DM quirk, but i have a player who has the habit of asking guards if they took an arrow to the knee. Apparently his village is riddled with adventure's who have and are now guards.

Question, did they propose, or did they take a literal arrow to their knee? Or is it a mix of both?

[Rerem115]

For a couple years now, there's always been the same module for each new party.

A several years ago, a wizard founded an inn. It became famous due to its staff, which consisted entirely of various golems. When the wizard died, the golems wouldn't take orders from anybody and the place fell into disrepair. The players have to find their way through the inn to the wizard's private office, where there are rumors of a great treasure.

[j_spencer93]

Question, did they propose, or did they take a literal arrow to their knee? Or is it a mix of both?

Apparently a literally arrow. To make it even better, he used the same origin for like 6 warlocks in a row, so once i asked him if all the kids from the village have the same background and he said yea. So every adventurer takes an arrow to the knee and becomes a guard...and all parents die in raids by dark elves and orcs.

[Ruslan]

Apparently a literally arrow. To make it even better, he used the same origin for like 6 warlocks in a row, so once i asked him if all the kids from the village have the same background and he said yea. So every adventurer takes an arrow to the knee and becomes a guard...and all parents die in raids by dark elves and orcs."Arrow to the knee" is a Skyrim meme.

[Black Socks]

I always have an NPC named Oswald the Owlbear Tamer. It comes from my first campaign. A character was weak, running low on spells, and cornered by an pack of owlbears. In desperation, he made an Animal Handling check to tame them.... and it worked. The character tamed twelve of them, hitched them to a sleigh, and rode into the boss battle like Santa Claus. Ever since then, Oswald the Owlbear Tamer always shows up.

[mgshamster]

Question, did they propose, or did they take a literal arrow to their knee? Or is it a mix of both?

Wait. What does proposing have to do with it?

[j_spencer93]

"Arrow to the knee" is a Skyrim meme.

Yea i am 100% aware of that.

[PapaQuackers]

Wait. What does proposing have to do with it?

Arrow to the knee actually means getting married in old speak.

[Ruslan]

Yea i am 100% aware of that.

Ok. Then stop me if you heard that one: What do you get when you cross Skyrim and Monty Python?

An arrow to the Ni!! Ni!! Ni!!

[Naanomi]

Arrow to the knee actually means getting married in old speak.
As in 'going down on one knee and proposing'

[JumboWheat01]

Arrow to the knee actually means getting married in old speak.

Suddenly the guards in Skyrim got a little more respect in my book.

I'm still going to maul them when I'm a werewolf, but I'll maul them with a little more respect.

[mgshamster]

Arrow to the knee actually means getting married in old speak.

I suspected as much, but when I looked it up I didn't see anything but skyrim stuff.

Just checked again to see if my google-fu was bad today. I found a snopes forum that says the "it means marriage proposal in norse/scandinavian/whatever" isn't actually true. Just something someone else made up to cover for the popularity in the game. Found another blog that spent a couple of hours looking it up, earliest reference to the "proposal" idea only popped up after the game came out, and the writer was unable to find any other reference other than gaming forums and Facebook talking about it.

Considering that no one can source it and the story keeps changing as to what language it actually belongs to, I'm inclined to believe that it's also a fake.

[dropbear8mybaby]

Constantly having NPC's react with a "Wtf?" to the PC's.

Actually, that might be more because of what my players say and do to NPC's.

[Chaosvii7]

We've adapted what perhaps might be the most famous quirk to date - a tendency to yell, with indignance and disbelief, "Green Flame!" - but I've had a few more show up recently.


