A weirder Dungeons & Dragons

[Yora]

In part it may be because of being a DM lets you see inside all the mechanics and how the sausage is being made, but D&D strikes me as a brand of fantasy that isn't really going much into the strange and the weird. Or it might also have to do with D&D focusing on Forgotten Realms for a long time, and this setting just isn't very interested in making anything feel unfamiliar and out of the ordinary. Nothing unusual to see here.
Of course, beholders, mind flayers, and aboleths have very inhuman appearances and backgrounds, but when it comes to their presentation they generally appear to have human minds. There's all the stuff with demons and devils and the lower planes, but again the presentation doesn't make them feel substantially different from evil human clerics fighters.

I think the outer planes and even the far reaches of the wilderness should feel like strange places, with alien creatures whose goals and methods are different from human tyrants or large predatory animals.

I feel like the required pieces are already there. Lots of weird looking creatures with unusual abilities, alien looking landscapes, and a wide range of various magical items and artifacts. But in the informal established common logic of what D&D worlds are like, strangeness and new unpredictable phenomenons aren't really part of the picture.

What are your perceptions of this and how could you use the alien and demonic that is already in D&D to a more impactful effect?

[Unoriginal]

D&D and its worlds are plenty weird to me. The Material Plane is composed of solar-system-encompassing crystal-like spheres, there are serpent-people with snake heads for hands, giant snails that hit people with natural flails, fairies pranking or eating mortals, talking animals, combatants capable of ridiculous feats, world-hoping demigods who creates strange beings then leave, color pools that let you travel through dimension, and metal people created in factories.

As for the non-humans beings feeling too humans for you, well, I don't really know what to tell you.

Illithids, Beholders and the like are clearly presented as having non-human minds and mindsets, not to mention societies. Sure, they have traits that are also present in humans, like the Beholder's intense paranoia or the Neogi's greed, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.

But then again they still need to be relatable or understandable in some ways, otherwise it's just "alien just does nonsense for 10 minutes", and then our tendency to anthropomorphise everything is applied to this, so it's true they can come off as less alien than they are.

As for the planar entities being human-like in some respect, that's kinda the point. They are incarnations of aspects of sapient life in the Material Plane, but distilled to their purest form. But then again, there are a lot of things that make them their own entities rather than just humans in monster bodies, their immortal perspective being only the start of that.

Truth is, we have a tendency to both anthropomorphise and Otherise the D&D species. Goblins are people, but they're different people than elves, who are different people than flumphs. Which is why falling into stereotyping often happens. Add to this that it's hard to imagine and DM beings that are utterly different.

Have you read the Volo's and the Mordenkainen's? I feel those books do a great job explaining how similar and different various beings are.

Like often, the question of how weird those worlds and creatures feel isn't a question of content, but of presentation.

[Grod_The_Giant]

I mean, d&d is fundamentally a game about killing monsters and taking their stuff. It's never going to be as good at weird horrific monsters as, say, Call of Cthulu*. It's never going to be as good at surviving in a weird horrific environment as... uh... Ryuutama, maybe? STaRS? (It's really hard to find good rulesets for this). It just doesn't have the underlying structure you need; everything comes back to combat.

You can do a lot with good DMing and descriptions, though the lack of ways to mechanically threaten players beyond HP damage hurts a bit. Ultimately, a good horror adventure in d&d is all about the atmosphere and buildup--you want to get the creepiness as high as possible before you finally reveal the monster and the games explodes into cathartic combat.


*Disclainer: I'm not actually familiar with CoC

[MoiMagnus]

D&D does the best it can while assuming most peoples (including some DMs) will only read the technical details, look at the images, and sometimes read the other text when they need a precise information.

Not saying they will just play "door-monster-treasure", but a lot of DM keep the interpretation of monsters they had from previous editions / other games rather than updating to the "official" texts, or just prefer having a homebrew universe.

That's why most of D&D content focus on telling a story which as near as possible to what the DM will improvise by just looking at few fragments of the book. And having "weird" stuff is the exact contrary of this.

However, it does give you enough piece of the puzzle for you to build a universe much more "weird" than the standard iterations of it.

[Great Dragon]

IME, there's simply way too much Metagaming - and not just D&D; where the Players seek out the information on every Alien, Race, and Monster. I start the description for a creature and someone (almost) always says: "I know what that is!!"

Horror simply doesn't work at my table, other than maybe a Sanity/Taint score.

But then, I'm not trying to scare the Players, simply make them uncertain about what's going on, and what might happen to their PCs.

For wierd, that really requires effort on the Players part. Both buy-in and reactions.

[Millstone85]

IME, there's simply way too much Metagaming - and not just D&D; where the Players seek out the information on every Alien, Race, and Monster. I start the description for a creature and someone (almost) always says: "I know what that is!!"

