Weird stuff in your settings

What weird stuff have you put in your settings, /dm/anons? Not magical realm stuff, just things that are innocently weird. Absurd little (or big) details that are so absurd your players love them.

Also, /pc/anons, what lovely weird stuff have you encountered in settings, or even put into your characters lore?

I'll start us off:

>Having half the male populace of a village being called a different spelling of Amalfi, with all of them hating the others to the absolute bone for the wierdest reasons.
>Calling the leader of a merchant's guild Barbara Corcoran
>Encounter on a muddy beach with a man too occupied with eating handfulls of raw krill to talk to the party.
>Naming the inbred slave-concubine of an evil prince Quank
>A skeleton filled with bees

Innsmouth but with sheep.

They've been to an underground dwarf city.

And I played that one straight like a Dwarf Fortress fortress. Since none of my players visit Veeky Forums or even know about DF, they were both amazed, amused and horrified by the things they've witnessed there.

For example:
>The weird communist economy and how most dwarves seemed to care more for booze than for money
>A dwarf woman who was ambushed by a frogman leaping out of the well when she was about to fetch water, and how she beat it to death before proceededing to take the corpse to the butcher
>The screams of a very angry dwarf who lied at the bottom of a 20 meters pit with both legs broken and how no one would try to help him. When questioned about it, the closest militiadwarf replied that he was possessed by ancestor spirits and killed five others before they managed to drop him into that hole, so they're just leaving him down there.
>Tales of how the terrible forgotten beast Cruxar the Titanmauler had almost wiped out everyone in the fortress fifty years ago, before he was slain by a miner who bumped into the beast while on his way to fetch more wine.
>The lower mines that were sealed by a raised drawbridge and an unholy amount of traps and ballistae pointing down the corridor. When asked about, a stoneworker replied nonchalantly that it was off-limits because it was "flooded with magma and demons".
>Trained war elephants doing security outside the surface entrance
>A goblin that appeared out of nowhere and stuffed a dwarf children into a large bag then made a run for it, before being crushed by a falling boulder trap.

Man, that was a fun session.

Elaborate

not but did you ever visited New Zealand or Wels? Thats your Innsmouth with sheeps.

We need more, keep going!

What is there to elaborate on?

It's a setting where there is a town where the townsfolk have been fucking sheep so long that many of them look like humans/sheep hybrids. They don't go out in the daylight when there are travelers around, some of the sheep-people are so far gone that they look exactly like sheep but have the mind of a person, so they go spy on approaching roads to warn the villagers to stay inside so nobody sees the half sheep half human people.

...do they sell wool?

I once had an innkeeper's daughter mention that her brother Billy had moved to the big city where the adventurers were heading, after he'd been injured when the horse he was riding tripped.

Later when they needed a forger they met with a guy named Bill who had a gimp leg.

Nobody noticed

>Gretchin revolution against their ork overlords. Currently are sneaking into human warehouses for equipment via standing on each other's shoulders and wearing a large trenchcoat while pretending to be inspectors.
>Arbites Traffic Cop, utilizes capital punishment against vehicles that double park. Party first met him performing a public hanging on a beaten civilian van.
>The current Ork Waaagh! wants to leave the planet because they heard about "da Tau pansies" and want to teach them a lesson. The local inquisitor would be perfectly willing to let them go if the planet in question wasn't in the far end of the Segmentum Pacificus.

...

>using real religion
Why more often than not they make up some fake religion? It doesn't make sense to me that people do this. It could completely change your perspective of the characters and could make you enjoy or hate them depending on the setting. I have literally never seen a western inspired fantasy setting that explicitly uses real religion.

Because you'd have to adapt the religion to fit into a fantasy setting anyway.

I don't see when someone would need to do that. Unless you for some reason feel the need to put in a detailed origin of how God made the Elves or why magic is real it shouldn't matter.

Real Christianity is anti-magic. Practitioners are hunted down by the inquisition. Astrology was a popular sin.
A society so anti-magic would not long remain standing. It would just be usurped by a more powerful country with a more lenient religion.

