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View Full Version : Weirdness outside of horror adventures and funhouse dungeons?



Yora
2017-03-26, 08:34 AM
When it comes to weird and strange content in RPGs, most stuff people are talking about these days is Lovecraftian body horror and some decades back there was this thing with funhouse dungeons that are full of random nonsense that people had a blast with in a very campy way.

"Serious" proper mainstream fantasy RPGs seem to be regarded as Ye Olde England plus wizards and dragons. Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, that kind of material. Even Forgotten Realms and Golarion seem to play it mostly safe and keep their high power magic to things that could be done with steam engines and electrical power. Anything that tries to step outside of this sphere appears to be either weird horror or gonzo camp. Both have their place and can be a lot of fun, but I enjoy them only in moderation and not as a regular thing for my games.

I think the dissatisfaction I feel about contemporary fantasy is that it tends to be very rational and down to Earth. The main exception to that, which I am aware of, is the fantastical creativity seen in many works by Japanese creators from the past 10-20 years. There is more stuff that is subversive of established expectations and more experimental, and in which things sometimes make only symbolic or emotional sense while seeming logically very implausible. With hints of camp, but mostly a serious core. I am thinking of things like Metal Gear Solid, Nier, Dark Souls, and also Final Fantasy to some degree. The only comparable thing I can think of in RPGs would be Planescape and Morrowind. I think there's also been Tekumel, but that one has apparently mostly vanished from the Earth since before I was born.

So I got two questions:

Are there any works you could recommend as material for running such a style of fantasy in an RPG?

And what is it exactly that makes such works wondrous and slightly surreal that can be worked into a campaign?

Martin Greywolf
2017-03-26, 12:14 PM
Most of the time, you can't fault a system for this. If you look at Dark Souls and the way it plays, it's pretty normal in the terms of what weapons and spells you get, and most if not all of the really cool stuff is in the backstory you never get to play through - well, Oolacile aside, that one was pretty cool. Thing is, they took this fact of life an incorporated it into the story of the game - you don't get to rain lightning on dragons because the world is going down the drain and powerful stuff like that just isn't around any more, or is incredibly faded. As evidenced by mastering parries to spank Gwyn like a naughty toddler.

One trilogy I can remember that had an unusual vibe to it is Narrenturm trilogy by Sapkowski - unlike Witcher, this one is based in Czech kingdom during the Hussite wars and had a few moments of Dark Souls-like wonder to it. And that is, I think, what you want to get here. Wonder.

Problem with that is that you need things to be hidden, you need to be unsure of what even your own character is eventually capable of. Elder Scrolls have it to a degree, their backstory has some really cool concepts (Blade singers, Chim, Zero-summing, Shezzarines, Mantling), but it can't really be shown in the games themselves, mostly because of technical limitations - hell, concept of thu'um is much more interesting than the actual in-game execution.

And to do that, you need a really, really good DM, who is willing to create a world like that, because you usually can't get a feeling of wonder from something that was published and half of the people at your table know what Elminster's HP is. And this world will also need a theme or a stroy arc that is a tad more complex than "kill bad god" - Dark Souls was centered around fatalism rooted in eastern philospohies, for example, Planescape Torment was about identity issues (and boy, did they hammer it home), Night Watch series of books asked you if there is a difference between someone who works for greater good(tm) and someone who is rationally selfish and SpecOps: The Line challenged the entire concept of down-to-earth military hero present in most modern FPS.

Yora
2017-03-26, 02:08 PM
Yeah, you probably need a strong theme. A narrative theme that goes well beyond just a consistent aesthetic style. The campaign needs to be about something.

Perhaps one way to make any kind of fantasy story somewhat surreal could be to fill it with things that make little rational sense but are symbolic indications of that something. As opposed to funhouse gonzo where they simply make no sense and have no reason for being there.
For example in Dark Souls you got flames everywhere. Bonfires, souls, humanity, embers, pyromancy, Lake of Ash, Kiln of the First Flame, Demon Ruins, Queelag, and so on. At the same time you have rot and decay everyhwere. It all comes together to create an image of reaching for power and decline into ruin,

Milo v3
2017-03-26, 08:29 PM
This is my main issue with settings like Eberron, "It's not Manapunk! It's steampunk with magic paint!".

There are games like Nobilis and Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine can have a near infinite amount of alien weirdness in it (you can actually get xp in Chuubo by just going through Town and experiencing all the weird fantasy stuff), while still being able to be completely serious when you require it to be.

But yeah, the lack of "Alien"-ness in most fantasy RPG's is something which always disappoints me, especially when so many have things like alternate planes of existence which means they can have their cake and eat it by having one plane be "normal" if they want and can have tonnes of cool non-standard stuff on the other planes.

This is why my own settings are purposefully immensely weird (I really need to figureout how to organize them enough to publish them one day) with tonnes of non-human magitech and alien cultures.

Yora
2017-03-27, 08:15 AM
I just remembered Numenera as one significant exception. It's very much focused on the strange and unexplainable. Not very surprising that Monte Cook did write some books for Planescape as well. The shortcomming of Numenera is that it feels to me rather random and inconherent. Simply adding together strange elements doesn't make them have any meaning.
However, the books really feel to me like an American made adaptation of Final Fantasy, which I really do appreciate.

