In regards to fantasy roleplay games, there are a wide variety of settings out there for players and GMs to use for their adventures and campaigns. Usually, a group of players will choose one particular setting that they enjoy and stick with it. This works well because, over time, the players become familiar with the geography, the bestiary, the economies, and power centers. This allows for a very immersive experience as everyone has the same detailed world to roleplay within and are able to make setting-specific references that other characters can build upon. This benefit can also be a drawback, in that the players become very reliant on their preconceived understandings of the world and how it works in order to make decisions or judge a situation.

What better fun is there, than to turn everything upside down occasionally? What if there was a setting where even the natives didn’t know what to expect from day to day? This is the kind of setting that I want to make available to all roleplayers out there. But I don’t want to ask anyone to abandon their established campaign worlds. Many GMs run campaigns in homebrew worlds that they are attached to and they aren’t inclined to just blindly transition to something completely different. That’s all fine, because I want to publish a new setting in a unique way that allows gamers to adopt unpredictable oddities and yet keep playing in the same game world they’re used to.

This brings me to the concept of playable anomalies. In our world, we have many mysterious places and occurrences that can inspire us. Sometimes it’s a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits scenario, or sometimes the Bermuda Triangle phenomenon, or even Area 51. These anomalies are just peculiar turns of events that no one can completely explain or comprehend, but they are fun to hear about or experience. Through this blog, our newsletter and forthcoming adventures, we will be delivering these anomalies for inclusion in your favorite gaming world.

Playable anomalies happen, so have fun with them.

A Taste

There is a strange world that exists in a remote place, between the planes. Long ago, it may have been much like any other world. But something horrible happened that changed everything, twisting life, death, and reality alike. Any now, in many other worlds, odd things are also happening. Unexplained phenomena are occurring, previously unseen creatures are materializing and very occasionally an otherworldly super being makes itself known.

In your town, where things have been going along as usual, you have now overheard two conversations of how a baker’s dog had to be killed because it began to electrocute things uncontrollably. Small bolts of lightning were said to leap from the dog and strike nearby objects and people. The baker is almost unrecognizable, as most of his body is covered with blackened burns and he drifts in and out of consciousness, babbling about leeches. He keeps saying that his dog didn’t get away and sometimes he starts flailing wildly like something is flying about his head. What’s going on? Did this dog really almost kill his owner with lightning? What do leeches have to do with anything? Does this have anything to do with the electrical storm a few nights ago? Something doesn’t seem right here…