For the GM

So your group has an established campaign setting and you want to introduce some new protowarped elements from Murkengard.  Well, first you must set the stage.  As a GM, you have a lot of control over the flow of events and information within your game world.  You should take advantage of this in every possible way.  If you intend to throw a serious twist into an ongoing campaign, you should leak a few hints and provide some foreshadowing to set the mood.  This way, when things get really weird, the players will not be completely lost and confused as to why it’s all happening, they can tie it back to something else which happened previously.

Having a weird, but seemingly innocuous, event in the background will leave the players with questions later, but will provide an immediate answer or clue to the origin of the current situation and let them focus on dealing with the situation instead of just scratching their heads.  Often, movies or television shows which intend to go into a “unbelievable” realm, will first present something else that is somewhat odd but easily dismissed.  In a sci-fi movie, if the writers are going to have undead come back to life and attack the townspeople,  they first establish that a satellite with previously unseen forms of radiation has crashed into Earth after visiting Venus.  That’s odd, but could be forgotten by the majority of everyone within a few days if nothing comes of it, as everyday life always competes for their attention.

Here are some ideas for setting the stage, though these only scratch the surface.

1. Strange weather.  Purple lightning anyone?
2. Astronomical oddity.  The clouds went behind the moon?
3. Earthquake.  Nine tremors exactly nine minutes apart?
4. Missing inventor/alchemist.  She was working on lava hat?
5. Stolen artifact.  It was supposed to keep time stable?
6. Mass suicide.  They killed themselves by eating cotton?
7. Local water or food.  The water briefly tasted like pine sap?
8. Lights circling the city at night.  A pattern?  What do you mean?
9. Unexplained abductions.  What kind of experiments?
10. Malfunctioning elements.  For a day, nothing would burn?

This can all be a lot of fun for the GM by taking the gloves off and granting more creative freedom, but the players may be wary of getting involved in such unnatural endeavors, instead opting to chase down gnolls or dragons.

For the players

One way to get players excited about a playable anomaly is to give their characters something cool that’s related.  Let’s say you are going to run an adventure that features zombies with super speed.  And the zombies are making a real nuisance out of how quickly they zip around the battlefield, tearing chunks out of the heroes.  They aren’t just charging in and chomping away, they are making flyby attacks with their claws and teeth.  Your average party may or may not have the necessary tools to handle these guys effectively, but what if the fighter had telekinesis?  He could mentally grab a zombie and hoist him in the air.  If the zombie can’t touch the ground, it can’t go anywhere.  Or maybe he waits until a zombie darts after a friend and erects a telekinetic forcefield directly in the zombie’s path, causing the zombie to run into a solid wall at full speed.  Ouch.

Sound like fun?  Sure!  But something to consider before granting the players these abilities is that you may not want to deal with how these new abilities could unbalance the game long-term.  We propose that these protowarped abilities only be made available until the conclusion of the adventure, and the players should be encouraged to enjoy and abuse them while they last.  There are plenty of ways to explain how the characters gain and lose such abilities, or you may not want to explain anything.  Sometimes the unexplained is part of the fun.

Here’s an example of a protowarped ability for player characters.  Enjoy!

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