Horror simply doesn't work at my table, other than maybe a Sanity/Taint score.Eh, which is scarier?

DM: You see a fleshy mass of eyes and teeth oozing toward you in a cacophony of voices.

MM: Same, but did you know those were the eyes and voices of its previous victims?

[Vogie]

What are your perceptions of this and how could you use the alien and demonic that is already in D&D to a more impactful effect?

Of course all of them seem to have human minds - it doesn't matter how many tentacles you add, the person trying to explain the creature and act in their stead is human. Having a tyrant or predatory mindset is easy to emulate, because both DMs and Players can understand and communicate these things to each other.

The best way to give them a more unnatural feel is to give them non-human goals and desires. Sci-fi uses this trope a fair amount. For example:

In the Ender's Game series, the antagonistic "buggers" assumed all creatures operated with hive minds before encountering humans, so they didn't realize that their first 2 invasions were actually killing sentient things.
In the Area X trilogy, there's a thought that the reason the Shimmer is expanding in a circle is because the first human thing it interacts with is a lighthouse.
In Stranger In a Strange Land, the desire to 'grok' a person or idea also includes having that thing being such a part of you that individuality starts to fade.
In The Faded Sun Trilogy, the regul have such a long lifespan that they can simply wait for experience to leave the human military
The Tralfamadorians of Slaughterhouse-Five and the heptapods of Story of Your Life (or the movie version, Arrival), the aliens experience all of their time simultaneously, altering their perspectives on what needs to be done.
The trees and vegetation of Pandora in Avatar are interconnected as though a giant brain, and can then connect to the other creatures of the planet, such as the Na'vi. Because of this, it makes sense that the planet can connect to and direct the wildlife to help defend itself like white blood cells would fight infection.
The Paperclip Maximizer (https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer)thought experiment would fall under this as well.
You can give the creatures of your world a non-tyrant or non-predatory mindset if you so desire.

[KorvinStarmast]

In part it may be because of being a DM lets you see inside all the mechanics and how the sausage is being made, but D&D strikes me as a brand of fantasy that isn't really going much into the strange and the weird. Or it might also have to do with D&D focusing on Forgotten Realms for a long time, and this setting just isn't very interested in making anything feel unfamiliar and out of the ordinary. Nothing unusual to see here. The original game didn't have these problems. Most DM's made their own monsters to supplement the basics in the second volume. More got added as time went on.
Here's a comment from Gygax about how cool Arneson's monsters were ...

If players know what all of the monster parameters are, what can be expected in a given situation, exactly what will happen to them if they perform thus and so, most of the charm of the game is gone. Frankly, the reason I enjoy playing in Dave Arneson's campaign is that I do not know his treatments of monsters and suchlike, so I must keep thinking and reasoning in order to "survive". (Bolding mine) Rob Kuntz made the off hand remark some years back about how Arneson as a DM could "scare the bejeebus out of you." (Can't find the article I read, but it was about him and Gary taking Robilar and one of Gary's wizards into this crazy city with balrogs and high tech horrors and they ended up withdrawing with some treasure).

Source for EGG's point: = a letter to Lee Gould's newsletter, Alarums and Excursions circa 1976.

So what do you do?

mix known monsters and custom monsters.

[Unoriginal]

The Pandora lifeforms regularly killed each other for various reasons, though. And the Na'vi had a conveniently human-like mindset and civilisation.

[Bjarkmundur]

That's exactly why I like fey-crossings.
Weird is best when directly compared to the mundane, so a short travel that goes through a fey crossing, with a narrative of walking through a dream and the feyworlds natural enchantment aura slowly seeping into the minds of the player has always been one of my favourite random encounters of a campaign.

[Imbalance]

There's plenty of weirdness in D&D, imo. There's even ample room to cross the line from weird to f'ing wrong for most people, if you dare. But once the novelty wears off, nothing kills the exhilaration of the weird like familiarity.

[Millstone85]

Have you read the Volo's and the Mordenkainen's? I feel those books do a great job explaining how similar and different various beings are.
In Stranger In a Strange Land, the desire to 'grok' a person or idea also includes having that thing being such a part of you that individuality starts to fade.Something I like in Volo's is that elder brains now actually believe that illithids, and even the humanoids whose brains they ate, are rendered immortal within them. Ilsensine is also reinterpreted as a philosophy of universal knowledge and consciousness.

Of course, the book also insists that elder brains have "no conception of" basic human decency, and are "utterly incapable of empathy". So I guess they are actually pretty bad at the whole mind-merge thing, which kind of ruins the theme.

[Great Dragon]

Eh, which is scarier?

