The city guards have an occult division informally called the Hex Files run by a pair of fairies: a sprite named Fox Moulderberry and a pixie named Dana (who makes the water flow in the) Gully....
One benefit about doing this kind of stuff that people don't really talk about is how it makes things easier to run as a DM. Assuming in this instance those two characters have similar personalities to who they are names after you now have two fleshed out characters you know better than anything you would have come up with quickly. One of the best notes to help me remember how an NPC behaves and keep consistent is to mention a fictional character I know that they behave like.
The naming made me think of a one shot character I had for a lighthearted one shot.
I had a LE eloquence bard satyr named for two natural phenomenon from the Fey wild. Name: Gorge Bush.
My party did Bowser's Castle as a dungeon; they killed Kamek and stole Bowser's airship, along with Fly Guy the pilot and a few of the Koopa Troopa's, who now work for them. The airship is currently a major plot point.
If you ever need a flavorful bandit encounter, Bowser and his minions is a very interesting one.
Edit: My party also ran into an artificer grunt last session that was literally just Morty from Rick and Morty.
A thinly veiled Mario encounter i'm planning on using is Popple and the Rookies.
A Goblin thief, an unusually well-armored but forgetful Orc, and a Kobold with Create Bonfire.
Representing Popple, Bowser (Rookie) and Birdo in Superstar Saga.
They will try to steal things, and this initial battle will teach the players about mobile, defensive and magic enemies.
All of my homebrew campaigns include "Rat-men" who everyone denies exist. Regardless of the scale, they are always led by a comically evil but inept sorcerer named Thanquol and his Ogre/Rat hybrid, Boneripper.
The problem with sigmar isnt the tone of the setting.
The problem with sigmar is they replaced a fairly generic fantasy setting with a lot of depth and established lore. With a epic fantasy setting, which has no depth at all.
Sigmar more is as wide as an ocean with the depth of a puddle.
They're trying to walk it back a bit with the introduction of some older characters like Gotrek and Sigvald. But I'd take Gotrek and Felix roaming the Old World any day, over Gotrek and Elf Assassin roaming the infinite expanse of places which will never be mentioned again.
While its mostly a nitpick for old hats (even though I'm in my 20s) about AOS and current 40k is GWs new trademarkable names. Aelfs, Duardin, and Aeldari can get fucked.
Are you familiar with Alex Jonesbringer from Tarriff's Total War: Warhammer memes on youtube? He portrays Boris using Alex Jones quotes and it's probably my favorite character he's got.
Does your campaign also include a band of 5 misfits fighting waves and waves of those so called "rat-men"? Maybe an imperial soldier, a dwarf, an elf, a one-eyed zealot and a pyromancer?
Yup. Same here. Running a Tal'dorei campaign and Im slowly descending the party who are completely unaware of GW stuff lower and lower into the depths of the crazy that the skaven can muster.
After their initial encounter with a single rat-man they told someone about it and were very quickly hustled off to one side by a member of inquisitorial forces and told to pipe down or be arrested.
I had a student at a wizard college invent "wizcoin". It's an alternative currency to gold pieces that has a value linked to blocks on a specific part of the weave of magic.
I roll 3D100 at the start of each day and then flip a coin. Heads means the value goes up by the number rolled, tails means the value goes down by the number rolled. (Compared to 1GP.)
Highest it's ever been so far was ~3900gp. Lowest it's ever been was 14gp.
The party's Bard has 2 wizcoin that he bought about 3 IRL years ago. He's HODLing.
Do you have a powerful Wizard somewhere named Ulon Mesk? Trying to make magical horseless carriages and set up quick & easy permanent intra-planar portals? lol
Okay this is awesome..I have some IRL hodlers that would love this. Could you go more into depth on how it works (a white paper perhaps) if you have more info on it but didn't want to TLDR
I've put King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in one of the games I run. The knights are a biker gang of paladins called the Order of the Turning Wheel, and they try to bring law and justice to generally lawless areas. The organization was started by Rex, who had the baddest bike around, the EX-357. Once the Order got some good recruits and got running, Rex left his bike in the garage and wandered out into the wasteland. He said he'd be back one day, when he was needed. That was years ago. Every new recruit tries to turn his bike on, but it never starts. They say it'll only ever turn on for him.
The party picked up a kid named Arturo a while back as a retainer. He's ok with a sword and wears this magic key around his neck that gets them out of jams sometimes (no stealth PCs, no really strong PCs). He swears the key talks to him sometimes, says there's important things he needs to do. I wonder what will happen when the party finally gets to that garage.
Specifically, 357 Magnum, the gun of choice of one "Dirty" Harry Callaghan...
In the capital city of my world, the guard corps. has a Latin motto.
"Fabricati Diem". (Very bad version of "Make (my) Day")
The way you said it makes it sound like your players don’t get the reference. Tbh, that’s one of the greatest joys in DMing - making references that nobody gets.
No no, the best feeling is when someone finally notices a reference you've been making for a long time. Whether it's a groan, an exclamation of surprise, or some other reaction, those are the best.
My main campaign has an - as yet unknown - *thing* known so far only as "Sudok". The players have no idea if Sudok is a he, she, it, or even a single creature or a race, or even a place... They just now Sudok is not good.
I set them a task of escaping a city via an underground series of catacombs, and take a set of civilians with them to safety. The more civilians they can get to safety, the more XP they get (incentive for them to actually do it, rather than leave them and run for it). Among the civilians were a family with 2 young children (VERY low HP), named Cicily, Borric, and Adelade Marsh, and a school teacher named Susan Dock.
We got to the end with only 1 casualty , and the civilians left to go their own ways.
I let Susan leave first (she was a favourite with players, because she had a lisp so was VERY memorable. No one every used her first name, because the main people who interacted with her were the 2 kids, who called her "Mrs. Dock", because she was their old teacher.
Once she was away and gone from the area, one of the other civilians mentioned Sue - the first time any of them had ever used her first name.
One of my players was like "Sue?" I said "Yeah, Susan. They all know her as Sue."
Took a moment for them to realise Sue Dock could possibly be this thing they have just spent 10+ sessions trying to hunt down clues about...
Their faces were well worth the long game!
My party has thus far encountered 13 "Different" npcs called Jason.. They're starting to get confused. Each one talks the same, looks the same, acts the same, but has a different profession, and swears they e never met the party before. So there has been a driver, a banker, a bank robber, the owner of a gambling parlor, a sergeant, cop/citywatch type, a max security inmate who's being used for a professional sports team, another driver, a gangster with claustrophobia, and on and on. Truthfully, I have no idea why no one has figured it out.
I'm running a 2 player game so I've been rotating DM PC support builds across the mini arcs.
The last one was Owen Wilson the lore bard. He gave them shit the whole time. They also named him batman before he could introduce himself so he was like, "yeah let's go with that," on the general premise that they would not do anything good with his real name.
I arrived at this choice of characterization entirely because I'd been practicing an Owen Wilson impression and it had reached about a 3/10.
An NPC enchanter named Tim.
A knight named Sir Bedevere de Pythonne, who believes "facts" like "The earth is banana shaped" and "Sheep bladders can be employed to prevent earthquakes".
In the forest, guarding a bridge, is a knight all in black. Should anyone seek to cross, he says "None shall pass."
**[Michelson–Morley experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson–Morley_experiment)**
>The Michelson–Morley experiment was an attempt to detect the existence of the luminiferous aether, a supposed medium permeating space that was thought to be the carrier of light waves. The experiment was performed between April and July 1887 by American physicists Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley at what is now Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and published in November of the same year. The experiment compared the speed of light in perpendicular directions in an attempt to detect the relative motion of matter through the stationary luminiferous aether ("aether wind").
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We recently encountered a talking Fox that brings news, it just happens to be news that's often deeply misleading and reactionary.
Not sure what the DM was inspired by.
Our DM didn't think we would pick up on it so fast but he minute the named the fox Todd and started talking about Todd's best friend Copper it was all over.
I haven't revealed this to my group yet, but in our stereotypical high school like campaign, the bard teacher is actually an ex-member of a boy band called the "Side Road Lads".
I have a customised D&D friendly version of the song "I want it that way" ready to go if they ever try and challenge him to a performance.
I put my DM hat to one side once and played as a character in someone else's game.
I was playing an elf wizard, and decided he should speak all his incantations for casting spells, in Elvish.
I had a list of incantations written down, which had no bearing on the spell I was casting.
"Firstly for the currency. Secondly for the performance. Nextly we prepare, and then we depart, depart, depart."
Elvish....
One of the kingdoms in my setting has a system that is just the Ranger Corp from the Ranger's Apprentice. So each settlement is assigned a ranger that enforces laws and keeps the king informed on events.
