Wither Weirdness

While pondering things at work to keep from going nuts I realized something, I like my rpgs to have a major element of weirdness, something that twists tropes.

     Dark Heresy is a wonderful example. The setting just drips weird, with the mix of science fiction and the dark Gothic nature of Edgar Allan Poe and other authors. Gone is all the shiny joy and hope for the future that franchises like Star Trek have in spades. Instead a witchfinder or inquisitor right out of the middle ages is leading a party made up of a WW2 esque soldier, a Wild West style card shark con man, and 1980s movie or A Clockwork Orange style gangbanger. This mismatch of archetypes appeals to me more than the traditional D&D party. Since the game focuses, predominately, on investigative adventures over combat this mix gives a pool of skills to draw on. Remember, this is Dark Heresy, your character is only a step above the masses of common people, so having a variety of skills to chose from gives you that little extra chance to survive a universe that really just doesnt care about you.

On the fantasy side my current favorite James Raggi's Lamentations of the Flame Princess. This is obviously an Old School Renaissance game (it is me after all) but with a twist. More than a few changes have been made to Classic D&D to change the feel of the game. Rather than the more high fantasy, almost anime feel of modern 4th Edition D&D, LoFP has a darker, low fantasy feel of the original Stories of Conan and other Robert Howard stories. The game is not intended for happy stories of dragon riding knights saving the maiden in distress, but rather the motley gang of loons that are looking for their next big score, slinking through some tomb or ruins. So its Fritz Leiber rather than Traci Hickman or Mercedes Lackey. Another way to view it is Dungeons and Dragons written so you could play in the Cthulhu mythos. Rather than being able to wade into combat against anything you encounter, each battle is a potential total party kill, because your facing creatures rather than monsters. I call them creatures because there are not traditional monsters like you'd find in a Monster Manual, each one is intended to be tinkered with in play.

Ill be adding to this as I think of things