Quote from: One Horse Town;444105The question i have - are Easter Eggs a sop to collectors rather than players?

They are invariably in-jokes that generally garner a "fuck you" in actual play or are designed to register a wry smile when reading them.

I say this as someone who has included them in my WFRP material.

I don't know, I guess it depends on how it's handled.  I think that it does tend to cater more toward the reader than the player.

My own FtA!GN! sourcebook is chalk-full of "easter eggs", including the Kitchen Sink mechanics (a tribute to both the idea of making a sourcebook that's got "everything but the kitchen sink"; and to the infamous Kitchen Sinks of Nethack fame, nethack being a major influence on FtA!'s style of play), the Evil Robot (which come in several varieties: one is basically very similar to a Dalek, another very similar to a Cyberman, and the third very similar to Bender from Futurama), and of course, the Were-Swine.

All of it a joke for the reader first, but all of the above perfectly usable in actual play.

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Then there's the ones in Gnomemurdered.  I don't know if I'm ready to give them all away yet, but there's the one in the example of play, that I was stunned more people didn't get (which I think just proves my point about how few people actually read examples of play) that the people playing in the example are all rather famous U.S. political figures.

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Does this one count?

I would say so.

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Hehe.

I don't have the books anymore but Mayfair's UNDERGROUND had some interesting easter eggs. As I recall many of the corporations listed in one of the books had abbreviations that matched up with game companies at the time. TSR, GW, FASA, WW, etc.

I think it went over most peoples heads and wasn't very obvious as I recall -- somebody pointed it out to me.

Been 15 years since I've seen the books so I don't have any specifics.

Mystara has several of these sorts of things, specifically in the Gazetteer series.  I know Magnum P.I. shows up there, and Hawaii 5-0 if I remember correctly (both of those in Ierendi, if I remember right).

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