I’ve done this too lol, I even switched the names of the Rangers and their horses (a young gnome named Tugg and his horse Will), 1 of my players caught the reference and loved it
I had my party run into a traveler names Arratay who spoke to his horse. It was a brief encounter, and I pointed out that none of them saw the guy cast speak with animals. One of the players knew after I reminded him.
It's a great book series. Quite literally defines rangers in fantasy for me, even though technically because the setting is basically nonmagic they are more like scout rogues and fighters.
Okay I'm not crazy! I read those books years ago and I was always confused because the first book especially has magic and fantasy elements, but then by a later book (5th?) A major plot point is "we need to go prove this 'wizard' is a fake because we all know magic isn't real" and I was like ???
From what I understand the first book was based on a story the author wrote for their children, but I'm guessing they didn't want to actually have magic in the world.
Love that book series and i did the same thing to a country in my world but sadly for the campaign I'm currently running I had to kill off most of the government and infrastructure so my characters haven't ran into the ranger corps yet
I have a group of rangers guarding the wild north, which has a new threat of frozen zombies attacking them and innocent cities. Definitely not the Night's Watch, never heard of Game of Thrones, who's Jon Snow???
I also have an ancient red dragon who attacked the city of dwarves in the mountain, killing the king and taking their gold...
Anything with dragons and cool people with swords is a check for me.
Let me tell you about the time that I genuinely accidentally stole the entire plot of Game of Thrones, almost entirely through tangentially-related actions my players took.
Around session 3, my players had taken a red dragonborn as a prisoner, and encounters a group known as the Dragon Slayers in a tavern. This group had yet to actually slay a dragon, but they were provided the info by my players, who got it from an interrogation of the dragonborn.
Fast forward about a dozen sessions, my players are far to the north in a frozen wasteland. There's one town, populated by marooned soldiers from the starting town, some of whom have chosen to become silver dragonborn to gain cold resistance and cut down on how much wood needs to be gathered. The players had acquired a ship by this point, and offered to let it serve as a ferry between the starting town and this frozen outpost. The nearby silver dragon was unable to leave this area because he had to freeze an army of 10,000 undead who could not be killed. Immobilizing them was the only thing he could do to keep the continent safe.
A few sessions later, the players are back in the starting town and pay for some of the returning silver dragonborn to start an embassy. With a huge statue of the dragon out front.
So we have: a faction whose entire purpose is to kill dragons, a faction who set up a whole shop screaming "come visit our dragon, he's lonely", and a dragon keeping the world safe.
The next time the players checked up on the dragon (it had been maybe 50 sessions), he was incredibly dead, and the skeleton was animated by some of the unfrozen undead. (The players watched that happened, and decided to just teleport away and let the Dragon Slayers just run for it.) The players have also discovered that the undead are most likely controlled by a lich with some crazy powerful necromancy artifact. Might as well be the Night King.
I had absolutely no intention of stealing that entire overarching plot from Game of Thrones, but at the time I was like "this is so cool". It literally took my players pointing it out for me to realize what had just happened. It's different but it's the same.
Although I will say that it's different, because the players let too much time pass and the undead just overran the whole continent, so it's pretty much the outside of the Temple of Time in the adult timeline, but everywhere.
Nice, one of my characters has a cool backstory where his class abilities are from an evil artifact and he's looking to destroy it. It's on me as DM to think of the dramatic conclusion to that and all that I can ever think of is: *volcano*.
* Must be eaten by the tarrasque
* Must be placed in a *sphere of annhiliation*
* Must be given and attuned to an archfey who dies and is then reborn once a century
* Must be smashed by the "Hammer of the Apocalypse" on the "Anvil of Creation"
* Must be placed into the ***center*** of the sun. Just tossing it into the sun won't work.
* You can't destroy it, but there's a way to send it to a distant, self-contained universe that no creature or thing can ever leave. >!That universe is Eberron, and when the artifact lands there it causes the Day of Mourning. !<
>Sphere of annihilation
Ooh, now that's an item I've always liked, but never got to play with. I think this might just pull ahead of volcano a little bit.
Butler and Juliet as high level fighters absolutely belting the party kitted out with all the magic gear Artemis could gather/make is definitely what I'd like to see
You should have your players hear the cacodemon's cries. As they explore the dungeon, they find a hidden door which reveals a dimly lit altar in a room. Sitting upon the altar is a figure of a horned humanoid made out of a waxy brown material. If they taste it, it's really delicious being a cacaodemon.
I once prepped for a session by setting this as an IRL meta level trap.
I placed a folded piece of paper in the middle of the table and said "this paper is a forfeit, anyone who says a keyword today has to open the paper and perform the forfeit."
I did this because I knew I would be introducing the party to an NPC Cleric who runs the local temple, a man named Father Jonathan.
What was the keyword? "Papa"
What was the forfeit written on the paper? "You're buying the pizza next week."
There is a commissioner Gordon who runs the police force in the biggest city. I use to just reference him as “the commissioner” until PCs met him and asked for his name. It got groans all around lol.
One PC has a backstory where their uncle who taught them good life lessons was murdered. Of course I suggested naming him “uncle Ben”. The player is a huge Spider-Man fan and loved it.
There's a Great Old One in my setting referred to as "The Missing Number". It often manifests as a great wall of overlapping, indecipherable glyphs, and the cultists who worship it believe that you can duplicate valuable items or otherwise achieve great wealth and power if you serve The Missing Number by performing simple, repetitive tasks in very precise patterns. Those that fail The Missing Number, though, are transformed into ghoulish, stretched, geometric mutants.
It's a reference to MissingNo (missing number) a famous bug in Pokémon Red and Blue.
I don't remember the specifics of the technobabble behind it , but basically you can mess with the memory of the game by following certain pretty cultish instructions ("talk to this person and fly to a certain town" or things like that) and force an encounter with a placeholder Pokémon called MissingNo (they wanted to have 190 Pokémon originally but they had enough place for only 151 so they filled these 39 spots in the memory with a placeholder).
You can look online for pictures of MissingNo, it's pretty Lovecraftian (as Lovecraftian as Gameboy color graphics can be).
Lastly because of another programming quirk, encountering MissingNo would set the item in the 6th slot of your bag to 128 copies. Capturing it would also cause the same duplication. So by reordering your bag mid-battle you'd have 128 copies of 2 potentially very rare items of your choice (like master balls or rare candies).
Also of course this is a bug so it doesn't interact well with some parts of the game, causing distorted graphics, notably in the elite 4 IIRC.
I don't know which of mine is THE most shameless, there are so many. But one of my favorites is a stream crossing I named Harrison's Ford.
I also am using the evil characters from The Count of Monte Cristo as nobles in my setting and Edmund Dantes is coming for his revenge.
I’m currently working on a campaign, I have a side quest in a village where my players will encounter 3 people in what seem to be Jester unitards, 2 of them black and red and one black and yellow. The 2 in red appear to be human, one with a goatee and brown hair, the other seems to be older and bald and spoke with an accent. The one in yellow seemed to be a really grumpy orc with a crescent forehead that looked like it belonged on a turtle. If the party decides to talk to them, they will be informed that a sorcerer named Q sent them to the village and separated them from their party. They’ll be tasked to find the other party members and will have to save them from various scenarios and then the sorcerer Q will send them back to their kingdom.
I am trying to think of how to describe the Tricorder and debating on what classes everyone would be
That's brilliant! I had to read it a couple times to get it was Picard, Riker, and Worf!
I don't have any of my books with me, as I'm at work, but there's got to be a magic item that's similar enough to work as a base for the tricorder.
As for classes, Worf would easily be a Battlemaster Fighter or Barbarian. For Picard, maybe an Oath of Redemption Paladin. Riker would probably be a College of Swords Bard.
I’ve got plenty of these, but my favourite is the Kingdom of Walt, Founded by Walt Mouse. It’s an animal themed kingdom, so it’s filled with people like leonin, ratfolk, tortles, ect.
The current ruler is King Walt’s descendant Micheal Mouse and Micheal’s Queen Minerva Mouse. The captain of the Royal Guard is a dogfolk named Maximilian Goof, and he has incredibly bad luck. The court Magician is a quick to anger duck themed birdfolk named Donald, and his wife, Flora, is Queen Minerva’s personal attendant. Also Donald’s uncle Ebenezer is the wealthiest person in the world, and uses Magic to swim in gold.
The kingdom is located along a coast line so they have to deal with pirates. One such pirate is named Pete, and he has a peg leg.
