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Author Topic: Strange places your players have explored?  (Read 2274 times)

Shipyard Locked

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Strange places your players have explored?
« on: July 05, 2016, 03:37:44 PM »
What are some of the strangest places your players have explored in one of your games? 'Place' in this case means anything from a building to a landscape to a universe.

Also, what system was it in?

JesterRaiin

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Strange places your players have explored?
« Reply #1 on: July 05, 2016, 03:59:22 PM »
Quote from: Shipyard Locked;906967
What are some of the strangest places your players have explored in one of your games? 'Place' in this case means anything from a building to a landscape to a universe.

Also, what system was it in?

Lowest accessible board of reality in "JAGS: Wonderland", or the realm of Chokmah in "KULT" - they, or rather their variations as presented by me, are pretty similar.

How do they look like...

It's... Difficult to describe in my own language, and in my shitty English it's even harder, but imagine a place, a primordial ocean of things and ideas becoming one another, changing their state from solid matter to loose ideas and the other way around. Players, their words, the way they express themselves determine the elements of the landscape and entities their PCs meet, sometimes influence the way they change, evolve.

Since it's damn difficult to play (for players and GMs alike) it were rather short visits, sometimes a stage in a multidimensional chase, sometimes part of a quest to find something. Each time it produced truckloads of "WTF" moments. ;)
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Edgewise

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Strange places your players have explored?
« Reply #2 on: July 05, 2016, 04:31:54 PM »
Quote from: JesterRaiin;906973
Lowest accessible board of reality in "JAGS: Wonderland", or the realm of Chokmah in "KULT" - they, or rather their variations as presented by me, are pretty similar.

JAGS:Wonderland seemed really interesting to me, but it looked like a challenge to play.  How did that go?

The strangest place my players visited so far was my own creation, the Cosmic Library.  It was built a long time back by an interstellar race of giant spiders who had conquered much of the galaxy, and is basically a library the occupies an entire planet.  The star system where this planet exists has started to go red giant, so the planet itself is wrapped in a time distortion field where everything happens very quickly, so it's been about five minutes till destruction for the last hundred thousand years of use (you get there through wormholes, since the planet is already gone in the current timeline).  Yes, the idea for a planetary-scale library on the verge of destruction was stolen from Dr. Who.

The race that made the library has since devolved into their current forms, which are (mostly) mindless spiders of all varieties; modern spiders are their descendants.  The various races of extant giant spiders are the remnants of their old castes.  To get around the library, you need to hire one of the Librarians, who are a race of four-armed tattooed blue giants able to (usually) safely guide visitors through the wilderness of The Stacks.  In return for this service, they charge one of your fondest memories.  While my players visited, they found a reading room with "mind-books" on crystal cylinders that gave them some random skills (some useless, some not).

The system is Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and yes, this is a fantasy setting.
Edgewise
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Omega

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Strange places your players have explored?
« Reply #3 on: July 05, 2016, 04:38:22 PM »
Yeesh what havent we?

Lets see. Up there on the weird-o-meter.
SMT playtest: Exploring the stomach of The Dragoness after she ate everyone. Exploring Gigantica (cant remember her name. Been nearly a decade since worked on that RPG.) after Buxome Gal KOed her trying to find a bomb that was stuck on her... somewhere... Yeah the comics were weird like that so so was the RPG.

BX/BECMI D&D: Forget the module. But the group ended up exploring a wizards tower. Which was the petrified body of a dragon that tried to eat said wizard and learned their mistake the hard way and was hollowed out to make a home. Another was a city that was a giant conch set up in the sea as a tower city, and another that was a castle sort of set up. A giant train powered by death. A giant robot that doubled as a gnome city.

Gamma World: An automated amusement park thats AI had gone crazy. Then another park whose AI had not gone crazy. Well kinda.

Star Frontiers: Exploring an abandoned alien space station apparently created by a race either adapted to zero-G or one with no real concept of up and down. The place was a a cross between a habitrail and a 3d maze. My maps looked like a handful of spaghetti tied in a big knot.

D&D: Baba Yaga's Dancing Hut. The Dragon Magazine version especially. Another one where we wandered around inside Moanders dead petrified body in the god grave void. Any given time you realize the tunnel you are in isnt a tunnel.