Segev
2017-03-27, 09:53 AM
Part of the goal of the original Exalted was to break the "D&D mold" of fantasy RPGs. You may like that system and setting.

BESM is a system designed for use in anime-inspired games.

As for fantasy with a truly alien world, I suggest Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy and his Stormlight Archives series.

solidork
2017-03-27, 01:12 PM
It's part of the Chronicles of Darkness, so I guess it technically counts as horror, but Mage the Awakening is super weird. I read an AP where the main antagonist's plan was to forcefully project the soul of every living human and every human who had ever lived into the realm where the 'god' of death resided. Billions would die, but the rest would essentially become gods. It pretty much worked as far as the rules were concerned, too.

Khaiel
2017-03-27, 06:31 PM
I'd suggest Anima Beyond Fantasy. Below the XV-XVIth century fantasy surface, it gets really weird really quickly in many ways. However, a lot of info about stuff from future books is only available through the forums, and since the end of their contract with FFG, there's no English Publisher yet (Although Edge Entertainment still publishes it in Spanish and French). Only 2 books missing in English, though: Core Exxet (a revised edition of the Core Rulebook, most of the change are can be found online) and Gaia II (Second fluff book).

Milo v3
2017-03-27, 10:15 PM
I'd suggest Anima Beyond Fantasy. Below the XV-XVIth century fantasy surface, it gets really weird really quickly in many ways. However, a lot of info about stuff from future books is only available through the forums, and since the end of their contract with FFG, there's no English Publisher yet (Although Edge Entertainment still publishes it in Spanish and French). Only 2 books missing in English, though: Core Exxet (a revised edition of the Core Rulebook, most of the change are can be found online) and Gaia II (Second fluff book).

Really? When I read it, it seemed like a generic fantasy setting aside from the art-style and tarot-style summoning. Maybe I missed something (I've only read Core).

Arbane
2017-03-27, 11:29 PM
My advice, for what it's worth: Read a lot of real-world mythology and OLD fantasy-fiction. (As in, pre-1960s at least - before Tolkien got really popular and inspired a lot of the cliches of Extruded Fantasy Product.)

As was mentioned earlier, it might help to pick a theme, and base the game around that, rather than D&D's usual 'kitchen sink' approach. (To quote one of the Marx Brothers' writers, if you have too much insanity in one place, the 's' will fall out.)

Toss out some real world assumptions, and see where your game goes from there. Make the world flat, or have magic work through singing - ANYONE's singing, even birds's. Say that souls are tangible and can be caught in a net when they leave the body. Set the game in two worlds at right-angles to each other. Say that True Love can over come any obstacle, even death, and see what you can do with that.

Think outside of the boxed set.

----

PS: I'd personally say not to use BESM - there's very little in it you couldn't do with a better-designed generic system, and 'anime' covers a pretty broad range of genres, most of which might work better with a more focussed game. (And if you really want a ninja, a magical girl, a mecha pilot and a Stand-user to fight Big Fire, a superhero game could handle that.)

Khaiel
2017-03-28, 04:04 AM
Really? When I read it, it seemed like a generic fantasy setting aside from the art-style and tarot-style summoning. Maybe I missed something (I've only read Core).

Core is the less weird of the books, and already has some interesting stuff if you read certain things, like how the Wake works, the Messiah being a literal Human God artificially created to unite Humanity, Gaia quite possibly being our world after a visit from extradimensional beings, and so on, although these are actually a bit low on the weirdness scale.

Gaia I and II add a lot to it, as do Anima Studio's post on their forums.

The thing about Gaia is that it looks like a generic fantasy setting at a first glance, but the closer you look, the darker and weirder it becomes.

As an example, due to how most of the deities that are still alive would prefer to keep hiding from the guys that use their souls as fuel and their bodies as raw materials, or from a world that no longer worships them, encounters with deities and similar entities have a fairly high chance (It varies, but it happens a lot more than in other settings) to touch on "Did we just have tea with Cthulhu?" (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DidWeJustHaveTeaWithCthulhu): Malekith, Prince of Crows and greatest of the Lords of Nightmares, is actually quite a jolly fella if you don't get on his bad side. Just don't hurt his ego or mention his sister.

Corsair14
2017-03-28, 07:50 AM
If you want weird and different, even within the DnD universe, you already mentioned Planescape which is about as different as you can go. There is also Dark Sun which cant be any less European and Spelljammer, Pirates of the Caribbean in space. Spelljammer is easily the hardest to run out of the three and while it is Renaissance level instead of the medieval level in normal DnD there is enough weirdness to go for years in a campaign with an imaginative DM. Dark Sun is survival role playing at its core, you aren't trying to save the world, you are trying to stay alive and find that next water skin.

