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Bizarre Encounters Needed
My party is venturing into the aftermath of a magical, planar disaster that wiped out a kingdom and scarred a quarter of the continent.
I'm looking for brains other than mine to contribute to the random encounter table. It currently includes inverted underground pyramids, people who exist solely through deluded mass belief, rain that falls up, areas of frequent polymorphing, areas where inanimate objects all speak, areas of planar bleed, etc.
Think the weird regions of faerie, or limbo, or touches of the far realm
Thanks for any help.
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
This kinda depends on what system you use.
Favorites of mine:
- Ethereal Filcher. Especially funny if you give it the Eye King Template and a couple of [force] spells. Pilfering Hand (Pathfinder) fits perfectly. Even better if he lures people into traps by stealing things before ethereal jaunting.
- Gray Render. He bonds with the party and even aids them in battle. He kills a wild animal so his "pets" can eat every morning. One day, he kills a domesticated animal like a sheep. The next day, he'll kill a shepherd.
- Mimic in the outhouse. Always a classic.
- Anything that moves the plot along. Random encounters don't tend to do much with the plot so I don't really care for them. They can be used to set the mood.
- Non-combat encounters. Usually this means animals, fellow travelers. Anything that you would normally expect to encounter while traveling. In your case that means the dead remains of animals that turned inside out or something.
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
When in doubt, just turn the ground/trees into flesh.
Alternatively, turn flesh into ground/trees.
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Hugh Mann
When in doubt, just turn the ground/trees into flesh.
Alternatively, turn flesh into ground/trees.
Weirdly that is already on my list.
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
Change the flow of time so that all things encountered in the environment are current but existing in different speeds or seasons. Trees and plants might be in spring flower or summer splendor, fall colors or covered in snow. Objects might be unusually warm, cold or neutral due to individual seasonal effect and operate at different perceived speeds. A fox in the clearing might appear frozen in mid run though it is only moving very slowly while other creatures seem to be only blurs. Two rocks plucked from the path dropped from the same height fall at different speeds etc.
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
Something I came up with recently is one of the monsters from Mordenkainen's Tome Of Foes, the Boneclaw, usually attaches itself to a humanoid (a lowly thief, an angry child, a malevolent wizard) but what if it broke those rules and attached itself to the only thing in range, which was a rabbit? Not a lagomorph of caerbannog that can leap 15 feet and rip your throat out, just a particularly angry and evil bunny? Could RP it that it looks like the giant skeletal monster is carrying the rabbit to its lair to eat it, but actually the bunny is commanding it.
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Prince Vine
Weirdly that is already on my list.
Gosh, I guess I have to dig really deep in my grab bag of weird stuff then.
-The speed of light slows down so people can only see where everything was 6 seconds ago. Everything that has moved since then is basically invisible.
-Characters can get healed over max HP but doing can make them explode/turn into monsters/get horribly sick
-A massive illusion covers the area so everyone and everything looks like something from a different plane
-Everything becomes boring and predictable. All dice rolls are replaced with the statistical averages of those dice.
-All dead things in the area are treated as if they were affected with a True Resurrection. Aside from just reviving corpses, all objects in the area that were made from living things are suddenly restored to how they were before they died
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
Let's see...
* Terrain becomes similar to minecraft, with floating stone structures and geographical landmarks that shouldn't be physically possible.
* There is no wind, the air is warm to the touch and carries a flavor similar to soap.
* A forest grows from the leaves and branches down towards the ground, fruit floats in the air and grows into clumps of leaves and branches, until it sends a shoot into the dirt.
* A large spider-like humanoid lives in a cave, and will invite anybody in for some tea and biscuits. He isn't hostile, just lonely. He may know some dark secrets about the world, being an ancient creature and all.
*The 4th wall becomes more like a 4th fence with holes in it, and there are people from real life running around, confused, before blinking back to their home without any memory of what happened.
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
Has anyone read Terry Pratchett's light fantastic?
one word: Wyrmberg.
Or you could homebrew the weirdest stuff ever
I.e A bunny with an illithid face.
A flying tiger (defying the laws of gravity!)*
A giant snake that jumos around like a spring.
And the weirdest one yet... ...A platypus.
*300 imaginary compensation points if you get that
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
There are some monsters in my gallery of ridiculous monsters that could maybe be appropriate.