Spelljammer: uh... Everything? What wasnt weird in Spelljammer? A town on the back of a giant? Got that. A death star shaped like a beholder? Got that. Essentially a Dyson sphere inhabited by mountain sized fauna? Got that. Space Pyramid piloted by a Mummy? Got that. Ship made out of skeletons and inhabited by Spectres? Got that.

And many more.

JesterRaiin

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Strange places your players have explored?
« Reply #4 on: July 05, 2016, 04:43:17 PM »
Quote from: Edgewise;906979
JAGS:Wonderland seemed really interesting to me, but it looked like a challenge to play.  How did that go?

I couldn't find it in me to like the mechanics, so I simply stole the setting and ran it under different set of rules.

The most difficult part for me was to manage the "reflections" PCs cast on different boards and the disassociation aspect, but I simplified both - I didn't keep any track of where the "reflections" are or what they do, until it was vital to the scenario.

My players were pretty happy with the result, if I may say so. One decided to replace me as our next GM and he ran a few sessions in similar way. I liked his GMing more than I like mine. ;)
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Ravenswing

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Strange places your players have explored?
« Reply #5 on: July 05, 2016, 05:09:05 PM »
1794 Revolutionary France ...

... for my Renaissance-tech fantasy game.

See, when I was playtesting Scarlet Pimpernel, I put my two fantasy campaigns on hiatus for a few months.  My players were very good about doing this strange milieu, codes against killing and the whole nine yards, even when I asked them to run through the same damn scenario twice each, only with completely different approaches and tactics.

So my present to them, at the end of it all, was one last run through Paris: with their regular fantasy characters, and sod anachronisms.  I gave them free rein to do whatever they liked, and they went on an orgy of killing and destruction, highlighted by one enterprising group wiping out most of the National Assembly in one swell foop.  ;)
This was a cool site, until it became an echo chamber for whiners screeching about how the "Evul SJWs are TAKING OVAH!!!" every time any RPG book included a non-"traditional" NPC or concept, or their MAGA peeners got in a twist. You're in luck, drama queens: the Taliban is hiring.

Mostlyjoe

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Strange places your players have explored?
« Reply #6 on: July 05, 2016, 11:01:22 PM »
A massive undead/larval host manufacturing plant under a pyramid where clockwork zombies were being put together for brain bugs to ride in. These were then sold off auction style in lots to bidders for their own armies. Add to this the massive interlocking clockwork of the place, testing arenas, tram ways, and magical essence batteries to reanimate the dead and fill them moving machine parts to 'enhance' them.

Ya, I kinda went places in that game.

Gronan of Simmerya

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Strange places your players have explored?
« Reply #7 on: July 05, 2016, 11:47:37 PM »
Their pants.
You should go to GaryCon.  Period.

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Omega

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Strange places your players have explored?
« Reply #8 on: July 06, 2016, 12:14:56 AM »
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;907018
Their pants.

So you were a playtester for SMT? :eek:

aheh.

Another weird place visited was in the only play I did of d20m GW. A dead city inhabited by toys and appliances. Many still tending the homes, and skeletons, of their families. Others setting up a weird cyber-fairy-tale society.

Krimson

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Strange places your players have explored?
« Reply #9 on: July 06, 2016, 01:01:39 AM »
I have a kind of Post Cyberpunk Urban Fantasy game I run from time to time called Hachi: Blue. It's set on an island which formed from a volcanic eruption in the late 40s after World War 2. This is fortunate because the island is located where the Midway Atoll is in our world. Subsequently various corporations and government interests made the island into a city state called Mirai. Flash forward almost 70 years, the city is ahead of it's time. It is run by an Artificial Intelligence called Maitreya, though not very many people know that. Certainly not the general population. The city state is a corporatocracy, openly run by corporations whose executives hold important offices. The President runs the company which provides much of the defense technology for MirSec (Mirai Security). In the middle of the city covering the entire caldera of the volcano is an Arcology. The wealthy and much of the upper middle class live there. Since this is a corporate state, that means executives and upper management. Mirai might be a little inspired by RAM from the Buck Rogers XXVc RPG. The arcology is a megatall structure of over 600 meters high. It's not nearly as tall as other megatall skyscrapers but the base is near a mile in diameter, which makes it quite imposing.