Yora
2017-03-28, 08:47 AM
Dark Sun is different from generic D&D but I wouldn't say that it has any weird elements. Halflings as cannibals are funny, but when consider that they are savage cannibals that just happen to be short there's not actually anything odd about that. It's a pretty straightforward rational setting where almost everything really is what it appears to be.

kraftcheese
2017-03-28, 09:34 AM
Dark Sun is different from generic D&D but I wouldn't say that it has any weird elements. Halflings as cannibals are funny, but when consider that they are savage cannibals that just happen to be short there's not actually anything odd about that. It's a pretty straightforward rational setting where almost everything really is what it appears to be.
There's some stuff in the backstory about Athas being a post-magical-apocalypse world too; the world is dying because most magic use is inimical to life and the Sorceror Kings are hastening its demise by their own hubris trying to turn themselves into godlike dragons.

There's also some weird stuff about an ancient halfling civilization that used biotechnology which I always found intruiging; imagine your players awakening some eons-old flesh computer in an ancient facility deep below the desert sands...

Arbane
2017-03-28, 10:55 AM
I think the dissatisfaction I feel about contemporary fantasy is that it tends to be very rational and down to Earth. The main exception to that, which I am aware of, is the fantastical creativity seen in many works by Japanese creators from the past 10-20 years. There is more stuff that is subversive of established expectations and more experimental, and in which things sometimes make only symbolic or emotional sense while seeming logically very implausible. With hints of camp, but mostly a serious core. I am thinking of things like Metal Gear Solid, Nier, Dark Souls, and also Final Fantasy to some degree. The only comparable thing I can think of in RPGs would be Planescape and Morrowind. I think there's also been Tekumel, but that one has apparently mostly vanished from the Earth since before I was born.

So I got two questions:

Are there any works you could recommend as material for running such a style of fantasy in an RPG?

And what is it exactly that makes such works wondrous and slightly surreal that can be worked into a campaign?

You might want to take a look at Tenra Bansho Zero - it's a Japanese tabletop RPG that's been translated into English, and it is quite different from Generic Fantasy Europe.
Spellbound Kingdoms looked interesting - it's the RPG that inspired my 'True Love can beat death' comment above. (Here's a rather foul-mouthed review (http://projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-and-friends/nifara/spellbound-kingdoms/) of it.)

One cynical thought I have is: don't let PCs be spellcasters. If magic isn't something you pick off of a list but something UTTERLY BIZARRE that happens to you sometimes, that seems like it should increase the ambient weirdness a notch or two.

TheCountAlucard
2017-03-28, 02:37 PM
Have you, by any chance, read any of the works of Lord Dunsany?

Yora
2017-03-28, 03:51 PM
No, but he regularly shows up getting mentioned as a major influence on many fantasy writers whose work I find quite fascinating. Probably have to get around to read some of his as well eventually.


You might want to take a look at Tenra Bansho Zero - it's a Japanese tabletop RPG that's been translated into English, and it is quite different from Generic Fantasy Europe.

My current interest is less in settings with different cultural appearance. I think I got a pretty good hang of that. What I am contemplating is settings that have a subtext and deeper themes that manifest themselves through the more bizare and fantastical elements of the world.

Algeh
2017-03-29, 03:52 AM
The main problem I have with inexplicable weirdness in RPGs is that players will want to interact with it. This will in turn lead to it being figured out by them (which they will probably find unsatisfying unless the thing they figure out "makes sense" to them, robbing it of its inexplicable quality due to it being explained). Then they make some logical extensions based on whatever premise they deduced from the now-explicable weirdness, and then all we have is a new set of described powers and/or mechanics for them to use when interacting with the world. (Many of the people I game with would prioritize "explore and explain the weirdness" as a plot hook. I suppose a detailed pre-game discussion of which parts of the setting were not to be rigorously logic'ed-at could head this off at the pass in the meta-game, but it would be a mindset issue with my players that they'd have to agree to try to set aside.)

Unless the players want to abstractly explore the concept of weirdness, it's hard to interact with meaningful weirdness in an RPG because it doesn't really make sense to stat out meaningful weirdness and make it behave predictably.

Mostly, I struggle with this in the context of a less mechanistic and predictable way for magic to work that is still fun to use in a game. I can make it "x spell predictably does y under z circumstances" as most games do, I can make it "casting x spell means rolling on y table to see which thing happens" which makes it less predictable but doesn't really make it "meaningfully" mysterious, just more arbitrary, or I can make it "player and/or GM improv a bunch of stuff together about how magic works on the fly each time magic is used", which can lack structure and detail unless both people like telling each other stories about magic, in which case they could also do that without the game structure anyway. (I have a friend like this. We've never actually gamed together, but we have built many ridiculous conversational stories over the years.)

Yora
2017-03-29, 12:15 PM
Inexplicable weirdness is indeed a major problem. What are the players supposed to do but shrug and move on?

Whatever strange elements you have must have some kind of consistency in what it does and how it behaves. Players need to be able to learn something useful about it. a good way to add mystery is to make it completely unclear how the strange thing came to be in this place and for what reason it was brought or created right here. Players could learn how to be safe from it or how to destroy it, but that also wouldn't answer the question why it was doing the thing that it did. For some things the players might even leatn how to make it do the thing it does when they want it and it will be to their benefit.