Sending Stones as cell phones, another common one I'd imagine
My party was at one point fascinated with Metal Gear Solid 5, and thus decided to develop a system to fulton people out of combat
One of my characters made up a magical island called Nooyawk, and it's constantly referenced as being just real enough that the party is driven to search for it, but will never find it
My party is scared to death, not of powerful demons and bloodthirsty undead, but of using abilities that produce cones like breath weapons and prismatic spray; suffice it to say that I use them very often now
The market streets are dominated by a hot dog salesman who is so powerful a spellcaster that he can have a hot dog stand on every corner in every city
I named an entire region after They Might Be Giants songs; Lumberland, which for a time was plagued by the Darlings of Lumberland (and filled with any number of TMBG references)
Whenever searching a room, one of my players' characters always accidentally stumbles upon books of lewd pictures...of llamas

[Mirakk]

I have a recurring character named "Snakefang" that shows up. He was just a random NPC at first, but it grew into so much more.

I set the world in the world of Norrath from Everquest in order to share that world and its events with my friends who didn't play, while providing a fun crossover for friends who did. When they went to the East Commonlands, there was a guy in ratty clothes hanging out by the Shady Swashbuckler in a very populated area filled with traders. He came up and started to beg for money or gear. One of the party members gave him a giant spider fang they'd looted fighting in the desert nearby. He failed his Knowledge: Nature check, so he identified it wrong. He says "Oh cool! A SNAKE FANG" and swishes it through the air. He then said he was ready to start a life of adventure and wandered off.

Later in the campaign, they went out and fought bandits, and discovered that Snake Fang was one of the lackeys. He begged for his life, and they spared him. Later still, he was found working for a vampire out of a nearby tomb. Even later, he was a vampire spawn that the party fought and dissipated.

In the next campaign, he had become a powerful vampire lord that the party had to fight and destroy. His fate was uncertain after he was swallowed by a strange portal.

In my current campaign, there's a guy posing as a mapmaker that the party is working with that carries a Snake Fang among his posessions, but his motives are as of yet unknown.

[PapaQuackers]

10/10 would be best friends with Snake-Fang and I demand to know how his quest plays out.

[Hrugner]

-I have a recurring character, who usually fills a minor villain role. If pressed he calls himself "the catholic" or "pope by default" and will explain that as the last surviving member of his species he has a direct line to the only true god. He wears a nicely tailored suit and uses modern firearms and slight of hand to pretend to be a powerful spell caster.

-took another one of our friend's recurring seedy bars and made it a recurring seedy gentleman's club. It often burns down filling the air with intoxicating smoke for miles.
-I have a black orb that can be thrown at a monster sending the thrower and the target into a small dimensional pocket locking the player and the target in one on one combat till only one lives.
-my traps are brutal, easily spotted, and can usually be repurposed.
-halflings are fairyfolk
-gnomes are halflings that have severe birth defects rendering them hunched over, strongly autistic, and accidentally magical. They often live in garbage heaps.
-about half of all magic items are cursed. Usually in a way that makes it easier for the creator to scry upon the item's location and recover the item when the user dies.
-the gods are always lower powered than they are meant to be.

[Mirakk]

10/10 would be best friends with Snake-Fang and I demand to know how his quest plays out.

The campaign is currently set on the moon. The world's most powerful wizard has set up a permanent teleportation circle between the planet and the moon. Currently, the army is up there constructing forts and scouting around to get the lay of the land, determine what dangers are up there, look for natives, and harvest any unusual resources. it's a strange world populated with creatures the likes of which nobody has ever seen. The aformentioned man with the Giant Spider Fang is a delusional Warlock under the service of Gibbeth. He was instructed by his patron to go up to the moon, so he forged some documents (Started as a rogue, before striking his pact), and was able to make his way up there as a guard. Of course, his papers were eventually discovered to be fake, and he had to kill some poor mapmaker and assume his identity and papers in order to hide. A team of investigators is hired to come up to the moon and rat out the stowaway before word gets out.

