Do you have silly adventures occasionally?

[Hatut Zeraze]

I rarely run many adventures that don't have at least some element of silly.  A lot of the cornball elements of superhero comics that modern fans find ridiculous, I find to be crucially needed tonal elements of a superhero campaign. 

[Jhamin]

On 4/6/2021 at 11:57 AM, BoloOfEarth said:

Had a non-Foxbat adventure where a group of vampires were trying to steal something that would have made them very powerful.  For the minion vampires, I included one who had been an Elvis impersonator before getting bit.  I rewrote the lyrics to a number of Elvis songs - Don't Step on My Blood Red Shoes, Undead Hotel, etc. and sang one of on each of his Phases.  Keeping in mind this was a minion, not the big bad or even one of her major minions... but half the hero team ganged up on Vampire Elvis just to shut him up. 

 

My Teen Hero PCs accidentally set free Nosferatu Red & his Proletariat of the Night while they were beach coming in Oregon.  They were a coven of Communist Vampires that had been imprisoned in a cave in 1937 by a Golden Age Hero.  They immediately resumed their plan to return Alaska for the Soviet Union.

[BoloOfEarth]

On 4/7/2021 at 7:28 AM, IndianaJoe3 said:

 

I hope you had a version of, "Don't Be Cruel" ready.

 

Unfortunately not.  I had: 

• All Shook Up (as I Vant Your Blood)
• Hound Dog (as Blood Hound)
• Heartbreak Hotel (as Undead Hotel)
• Blue Suede Shoes (as Blood Red Shoes)
• Jailhouse Rock (as Vampire Rock)

- - - - - - - -  

 

In my new campaign (set in San Francisco), one of the PC heroes owns a series of pet spas, so for the intro adventure I introduced the New Peace Armada, a cause-of-the-week team from the Villain Theme Teams thread.  Their cause that week was animal rights, and they decided to "free" all the pets, as well as let loose all the animals at the zoo.  

The New Peace Armada's membership include Captain Compassion, Ranger Rick, Reefer Gladness, Hippie Biker, BMOC... so you can guess that they're not the most serious group.  

 

[fdw3773]

On 4/6/2021 at 7:54 PM, Christopher R Taylor said:

 

Thrash your throat doing that voice for long, though

True, which is why I kept it to quick phrases and one-liners and not the long monologues and soliloquies featured in the cartoons back then. 😉

 

"Behold...the Sword of Plundarrrrr!!!!"

"Oh-ho....you dare challenge Mumm-Ra, the Ever-Living!?"

"Bwah-ahahaha!!!!"

"Oh-ho...what is this!?"

[phydaux]

The question should be do we ever have then INTENTIONALLY.  

[Jhamin]

I try to make sure my games are serious, never deviate from the plan, and are, if possible, depressing.

That is why I game.

[Cancer]

As a player, I have a powerful psychlim that requires my characters to be silly somehow, though that often is limited to the origin story or perhaps the character psychlims or other details.  Too many GMs disapprove of satirical content that they didn't create.

 

As an example, I blundered across the below as an eight-year-old piece of character origin story for a superheroic power level brick who was an orangutan brought to human intelligence and super-powers magically.

========================

In 1967, a mad Borneo witch doctor, incensed at the deforestation and damage to the deep jungles of the island, made a great spell dedicated to Pukpuk, Mighty Forest Spirit, calling on him to send a great warrior to defeat the hated invaders who were cutting down the forests.  A bewildered young orangutan found himself suddenly bigger, stronger, smarter than ever before, and possessed of a terrible rage against humans and their tree-cutting.  He ignored the crazy, smelly old coot who capered around him, and vanished into the forest.  Possessed of superhuman strength, human-level intelligence coupled with the wild ape's senses, and a supernatural ability to hit targets with thrown objects (and sometimes very large thrown objects), he was steered by the forest spirit's anger to attack by night those places where engines growled by day.

 

(Explanation: In the character build was campaign-limit STR, and campaign-limit CSLs for thrown improvised weapons, in direct imitation of Mr. Incredible's abilities in the first Incredibles movie.)

 

For two years he busted up logging operations and mining camps on Borneo, killing a few loggers, more through collateral damage than intent.  (The sound of a chainsaw sends him into a berserk rage.)  He destroyed all the equipment: trucks, loaders, bulldozers, generators, compressors, and especially chainsaws and sawmills.  He had no name and never surfaced into human society, unknowingly leaving a variety of political and ecoterrorist groups to claim credit for his activities.  One of these called itself Orah, after a striking lumber worker killed by a company goon squad.  Ultimately, that name stuck for the responsible party for all the unexplained destruction in the northern and northeastern parts of Borneo, even after the original Orah group was infiltrated and arrested en bloc by the police.  Though brutal and random, his activities did make a dozen timber companies go under and forced five mining operations to shut down entirely, and Orah was hunted desperately by both governmental and international authorities.  Of course, they were hunting for a human operation, and never looked for a super-orangutan.

