Are your gaming sessions a little stale?
Maybe what your table needs is a pie in the face.
No, make that a mud pie.
Fair warning: This advice may not work with your group. It may not even work with most groups.
But maybe what you need is a bit of things you step in, go squish, and involve unwashed and unbraided hobbit feet.
The appeal of gross-out humor might only be toward a slim segment of the gaming community. After all, things that make you go yuck are, by definition, inappropriate.
On the other hand, for some of us, nothing satisfies a needed change of pace like a goodly dose of things that trigger a gag reflex. In fact, your players might thank you if their most memorable day of adventuring involves their characters ending up face first in a big steaming pile of goo.
Isn’t that more interesting than the PCs appearing before the queen and her court in all their finery?
Raising a Stink
- Skunk ape: The most potent weapon of a troglodyte is its stench. Most games even have a mechanic for it. Save against stink or upchuck.
- Burning hunger: The hell hound is just a big, mean fire-breathing dog, right? I guess that means it will eat anything, including …
- Bullish: The D&D Gorgon has a petrifying breath. Its legendary antecedent, the bull of heaven, flings cow patties for damage.
- Ker-splat: Speaking of flinging, if monkeys fling poo, guess what the fiend barlgura tosses when it is mad?
- Fish guts: What lurks within an aboleth, eh?
You Might Want to Get that Checked Out
- A piece of me: That skin fungus is causing some flaking — by the handful.
- Bed bugs: Yes they bite. In fantasy land they dig in and breed, too.
- Lay down your head: Head lice. That’s the least of the things left behind by the orc that slept here last.
- Pop it: Magical puss-filled boils keep growing unless you lance them.
- Did you pack the TP?: Eat anything in the dungeon not on the official food pyramid? Guaranteed you’ve got the trots.
- Pinocchio effect: What happens if a body part keeps growing — and something else shrinks to compensate?
Get Your Mind Out of the Outhouse
- Rhinovirus: Hill giant with a cold sneezes a shower of snot in your direction.
- Garbage pile or latrine?: That magic item you desire? Well, it’s guarded by an Otyugh.
- Wiggly wormy: That pit you just fell into is filled a foot deep with carrion crawler larvae.
- Horse apples: Remember, if you are tracking centaurs, they don’t eat hay.
- You can’t candy coat it: You can bet that what looks like a sumptuous dinner is a hag glamoured serving of offal pie and witch’s cake.
Do you have anything funnier than orc farts? Share us your experiences below?
Disgust is a powerful way to evoke emotions. But I wouldn’t combine that with comedy. That’s just plain immature and silly and not at all what I would want for my games.
Disgust with terror, that’s where it is.
Strong responses is exactly what I’m going for. If humor doesn’t work for you and your group, that’s your call. You define your ownfun.
I think there’s a place for disgust both with terror and with humor. There’s a great deal to be said for the humor of seeing a normally put-together, dashing hero suddenly dealing with being hip deep in bat guano.
That said, I don’t think it would be a bit jarring to try and combine the terror and the humor of disgust. One or the other, not both.
I meant “I do think it would be a bit jarring…”
Hate when my typing doesn’t catch up to my brain. 🙂
One of my favorite disgusting encounters of all time was in a fantasy setting after the group manged to slay a dragon, (with the help of hired mercs and some powerful one shot magical items.)
While they were divvying up the loot and discussing whether or not to carve up parts of the dragon corpse to sell piece meal to an alchemist the beasts belly began to quiver, and erupt across the nearest party members in a spray of over a dozen three to eight foot long intestinal parasites. (kept in check by the dragons magical healing and such they were in search of a new host now it was dead.)
I described them as a mixture of tape worm crossed with hook worm with the added ability to spray bile, it made for a nauseating unexpected encounter (that oddly enough was more challenging than the dragon due to the low hp of the group and they;d expended most of their powerful spells and such killing the dragon.
That is awesome.
Agreed. I can imagine the cringe… I bet it was visible from across the table.
The one more threat, just as the PCs start to relax… the can be terrible and terrifying.
Me likey.
I’m on board with this one.
One of the more memorable moments in the last few years for our gaming group was in an urban horror game that had a PC — a drunken, PTSD federal agent locked into a fight with a fox spirit or some such (that wasn’t the good part) in a nightclub bathroom. It involved people “engaged” in their stalls who were fallen on, and at one point the PC peed and threw up all over himself from the punches and effects of the drinking.
While it might sound purile, it did play into the character’s weaknesses, allowed the bad guy to escape, and was played with such hilarity one of the players nearly passed out from lack of air laughing.
Similarly, in a Star Trek game, we had a series of toilet mains fail early on. Why? To get across the “more realistic, things do break on a starship” feel that we were going for. Plumbing. It fails.
Dirty, stinking characters — that’s typical for our pulp games when they’re out in the field. One character in a Victorian game got dysentery.
It adds verisimilitude, and it also a challenge that is not life threatening (or not always) that can’t be simply bashed or shot…sometimes, you’re too stinking to romance the barmaid in that fantasy game village. Should washed that dragon gore off, there, tough guy.