During the course of the story, someone planetside assassinates the wizard, and while tragic, his legacy lives on. The warlock discovers an artifact that he steals away for himself, using it to destroy the portal for all time. This traps the party up on the moon, where the Reeve of the settlement decides to throw all the traders and other civilians out into the wilderness and lock up the doors, keeping himself walled in with all the supplies and the protection of the military. The party is then cast out, and has to figure out how they are going to survive in an alien world. Will they rebel against the Reeve? Will they try to find the other settlements? Will the other settlements even accept them? Or do they simply strike out into the wilderness and try to survive, maybe meeting some native races along the way? However it plays out, they are eventually forced to choose sides in a holy war between Eladrin followers of Selune (Residing on the light side of the moon) and Shadow Fey followers of Shar (Dark Side of the Moon) in order to try and find their way back home using their knowledge of planar travel.

Of course, during all this, the party will discover that their traveling companion is not in fact the mapmaker they think he is, and that he is responsible for the destruction of the portal. I'm curious to see how they handle that revelation, as by the time they realize it all, they'll see that he is in fact quite mad, and a victim in the grand scheme of things. When he assumes a new identity, he loses all recollection of his previous "life" and honestly believes himself to be who he says he is, as a symptom of his exposure to a being of pure madness. In fact, the revelation that he's the killer they've been looking for the entire time leading up to that is sure to have some serious psychological repercussions for him!


And that's what's cooking with Snake Fang for now.

[Grod_The_Giant]

One of my best friends and most regular players has told me that he's learned to leg it in the other direction at the slightest mention of mad scientists-- doubly so if they're biology/fleshcrafting related.

[R.Shackleford]

The campaign is currently set on the moon. The world's most powerful wizard has set up a permanent teleportation circle between the planet and the moon. Currently, the army is up there constructing forts and scouting around to get the lay of the land, determine what dangers are up there, look for natives, and harvest any unusual resources. it's a strange world populated with creatures the likes of which nobody has ever seen. The aformentioned man with the Giant Spider Fang is a delusional Warlock under the service of Gibbeth. He was instructed by his patron to go up to the moon, so he forged some documents (Started as a rogue, before striking his pact), and was able to make his way up there as a guard. Of course, his papers were eventually discovered to be fake, and he had to kill some poor mapmaker and assume his identity and papers in order to hide. A team of investigators is hired to come up to the moon and rat out the stowaway before word gets out.

During the course of the story, someone planetside assassinates the wizard, and while tragic, his legacy lives on. The warlock discovers an artifact that he steals away for himself, using it to destroy the portal for all time. This traps the party up on the moon, where the Reeve of the settlement decides to throw all the traders and other civilians out into the wilderness and lock up the doors, keeping himself walled in with all the supplies and the protection of the military. The party is then cast out, and has to figure out how they are going to survive in an alien world. Will they rebel against the Reeve? Will they try to find the other settlements? Will the other settlements even accept them? Or do they simply strike out into the wilderness and try to survive, maybe meeting some native races along the way? However it plays out, they are eventually forced to choose sides in a holy war between Eladrin followers of Selune (Residing on the light side of the moon) and Shadow Fey followers of Shar (Dark Side of the Moon) in order to try and find their way back home using their knowledge of planar travel.

Of course, during all this, the party will discover that their traveling companion is not in fact the mapmaker they think he is, and that he is responsible for the destruction of the portal. I'm curious to see how they handle that revelation, as by the time they realize it all, they'll see that he is in fact quite mad, and a victim in the grand scheme of things. When he assumes a new identity, he loses all recollection of his previous "life" and honestly believes himself to be who he says he is, as a symptom of his exposure to a being of pure madness. In fact, the revelation that he's the killer they've been looking for the entire time leading up to that is sure to have some serious psychological repercussions for him!


And that's what's cooking with Snake Fang for now.

Final Fantasy VIII Lunar Cry!

Totally going to have to incorporate this into a game...

[Naanomi]

In my world building; I like to have several pantheons of Gods that are all just different 'aspects' or false interpretation of a very small pantheon of distant, non-personal Gods

[R.Shackleford]

In my world building; I like to have several pantheons of Hods that are all just different 'aspects' or false interpretation of a very small pantheon of distant, non-personal Gods

Is one of them Zod?


Or maybe Grodd (, gorilla).