 

One day the orang encountered a young white man in the jungle, as the latter relaxed ape-style on a leaf-bed in the crotch of a large tree.  The human had no power tools, and the orang followed him stealthily for a day or two as the man took pictures, wrote notes, and (but for clothes and large amounts of mosquito repellent) lived unobtrusively in the forest.

 

On the third day the human saw him and stared, then turned away and started eating: correct orang etiquette for an encounter with a stranger.  The orang joined him, and both were astonished when the ape understood the human's speech.  Young Jim Dirtbag (the human) had been on the Malaysian side of the border as something of a Maoist sympathizer when violent riots and government reaction made everyone leave town or go underground.  The orangutan described what he'd been doing, destroying exploitation activities in the jungle.

 

"You're Orah!" exclaimed the human.  "For that you get a beer."

 

"What?" replied the orang, utterly without comprehension.

 

Dirtbag explained that "Orah" was getting all the credit (or blame) for the destruction in the jungle, and the orang accepted the label with indifference.  In long talks, the young, foolish, and rather left-leaning young American told him that to really make progress against the damage to the forest he had to hit the rich men in the cities, the capitalists, for whose profit all the destruction was done.  Now, in Borneo he could destroy the local bosses in the city, but to really halt it all, he'd have to come to America and destroy the fat cats of Wall Street.

 

The organtuan also learned that he really liked this liquid stuff the human called "beer".

 

A few weeks later, the orangutan went into the city of Samarinda in early evening, and demolished a corporate office building, killing a dozen office workers, including the company president and several other officers.  It was spectacular, as Orah got away, leaving the authorities to puzzle over a cement-and-brick building knocked down without the use of explosives or power equipment, other than the sixteen-ton bulldozer that had been launched from the street so that it crashed through the second-story wall, tumbled through the room where the company officers' meeting was taking place, through the floor, and collapsed the structure around it as it came to rest on its side at ground level.  That the perpetrator also broke into a store and made off with two full beer kegs was a minor tweak on the mystery.

 

Jim Dirtbag's money ran out and he departed for the States, never spilling the beans on Orah the Orangutan.  Finishing a degree with a double major in wildlife management and agriculture at WSU, he got a job as a game warden in southeastern Washington, supplementing the low warden's pay by growing pot outside a shanty he had in the Blue Mountains and selling it to college students in Pullman.  He found himself living a low but satisfactory lifestyle, writing up poachers and illegal loggers, accepting bribes from people he caught with a couple too many trout in their cooler, and writing incoherent leftist tracts while stoned that he subsequently used to light his fireplace in the winter.

 

Orah never forgot the strange man and his words about coming to America, and in late 1971 he stole aboard a tramp steamer, ate coconuts out of a container for ten days, and jumped ship at the mouth of the Columbia River.  Swimming ashore he headed into the Cascades in southern Washington, where he came upon a recently dead human hanging from some shredded cloth in a tree, a single big bag under the swinging corpse.

 

(Explanatory comment: The corpse is D. B. Cooper, and the bag of money is the ransom he collected during his skyjacking.  This was inserted into the character background so Orah the Orangutan had upwards of $100,000 in cash at the time the campaign started.)

 

The bag had money (that much he recognized, Jim Dirtbag having showed him some and expounded on its evils), and he pulled down the body and carried it and the money for three days as he continued moving eastward through the mountains.  Where the trees started running out -- never in his worst nightmares had he imagined a landscape that went for miles of apparently treeless hills -- he buried the corpse under several tons of loose rock at the base of a cliff, and set off over the grassy, arid, cold landscape.

 

He found he had to break into buildings for food, since he recognized nothing edible standing out in December in Washington east of the Cascades, and left a trail of petty burglaries behind as he made his way across the Yakama Reservation, crossed the Columbia north of the Wallula Gap, passed north of Walla Walla, and ascended into the snowy forest of the Blue Mountains southeast of Dayton, Washington.  Bitterly cold, miserably wondering why he had come to this unimaginable snowy desolation, he broke into a dilapidated cabin above the Tucannon River on Christmas Eve, 1971, where he and Jim Dirtbag were utterly astonished to renew their acquaintance.