You could have any magic effect become randomly distorted. Possible effects include
- the spell is maximized
- the spell resolves into some big flashy effect that ultimately does nothing at all
- the spell affects a different target
- change the spell with another random spell of the same level. Or of a different level
- roll two and combine
You could have the space itself be distorted. Perhaps by walking in a straight line people will actually move in circles, and viceversa. Peole walk in flat ground and feel like they're moving uphill, or they may be walking easily on an apparently vertical cliff - while dropped items still follow normal gravity. There is a hole in the ground, you climb in, then get out and find yourself in a different place. You takethe boat on the river and reach the city, but once in the city there are no rivers anywhere.
And maybe there are natives to which all of it makes perfect sense and will call a madman anyone trying to walk in a straight line...
I once put my players in a similar scenario with endless fields of killer cucumber. They were regular cucumber plants, but they moved whenever not looked at. You could never catch them moving, but turn around and they'd be in a different position. Chop down the shrubs, turn around, and they'd be there again. Get distracted, and they would creep closer to you. And here and there were giant cucumbers that, when opened, revealed a human skeleton and clothes inside.
Run everywhere, still cucumbers. Fly, and you'll see a cucumber-covered ceiling. If your companions remained on the ground, you may see them both above and below you at the same time. Dig, and you'll break into a cave with more cucumbers. Teleport/planeshift only moves you around the place.
It was escapable by a high check on knowledge:the planes, finding the right book at the library, or hiring a guide with the knack for it. All those ways would reveal the exact sequence of moves required to get out.
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
After casting a spell make it as if they are wild magic sorcerers.
(roll a d20 if roll is a 1 roll on the wiod magic table)
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Wizard_Lizard
After casting a spell make it as if they are wild magic sorcerers.
(roll a d20 if roll is a 1 roll on the wiod magic table)
I'm currently going with a chance that after casting a spell it becomes a creature and joins the fight
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
I've had a recurring dream about a stone city somehow balanced in the treetops of a thick jungle, with unsupported stone staircases leading from the forest floor up to the doorways. Sone of the rooftops were flat, like for some sort of aircraft to land on, and the highest towers had some other, even longer staircases that led up to something hidden in the clouds.
You could probably combine this with DuctTapeKatar's backwards forest idea from a few posts ago.
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
floating rocks instead of clouds.
The seasons go by every day.
time slows down/speeds up.
a platypus... ...exists.
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
I'm a fan of things that are normal, but wildly out of place. Just as background elements, possibly in the border regions of the disaster where it's not that bad. Fish swimming in the air. Waterfalls out of thin air. Birds that burrow out of the ground at night. Random furniture just standing around in a circle somewhere. It's not dangerous, but it puts people on edge.
Then you go weirder from there. As stolen from Fallen London: birds that sing the names of passing people/characters. Moths made of ice that melt when touched. Wind that laughs at people.
Then you start with the dangerously weird stuff. Rain of razor-sharp mirrors from the sky. An area where time runs backwards. Sudden inverted gravity.
Then, once things go too chaotic, have things be super lawful for a while. A flock of birds lines up in perfect square formation and whistles in unison. The grass grows in lines. The trees are square. The sun just pops into the sky as if it was noon, stays there for twelve hours, then is replaced by a full moon for twelve hours.
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
genderbending area?
mirror which produce violent clones?
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
*Saltwater rain
*Lake filled with clouds
*Scene of violent explosion frozen in time
*the sky acts as a mirror
*The cobblestones undulate
*Day and night have erratic lengths
*Oddly colored fog
*Fires with freezing cold flame
*Town whose population are all corpses, mannequins, suits or armor, and/or other person shaped objects that have been possessed and animated by various spirits
*Blood rain
*Oily rain
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
All spell effects are inverted, but appear to the characters as though they work normally.
All sounds in the area are backwards. Speech is nearly indecipherable as each sentence comes out backwards (last word to first word) and the words are reversed but the sentences are still in their correct places. IE: "The porridge got cold. So I put it in the microwave and nuked it. When I took it out, the bowl burned me but the porridge was still ice cold." would come out as "D'lok togg egg'dri-drop eh-t. Tee dekun d'na eva'workim eh-t ni tee tup I os. D'lok es-ee list saw egg'dri-drop eh-t tub em denrub luh-wob eh-t, tu-oh tww koot I neh-wu."