DM: You see a fleshy mass of eyes and teeth oozing toward you in a cacophony of voices.

MM: Same, but did you know those were the eyes and voices of its previous victims?

Yeah, but that's not what most Metagamers look at - or remember.
They recall the Gibbering Mouther's AC 9 and 67 HP


Imbalance But once the novelty wears off, nothing kills the exhilaration of the weird like familiarity.
Very true.

KorvinStarmast I tend to follow Arneson's game style.
Even if a creature looks like something you recognize, doesn't mean they are exactly what you expect.

Bjarkmundur while I use this fey idea, I try not to use it too often.
doing so can make it seem to the players that your just trying to control their Characters.

[JakOfAllTirades]

In and of itself, the D&D 5E core books and their supplements don't have a lot of flavor; it's up to the DMs and players to infuse the game with whatever they bring to the table. If you want a weird D&D game, it helps a great deal to have a weird DM and a group of players who are willing to buy into his or her weirdness for a few hours every week. It helps even more if the players don't know in advance just how weird it's going to get, and things go just a little bit beyond what they expected. And again in the next session, and again, and again. Start off slowly, and don't let them know how deep the rabbit hole really is.

Or just run a one shot and go completely psychofunkadelic without telling them what you're planning. They might let you DM for them again.

[Trask]

I think D&D's weirdness is kind of a plasticky, "fake" weirdness. Almost every time I read or encounter something weird, its so overexplained and thoroughly demystified that it loses all power, and I think thats largely due to the obsessive way that D&D categorizes and labels everything and leaves very little as free floating and unknown space. Monsters have to fit into a certain creature type, fey, fiend, monstrosity, aberration, whatever and so you and players can already make assumptions about it. D&D has some cool ideas sure, and some monsters are very weird visually but even the bizarre beholder becomes mundane when you have one on the cover an officially published book as a crime boss who loves his pet goldfish and I'm still supposed to believe in that monster as some kind of unknowable horror.

I absolutely adore creating customs monsters, even just reskinning stat blocks, I think it is one of the best ways to really bring back the sense of wonder and the exploration of the unknown. But then the barrage of demands for Arcana, History, Nature, and Religion checks leaves me kind of at a loss because I honestly think that creatures are more fun when they are a mystery, at least as a player I feel that way, but it seems to be the minority opinion in circles I've played in.

[JakOfAllTirades]

What if the goldfish is actually the crime boss?

[Millstone85]

What if the goldfish is actually the crime boss?Sylgar is obviously a polymorphed aboleth, and Zushaxx is its thrall.

[Unoriginal]

"Weird" doesn't mean "unknowable horror".


The Xanathar is weird, being a crime boss with intense paranoia and a pretty loopy conception of the world. Knowing more about it just show how weird it is.

[No brains]

I think Xanathar's adoration for its goldfish is weird in that it's a monster arbitrarily aping a human behaviour. Does it really care for the fish? Is its fish care an act to trick humans into believing it has some humanoid thought processes?

[Unoriginal]

I think Xanathar's adoration for its goldfish is weird in that it's a monster arbitrarily aping a human behaviour. Does it really care for the fish? Is its fish care an act to trick humans into believing it has some humanoid thought processes?

Well everything indicates that yes, it really cares for the fish that much. It's even included in its Bonds/Traits and everything.

A potential reaction in Dragon Heist shows how much the Xanathar cares for the goldfish.

Personally I've made so that the Xanathar is aware that the Guild replace the fish whenever it dies, because trying to fool a beholder with a look-alike when the beholders have incredible eyesight is kind of dumb, but that the Xanathar let them do so because it falls in love with the new fish anyway. But that doesn't mean it won't fly into a murderous rage if it sees its fish dead or missing.

[Millstone85]

Well everything indicates that yes, it really cares for the fish that much. It's even included in its Bonds/Traits and everything.I would say it is also part of its "Bond traits".

It must have heard that villainous masterminds are supposed to pet a cat while talking to underlings. It reminds the latter that they have less value than an animal.

But cats are the worst! Meow, meeeow, hiss! And they clearly think they are better than everyone else, including beholders! They are just asking to be disintegrated. Now, fishes? Fishes are good.

[Unoriginal]

I've written a beholder who's persuaded that doing things like respecting etiquette, dressing in elaborate fashion, listening to operas, eating fine food and being a patron of the arts make one more powerful, and so does its best to do so. Despite the fact it's still very much a fanged sphere with many eyes with an alien mindset.

Its two current goals are becoming the next Xanathar and becoming one of the Hidden Lords of Waterdeep.

[JakOfAllTirades]

Sylgar is obviously a polymorphed aboleth, and Zushaxx is its thrall.

This just became canon in my game.