[PapaQuackers]

Well, since I got the ball rolling I suppose I should put forth another quirk of mine that is perhaps my biggest DM flaw.

I literally always start every campaign in a prison or a tavern. It's just my starting point in all my campaigns and I really can't say why on the prison one, but the tavern one seems obvious.

[JumboWheat01]

Well, since I got the ball rolling I suppose I should put forth another quirk of mine that is perhaps my biggest DM flaw.

I literally always start every campaign in a prison or a tavern. It's just my starting point in all my campaigns and I really can't say why on the prison one, but the tavern one seems obvious.

I can infer why. You've been playing a lot of Elder Scrolls games lately. That's how you almost always start in them, in custody.

[R.Shackleford]

Well, since I got the ball rolling I suppose I should put forth another quirk of mine that is perhaps my biggest DM flaw.

I literally always start every campaign in a prison or a tavern. It's just my starting point in all my campaigns and I really can't say why on the prison one, but the tavern one seems obvious.

These are two of the oldest tropes in D&D.

I joined a game through meetup once and a fellow player said "screw this, I've been starting in a tavern since the 80's, I'm out" and left in a huff haha.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Or maybe Grodd (, gorilla).
Hey! Are you calling me a monkey, sir? :smallmad:
(Because if so cool; Gorilla Grodd is one of my favorite villains)

[Mirakk]

Final Fantasy VIII Lunar Cry!

Totally going to have to incorporate this into a game...

I was thinking of a way to do a Lord of the Flies thing when I did it, but yeah, looking at it, that's pretty similar too.

[R.Shackleford]

Hey! Are you calling me a monkey, sir? :smallmad:
(Because if so cool; Gorilla Grodd is one of my favorite villains)

Gorilla Grodd is an Ape, not a monkey.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla

"Check yourself before you wreck yourself"
- Spock, copilot of the milinuim falcon (Outlaw Star, episodes 1 - 3)

You should totally get a gorilla barbarian avatar. Gorilla barbarian/wilder avatar so that you can be a psionic barbarian gorilla

[j_spencer93]

Gorilla Grodd is an Ape, not a monkey.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla

"Check yourself before you wreck yourself"
- Spock, copilot of the milinuim falcon (Outlaw Star, episodes 1 - 3)

You should totally get a gorilla barbarian avatar. Gorilla barbarian/wilder avatar so that you can be a psionic barbarian gorilla

R.Shackleford.....are you Dale Gribble?

[R.Shackleford]

R.Shackleford.....are you Dale Gribble?

Well... uhhh...



http://i.imgur.com/TpHkT.gif

[j_spencer93]

loi freaking loved kind of the hill.

[PapaQuackers]

"You don't know who I am or where I live."

"Dale?"

"Oh hi Peggy, can you put Hank on the phone?"

*Hank picks up*

"You don't know who I am or where I live..."

[j_spencer93]

Should be a crime they canceled that show.

[Afrodactyl]

I try not to use monsters straight out of the manual, I usually reskin monsters at the very least.

I like using multi-staged encounters.

I like using encounters that use infinite enemies and the party have to get creative to defeat them.

I like pitting my PCs against enemies far too powerful for them, much like the infinite enemies thing.

[R.Shackleford]

Should be a crime they canceled that show.

It ran it's course. Go too long and you become the Simpsons... No thank you.

Another quirk that I have is using Rule of Cool. I always forget that this isn't the base assumption for many people.

[Scorponok]

Every one of my town stores sell two different category of things. So for example, Grog's Metal Armors and Soup Kitchen, or Forget-Me-Not Magical Flowers and Weapons Training Pants.

There are also very few gnomes in my campaigns. Generally because I've never been sure where to fit them in, so I've always had something unfortunate happen to their civilization, such as an asteroid strike that wipes out 95% of them or their capital city being invaded by goblins.

[beargryllz]

A magical gnome person with a magical ship of some kind invites the players to come adventure. It can be an airship, regular ship, or space ship. I've used all of those in my campaigns