Colours are switched with their complementary colours, but only when it would make the resulting pallet both garish and hurt to look at.
All spell effects appear inverted to the characters, but actually work normally.
Characters in the area look like they did when they were babies, no stat changes other than a possible bonus to diplomacy in the area.
Writing appears above a creature's head whenever it makes a noise(a la comic book speech bubbles and sound effects) and is visible to everyone within a certain range based on factors like stealth, vision types, lighting, cover, etc.
Sizes are switched (your choice) in the area until all of the creature's body is out of the area.
As above but the size table is completely reversed eg. Fine sized creature would be the size of a colossal and have the size modifiers as such and vise versa. Medium characters get a size chosen randomly, but should be penalizing in some way. (Tiny fighter, gargantuan wizard, etc.)
Characters lose their voices and a random piece of their equipment instead gains the voice and speaks for them. The item does not become intelligent and cannot read the character's mind, it just speaks what it, the mindless and inanimate object, assumes the character wants to say.
Have them fight a colossal creature. When the creature dies, it turns out it was actually 2 gargantuan creatues in a colossal suit. Repeat until you get to the medium size and have them all be some sort of human-shaped entity. When they die, they're all just 2 halfings/gnomes/goblins/small-annoying-race in a trenchcoat enchanted to look like the creature, but they all have construct immunities. Inside each of them is like a small number of mice piloting it like a freaking megazord. You can continue if you want but honestly by now you'd be sick of it.
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
*Rusty gold
*Fires un-burning into logs and trees
*All animals are carrying a level appropriate amount of treasure
*Areas of anti-gravity where you have to attach yourself to the ground with mountain climbing equipment
*Household items sprouting legs and wandering off
*The sun is paisley
*Tie-dye sky
*The interesting people from the Monty Python sketch "Interesting People"
EDIT:
*The wilderness between two cities is just a room painted to look like a forest a la the Rainforest Cafe
*Everyone is dressed up as clowns, even the animals
*A short backwards-talking demon that lives in a madman's arm like in that TV show from the 1990's
EDIT:
*Bipedal dogs walking quadripedal humans
*All timepieces melt
*A sword that looks and feels for all the world like a tobacco pipe but still cuts like a sword and can't be used for smoking
*Objects shuffle their positions when nobody is looking
*Locations shuffle their positions when noone is looking (divide the dungeon into tiles, place them as the dungeon is explored, and shuffle them back in to the stack when they are exited)
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
A box with a single rat in it.
Neither the box nor the rat are anomalous in any way.
The rat does not talks nor does it mutilate itself.
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
All of the normal animals in the area are replaced with aquatic life that is having absolutely no problem in the environment. IE Flying fish, arboreal octopi, terrestrial mantis shrimp that still have the cavitation bubble effect without the water, etc.
Everything takes on a random hue when in the area but this does not show when outside of the area.
All creatures gain the extraplanar subtype and a random home plane when in the area. Dismissal and banishment effects resolve normally and send the creature to their new home plane. The creature then keeps the extraplanar subtype if on another plane and regains their original home plane when leaving the area.
All weapons sing when used. The volume is dependent on how far from 10 the die was rolled with nat 1s and 20s being a near screaming choir erupting from the weapon.
Consumables are not consumed and instead give an additional item when they would be consumed. If leaving the area, all of the consumables activate at once which could spell instant disaster. (50 thunderstones going off simultaneously is gonna be a bad thing)
Everything living becomes a frog as though a polymorph effect that bypasses immunities until they leave the area.
Whenever a character does something in line with their alignment, they hear praise in some strange eldritch tongue from within their head. After a few actions, a small doll ala Raggedy Anne appears in the character's hand and winks before disappearing again.
The hair on all creatures begins to move as if it were agitated worms or mating snakes. All creatures become under the effects of distraction and are counted as a swarm in addition to other conditions for anything that would negatively affect them.
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
randomly say
"everyone roll initiative"
wait for them to roll.
wait a bit longer
wait until someone asks something along the lines of.
"what are we fighting"
say that a table fals out of the sky and then disappears.
Then carry on as if nothing happened
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
*The bricks in the buildings hover over each other, with empty space (or perhaps crackling blue energy) where the mortar should be
*Buildings made of fire and/or air
*Undead trees that grow without leaves or chlorophyll
*cacti in the rainforest
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
everything is upsidedown
everything has an illithid face
laser cats
and did I mention platypuses?