[KorvinStarmast]

Sylgar is obviously a polymorphed aboleth, and Zushaxx is its thrall. *bows* we are not worthy. I'd PM you a beer if I could ...

[Millstone85]

This just became canon in my game.
*bows* we are not worthy. I'd PM you a beer if I could ...Now I feel obligated to say that the theory appeared on this very forum before.

Can't remember who first brought it, though. :-/

[Trask]

"Weird" doesn't mean "unknowable horror".


The Xanathar is weird, being a crime boss with intense paranoia and a pretty loopy conception of the world. Knowing more about it just show how weird it is.

Well I disagree, most weird horror literature specifically focuses on the fact that the protagonist and the reader has little understanding of the nature of the forces at play, which creates more fear about what it is. Thats a classic principle of weird stories, knowing more about it almost never makes players more weirded out by out, but always less (in my experience) and not only in rpgs but in stories or movies. Explain the thing and you take away all it's power.

Obviously the nature of the hobby demands that you have to explain it at least a little, we are playing a game about heroic combat with monsters after all, but whenever I create or reskin a monster to be something weird and not possible to meta-guess, its always way more fun at the table and that element of fear and wonder takes over where they dont know what it does or if it has a weakness or how strong it is.

I agree very strongly with the Gygax quote above that it is very much the charm of D&D to be facing the unknown and the mysterious, not the known and pedestrian fake "weird" monsters anyone can look up and read 3 pages of wiki articles about.

[strangebloke]

Weird horror is easy, you just have to put in the effort.

Previous campaign had weird portals as one of the primary drivers of conflict. The portals would deposit monsters of various stripes into the material plane, and a big part of what the PCs had to do was enter the portals, find the wizard/artifact/whatever that was creating the portal on the other side, and then close it.

This provided a natural arc to each major chapter of the story.

hear about portal-> get to portal -> adventure in alien landscape.

The 'get to portal' part was always very heavily grounded in reality. Politics, armies, criminal underbellies. All very standard stuff that DND players know how to recognize.

The 'Alien' part was a mess. One had them navigating the inner workings of a brain where gravity didn't exist. Another was a limbo adventure where strange crustaceans were sealing humans in crysallis'. Another was the distant past in a city of legend, haunted by ghosts.

Combat was scary and highly lethal if you weren't careful. I used a lot of self-disguising monsters like dragons and oni and hags, so the party was never confident that the local person they were facing in the alien realm was someone that they could fight or not.

Then too, sometimes a seemingly familiar monster would actually be a different familiar monster, tweaked and reskinned. I had a gynosphynx reskinned to look like a giant spider mother, for example. There's nothing quite like seeing a player panic when they realize that the monsters they thought were CR 2 are actually CR 12.

Overall, I think I did a decent job of maintaining a very creepy feel to things at times.

Another example from a more recent campaign: In an ancient tomb, the party found a very detailed depiction of one of the party members dying in a horrible fashion. There's no context to this, but when that strange creature from the mural finally appears....

[opaopajr]

Forgotten Realms IS weird, but no one ever uses the weirdness. They keep running Sword Coast as ersatz Ren Faire England, complete with modern cosmopolitanism, Human Resources Dept., and Theme Park Directory Maps. :smallyuk: Grab an old 2e setting box set and dig for weird treasure -- it is very much there! :smallcool:

The big secret: Leave Your Current World Behind. :smallsmile: If it is a modern concept, don't carry it over into your table. Pick a few first, discard more modernism to taste!

[Ventruenox]

I've always enjoyed playing an alien mindset. When I DM, it usually is the pinnacle of RP encounters for my own enjoyment. But then, I also find value in knowing what my players are thinking and confusing them at the same time. My players typically expect NPCs to have similar mindsets as themselves, so throwing them for a loop is pretty easy with a "Why would I care about gold?" response to increase the challenge of those encounters.

I create a value set of the alien mind and the rest is merely playing out an algorithm to me. This is a skill that I honed first by figuring out "how does a cat think?" and then expanding upon that. Fey creatures are the most challenging, going with a monkey paw subterfuge in every dealing. Surprisingly, Lizardfolk, Mind Flayers, outer realm elder gods, and the like are easier to pull off.

[Vogie]

Previous campaign had weird portals as one of the primary drivers of conflict. The portals would deposit monsters of various stripes into the material plane, and a big part of what the PCs had to do was enter the portals, find the wizard/artifact/whatever that was creating the portal on the other side, and then close it.

This provided a natural arc to each major chapter of the story.

hear about portal-> get to portal -> adventure in alien landscape.

The 'get to portal' part was always very heavily grounded in reality. Politics, armies, criminal underbellies. All very standard stuff that DND players know how to recognize.