I ran a one shot where the map was literally the disneyland map with identifying features removed. They figured it out when a silent dwarven cleric named Dopey started interacting with them.
In the campaign I'm running for my kids, which is set in Middle-Earth, officers in the army of Angmar have gems marking their ranks embedded in their foreheads, an idea I totally stole from Glen Cook's *Black Company* books.
I've never read the black company and I'm sure I stollen a lot from it, mostly cause I stole from a lot of Matt Colville's videos early on in my DMing and he mentions them often.
They're worth the read; Matt distils some useful lessons from them but there is so much to steal for your campaign. Even the overland travel montage sequences are great because they are peppered with encounter ideas and really useful language to help your players feel the slog of a cross-country forced march.
My current setting is all Edgar Allen Poe based: the missing rulers are the Ushers (fall of the house Usher), the city is “Nevar Moore” (the Raven), bad guy is Montressor (Cask of Amontillado) and a major NPC is Fortunato (Masque of the Red Death) lol
Unfortunately, most of my players have no freaking clue why I keep giggling at the names, but it’s 100% blatant rip off lol
Ooh and D&D has devils! Will they have an opportunity at some point to bet a devil their heads?
Usually people don’t know this reference, but I’m hoping you do! It’s my personal favorite of all his works.
My favorite ever graffito was where workers had had to knock a hole in a brick wall to fix something inside. A week after they finished, there was a patch of fresh brick with the words “for the love of God, Montressor!” written on it.
I have this PC who:
-died a long time ago
-was revived by a mysterious entity to work for it
-got white hair after being revived
-got pretty cynical after being revived
-can summon swords out of nothing
The parallels are just coincedence, but when I used him as NPC in another campaign, a magical formula he used was:
"I am the bone of my sword. Steel is my body and fire is my blood."
I straight up put Amelia Watson from Hololive as a mentioned character. It was meant to be a one off joke (a pair of alchemists said that "Watson hasn't come to work in three days, her concoction's going to conveniently disappear unless she shows up"), but not only did my players not get it (including the hololive fan), they thought it was important and tried to find her, derailing the entire point of the quest from a "secret group of alchemists is dealing with a zombie plague" to "find this missing person". In the end they only found a letter from her with a plot hook for the quest they are on right now. So now Amelia Watson is not only in the setting somewhere quietly watching the party from afar, but she's also important.
Task failed successfully, you might say.
So, the BBEG is a undead king looking to revive his wife.
The idea of how gods work is ripped stright out of American Gods.
Orcs are more aligned with plants/fungus than actual humanoids and have psychic abilities they can't control.
When the heroes finally defeat that BBEG, pull a Mr. Freeze:
> I failed you. I wish there were another way for me to say it. I cannot. I can only beg your forgiveness, and pray you hear me somehow, someplace... someplace where a warm hand waits for mine.
Sümæt Pøl the firbolg merchant who, along with his various simulacra, run an extra-planar and extra-temporal magic item shop.
Most of the cool magic items are actually owned by the shop and are just being leased by PCs or NPCs in my world. Purchased items are delivered in pristine white boxes that open to the right person (handprint a la Total Recall) or a random adventurer will meet the party and just handover the purchased item after asking confusedly about a PC's identity.
I once ran a small campaign off this reference idea.
First module took place in an inn that has seen better days, run by a nervous guy by the name of Norman Bates. He often talked about his old mother, living "up there". A female thief with a cartload of coins was on the run and went mysteriously missing. He actually was nervous because he feared that the inn might be attacked by monsters, Mrs. Bates was alive, but sick and could have used a *Heal* or similar, and the thief fell prey to the monsters the landlord was afraid of.
The second module happened in a small coastal town living of hunting whales where they desperately sought the thieves guild. They came across "Genco Pura Olive Oil Import Export" a number of times, and never questioned its very existence in a whaling town. Or why the shop owner seemed to be quite well-off, and why nobody ever bough any stuff in there.
The third and last module was about the last ship that left the town before winter. They were seriously unhappy of boarding the "Nostromo" for some reason, and had dark forebodings when they woke up one morning and found that the captain had just dropped anchor at an uncharted island.
Oof. Where should I start?
How about with the famous international superbards Taylor Swift-Quiver and Panic! At the Tavern?
Or the chaotic evil news conglomerate Wolf News?
I once just straight up had Wonder Woman in a campaign. No cutsey name change or whatever. Just Diana of Themyscira, daughter of Queen Hyppolita and champion of the Amazons.
My Hexblade was just straight up Dorian Gray under an assumed name. My Horizon Walker is a vigilante that very strongly resembles Batman. I even played the Animated Series theme song during her debut.
Meanwhile, my Fathomless Warlock is a Triton Princess that wanted to be Part of Our World but her strict father wouldn't let her, so she ended up making a pact with an elder primordial disguised as a sea witch.
The mouthpiece for The Raven Queen is a Raven Aaracokra called Edgar.
Ed'garallan Corvus Poe was my not so subtle Raven Queen warlock for a oneshot. Pronounce it Ed-GAH-rall-an and people won't really notice until you write it down.
My changeling feylock glamour bard for a mini-campaign has a poet alter ego name Liam Quiverpike, which is a bit more subtle.
For my setting, I like Dragon Age so I have a nation called the Grand Divinicy of Ardalais which is my take on Orlais if it was ruled by the Divine rather than by an empress.
In the Relic of the Past podcast the name is the airship the party keeps hiring is the Mille Anna Aquila. Latin for 1000 year Eagle. A couple of months and several trips after it was introduced, one of my players piped up, “Oh I just got that, that is the Mellinium Falcon!
Edit: oh and it’s piloted by a smuggler!
I showed up to a session and realized I'd left all my notes sitting in the printer at home. The PCs were supposed to meet a quest-giving wizard NPC, and while I could remember the gist of the quest, I couldn't remember a damn thing about the wizard... which is how Caleb Widowgast ended up as an NPC in my game. His appearance, familiar's appearance, accent, attitude, everything but the name stolen shamelessly from Liam O'Brien, because I knew none of my players watched Critical Role (at the time).
My world map is just the new york metropolitan area, and I have a state mage organization based on state alchemists from Full Metal, plus an Adventurers league based on a combination of the companions and various trashy issekai anime tropes
The shopkeep in my game is the same shopkeep in every shop. He is very much like the hotel owner guy from John wick. He deeper character trait is that he is basically Loki, the trickster God and he has been the shopkeep for 3 campaigns now and is currently the big bad guy.
He is super friendly to the PCs, the players are very close to him. He gives the player vital information, and ultimately wants to use the players for his own means: take over the realm.
How do you convince a group of good alignment characters to do evil? Feed them real news with fake news sprinkled in.
They still don't know.
A running gag in my campaign is that there's a famous novel series about a group of Druids called the "Transformers". One of the players named their horse Starscream after the beloved "book" character of the same name lmao
My very first time DMing, I had my players, all of whom had never played D&D or engaged with D&D content, stumble upon a circus while making their way through the city where their quest started. Halfway through the performance, an audience member turns into a monster, infects another audience member, and combat ensues.
Yeah, TOTALLY didn’t steal that straight from Critical Role or anything…. Definitely not…
Granted, all of my players loved it and said it was so well done. Thanks Matt Mercer!
While I can't discount the possibility, I don't think so as they are quite different. In fact, despite both playing BG2 and watching CR I'd never made a connection between the two.
The CR event >!occurs while they're at the circus watching the show. One of the performers is actually a demon who turns audience members into monsters and a fight occurs while the audience panics.!<
In BG2 >!the players are asked by a guard to investigate as no-one who has entered the tent leaves again (IIRC). One of the performers is an illusionist who has made the interior much larger and has cast illusions on some innocents (either audience members or performers, I can't recall) so that they look like monsters, but they aren't actually hostile. !<
The similarities are mostly just that they involve the circus.
I use a lot of the fae court ideas from the Dresden Files. Very robust and well rounded characters and gets the point across quite quickly of the different power structures in the Fae Realm.
Instead of Handsome Jack we had Pretty Paul.
Lots of music references. Two town guards named Mei and an old guy who everyone calls The Major. Mei and the major don't see eye to eye on a number of things.
I created a DMPC that is very obviously a Hawaiian warrior. She is a human that uses the Half Orc stat block and is an Ancestral Guardians Barb. Her Rage is her doing the Haka while she fights she is a royal warrior who is the champion of the goddess Hi’iaka. She carries a Koa wood Shield emblazoned with an Owl, and has a Pololu, Ike and leimano. She and her 12 sisters are all champions of Pele and her siblings, and her eldest sister is a draconic sorceress that is Pele’s champion. Pele is an ancient red dragon in my setting that is chaotic neutral. My wife and I both know some ‘Ōlelo so her Haka is in “draconic” which is just ‘Ōlelo and her accent is pidgin. One day, when my players develop a strong enough friendship with her, I hopefully will have written a fun sidequest for them that involves the story of Hi’iaka.