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
*Gravity pulls sideways in a certain area, pulling everything on that particular great circle into orbit
*Bricks/stones with eyes in them
*Nobody ever has to use the bathroom
*Inorganic material rots
*Nothing rots
EDIT:
*Instead of rotting, things turn to stone
*Reverse rain where water is drawn from the ground and rises into the sky
*A bolt of lightning during a storm spontaneously turns to stone (As in the bolt itself turns to stone, not whatever it hits. Just a big irregular mass of stone reaching from ground to sky and which quickly topples over)
*It's very bright like a sunny day despite a massive storm going on
*There's a point somewhere where anything that gets close to it shrinks more and more the closer they get to it
*Animals and plants are spontanously generated and just pop into existence
EDIT:
*A good, old fashioned everything-that-dies-automatically-zombifies zombie apocalypse
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
zombie bunnies.
Flying illithid canaries
half orc celestial butterfly
dragons made of glass
when something dies, it turns to stone
a platypus
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
*All the buildings are just standees. Yet the doors and interiors work fine.
*An entire forest composed of people in middleschool school play style tree costumes instead of actual trees
*All flames are shifting swirling tie-dye colors instead of whatever color they should be
*All dirt roads are now canals filled with mud
*Unexplained pressure felt on everyones eyes
*People's left foot and right foot switch places
*A certain lake now functions as a mirror of opposition if you look at your reflection in it
*Another lake, or maybe the same lake, displays images of a nearby town
*The stars spell out messages
*All farts are visible as green clouds
*The streets in a city somewhere have rearranged themselves to form some arcane symbol
*"Log" cabins made out of dead bodies
*The new food craze: Diminutive cows that you pick up and eat whole as they graze on your plate
*Anything from the Codex Seraphinianus
*A building raised up from the ground on 100 foot high wood pilings/stilts. The building itself is twice that high and shaped approxiately like a vertical domino, wirh a wide expansive flat surface. By all rights the wind should topple it but it doesn;t
*a fox tearing at and eating one of it's own forelegs as if the leg were a bunny rabbit or something
*The trees are actually some other kind of plant growing in the shape of a tree. Like a stretched out cactus or something
*weird mirror symmetric trees with superfluous second trunks and roots growing above the branches
EDIT:
*Trees with ghost leaves
*Ghost bacteria
*People's weight rapidly fluctuates
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
Things unravel like Yarn whenever they take damage.
Meat Rain.
The forest seems unnaturally DEEP/TALL with animals growing larger in this area, reaching the size of dragons and giants and having eerie fae traits, it is full of Thri-keen and Mycons.
A portal opens up in the air and a lost legion of warforged from Eberron are stumbling around wondering how the heck they got wherever 'here' is.
Finally, a friendly scholarly beholder is floating around archiving the other oddities, but they're being hunted by a squad of merciless halfling eldritch hunters that collect eyes.
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Re: Bizarre Encounters Needed
*Rocks and other inorganic objects start growing hair
*All speech is garbled
*Animals growing out of plants
*Deer and cattle raining from the sky
*Sideways rain that condenses out of a wall and "falls" across the street into anoter building's wall
*Otherwise normal mushrooms with human heads instead of caps
*The trees just have a mess of tendrils of undifferentiated green stuff instead of leaves; like a child's crayon drawing
*Wormholes opening up in random locations
*Everyone gains a third foot, attached to their body via a poiuyt without the addition of a third leg
*A guy who's just a bunch of mice in a suit
*A guy who's made of a bunch of tiny people grafted together like the frontispiece from Leviathan
*Mountains made of fire instead of stone
*Candles that produce water instead of flame
*A man whose legs are a bicycle. Which is to say that his torso is growing out of a bicycle approximately where the seat should be.
*Everyone in a certain area can hear everyone else's thoughts, even animals
*It's raining mud
*It's raining fire
*It's raining eyeballs
*It's raining men. The street is littered with corpses and the dying.
*Burrowing birds, like the diggles from Dungeons of Dredmor
*air retaining underwater cacti
EDIT:
*A man with a puppy-dog head for an eye like in that one episode of The Fear Hole
*Fast snails, like in that one Bob The Angry Flower strip