When have you intentionally the thing?

[roko10]

Since we had a "When have you accidentally the thing" thread, I'd figured out that we need a thread to collect all our shout-outs to media.

In my unfortunately abadoned campaign with my brother, I was getting sick of him being all overpowered and the like, so I decided to sic a LOT of giants at him. Eventaully, I would give him reinforcements from TWF rangers, who were level 3 and were intended to get absolutely slaughtered by the giants.

Yes, I decided that the campaign would be Attack On Titan at that point.

[Karl Aegis]

I had a game of Deathwatch where the team had to recover something from a basement deep behind enemy lines. They had to fight through hordes of perfectly generic enemies with some more abnormal enemies mixed in as bosses. They were fighting Tyranid on the way to the basement and the thing they had to recover was a chair.

The game was inspired by a mix of Attack of Titan and Warrior Brood.

No Abaddon was harmed in the making of this game.

[ufo]

During an urban gang warfare-themed fantasy campaign, the players were dealing with an elusive (homebrewed) beast that was invisible and had ridiculous damage reductions that had been murdering their gangmembers (and townsfolk in general, not that they cared). After two sessions of failures the players were fealing a bit down, and in an encounter with it they were massively lucky and hit it with a crossbow or somesuch. In surprise I accidentally said something like "Hey, wow, you dealt 4 damage".

As if on cue, the players all started singing, in chorus, "... if it bleeds we can kill it!"

[Kurald Galain]

I frequently run Paranoia games like this. For example, I've run a game where the clones were given experimental wand-shaped and broomstick-shaped devices and were told to recover the [classified]'s stone before a high-powered mutant named Vold-O-MRT could get at it. Predictably it turned into a big but fun mess...

[JAL_1138]

I have a strong tendency to overdo it on references, especially Discworld shout-outs like having various Dibblers as merchants. Haven't done any as full campaigns yet, though.

[Joe the Rat]

Spinning off of the traits and themes of the Archfey Courts in my D&D game, I have a Lesser Noble who has been tasked with stopping the party Warlock, and to ensure success, she is leveraging the narrative by using heroic story archetypes to create her minions.

Thus far I have assembled:

Spoiler: Don't ruin the surprise!

Show

Ms. Gale, Her animated armor, scarecrow, an overly anxious flind, and her cairn terrier familiar, Tew.
Ebonhair and her Duergar companions, each named after a deadly sin.
Liddel, accompanied by a argumentative ettin, displacer beast, and a stack of pike-wielding cards. And something that looks like, but is not actually, a hook horror.

[Lord Torath]

Spoiler: Don't ruin the surprise!

Show

Ms. Gale, Her animated armor, scarecrow, an overly anxious flind, and her cairn terrier familiar, Tew.
Ebonhair and her Duergar companions, each named after a deadly sin.
Liddel, accompanied by a argumentative ettin, displacer beast, and a stack of pike-wielding cards. And something that looks like, but is not actually, a hook horror.

Spoiler: Spoilered to not ruin the surprise

Show

Ms. Gale, Her animated armor, scarecrow, an overly anxious flind, and her cairn terrier familiar, Tew. Obviously the Wizard of Oz.
Ebonhair and her Duergar companions, each named after a deadly sin. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
Liddel, accompanied by a argumentative ettin, displacer beast, and a stack of pike-wielding cards. And something that looks like, but is not actually, a hook horror. I'm guessing Alice in Wonderland?

[Joe the Rat]

Spoiler: Spoilered to not ruin the surprise

Show

Ms. Gale, Her animated armor, scarecrow, an overly anxious flind, and her cairn terrier familiar, Tew. Obviously the Wizard of Oz.
Ebonhair and her Duergar companions, each named after a deadly sin. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
Liddel, accompanied by a argumentative ettin, displacer beast, and a stack of pike-wielding cards. And something that looks like, but is not actually, a hook horror. I'm guessing Alice in Wonderland?

Spoiler: Indeed!

Show

Tell me Tweedle the Ettin isn't just perfect.

[The Grue]

One of my Eclipse Phase campaigns wound up on a Scum swarm in the orbit of Saturn. Source material suggested the local big-shots were an anarchist gang called "The Kenshasa Buffalo Bills". Obviously, the party ended up seeking them out.

I drew up stats for the nominal "leader", a big dude called Flint Westwood, had his men invite the party over to their saloon(where an octopus with a tie was tending bar), and then launched into an Old West shootout complete with thematic music.

[Geddy2112]

I am shameless in ripping from other fiction and reality. Most of my characters are either musicians or from a funny youtube video.

As a DM, I have run a campaign based in Ravnica from Magic the Gathering, and I am starting a short campaign that is Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse now with some new wallpaper.

[Arutema]

Thanks to the PF Technology Guide, I'm in the planning stages of a sci-fi vs. fantasy campaign.