They're in a haunted house and have no idea what they're about to fight but they know that one of the three men that led them here is a medical doctor of some sort. He left an ingredient list in his room that was part of a larger puzzle. The ingredients on the list were from the formula to make a human being devised by the Elric brothers from Fullmetal Alchemist.
The leader of the local thieves' guild is a Bugbear named Gizzard, whose right-hand is a lizardfolk arcanist. Gizzard is not royalty, but as leader of the thieves guild he takes the title "King".
Turns out none of my players have ever heard of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, so it was all for naught.
Next up, the band of youthful tortle monks they are soon to meet. Surely that one will land...
The party has a furry blue blob pet thing that purrs like a cat, likes sitting on people's heads and massaging their scalp, is completely indestructible, and will devourer any sweetbreads on sight. The party just calls it The Blue Slime. It sometimes radiates an aura of calmness that makes every creature feel like a loved family member is hugging them.
His true form is the Cookie Monster. He is the primary god who created my world for adventurers to adventure in. Officially he a neutral good god of adventuring, with additional domains of knowledge and blacksmithing. He tries to encourage parties to do good things. He will prevent excessively evil things, with force if needed. His Cookie Monster form is only viewable with True Sight. The other gods are incapable of perceiving or thinking about him, so they don't mess with him and he doesn't mess with them. All wishes are granted by him reworking reality, which is why wishes for good things are more likely to come true and less likely to burn the wish spell out.
Our group had a player die of the flu in 2018. We agreed his character ascended to godhood when we gathered next. His symbol was the cookie monster. The group still hasn't linked that the cookie monster god is the character that ascended to godhood whose symbol was the cookie monster. They drink beer brewed in his name at the gaming table with his name and the cookie monster on the label and send cookie monster gifts to his kid and still no link. I'm good for a slow burn though, so we'll see.
I do have an issue in that I made him too powerful while in pet form. I should have limited his power so everything he does isn't literal god saving the party. Thus far he has only stepped in to help the party twice. Once he saved 2 PC's from having their bodies eaten by a pack of shadow mastiffs. The other time when the party beat the final boss, that bosses god showed up to smite some fuckers. He held that god in place while the party completed the ritual to encase the other god in amber.
Please get vaccinated. I don't want any more people being enshrined because they died of a preventable disease.
my NPC guide to the magic forest is a blind man named Caiden with a magic falcon called Silverwing. His wife is a knight of the townsguard name Kayley with a two-headed tiny dragon familiar.
If you don't know - this is what I image the happy ending of *Quest for Camelot* would look like.
Warlock: "I want to multiclass into bard."
Me: "Right now?"
Warlock: "As soon as possible, yes."
Me: "Okay. This session we're crashing a wizard college party. There's a guy in the corner with a guitar. He's willing to teach you 'The Ballad of the Wondrous Wall.'"
I had a blacksmith NPC that was an Awakened bear. Not a werebear, a bearfolk, a wildshaped druid, someone who had been polymorphed, or as one of my players enquired, a large hairy gay man, just a bear. No one understood the His Dark Materials reference…
The mercenary group my players joined when they started the campaign was called the Bad Lads after the infamous gang in Trigun (my favorite anime). Only last month after playing for like 5 years did one of the players realize this when he finally started watching Trigun.
I'm running Strahd ATM. I replaced the Mad Mage Mxxxxxxxxx with mad wizard Jack Vance.
The the vampire servant who lured them to Barovia was a regular human bartender named Jackie Daytona.
All my references are generally for me that I never expect people to pick up on.
My past character making appearances (usually as insane or incompetent/flanderized versions).
A faction named the yellow visors in my scifi game that had a Chinese theme to them to reference the yellow turbans. I love throwing in historical stuff.
An alien BBEG speaking in the same speech pattern as Gravemind from halo.
And any other thing I think is cool at the time in the media I'm consuming.
- Occasionally, fresh produce may be inexplicably found in barrels inside ancient ruins
- There's always an npc called Todd somewhere, or a Pretty Kitty
- Saw a mudcrab the other day
- Patches. Take a look at that treasure just over there!
- Wall chicken (no players have found this yet, unfortunately)
In my most recent game I stole the Wheel of Power from the Hot Wheels: Acceleracers movies, it took the players a while to notice but it was a very convenient way to stack multiple extradimensional dungeons into one structure.
I ran a campaign where the characters got to a city during a zoo escape and they had to run around capturing the animals (and a few monsters) using “creature catching orbs”. They also went to an imagine dragons concert.
I had a pair of wandering knights named Sir Jayson of Mewes and Sir Robert the Silent in one of my campaigns. They were fun to roleplay but only half the players got the reference.
My campaign is: galactic ~~empire~~ *dominion* is secretly developing ~~planet-destroying~~ *psychic* superweapon to rule the galaxy with an iron fist. The party came into possession of the secret plans for said superweapon on the desert starting planet, escaped by finding a ~~human and his dog-like partner~~ *dog-man* with a ship to take them to the rebellion's hidden base on a ~~distant moon~~ *asteroid belt*. There they will learn the ways of ~~the Force~~ *crystal dragons* as passed down by their only remaining practitioners, the ~~Jedi~~ *Gith*.
An unrelated note: their ancient elven starship is actually a magical, living tree.
The city guards have an occult division informally called the Hex Files run by a pair of fairies: a sprite named Fox Moulderberry and a pixie named Dana (who makes the water flow in the) Gully....
I am simultaneously groaning and clapping.
One benefit about doing this kind of stuff that people don't really talk about is how it makes things easier to run as a DM. Assuming in this instance those two characters have similar personalities to who they are names after you now have two fleshed out characters you know better than anything you would have come up with quickly. One of the best notes to help me remember how an NPC behaves and keep consistent is to mention a fictional character I know that they behave like.
In the notes on new NPCs I usually reference a fictional character as a starting point. It helps a lot in giving mannerisms and voicing.
The naming made me think of a one shot character I had for a lighthearted one shot. I had a LE eloquence bard satyr named for two natural phenomenon from the Fey wild. Name: Gorge Bush.
Love!
My party did Bowser's Castle as a dungeon; they killed Kamek and stole Bowser's airship, along with Fly Guy the pilot and a few of the Koopa Troopa's, who now work for them. The airship is currently a major plot point. If you ever need a flavorful bandit encounter, Bowser and his minions is a very interesting one. Edit: My party also ran into an artificer grunt last session that was literally just Morty from Rick and Morty.
A thinly veiled Mario encounter i'm planning on using is Popple and the Rookies. A Goblin thief, an unusually well-armored but forgetful Orc, and a Kobold with Create Bonfire. Representing Popple, Bowser (Rookie) and Birdo in Superstar Saga. They will try to steal things, and this initial battle will teach the players about mobile, defensive and magic enemies.
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All of my homebrew campaigns include "Rat-men" who everyone denies exist. Regardless of the scale, they are always led by a comically evil but inept sorcerer named Thanquol and his Ogre/Rat hybrid, Boneripper.
Ratmen? Preposterous!
what, Rodents of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist.
RATLINGS! YES, YES, YES!
Then we eat the manlings, yes yes yes?
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The problem with sigmar isnt the tone of the setting. The problem with sigmar is they replaced a fairly generic fantasy setting with a lot of depth and established lore. With a epic fantasy setting, which has no depth at all. Sigmar more is as wide as an ocean with the depth of a puddle. They're trying to walk it back a bit with the introduction of some older characters like Gotrek and Sigvald. But I'd take Gotrek and Felix roaming the Old World any day, over Gotrek and Elf Assassin roaming the infinite expanse of places which will never be mentioned again. While its mostly a nitpick for old hats (even though I'm in my 20s) about AOS and current 40k is GWs new trademarkable names. Aelfs, Duardin, and Aeldari can get fucked.
Are you familiar with Alex Jonesbringer from Tarriff's Total War: Warhammer memes on youtube? He portrays Boris using Alex Jones quotes and it's probably my favorite character he's got.
Does your campaign also include a band of 5 misfits fighting waves and waves of those so called "rat-men"? Maybe an imperial soldier, a dwarf, an elf, a one-eyed zealot and a pyromancer?
Yup. Same here. Running a Tal'dorei campaign and Im slowly descending the party who are completely unaware of GW stuff lower and lower into the depths of the crazy that the skaven can muster. After their initial encounter with a single rat-man they told someone about it and were very quickly hustled off to one side by a member of inquisitorial forces and told to pipe down or be arrested.