I am actually in the midst of writing a rift/portal-based campaign as well, but how did you keep the players from retreating through the portals for rests? I've got a couple ideas, but there's only so many times they can walk through and get immediately captured...

[Imbalance]

I am actually in the midst of writing a rift/portal-based campaign as well, but how did you keep the players from retreating through the portals for rests? I've got a couple ideas, but there's only so many times they can walk through and get immediately captured...

TES IV: Oblivion
Closing a portal requires going in and ascending a heavily guarded tower and destroying a magical artifact, which then transported you back through to whence you came. Exiting the portal before it is closed allows the entire area to repopulate. Some towers had traps or puzzles or even false towers. Some held open more than one portal, allowing a wormhole effect to cross large areas of the overworld more efficiently.

[Unoriginal]

I am actually in the midst of writing a rift/portal-based campaign as well, but how did you keep the players from retreating through the portals for rests? I've got a couple ideas, but there's only so many times they can walk through and get immediately captured...

If they don't learn the first time it happens, their loss.

[stack]

TES IV: Oblivion
Closing a portal requires going in and ascending a heavily guarded tower and destroying a magical artifact, which then transported you back through to whence you came. Exiting the portal before it is closed allows the entire area to repopulate. Some towers had traps or puzzles or even false towers. Some held open more than one portal, allowing a wormhole effect to cross large areas of the overworld more efficiently.

The weird turns to tedious after you go through identical portals to climb repetitive towers a few times. :smalltongue:

[TeChameleon]

I think D&D's weirdness is kind of a plasticky, "fake" weirdness. Almost every time I read or encounter something weird, its so overexplained and thoroughly demystified that it loses all power, and I think thats largely due to the obsessive way that D&D categorizes and labels everything and leaves very little as free floating and unknown space. Monsters have to fit into a certain creature type, fey, fiend, monstrosity, aberration, whatever and so you and players can already make assumptions about it. D&D has some cool ideas sure, and some monsters are very weird visually but even the bizarre beholder becomes mundane when you have one on the cover an officially published book as a crime boss who loves his pet goldfish and I'm still supposed to believe in that monster as some kind of unknowable horror.

I absolutely adore creating customs monsters, even just reskinning stat blocks, I think it is one of the best ways to really bring back the sense of wonder and the exploration of the unknown. But then the barrage of demands for Arcana, History, Nature, and Religion checks leaves me kind of at a loss because I honestly think that creatures are more fun when they are a mystery, at least as a player I feel that way, but it seems to be the minority opinion in circles I've played in.

I'd say that you can give useful information in response to the 'barrage o' checks' without demystifying a monster. If you do it carefully, each reveal can make the thing creepier and weirder than before.

I mean, the beholder 'crime boss who loves his pet goldfish'? Easy. Goldfish have no eyelids, and cannot blink, because beholders hate 'blinkers' on an instinctual level. And 'crime boss' is just how it interacts with humans- the way it acts when it doesn't have to deal with an enormous mob of hairless monkeys is far more alien.

[Imbalance]

The weird turns to tedious after you go through identical portals to climb repetitive towers a few times. :smalltongue:

True. But there were what? three or four that were required and those were fairly unique to each other. If you absolutely couldn't feel complete in your life without closing all 200-some gates, well...I can relate. Thankfully, any compulsion to grind in D&D is thwarted by groupmind. Or, put another way, if a DM writes a campaign that requires visiting the same half a dozen battlemaps a combined total of 200 times, he would probably do better in the video game industry.

[BloodOgre]

Weird horror is easy, you just have to put in the effort.

To me, that sounds a bit like an oxymoron. Was that the intent?

I have been in a Call of Cthulu campaign where the DM couldn't help but make even the creepiest of circumstances seem mundane. And I've been in D&D sessions where the DM had everyone completely freaked out, and another where one player was so freaked he got up, said, "sorry, this just gives me too much of the oogies" and left. A DM, if they put in the effort, and have a good imagination, can make any game come alive.

As for the people that have memorized the monster manual, use that to your advantage. Level the monsters up or down. Surprise, your party of seven 4th level characters just got their @$$es handed to them by 5 kobolds and a racoon. You really only have to do that once, maybe twice, before the players suspect that anything they encounter may be more than they think it is.

Or simply change the monsters in some way. I have weeping angels in my campaign. Most of the players know what they are from Dr. Who and do NOT want to get near them. But most of the time, I just use Gargoyle stats and maybe let one have stone golom stats. But they all look the same, so the players don't know which is which. And the Dr. is a lich.

[Rukelnikov]

Weirdness in an RPG is completely independant of the system you are playing, its 100% DMing style thing.

In our group normally its either me or a friend that are DMing, and the party has dubbed my DM style "Changeling", because you never know what you are getting into.

