How do you create a foreign and alien feeling setting in an entirely oral and text based medium like roleplaying?
It just doesn't seem like it would work out, and all my attempts haven't struck as confusing and weird like they should.
I think it might be an almost entirely visual phenomina
Drugs
Subsonic sounds
Verbosity
so, basically, covertly drug your players for fun and profit.
Make sure it is addictive too so they keep coming back.
You know, I feel like somehow we are missing the mark of what I intended with all this drug-cult creation
For maximum amplification of acoustic sensitivity, you should play in a completely dark room.
At my table, I don't do an entirely oral GM game. I've got a few props I use to set the mood.
If the players are doing Shadowrun and I want to convey a sci-fi atmosphere, I toss up a couple ducks above the table with red LEDs in them to shoot out some harsh red lights, and I bring out my metal workbench as the table instead of my old dining room table.
If the players are running high fantasy, the old table comes out, I throw up some sheers with some soft lights behind them.
Call of Cthulhu campaign? Dry ice in a bucket underneath the table so players can't see the floor, and an old smartphone which randomly plays loud cricket chirps and other noises hidden somewhere in the room, which I swap anytime my players take a smoke/piss/snack break.
It's little things which can transform your gaming sessions.
*ducts. Fuck, I'm going to get shit for this.
Talk about regular things being different. I played a space colonisation game recently where the sea and sky was pink. Whenever I imagined the scenes, I was reminded that I wasn't in Kansas any more.
Anpther time, in 40k we were searching for escaped love Zeno specimens in the expansive cargo bay of a Luxury cruiser. The sudden change from gold filigree and velvety carpets with bright, warm lighting to the stutters ancient electrics and cold, industrial metal occasionally broken up by a skull was a bit jarring, along with the pervasive threat that there were three very dangerous aliens around and about, and our boss who had the authority to burn worlds was watching. It was a hell of a first day on the job!
Yeah I was imagining a pretty pink Mohawk game with laser ducks
>If the players are doing Shadowrun and I want to convey a sci-fi atmosphere, I toss up a couple ducks above the table with red LEDs in them to shoot out some harsh red lights
Drawfags!!!
Dont act like its out of this world, act like its completely normal. The whole foreign thing doesnt really come on that well in the roleplay medium so making the players feel like something is out of place has to be put in.
This is good advice, I think.
It temporarily disabled me because I thought you were talking about the game though.
Figure out how book authors pull it off. Maybe that could help you.
This might work well. Just throw in the choice between screech worms or slime pastes as the fares of street vendors.
Maybe a single taco.
That which is foreign and alien are, by definition, difficult to grasp or connect with, difficult to understand.
p&p games have the sole advantage of being able to provide incomparable levels of choice to players.
The ability to make choices relies on being able to understand the value of different choices.
The ability to understand the value of different choices relies on understanding the choices to begin with. If choices are so meaningless or the players have so little information as to essentially have the choices be interchangeable, the game is not being run well.
In order to run a good game, players must be able to grasp the meaning of their choices, because it is only through such that they are able to make meaningful choices, which means the GM must make a comprehensible scenario.
By such definitions, any well-run game is not going to feel very foreign and alien, because else it risks becoming incomprehensible to its players. This is why you don't feel your games have been confusing or weird; by necessity, they can't be, or they'll be shit, and you recognize that on a subconscious level, which is why you don't *allow* them to be confusing and weird.
>implying that's "otherworldly" or whatever
it's pixelated rio with weird text.
Whenever I try to get otherworldly with how things work I have a hard time building the bridge on exactly HOW that whatever-it-is works.
Like, trying to describe to someone what going through the Warp is always a really interesting experience to me. First thing I mention is that it's contextual to each person- when someone stares into the abyss it stares into them- but when they all look out the window the first thing they notice is that they all see the same thing. The very nature of the Warp is paradoxical (given that it can hold distance and yet has no spacetime), and explaining it always leaves my players scratching their heads as violently as their characters might.
Like explaining a Slaaneshi warp daemon to someone.
>The Slaaneshi daemon wiggles with erotic energy, and its corporeal form shifts to show you two of the most glorious pairs of tits you've ever seen
>"But that sounds creepy and gross, I'm not aroused."
>The physical embodiment of the daemon is constantly changing, and its skin seems almost fuzzy to you
>"user, are these daemons actually here?"
>Well, technically yes AND no-
>"Will shooting it work?"
>Well, YES but KIND OF no-
>"Doesn't matter anymore, I kill them all."
>Well, I mean, the corpses are howling back into the warp but they're still alive after being killed
>"even the one I atomized?"
>yeah that one still technically exists in the Warp.
>"What the fuck did we just kill?"
>A superposition of something being physical and incorporeal, I.E. a daemon
>seems pretty self explanatory
>group goes crosseyed
This, lighting and music are what I always do. I also try to get drinks/snacks that fit the mood, to some degree. Burning Wheel? Nice wines and ciders. Cyberpunk? Tsingtao and Asahi.
stop having extremely solid points on why we can't have nice things
One very odd thing in a fairly standard environment will feel dramatically stranger and more alien than an environment where everything is strange and bizarre all the time.
A bar where the drinks are served through tubes that are lowed from the ceiling will be much stranger if it is in all other ways a fairly standard saloon/nightclub.
Likewise, a birthday party that is all ways standard to contemporary American culture. except instead of a sheet cakes small, ridiculously shortcake discs are being served with a drizzle of fresh beef blood instead of icing with no commentary,but when the grandmother of the family starts to serve the parties she makes a gesture trying to ascertain if they'd prefer theirs un-blooded is going to be much more alien, interesting, and dramatic than if nothing in the scene was relate-able.
...
Have you tried playing Dungeons and Dadaragons like a normal droller, ya jniggot? Because if you rotanurn the usual trodea, you can get an entirely frenew and waerlid session out of it. And perhaps just throw in frenew vocaords in the middle of an otherwise mundormie sentence. Also a clue to how these frenew vocaords work: they're mundormie words, but smacrullided together. So make up your own to make your worlttings less mundormie!
Voice the citizens entirely in your native Polish.
If you do not speak Polish I am very sorry.