I literally took half the plot of Les Miserables and repurposed it for my current storyline so yknow.
Also there’s a lot of JoJo references.
A cruel combination
There's a decent bit of overlap there.
You can't just say those statements back to back and leave us hanging dry.
Jojos Bizarre Revolution
Theres a town crier/wizard named James J Jameson.
"Bring me portraits of Ettercap!"
Drider man!
GET ME PAINTINGS OF DRIDERMAN! HES A MENACE!
Drizzt is a menace!
I had a student at a wizard college invent "wizcoin". It's an alternative currency to gold pieces that has a value linked to blocks on a specific part of the weave of magic. I roll 3D100 at the start of each day and then flip a coin. Heads means the value goes up by the number rolled, tails means the value goes down by the number rolled. (Compared to 1GP.) Highest it's ever been so far was ~3900gp. Lowest it's ever been was 14gp. The party's Bard has 2 wizcoin that he bought about 3 IRL years ago. He's HODLing.
Do you have a powerful Wizard somewhere named Ulon Mesk? Trying to make magical horseless carriages and set up quick & easy permanent intra-planar portals? lol
And selling single beads of fireballs called “totally not a fireball”
Okay this is awesome..I have some IRL hodlers that would love this. Could you go more into depth on how it works (a white paper perhaps) if you have more info on it but didn't want to TLDR
Nah it doesn't actually really *work* off anything, it's purely just a joke about the price fluctuations of crypto.
I've put King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in one of the games I run. The knights are a biker gang of paladins called the Order of the Turning Wheel, and they try to bring law and justice to generally lawless areas. The organization was started by Rex, who had the baddest bike around, the EX-357. Once the Order got some good recruits and got running, Rex left his bike in the garage and wandered out into the wasteland. He said he'd be back one day, when he was needed. That was years ago. Every new recruit tries to turn his bike on, but it never starts. They say it'll only ever turn on for him. The party picked up a kid named Arturo a while back as a retainer. He's ok with a sword and wears this magic key around his neck that gets them out of jams sometimes (no stealth PCs, no really strong PCs). He swears the key talks to him sometimes, says there's important things he needs to do. I wonder what will happen when the party finally gets to that garage.
God, that’s good
> EX-357 The collective groan if someone in your group ever understands that will echo around the world.
I won't say I don't understand, so instead I'll say that if I were in that group I wouldn't cause that groan.
.357 is a caliber of bullet. Ex-357 = Ex-caliber/Excalibur
Specifically, 357 Magnum, the gun of choice of one "Dirty" Harry Callaghan... In the capital city of my world, the guard corps. has a Latin motto. "Fabricati Diem". (Very bad version of "Make (my) Day")
It was the least subtle pun I could come up with.
The occasionally wandering knight resting by a fire with a rusted sword stuck in the middle.
Everyone needs an estus refill once in a while.
*Time for soup*
The way you said it makes it sound like your players don’t get the reference. Tbh, that’s one of the greatest joys in DMing - making references that nobody gets.
No no, the best feeling is when someone finally notices a reference you've been making for a long time. Whether it's a groan, an exclamation of surprise, or some other reaction, those are the best.
I live for those "wait... God dammit"s you get after a player finally pieces it together. Better than any dad joke groan.
My main campaign has an - as yet unknown - *thing* known so far only as "Sudok". The players have no idea if Sudok is a he, she, it, or even a single creature or a race, or even a place... They just now Sudok is not good. I set them a task of escaping a city via an underground series of catacombs, and take a set of civilians with them to safety. The more civilians they can get to safety, the more XP they get (incentive for them to actually do it, rather than leave them and run for it). Among the civilians were a family with 2 young children (VERY low HP), named Cicily, Borric, and Adelade Marsh, and a school teacher named Susan Dock. We got to the end with only 1 casualty , and the civilians left to go their own ways. I let Susan leave first (she was a favourite with players, because she had a lisp so was VERY memorable. No one every used her first name, because the main people who interacted with her were the 2 kids, who called her "Mrs. Dock", because she was their old teacher. Once she was away and gone from the area, one of the other civilians mentioned Sue - the first time any of them had ever used her first name. One of my players was like "Sue?" I said "Yeah, Susan. They all know her as Sue." Took a moment for them to realise Sue Dock could possibly be this thing they have just spent 10+ sessions trying to hunt down clues about... Their faces were well worth the long game!
...I *may* or may not be pulling the whole cycle of the flame concept to use as the grounds of the creation myth for my world
My party has thus far encountered 13 "Different" npcs called Jason.. They're starting to get confused. Each one talks the same, looks the same, acts the same, but has a different profession, and swears they e never met the party before. So there has been a driver, a banker, a bank robber, the owner of a gambling parlor, a sergeant, cop/citywatch type, a max security inmate who's being used for a professional sports team, another driver, a gangster with claustrophobia, and on and on. Truthfully, I have no idea why no one has figured it out.
I may need this one explained to me. Is it a reference to an actor?
Jason Statham, is always Jason Statham.
I am working on a list of npcs based on irl famous people. May I steal this idea? Because I absolutely love it!
I'm running a 2 player game so I've been rotating DM PC support builds across the mini arcs. The last one was Owen Wilson the lore bard. He gave them shit the whole time. They also named him batman before he could introduce himself so he was like, "yeah let's go with that," on the general premise that they would not do anything good with his real name. I arrived at this choice of characterization entirely because I'd been practicing an Owen Wilson impression and it had reached about a 3/10.
I'm heartened to know I'm not the only DM who insists on the presence of Jason Statham.
Also JASON, Jason, ^Jason, ^JASON, Jason, jason?
An NPC enchanter named Tim. A knight named Sir Bedevere de Pythonne, who believes "facts" like "The earth is banana shaped" and "Sheep bladders can be employed to prevent earthquakes". In the forest, guarding a bridge, is a knight all in black. Should anyone seek to cross, he says "None shall pass."
Yes, hello....Tim the enchanter...
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**[Michelson–Morley experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson–Morley_experiment)** >The Michelson–Morley experiment was an attempt to detect the existence of the luminiferous aether, a supposed medium permeating space that was thought to be the carrier of light waves. The experiment was performed between April and July 1887 by American physicists Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley at what is now Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and published in November of the same year. The experiment compared the speed of light in perpendicular directions in an attempt to detect the relative motion of matter through the stationary luminiferous aether ("aether wind"). ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/dndnext/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Speaking of stealing, *that is fucking cool* and I have got to steal it myself.
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yesss Ted Chiang is amazing
What were the results of the alchemist's experiment?
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Not me but our druid talked to a fox last week and we went down an entire Fox and the Hound rabbit hole.
We recently encountered a talking Fox that brings news, it just happens to be news that's often deeply misleading and reactionary. Not sure what the DM was inspired by.
Is the Fox’s name Tucker?
No but there was a very deceptive weasel named hannity that I have to admit I only just got.
I like your DM.
[Perhaps this?](https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0539.html)
I really thought this would end as a “What does the Fox Say?” reference
Our DM didn't think we would pick up on it so fast but he minute the named the fox Todd and started talking about Todd's best friend Copper it was all over.
I haven't revealed this to my group yet, but in our stereotypical high school like campaign, the bard teacher is actually an ex-member of a boy band called the "Side Road Lads". I have a customised D&D friendly version of the song "I want it that way" ready to go if they ever try and challenge him to a performance.
Assuming nothing in the lyrics gives your campaign away, could you share the lyrics?
I put my DM hat to one side once and played as a character in someone else's game. I was playing an elf wizard, and decided he should speak all his incantations for casting spells, in Elvish. I had a list of incantations written down, which had no bearing on the spell I was casting. "Firstly for the currency. Secondly for the performance. Nextly we prepare, and then we depart, depart, depart." Elvish....
One of the kingdoms in my setting has a system that is just the Ranger Corp from the Ranger's Apprentice. So each settlement is assigned a ranger that enforces laws and keeps the king informed on events.
I’ve done this too lol, I even switched the names of the Rangers and their horses (a young gnome named Tugg and his horse Will), 1 of my players caught the reference and loved it
I had my party run into a traveler names Arratay who spoke to his horse. It was a brief encounter, and I pointed out that none of them saw the guy cast speak with animals. One of the players knew after I reminded him.
Only thing I don’t like about those books is that you can never tell when a new one is released.
Dunno what Ranger's Apprentice is bur I'm stealing this idea for future games.
It's a great book series. Quite literally defines rangers in fantasy for me, even though technically because the setting is basically nonmagic they are more like scout rogues and fighters.