One of the first things you need to realize for this is, the more printed material you use, the less surprising things will be, players will probably know something about creatures and region, either from previous adventures, reading the manuals (specially if they also DM), or from CRPGs.

After my third campaign as a DM I ditched FR and created a new setting every other time I DM or so. My reason behind this was twofold:

First, many of my party's DMs use the Realms, and thus I don't feel like I have the right to cover the world in darkness for instance, since after my campaign is over someone else may want to DM in the realms, and may not want to deal with the world being covered in darkness, nor would I like for them to lift the darkness to tell their story. So, it being kind of a "shared setting" I don't feel like I have complete freedom in what I can do as a DM there.

Second, there are too many established things, and we played in them for years, mostly in the Northern Marches and Sword Coast, but we've been around quite a bit too, so it gets increasingly harder to make for a complete novelty region, while trying to stay within printed material boundaries, and if I'm not gonna respect those boundaries I may as well just create a new setting.

I also tend to create or alter many monsters that have no nerrative relevance but make combat more interesnting since the PLAYERS dont know what they are against. The characters may know with a check, and that's great, but generally they still tackle first time enemies with much more care, even if their pcs know something about them.

DMing/Atmosphere/Concept/Whatever:

This is by far the most important part IMO, regardless of what system you are playing.

One of my settings has pretty much cartoons logic, it's in the plane of dreams, and was my first departure from FR, I had the PCs lured there by chasing a Nightmare Beast thru a "portal" (it was actually a series of caves which someone at the time was dreaming about, and a couple Night Hags made it so that dream and reality overlapped for a while, when the players exited the caves while chasing the beast they were already in dreamscape). Once in the first town they started noticing strange stuff happen, like Nurse Joyce patching someone who had been ran thru by said beast, and said someone being alright a couple moments later, detect magic didn't reveal anything, because there was actually no magic involved, what's "natural" here, is different than what's "natural" in Toril.

In that same setting, some time later, a skycraper sized spider leg pierced the sky, and the pcs had to find help from a swamp witch to A- understand what's going on, and B- fix it somehow, they did a couple trivial things for her and she "lowered" the sky so that the leg didn't stick out and sewed it so that the hole in it wasn't as evident.

After the witch "lowered the sky" players finally accepted they couldn't rely on their "logic" anymore, which they had been doubting for a while but still somewhat clinged to. And for me that fulfilled its purpose, they encountered strange things, and gradually relied less and less on what they were used to.

Next setting was much more "mundane". All the "known" world was basically a big island mostly covered by a forest, and 3 small islands. No arcane magic (except bard), no gods, no elves (they lived in one of the three islands, and shot on sight). Known humanoids were basically an endangered species(*), counting at 2-3k total, 2 "big" cities(one lost during campaign), and 3 settlements at campaign begining. The forest in the big island were the PCs started is wolf territory, they are basically the predominant species in the setting, with most packs having at least one wolf with at least humanlike intelligence(spontaneous awakening is a thing), and many having druid wolves that can wildshape into humanoids. The discovery of this wolf "society" and some of its workings, surprised and confused my players many times.

This setting wasn't as strange, but not answering questions during campaign start and leaving them to be explored in game is what the idea was about ("Why do elves shoot on sight?", "What's beyond these waters? There has to be something more", "Why do we live in the coast and not in the forest?"), it was my first sandbox and my intention was to make the setting as "young" as possible.

As a final example of unpredictable DMing, something that happened in the last dnd campaign I DMed, during an encounter a PC accidentially kicked a table's leg while standing from his chair, which shook the table a bit and moved the pieces in the gird, I decided to leave like that, there was an earthquake mid encounter, I had everyone, enemies included, roll a ref save or be prone in addition to the movement caused by it. They night after the encounter, they saw a massive dormant volcano they already knew about erupting and slowly covering the world in a sparse fog of volcanic ash, pretty much blocking sunlight alltogether, apparently triggered by the earthquake (this is the kind of stuff I can't do if im DMing FR).

[MaxWilson]

What are your perceptions of this and how could you use the alien and demonic that is already in D&D to a more impactful effect?

More weird ecologies, spontaneous generation of life, and non-Euclidean movement. See Courtney Campbell's various ecology articles on hackslashmaster for examples, but for example instead of trolls as a distinct species where mama and papa trolls have baby trolls that turn into grown up trolls, how about a campaign world for example where trolls are the mythic manifestation of greed and gluttony: greedy thoughts make your shadow look less human trollier and trollier until one day it can reach out and grab you and switch places with you. Furthermore, turning away a beggar is bad luck and could make a troll appear to eat you next time you cross a bridge, if you do not cross walking backwards in order to trick it. Where did that troll come from? Who knows, that's just what happens when you're greedy. Or what about a He Who Walks Behind monster which only attacks when you're alone, but always has the option to be directly behind you at the start and end of your turn no matter where it was before--its movement rate is "N/A."

