Have you ever gotten "meta" at the table Veeky Forums?
I was thinking of having my players find a skull belonging to a dead god. The dead god would be me. Inside the skull would be the origins of the world they inhabit.
I was also thinking of having them find the 5th Ed players handbook at some point. They wouldn't KNOW it was the phb at first, I'd describe a book with a giant on the cover, and a strange text they can't read.
Is this a terrible idea?
>Is this a terrible idea?
Probably. Do it anyway.
Can you give more details on the god skull?
Im curious
Fine for a "fun" game, with whacky situations.
For a serious game, it would instantly break all my immersion.
Players arrive, GM is nowhere to be seen. Just a skull on the table...
I'm still working out the details myself, but it'd be an ancient skull and bones in an elaborate tomb. Once again that strange script the PC's can't decipher (English) would mention my final resting place.
I'm thinking the skull would work as some kind of artifact, and needs to be attached to some other powerful magic item to summon a "hologram" or imprint of me. Or a NPC who looks and talks just like me that the PC's could interact with. He'd either spew exposition or literally project my thoughts of how the world was created onto a wall for the PC's to view.
That would sort of be the point. The characters discovering they aren't truly "real" but in a sense, they are. They exist now to our group at this table. This small corner of reality is theirs.
>Once again that strange script the PC's can't decipher (English) would mention my final resting place.
Make it an actual location on earth. After the campaign concludes go to that place and commit suicide. Maybe your players will find you. Maybe not. Ultimate time travel mindfuck. It's the ultimate arg. The ultimate immersion.
>He'd either spew exposition or literally project my thoughts of how the world was created onto a wall for the PC's to view.
This part isn't great. Too infodumpy. Make it exciting, maybe a little ambiguous.
I love the skull idea, OP.
Not so much the Player's Handbook one.
The most meta idea I've ever run is the party retrieves a thin, colorful box for a Silver Wyrm with a strange circular plate inside (a DvD). The Silver Wyrm, regarded by the world as a delusional far-realms researcher, tells the party that the box comes from outside of reality (Earth), and that he is searching for a way to reach that reality. His lair is also weird, with the foyer being covered in pillars 1-3 feet tall (a scale map of a real-world city). Only after much strife did I tell the players the truth in character: that the dragon truly is a deranged weeaboo who has been obsessed with the same handful of manga/anime for nearly 600 years. Disgusted by his obsession, his community, mate, and god all abandoned him. My players loved and hated me for it.
My advice to you is to lead them on; give them hints and clues with lots of foreshadowing, then after a few sessions, make the big reveal by dropping a very obvious clue. That's how I made 15 sessions of buildup for the above dragon memorable to my players. I have another group that's 40 sessions in and hasn't figured it out yet.
It would be an interesting encounter, go for it OP, no reason not too.
Meta wise, my DM spent 2 years running a campaign setting up a shitty pun.
He lay down clues, gave us evidence, rumors, hearsay and finally those huge zombified water mammals came sailing over the horizon and the captain of our airship said "oh, the huge manatee!"
We had multiple quest lines to stop this shit and it was all a goddamn setup.
...
Jesus Christ, OP... Don't do any of this.
Reminds me of some easter eggs from old school games. Could be interesting if done well and your group is ok with this sort of encounter.
Be careful about shoving your head up your own ass but nothing sounds explicitly bad.
At the end of one of my campains the players will run in to a floating glove (the GM) and he will note that this is only because the big bad has broken the universe and they shouldent see him. he then opens up the fabrics of time and space to have thm flus the BB's minons out of the universe's inner workigs
>Is this a terrible idea?
Yes, and you're fucking retarded for considering it.
no u
>Is this a terrible idea?
More than likely, but how are you supposed to get reward without risk? Like, with the dead god idea, you are putting something personal about yourself out on the table, which can create a good reaction. At the same time, it can also make it so that your party doesn't like it because they see it coming and think it's just a trope.
If nothing else, you're trying something new, and that's more than I think a lot of people on Veeky Forums can say. They get caught in their own spheres, in their own habits, until they get a rude reminder that other people change.
In a game where we used Dawn of world's to Homebrew the setting the mcguffin the bbeg was searching for turned out to be the leftover points from the last round before we switched to role-playing.
It will either be terrible depending on your approach, and super cringey, or it will actually be pretty cool. If you infodump like you're just spewing about how cool your campaign and brain is then you're just being a twat.
This isn't a bad precedent to work off of, probably - make it stupidly subtle and actually make it have a point beyond just self-insertion.
I was just spitballing when I mentioned the infodump. I'll definitely avoid that now.
Still, not sure what to do with the skull if I decide to go through with all thi
It's something I've considered, but decided against. It's masturbatory self-insert at its most pretentious level, stripping away even the pretense that the game is not all about you by injecting the faux-revelation that the characters are just there for your personal entertainment and aren't real, which is the very opposite of the game's purpose.
And what exactly are the characters supposed to do when they discover what the book is?
So many supposedly "deep" plots are bandied about here but no one ever seems to ask themselves what reaction their totally-mind-blowing idea is actually supposed to elicit.
In this case, it will elicit boredom.
Make the skull out of some kind of rare, and valuable extraplanar material that also induces peyote-like effects. Vision quests and some trippy shit. Thus if it backfires and the players call you out on being lame, you can just say it was all hallucinogenic space ore magic. Good excuse to make the inside of the skull look like staring in to space