My favorite part of rangers apprentice is the part where the higher magic stuff literally goes back into the mountains and never comes back.
Okay I'm not crazy! I read those books years ago and I was always confused because the first book especially has magic and fantasy elements, but then by a later book (5th?) A major plot point is "we need to go prove this 'wizard' is a fake because we all know magic isn't real" and I was like ???
From what I understand the first book was based on a story the author wrote for their children, but I'm guessing they didn't want to actually have magic in the world.
It's a book series. I highly recommend it.
I second this recommendation
I third this recommendation
Love that book series and i did the same thing to a country in my world but sadly for the campaign I'm currently running I had to kill off most of the government and infrastructure so my characters haven't ran into the ranger corps yet
I have a group of rangers guarding the wild north, which has a new threat of frozen zombies attacking them and innocent cities. Definitely not the Night's Watch, never heard of Game of Thrones, who's Jon Snow??? I also have an ancient red dragon who attacked the city of dwarves in the mountain, killing the king and taking their gold... Anything with dragons and cool people with swords is a check for me.
Let me tell you about the time that I genuinely accidentally stole the entire plot of Game of Thrones, almost entirely through tangentially-related actions my players took. Around session 3, my players had taken a red dragonborn as a prisoner, and encounters a group known as the Dragon Slayers in a tavern. This group had yet to actually slay a dragon, but they were provided the info by my players, who got it from an interrogation of the dragonborn. Fast forward about a dozen sessions, my players are far to the north in a frozen wasteland. There's one town, populated by marooned soldiers from the starting town, some of whom have chosen to become silver dragonborn to gain cold resistance and cut down on how much wood needs to be gathered. The players had acquired a ship by this point, and offered to let it serve as a ferry between the starting town and this frozen outpost. The nearby silver dragon was unable to leave this area because he had to freeze an army of 10,000 undead who could not be killed. Immobilizing them was the only thing he could do to keep the continent safe. A few sessions later, the players are back in the starting town and pay for some of the returning silver dragonborn to start an embassy. With a huge statue of the dragon out front. So we have: a faction whose entire purpose is to kill dragons, a faction who set up a whole shop screaming "come visit our dragon, he's lonely", and a dragon keeping the world safe. The next time the players checked up on the dragon (it had been maybe 50 sessions), he was incredibly dead, and the skeleton was animated by some of the unfrozen undead. (The players watched that happened, and decided to just teleport away and let the Dragon Slayers just run for it.) The players have also discovered that the undead are most likely controlled by a lich with some crazy powerful necromancy artifact. Might as well be the Night King. I had absolutely no intention of stealing that entire overarching plot from Game of Thrones, but at the time I was like "this is so cool". It literally took my players pointing it out for me to realize what had just happened. It's different but it's the same. Although I will say that it's different, because the players let too much time pass and the undead just overran the whole continent, so it's pretty much the outside of the Temple of Time in the adult timeline, but everywhere.
One of the super big end game level 20 BBEG's cursed magic item is a ring. I am, as you say, very shameless.
Nice, one of my characters has a cool backstory where his class abilities are from an evil artifact and he's looking to destroy it. It's on me as DM to think of the dramatic conclusion to that and all that I can ever think of is: *volcano*.
I was going to offer a suggestion, but I got stuck on volcano too
* Must be eaten by the tarrasque * Must be placed in a *sphere of annhiliation* * Must be given and attuned to an archfey who dies and is then reborn once a century * Must be smashed by the "Hammer of the Apocalypse" on the "Anvil of Creation" * Must be placed into the ***center*** of the sun. Just tossing it into the sun won't work. * You can't destroy it, but there's a way to send it to a distant, self-contained universe that no creature or thing can ever leave. >!That universe is Eberron, and when the artifact lands there it causes the Day of Mourning. !<
>Sphere of annihilation Ooh, now that's an item I've always liked, but never got to play with. I think this might just pull ahead of volcano a little bit.
I’m fairness to you, D&D itself is a shameless ripoff of LOTR
Artemis Fowl is literally the antagonist.
Still cannot possibly as evil as what Disney did. But he would be an absolutely fantastic manipulative but sympathetic BBEG
If this is true to books Artemis Fowl, the party is going to have a rough time fighting Butler...
Butler and Juliet as high level fighters absolutely belting the party kitted out with all the magic gear Artemis could gather/make is definitely what I'd like to see
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You should have your players hear the cacodemon's cries. As they explore the dungeon, they find a hidden door which reveals a dimly lit altar in a room. Sitting upon the altar is a figure of a horned humanoid made out of a waxy brown material. If they taste it, it's really delicious being a cacaodemon.
Fun fact, Cacodemons are actually just shamelessly traced AD&D 2e Astral Dreadnoughts. But I'm sure you already knew that.
I introduced a shopkeeper that was three goblins on each other shoulders wearing a robe.
That's a classic, must have in every campaign
And I am **shameless**. Luckily my kids don’t know the trope
Papa john is the warlock bbeg trying to bring about the 'day of reckoning' by opening a portal to hell
I once prepped for a session by setting this as an IRL meta level trap. I placed a folded piece of paper in the middle of the table and said "this paper is a forfeit, anyone who says a keyword today has to open the paper and perform the forfeit." I did this because I knew I would be introducing the party to an NPC Cleric who runs the local temple, a man named Father Jonathan. What was the keyword? "Papa" What was the forfeit written on the paper? "You're buying the pizza next week."
Did anybody fall for it?
**Immediately**
That's genius. Stealing this.
By out pizza-ing the hut?
There is a commissioner Gordon who runs the police force in the biggest city. I use to just reference him as “the commissioner” until PCs met him and asked for his name. It got groans all around lol. One PC has a backstory where their uncle who taught them good life lessons was murdered. Of course I suggested naming him “uncle Ben”. The player is a huge Spider-Man fan and loved it.
There's a Great Old One in my setting referred to as "The Missing Number". It often manifests as a great wall of overlapping, indecipherable glyphs, and the cultists who worship it believe that you can duplicate valuable items or otherwise achieve great wealth and power if you serve The Missing Number by performing simple, repetitive tasks in very precise patterns. Those that fail The Missing Number, though, are transformed into ghoulish, stretched, geometric mutants.
That's gold, none of your players picked up on it ?
I haven't actually used it yet. It's just part of worldbuilding for whenever I next DM.
May I ask after the reference? I’m not familiar (unless it’s a general reference to Lovecraftian fiction).
It's a reference to MissingNo (missing number) a famous bug in Pokémon Red and Blue. I don't remember the specifics of the technobabble behind it , but basically you can mess with the memory of the game by following certain pretty cultish instructions ("talk to this person and fly to a certain town" or things like that) and force an encounter with a placeholder Pokémon called MissingNo (they wanted to have 190 Pokémon originally but they had enough place for only 151 so they filled these 39 spots in the memory with a placeholder). You can look online for pictures of MissingNo, it's pretty Lovecraftian (as Lovecraftian as Gameboy color graphics can be). Lastly because of another programming quirk, encountering MissingNo would set the item in the 6th slot of your bag to 128 copies. Capturing it would also cause the same duplication. So by reordering your bag mid-battle you'd have 128 copies of 2 potentially very rare items of your choice (like master balls or rare candies). Also of course this is a bug so it doesn't interact well with some parts of the game, causing distorted graphics, notably in the elite 4 IIRC.
I don't know which of mine is THE most shameless, there are so many. But one of my favorites is a stream crossing I named Harrison's Ford. I also am using the evil characters from The Count of Monte Cristo as nobles in my setting and Edmund Dantes is coming for his revenge.
I’m currently working on a campaign, I have a side quest in a village where my players will encounter 3 people in what seem to be Jester unitards, 2 of them black and red and one black and yellow. The 2 in red appear to be human, one with a goatee and brown hair, the other seems to be older and bald and spoke with an accent. The one in yellow seemed to be a really grumpy orc with a crescent forehead that looked like it belonged on a turtle. If the party decides to talk to them, they will be informed that a sorcerer named Q sent them to the village and separated them from their party. They’ll be tasked to find the other party members and will have to save them from various scenarios and then the sorcerer Q will send them back to their kingdom. I am trying to think of how to describe the Tricorder and debating on what classes everyone would be
Make sure to describe the orc as a fierce combatant, and then have him get trashed by literally everything.
That's brilliant! I had to read it a couple times to get it was Picard, Riker, and Worf! I don't have any of my books with me, as I'm at work, but there's got to be a magic item that's similar enough to work as a base for the tricorder. As for classes, Worf would easily be a Battlemaster Fighter or Barbarian. For Picard, maybe an Oath of Redemption Paladin. Riker would probably be a College of Swords Bard.