Draw inspiration from myth and folklore, not from 5E's monster stat blocks, because 5E stat blocks are terribly boring. The only moderately interesting one is the vampire, because vampire folklore is so well-known that WotC went ahead and included it anyway, even though they watered it down so much that e.g. vampires can cross running water and kill people just fine in sunlight as long as they take regular 30 second breaks in shadow to regenerate the damage.

Read Courtney Campbell's stuff, it's better than my examples in this post.

[strangebloke]

I am actually in the midst of writing a rift/portal-based campaign as well, but how did you keep the players from retreating through the portals for rests? I've got a couple ideas, but there's only so many times they can walk through and get immediately captured...

There's a doom timer. An ally is trapped in the portal and will die in three days time.
The Portal is one-way. I had a giant NPC that had covered the portal with a giant stone. He'd move it away if they wanted to go in, and at a set time in the future, but when they went through, he put the stone back.
The party was running away from a powerful enemy when the ducked into the portal. Can't go back until they have some way of fighting it.



To me, that sounds a bit like an oxymoron. Was that the intent?

I would distinguish between something that's simple, but a means lot of work (lifting an engine block) and something that requires a special knack, or je ne sais quoi.

DMing, good DMing, always requires work. Horror isn't much harder to shoot for than anything else.

For weird horror, just think of strange, alien things. Heck, just make a dungeon with SCP foundation entries in each room. It's not that complicated. Its just work.

[Citadel97501]

May I introduce you to Numenera, while not a D&D system it is very weird and should lead into the type of games your looking for. Below is a useful link to show the differences between the 2 styles of game.

https://theninthworld.com/gm-experiences-in-dnd-vs-numenera/

[No brains]

The weird turns to tedious after you go through identical portals to climb repetitive towers a few times. :smalltongue:

I think this quote goes a long way toward explaining why a world of scientifically verifiable spirituality doesn't seem weird.

"Oh look, there's a hollow skeleton standing under its own power over there. It's looking right at me even though it doesn't have eyes. I'm not surprised something without a brain is so dumb, but doesn't this ossified jackass have something better to do than try to kill me? Why is he decently good at it? Nuts. Now I'm dead. I hope I get brought back the right way and lot as an idiot like him. Hello again, God. Boooring."

[Chaosmancer]

I'd say a big hurdle in making things weirder is having to explain them to players.

If I say a group of goblin bandits come out of the woods, then I don't need to spend time describing how "a band of child-sized, green humanoids with red eyes and large ears exit the forest. They are wearing patchwork armor and carrying shoddy equipmemt."

Sure, the second one can make a better story but inevitably someone asks "are those goblins" or I start referring to them as goblins instead of "small green skinned humanoids".


So, I don't try and make things weird or unknowable, I make them different. If you live in a culture where giving your name to someone is eauivalent to enslaving yourself to them(because magic) then people would not greet each other by name, maybe not even by nicknames. Having a conversation where not only does the person not call you by name, but gets terrified when you try to introduce yourself is going to be weird in practice. But I didn't get there by asking "how can I make this weird" but by asking "if names give you power over someone, how would society react?"

[Finback]

I'm just going to add that if you want to read over some material to give ideas, then try the Operation Unfathomable stuff on drivethrurpg. It's from the people who also gave us the Dungeon Dozen website, which has heaps of *weird* random tables.

[opaopajr]

The big issue is a known thing tends to be taken for granted. "Familiarity breeds contempt." :smallannoyed:

But that is on the GM to "subvert expectations" (:smalltongue:) in a meaningful and engaging way. It's risky though, as any creative interpretation strays from the 'safe shores' of the familiar. And not all attempts are equal; some can be lazy palette swaps (merely changing out the color scheme), others can forget the value of using 'the known' in the first place (incoherent weirdness for its own sake).

That said, there has been plenty of creatively weird things made for D&D over the decades. The problem is how often the same old needs to be retread for a new generation with an eye to enticement. That's not a failure thing so much as a generational thing, bringing new people's palate (tastes) up to speed for more complexity, shock, or nuance. :smallcool:

[Yora]

I think probably a good approach towards making things seem strange puzzling without making them completely incomprehensible and impossible to meaningfully interact with is to establish patterns of behavior, but without disclosing the underlying mechanics or motivations. We don't know how it does these things, or why, but with some observation and trial and error, we can establish what will usually happen when it encounters or you expose it to certain things and situations.
Generally, the main concern for players when encountering strange things are how do we stop it?, how do we keep it from causing more damage?, and how do we avoid getting hurt by it?