Well to be honest, if I were living in the universe where Dwarf Fortress takes palce, I would be more concerned with booze rather than money

I love goofball NPCs with extremely myopic lives that have very little to offer the players- a little flame elemental who only knows about lighting one furnace, a forest spirit that has no interest in the spooky place the players want to explore, non-hostile undead that have been around too long to remember their previous lives, etc. It drives one of my players insane, but I can't help but populate the world with at least a few faces that have nothing to do with furthering the party's agenda. These guys have lives, too, you know.

There's a being that no one really knows the origin or identity of named March the Wise. He's a presumably extra dimensional being of unknown power that has taken it upon himself to teach life lessons to creatures in need. The "need" of these creatures and the importance and practicality of these lessons is arbitrarily decided by March. For example, a king may wake up one day with a nearly completely empty treasury, save for a note that has a parable about generosity signed by March. A shoemaker might find that all the food around him takes twice as long to cook and he takes twice as long to fall asleep, waking to a simple whisper of "patience is a virtue." There's not really any pattern in March's selection, and at times he tries to teach a lesson that someone already follows just to drive the point home. By all appearances he's just a misguided dick that everyone hates but they can't really do anything other than have a festival of protection every summer solstice and tell each other to "beware the ire of March."

1) offendable wussies
2) "it wasn't like that" autists
3) reality is a stale meme

Nah, they'd just start calling their magic users miracle workers or something.

Military grade retards built in masse.

Yes, they'd find workarounds. They'd adapt, as I said.
And that's even before you as the GM get into the trouble of trying to explain why a religion with a silent God would have much popularity in a context where most divine miracles in the bible could easily be reproduced by high level wizards who don't even believe in the Lord.

I wouldn't call that weird, but every single human has magic resistance as does anything with iron and steel. And dragons are godlike and immune to magic. And even that is not that weird, i guess.

Mostly minor shit, like a wand of Create Wand (1 charge) that only carries one charge for, the party has been desperate to find a use for lots of wooden sticks.

I do like to give them gag magical items, especially when they plundered the contraband chest of the setting's Not!Hogwarts. Items such as a ring of invulnerability (the Ring could not be damaged in any way), a wand of Disintegrate (promptly turned into dust when it was cast against a Golem), and a Magical Hat that could correctly guess the answer 25% of the time on multiple choice tests.

Major shit includes the bard slowly turning into a powerful diabolist, the ranger purposefully mutating himself whenever he can, the wizard using a loophole to free himself from lycanthropy but turning himself permanently into a tigerman instead.

The under ground civilization no one acknowledges, that is so alien, that most people don't know they exist, and only a handful of people have actually interacted with.

...

There is a town in my world called Selec. The head person is traditionally called the Thom. Of selec. The players find it hilarious.
Coincidentally in that town there is an undead cat that I tossed in just to mess with them when they used detect undead at one point. The cat became even more popular than the Thom, and completely derailed a session into investigating the cat.
Also, the maps and astronomical facts of the world that I have given them don't actually make Euclidean sense, but they still haven't noticed even two years on.

>when it was cast against a Golem
Wait. Do wands ignore magic resistance?

>why wouldn't a system of beliefs based on real locations, real events, real cultures and real peoples work in a fictional setting where none of the aforementioned exist?

That hat is overpowered.

Depends on whether you know if it's correctly guessing or incorrectly guessing, and how many questions multiple choice tests have in that universe, on average.
And, on how many uses you have per day and if you can use the hat on the same question more than once.

Corruption / zombie virus type thing I had, had an interesting effect on pregnant women. Basically a russian nesting dolls effect. So it was like the witch in left 4 dead 2, except when you killed her, a smaller witch would rip its way out of her stomach. Then when you killed that one.... you get the point. Unfortunately it was the size of a normal human woman so it started to make less and less sense... but maybe I'll have it happen to an ogress next time.

We're all assuming a multiple choice question is ABCD. if the question is ABCDEFG, then the hat is OP