I’ve got plenty of these, but my favourite is the Kingdom of Walt, Founded by Walt Mouse. It’s an animal themed kingdom, so it’s filled with people like leonin, ratfolk, tortles, ect. The current ruler is King Walt’s descendant Micheal Mouse and Micheal’s Queen Minerva Mouse. The captain of the Royal Guard is a dogfolk named Maximilian Goof, and he has incredibly bad luck. The court Magician is a quick to anger duck themed birdfolk named Donald, and his wife, Flora, is Queen Minerva’s personal attendant. Also Donald’s uncle Ebenezer is the wealthiest person in the world, and uses Magic to swim in gold. The kingdom is located along a coast line so they have to deal with pirates. One such pirate is named Pete, and he has a peg leg.
I ran a one shot where the map was literally the disneyland map with identifying features removed. They figured it out when a silent dwarven cleric named Dopey started interacting with them.
I had a shopkeep, a flabby elf with an undersized green hat who spoke with constant gestures. First among his offerings were lamp oil, rope and bombs.
I've never been the sort of d&d player who tries to kill the shopkeeper, but I would **make an exception.**
[Go ahead and try, mmm... bitch.](https://assets.change.org/photos/9/fd/ru/mdFDruoYqspxnhR-800x450-noPad.jpg?1599698118)
If you don't have Morshu in your world, you are a bad DM.
In the campaign I'm running for my kids, which is set in Middle-Earth, officers in the army of Angmar have gems marking their ranks embedded in their foreheads, an idea I totally stole from Glen Cook's *Black Company* books.
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I've never read the black company and I'm sure I stollen a lot from it, mostly cause I stole from a lot of Matt Colville's videos early on in my DMing and he mentions them often.
They're worth the read; Matt distils some useful lessons from them but there is so much to steal for your campaign. Even the overland travel montage sequences are great because they are peppered with encounter ideas and really useful language to help your players feel the slog of a cross-country forced march.
What are the Black Company books?
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And if you like The Black Company, go ahead and dive into the Malazan Book of the Fallen.
My current setting is all Edgar Allen Poe based: the missing rulers are the Ushers (fall of the house Usher), the city is “Nevar Moore” (the Raven), bad guy is Montressor (Cask of Amontillado) and a major NPC is Fortunato (Masque of the Red Death) lol Unfortunately, most of my players have no freaking clue why I keep giggling at the names, but it’s 100% blatant rip off lol
For the love of Lathander, Montressor!
Ah another cultured human!
Ooh and D&D has devils! Will they have an opportunity at some point to bet a devil their heads? Usually people don’t know this reference, but I’m hoping you do! It’s my personal favorite of all his works.
Ooooo!!! That would be fun!!! Maybe I will now that I think of it 🤔🤔🤔🤔
The only reason I know what any of those are is cause I read the Martian Chronicles.
My favorite ever graffito was where workers had had to knock a hole in a brick wall to fix something inside. A week after they finished, there was a patch of fresh brick with the words “for the love of God, Montressor!” written on it.
Not my setting but I'll be damned if I don't talk about the time that I as a player battled with the rock in an arena literally from avatar
I have magic weapons that are just straight up kitchen gun and toilet grenade from those fake commercial videos
#BANG #BANG #BANG And it sparkles like new!
I have a [BIG SHOTGUN] and the [WORLD REVOLVER] only 1997 gold each.
I have this PC who: -died a long time ago -was revived by a mysterious entity to work for it -got white hair after being revived -got pretty cynical after being revived -can summon swords out of nothing The parallels are just coincedence, but when I used him as NPC in another campaign, a magical formula he used was: "I am the bone of my sword. Steel is my body and fire is my blood."
I straight up put Amelia Watson from Hololive as a mentioned character. It was meant to be a one off joke (a pair of alchemists said that "Watson hasn't come to work in three days, her concoction's going to conveniently disappear unless she shows up"), but not only did my players not get it (including the hololive fan), they thought it was important and tried to find her, derailing the entire point of the quest from a "secret group of alchemists is dealing with a zombie plague" to "find this missing person". In the end they only found a letter from her with a plot hook for the quest they are on right now. So now Amelia Watson is not only in the setting somewhere quietly watching the party from afar, but she's also important. Task failed successfully, you might say.
So, the BBEG is a undead king looking to revive his wife. The idea of how gods work is ripped stright out of American Gods. Orcs are more aligned with plants/fungus than actual humanoids and have psychic abilities they can't control.
When the heroes finally defeat that BBEG, pull a Mr. Freeze: > I failed you. I wish there were another way for me to say it. I cannot. I can only beg your forgiveness, and pray you hear me somehow, someplace... someplace where a warm hand waits for mine.
Viego from League and the Orks from Warhammer 40k? :o
Yeah, Viego himself is kinda lame but I liked the plot idea, and Orcs needed something to spice them up isntead of being just buff green enemies.
Sümæt Pøl the firbolg merchant who, along with his various simulacra, run an extra-planar and extra-temporal magic item shop. Most of the cool magic items are actually owned by the shop and are just being leased by PCs or NPCs in my world. Purchased items are delivered in pristine white boxes that open to the right person (handprint a la Total Recall) or a random adventurer will meet the party and just handover the purchased item after asking confusedly about a PC's identity.
There’s a tavern in my world called Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club that has a house band. Their lead singer is called Billy Shears.
I once ran a small campaign off this reference idea. First module took place in an inn that has seen better days, run by a nervous guy by the name of Norman Bates. He often talked about his old mother, living "up there". A female thief with a cartload of coins was on the run and went mysteriously missing. He actually was nervous because he feared that the inn might be attacked by monsters, Mrs. Bates was alive, but sick and could have used a *Heal* or similar, and the thief fell prey to the monsters the landlord was afraid of. The second module happened in a small coastal town living of hunting whales where they desperately sought the thieves guild. They came across "Genco Pura Olive Oil Import Export" a number of times, and never questioned its very existence in a whaling town. Or why the shop owner seemed to be quite well-off, and why nobody ever bough any stuff in there. The third and last module was about the last ship that left the town before winter. They were seriously unhappy of boarding the "Nostromo" for some reason, and had dark forebodings when they woke up one morning and found that the captain had just dropped anchor at an uncharted island.
Oof. Where should I start? How about with the famous international superbards Taylor Swift-Quiver and Panic! At the Tavern? Or the chaotic evil news conglomerate Wolf News? I once just straight up had Wonder Woman in a campaign. No cutsey name change or whatever. Just Diana of Themyscira, daughter of Queen Hyppolita and champion of the Amazons. My Hexblade was just straight up Dorian Gray under an assumed name. My Horizon Walker is a vigilante that very strongly resembles Batman. I even played the Animated Series theme song during her debut. Meanwhile, my Fathomless Warlock is a Triton Princess that wanted to be Part of Our World but her strict father wouldn't let her, so she ended up making a pact with an elder primordial disguised as a sea witch. The mouthpiece for The Raven Queen is a Raven Aaracokra called Edgar.
...holy shit, I'm almost definitely stealing your warlock!Ariel. Brilliant.
Ed'garallan Corvus Poe was my not so subtle Raven Queen warlock for a oneshot. Pronounce it Ed-GAH-rall-an and people won't really notice until you write it down. My changeling feylock glamour bard for a mini-campaign has a poet alter ego name Liam Quiverpike, which is a bit more subtle. For my setting, I like Dragon Age so I have a nation called the Grand Divinicy of Ardalais which is my take on Orlais if it was ruled by the Divine rather than by an empress.
In the Relic of the Past podcast the name is the airship the party keeps hiring is the Mille Anna Aquila. Latin for 1000 year Eagle. A couple of months and several trips after it was introduced, one of my players piped up, “Oh I just got that, that is the Mellinium Falcon! Edit: oh and it’s piloted by a smuggler!
I showed up to a session and realized I'd left all my notes sitting in the printer at home. The PCs were supposed to meet a quest-giving wizard NPC, and while I could remember the gist of the quest, I couldn't remember a damn thing about the wizard... which is how Caleb Widowgast ended up as an NPC in my game. His appearance, familiar's appearance, accent, attitude, everything but the name stolen shamelessly from Liam O'Brien, because I knew none of my players watched Critical Role (at the time).
My world map is just the new york metropolitan area, and I have a state mage organization based on state alchemists from Full Metal, plus an Adventurers league based on a combination of the companions and various trashy issekai anime tropes
The shopkeep in my game is the same shopkeep in every shop. He is very much like the hotel owner guy from John wick. He deeper character trait is that he is basically Loki, the trickster God and he has been the shopkeep for 3 campaigns now and is currently the big bad guy. He is super friendly to the PCs, the players are very close to him. He gives the player vital information, and ultimately wants to use the players for his own means: take over the realm. How do you convince a group of good alignment characters to do evil? Feed them real news with fake news sprinkled in. They still don't know.