For weird horror, just think of strange, alien things. Heck, just make a dungeon with SCP foundation entries in each room. It's not that complicated. Its just work.

I think SCP might actually a really good example. All that SCP entries are are basically summaries of how the object and creatures behave around humans, with no explanation given where they come from, how they do these things, and why they do them. Some are accompanies by a creepy photo that inspired them, but usually the description of how they look aren't particularly interesting.


May I introduce you to Numenera, while not a D&D system it is very weird and should lead into the type of games your looking for. Below is a useful link to show the differences between the 2 styles of game.

https://theninthworld.com/gm-experiences-in-dnd-vs-numenera/

I've read Numenera some years ago because I was interested in a game about weird encounters and objects, and I was very disappointed by it because of what I actually found inside it about such things. The stuff often looks a bit strange and have one or two strange abilities, but my perception was usually that they are just random instead of implying anything weird. In that regard, I felt that it didn't do any better than D&D already does with the funkier looking monsters. And I didn't find anything about how you're supposed to run Numenera in a way that creates sensations of the strange and weird. Here's some weird looking stuff, you of course know what to do with it.
It's the same big problem that has always plagued Planescape. It looks attention grabbing at first, and then leaves you wondering how you're supposed to use to make it different from any generic D&D campaign.

[Rukelnikov]

It's the same big problem that has always plagued Planescape. It looks attention grabbing at first, and then leaves you wondering how you're supposed to use to make it different from any generic D&D campaign.

Then the problem is not the content, but they DMing way, what you are looking for is not a setting or system that's weird enough, but some kind of DMing guide.

[Yora]

Yes, that is what I wrote in the first post of the thread.

[opaopajr]

Well there's a vast array of DM guides, for various systems, whose advice often carries across systems. If that is your interest start there. :smallsmile:

If you are asking US how WE do it, well, again it'll be mostly to taste in the details and roughly the same from the DM guides' broad outline.

The quickest way to figure out for yourself How to Do It Yourself (DIY) is answer: What things do find interesting and weird? Next ask: Why do they interest me? Then: Will these factors appeal to my audience, my players? And finally: Can those interests be articulated in a way as guidelines for setting usage?

Do that reflection exercise and anyone's personal aesthetics of the weird can be brought forth to the table, regardless of content. :smallcool: You learned how to bring your sensibility to offer a variation on themes to the group. You've personalized the familiar with your brand of weird. :smallsmile: Easy.

[Sigreid]

More weird D&D...well, lets see. In it's history it has:

Mirrors that make an "evil" copy of a person that will try to kill him.

A vampire lizard man king.

A crashed alien sci-fi space ship with functioning robots.

A jester class that could control a wand of wonder because crazy understand crazy.

A mirror that takes you to Alice in Wonderland's world where you find that Zagyag the Mad has built a middle class 1980's ranch house complete with appliances.

Gun toting humanoid hippopotamuses

Sailing ships that fly through space

A mighty hero who is literally a badger due to a reincarnation spell

Wizards to create mixed species just for fun and to see what would happen

Exploding dragon people

Shape shifting (I believe they were ogres) people who at some point in their life are completely driving by their need to mate with the one individual that will ever give them offspring

An evil slaver mage that modified the clone spell to create for herself her ideal boyfriend

A palm tree with coconuts that explode like handgernades

Dragons picking up human and other chicks

A deck of cards that alters reality when you use it

A sack full of small furry animals that you can pull out at random

giant worms that swallow people whole

Nature spirits that kidnap handsome good men to use as love toys for a year before letting them go

A charm person spell that would let you convince the charmed person to "hold of an angry ancient red dragon for a round or 2 so you can get away" (old version)

Liches, wizards, demons and other powerful beings that build elaborate complexes and fill them with monsters and treasure for the entertainment value of watching a group of home invasion robbers try to get the loot

Characters that can survive a cannon ball to the chest at point blank range, or a fall from orbit without any gear or magic

Dead bodies animated by fungus

A creature pretty much originally designed to end campaigns on an exciting note by swallowing them, gods and all.

Gods that die and resurrect more often than the characters in a soap opera.

Peaceful levitating telekinetic jellyfish.

the list goes on.

There's a lot of weird that's already acceptable in D&D without breaking the established fiction.

[Finback]

More weird D&D...well, lets see. In it's history it has:(snip)

You forgot the fire-breathing phase doppleganger giant space hamster, the two-headed Lernaean bombardier giant space hamster, and..

Woolly Rupert.

[Sigreid]

You forgot the fire-breathing phase doppleganger giant space hamster, the two-headed Lernaean bombardier giant space hamster, and..

Woolly Rupert.

I dont think anyone has the time for a full list. Hehe