I've come to realize that the antagonist empire I'm cooking up is basically The Alliance from Firefly.

Hyperspace travel in this setting will probably work like it does in Babylon 5, with the added catch that hyperspace is also the astral plane.

[illyahr]

I intentionally the thing all the time. My players get bonus XP for catching the reference based on how obscure it is.

I once based a game off of Might and Magic 7. One player figured it out but kept quiet and played along. Guess who the first one to find a blaster (+1 Brilliant Energy Explosive Light Crossbow)?

[TeChameleon]

*chuckle*

I've mentioned it elsewhere on these forums, but I recently did a Shadowrun campaign where my players ended up in an abandoned complex under Chicago (It's a bug hunt!)... where the bugs were afraid to go. Turned out it was guarded by blood-magic animated children's toys that were geased to be unable to move while observed (Don't blink.). Aliens meets Toy Story meets the Weeping Angels. That was fun... my players were completely creeped out.

[DixieDevil]

The thing?

I don't understand.

[TheCountAlucard]

As in, made something into a giant reference.

My seafaring game has thrown together Hercules, a genderswapped Franken Stein, and a demonic Barbossa and set them against an empire.

Robert Vance (aka TheDementedOne) ran a game on GitP some time back, "God-Kings of Lotus," that was chock-full of references, such as these two guys, Vega and Iulus…

Spoiler

Show

And in the palace at the city's heart, two men enter unnoticed by all save O-Mochi (for no man can walk through Lotus without gathering a few grains of rice beneath his shoes). Both are dressed more for business than battle–they wear suits of exquisite black, ebon threads perfectly tailored to their forms. Ties of silken shadow proclaim dignity against the backdrop of their white shirts, so pure and unstained that they must have known the luxury of alchemical soap. One man is dark-skinned, his frizzled hair expanding in a small puff around his head. The other's skin is pale white, his hair long and fairly unkempt. The black man is fit and muscular; the white man seems somewhat overweight. Both wear flame pieces of some sort at their belt.

They sit in the same board room where the Circle dealt with V'Neef Enzo. The black man stands, pacing the room's length and breadth; his partner leans over the table, rolling a cigarette. He looks up from his alchemy to speak to his partner. They are apparently already in the midst of conversation.

"But you know what the funniest thing about Malfeas is?"

The dark-skinned man looks over towards him, vaguely bemused. "What?"

"It's the little differences. I mean, they got the same stuff over there that they got here, but it's just – it's just there it's a little different."

An indifferent, sideways glance. "Example."

"All right. Well you can walk into a church in the Eternal Desert and buy a beer. And I don't mean just like in no paper cup, I'm talking about a glass of beer. And in the Demon City, you can buy a beer at the Conventicle Malfeasant. And you know what they call a quarter-pound of beef in Malfeas?"

"They don't call it a quarter-pound of beef?"

"Nah, man, they got the Old Realm system. They wouldn't know what the eff a quarter pound is."

"What do they call it?"

"They call it a royal cut of beef."

"A royal cut?"

"That's right."

Both men laugh whole-heartedly, disparate to any insidious purpose they might have.

[BootStrapTommy]

I once ran a campaign where the players were trapped in a mightly fortress held by a coalition of generic fantasy nations, besieged by a horde of primitive, agrophobic human shaman and orcish nomads from the plains of the east, bent on the destruction of civilization in the name of their earth goddess. The players must fulfill a series of secret missions to save the castle until reinforcements can arrive.

Anyone who can name the thing earns internets. And my eternal friendship.

[Iamyourking]

In one of my current campaigns (Not Two Worlds Collide, in case of you are reading this), I deliberately gave the antagonistic group names whose names hint at their personalities: Leonard Omphalos, Maya Renard, Jairaj Pradhan, Gang Ganzorig, Luciana Barco, and Therese Peralte. So far nobody has figured it out, although they got kind of close with Leonard.

[Gritmonger]

I once ran a rather freeform campaign where the entire basis was "summon" and "create" spells were actually drawing extradimensional material, and the PCs started in the universe that was the one that had been drawn on. For millennia. They had all of a single farmhouse left in the universe, and their only way out was through a bogeyman who could travel from closet to closet.

Mind you, this was at least a decade and a half before Monsters, Inc., so that was an accidentally the thing - but every closet they went to was drawn from popular culture. They ended up in "The Highlander" - first movie, which they immediately tried to escape, and at one point in "Duckburg" (from "Ducktales") where they actually had a blast with every cartoon trope they could exploit.

[illyahr]

As in, made something into a giant reference.

My seafaring game has thrown together Hercules, a genderswapped Franken Stein, and a demonic Barbossa and set them against an empire.

Robert Vance (aka TheDementedOne) ran a game on GitP some time back, "God-Kings of Lotus," that was chock-full of references, such as these two guys, Vega and Iulus…

I just watched Pulp Fiction the other day.