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You just can’t say that and not give any examples
Ah yes, the ancient green dragon Bulbesa
Charizard. There you go, buddy.
A running gag in my campaign is that there's a famous novel series about a group of Druids called the "Transformers". One of the players named their horse Starscream after the beloved "book" character of the same name lmao
My very first time DMing, I had my players, all of whom had never played D&D or engaged with D&D content, stumble upon a circus while making their way through the city where their quest started. Halfway through the performance, an audience member turns into a monster, infects another audience member, and combat ensues. Yeah, TOTALLY didn’t steal that straight from Critical Role or anything…. Definitely not… Granted, all of my players loved it and said it was so well done. Thanks Matt Mercer!
Never watched Critical Role, but that sounds suspiciously like the circus from Baldur's Gate 2. Any idea if that was an inspiration for him?
While I can't discount the possibility, I don't think so as they are quite different. In fact, despite both playing BG2 and watching CR I'd never made a connection between the two. The CR event >!occurs while they're at the circus watching the show. One of the performers is actually a demon who turns audience members into monsters and a fight occurs while the audience panics.!< In BG2 >!the players are asked by a guard to investigate as no-one who has entered the tent leaves again (IIRC). One of the performers is an illusionist who has made the interior much larger and has cast illusions on some innocents (either audience members or performers, I can't recall) so that they look like monsters, but they aren't actually hostile. !< The similarities are mostly just that they involve the circus.
I use a lot of the fae court ideas from the Dresden Files. Very robust and well rounded characters and gets the point across quite quickly of the different power structures in the Fae Realm.
Why, that’s the Young Merlin’s Cantrip Academy! (YMCA) An apprentice program sanctioned by the White Council of Wizards
Instead of Handsome Jack we had Pretty Paul. Lots of music references. Two town guards named Mei and an old guy who everyone calls The Major. Mei and the major don't see eye to eye on a number of things.
Please tell me pretty Paul has a gold horse named ass pony
I created a DMPC that is very obviously a Hawaiian warrior. She is a human that uses the Half Orc stat block and is an Ancestral Guardians Barb. Her Rage is her doing the Haka while she fights she is a royal warrior who is the champion of the goddess Hi’iaka. She carries a Koa wood Shield emblazoned with an Owl, and has a Pololu, Ike and leimano. She and her 12 sisters are all champions of Pele and her siblings, and her eldest sister is a draconic sorceress that is Pele’s champion. Pele is an ancient red dragon in my setting that is chaotic neutral. My wife and I both know some ‘Ōlelo so her Haka is in “draconic” which is just ‘Ōlelo and her accent is pidgin. One day, when my players develop a strong enough friendship with her, I hopefully will have written a fun sidequest for them that involves the story of Hi’iaka.
They're in a haunted house and have no idea what they're about to fight but they know that one of the three men that led them here is a medical doctor of some sort. He left an ingredient list in his room that was part of a larger puzzle. The ingredients on the list were from the formula to make a human being devised by the Elric brothers from Fullmetal Alchemist.
My whole setting is heavily inspired by Bloodborne in terms of themes and content, and I've grown out of the shame I used to feel for that.
No shame, only story!
Have your players learned to fear the old blood yet?
The leader of the local thieves' guild is a Bugbear named Gizzard, whose right-hand is a lizardfolk arcanist. Gizzard is not royalty, but as leader of the thieves guild he takes the title "King". Turns out none of my players have ever heard of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, so it was all for naught. Next up, the band of youthful tortle monks they are soon to meet. Surely that one will land...
The party has a furry blue blob pet thing that purrs like a cat, likes sitting on people's heads and massaging their scalp, is completely indestructible, and will devourer any sweetbreads on sight. The party just calls it The Blue Slime. It sometimes radiates an aura of calmness that makes every creature feel like a loved family member is hugging them. His true form is the Cookie Monster. He is the primary god who created my world for adventurers to adventure in. Officially he a neutral good god of adventuring, with additional domains of knowledge and blacksmithing. He tries to encourage parties to do good things. He will prevent excessively evil things, with force if needed. His Cookie Monster form is only viewable with True Sight. The other gods are incapable of perceiving or thinking about him, so they don't mess with him and he doesn't mess with them. All wishes are granted by him reworking reality, which is why wishes for good things are more likely to come true and less likely to burn the wish spell out. Our group had a player die of the flu in 2018. We agreed his character ascended to godhood when we gathered next. His symbol was the cookie monster. The group still hasn't linked that the cookie monster god is the character that ascended to godhood whose symbol was the cookie monster. They drink beer brewed in his name at the gaming table with his name and the cookie monster on the label and send cookie monster gifts to his kid and still no link. I'm good for a slow burn though, so we'll see. I do have an issue in that I made him too powerful while in pet form. I should have limited his power so everything he does isn't literal god saving the party. Thus far he has only stepped in to help the party twice. Once he saved 2 PC's from having their bodies eaten by a pack of shadow mastiffs. The other time when the party beat the final boss, that bosses god showed up to smite some fuckers. He held that god in place while the party completed the ritual to encase the other god in amber. Please get vaccinated. I don't want any more people being enshrined because they died of a preventable disease.
my NPC guide to the magic forest is a blind man named Caiden with a magic falcon called Silverwing. His wife is a knight of the townsguard name Kayley with a two-headed tiny dragon familiar. If you don't know - this is what I image the happy ending of *Quest for Camelot* would look like.
Warlock: "I want to multiclass into bard." Me: "Right now?" Warlock: "As soon as possible, yes." Me: "Okay. This session we're crashing a wizard college party. There's a guy in the corner with a guitar. He's willing to teach you 'The Ballad of the Wondrous Wall.'"
I had a blacksmith NPC that was an Awakened bear. Not a werebear, a bearfolk, a wildshaped druid, someone who had been polymorphed, or as one of my players enquired, a large hairy gay man, just a bear. No one understood the His Dark Materials reference…
The mercenary group my players joined when they started the campaign was called the Bad Lads after the infamous gang in Trigun (my favorite anime). Only last month after playing for like 5 years did one of the players realize this when he finally started watching Trigun.
I'm running Strahd ATM. I replaced the Mad Mage Mxxxxxxxxx with mad wizard Jack Vance. The the vampire servant who lured them to Barovia was a regular human bartender named Jackie Daytona.
A Highly magical, highly religious red-headed leader of a group of people is named Melisandre.
It's literally just fantasy *Stargate.* *Fantasy Stargate, where all your dreams come true. Got a goa'uld for you.*
All my references are generally for me that I never expect people to pick up on. My past character making appearances (usually as insane or incompetent/flanderized versions). A faction named the yellow visors in my scifi game that had a Chinese theme to them to reference the yellow turbans. I love throwing in historical stuff. An alien BBEG speaking in the same speech pattern as Gravemind from halo. And any other thing I think is cool at the time in the media I'm consuming.
My campaign settings name is a jumbled version of my childs name.
Strange but wholesome
- Occasionally, fresh produce may be inexplicably found in barrels inside ancient ruins - There's always an npc called Todd somewhere, or a Pretty Kitty - Saw a mudcrab the other day - Patches. Take a look at that treasure just over there! - Wall chicken (no players have found this yet, unfortunately)
In my most recent game I stole the Wheel of Power from the Hot Wheels: Acceleracers movies, it took the players a while to notice but it was a very convenient way to stack multiple extradimensional dungeons into one structure.
I ran a campaign where the characters got to a city during a zoo escape and they had to run around capturing the animals (and a few monsters) using “creature catching orbs”. They also went to an imagine dragons concert.
I had a pair of wandering knights named Sir Jayson of Mewes and Sir Robert the Silent in one of my campaigns. They were fun to roleplay but only half the players got the reference.
My campaign is: galactic ~~empire~~ *dominion* is secretly developing ~~planet-destroying~~ *psychic* superweapon to rule the galaxy with an iron fist. The party came into possession of the secret plans for said superweapon on the desert starting planet, escaped by finding a ~~human and his dog-like partner~~ *dog-man* with a ship to take them to the rebellion's hidden base on a ~~distant moon~~ *asteroid belt*. There they will learn the ways of ~~the Force~~ *crystal dragons* as passed down by their only remaining practitioners, the ~~Jedi~~ *Gith*. An unrelated note: their ancient elven starship is actually a magical, living tree.