Underneath the cities are an extensive sewer system which eventually links up with lava tubes. The city harnesses the energy of the volcano and there are ways to vent lava flow. Yes I've seen Fire and Ice way too many times. There are also not so human denizens living down there. A few years back Maitreya had to vent a lot of steam away from the city. Those denizens did not fare so well.

The weirdest place though is that one of the neighbourhoods kind of exists in a perpendicular space which can only be accessed by psychic entities and Maitreya. The universe in this setting is a 12 dimensional space, with two of the dimensions being time dimensions. One is the one we are familiar with, and then there is another one which runs perpendicular. The zeroth neighbourhood runs along the second time dimension. Maitreya used certain technologies to give the place form. It is deadly to most supernatural creatures. By deadly I mean they explode in a big gooey mess. As Maitreya is kind of a benevolent dictator who sees herself as being responsible for protecting her citizens, she doesn't take kindly to supernatural beings messing with humans. So she does stuff like build androids and gynoids who can physically tear the creatures apart, or recruit player characters by manipulating them to give them psychic powers.

I initially ran the setting using Mutants and Masterminds 3e. I later ran it with a hack of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying with some borrowed elements from Fate Accelerated (replacing Affiliations with Approaches and adapting the formula for making stunts to SFX) which probably lasted the longest. I think when Ultramodern5 by Deus Ex Machina comes out, I'll probably use that and D&D 5e.
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Edgewise

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Strange places your players have explored?
« Reply #10 on: July 06, 2016, 01:43:30 AM »
Quote from: Ravenswing;906986
My players were very good about doing this strange milieu, codes against killing and the whole nine yards, even when I asked them to run through the same damn scenario twice each, only with completely different approaches and tactics.

So my present to them, at the end of it all, was one last run through Paris: with their regular fantasy characters, and sod anachronisms.  I gave them free rein to do whatever they liked, and they went on an orgy of killing and destruction, highlighted by one enterprising group wiping out most of the National Assembly in one swell foop.  ;)

It sounds like you have a great group of players, and I love your reward for them.
Edgewise
Updated sporadically: http://artifactsandrelics.blogspot.com/

Ravenswing

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Strange places your players have explored?
« Reply #11 on: July 07, 2016, 12:23:24 AM »
Quote from: Edgewise;907039
It sounds like you have a great group of players, and I love your reward for them.
I do!
This was a cool site, until it became an echo chamber for whiners screeching about how the "Evul SJWs are TAKING OVAH!!!" every time any RPG book included a non-"traditional" NPC or concept, or their MAGA peeners got in a twist. You're in luck, drama queens: the Taliban is hiring.

Rincewind1

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Strange places your players have explored?
« Reply #12 on: July 07, 2016, 07:21:58 AM »
I'm torn between a demon - infested cavern that was actually a part of said demon, with pulsating demon flesh all over the place, as well as rather odd traps, and nightmarish Scotland in Kult, with Fae highlanders hunting the tarpan - skinned workers in a bizarre maze of factories, steel and mountains.
Furthermore, I consider that  This is Why We Don't Like You thread should be closed

Future Villain Band

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Strange places your players have explored?
« Reply #13 on: July 07, 2016, 08:04:40 AM »
My prostate.  I had an colonoscopy and I used the resulting photos of a polyp as the basis of an Exalted encounter in Malfeas.  

It's one of the few times the players took more SAN loss than their characters when they found out where those photos I'd turned into a hexmap came from.

JesterRaiin

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Strange places your players have explored?
« Reply #14 on: July 07, 2016, 08:14:28 AM »
Quote from: Future Villain Band;907214
My prostate.  I had an colonoscopy and I used the resulting photos of a polyp as the basis of an Exalted encounter in Malfeas.  

It's one of the few times the players took more SAN loss than their characters when they found out where those photos I'd turned into a hexmap came from.

Sir, you're evil and twisted human being with a strange sense of humor, and I'm glad we had a chance to exchange a few comments. :cool:

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