🤪 Weird RPG mashups

I quite like mixing different modules. Currently, my Ghosts of Saltmarsh game is borrowing from Uncaged. I intend my Waterdeep Dragon Heist to use Keys for the Golden Vault. But that got me wondering...

What would be a mashup that would be just plain weird? An unholy mix of different RPGs or modules or themes? Not necessarily bad, I'm sure a good GM could make the weirdness bug into a feature.

Starfinder mausritter? Kids on Cthulhus?

Sentinel comics and Shadows over Sol, to pick some less known ones.

Super heroes in sci-fi survival horror.

I guess PCs are supers, but the alien is superer

It wasn't myself, but an acquaintance on the Discord server for Shadow of the Demon Lord liked to talk about his Kingdom Hearts campaign that he ran some years ago. For those unfamiliar with SotDL, it's a rather unsanitized game with corruption that physically mutates characters in horrible ways, demons that are vulgar by description alone, and dark magics that can turn one's foes into eunuchs. Despite the incredibly odd mash-up, apparently the system served him quite well to run the Disney + Final Fantasy IP.

I have mixed Stargate and DrWho into my fantasy homebrew, but haven't really mixed established adventures together - yet

I have absolutely considered running The One Ring modules using Dragonbane. COMPLETE tonal shift. Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, those are easy. Dúnedain came from the sea, so clearly they're Mallards. It would be worth it to see Gandalf yeeting Fireballs.

Oh, for sure I mix in other references into my D&D. My Waterdeep steals from Ankh Morpork, and the Spelljamming clerics of Celestian are totally Star Trek.



But that's not weird. That's normal! It'd be weird if our games didn't shamelessly crash into pop culture without swapping insurance details. Or am I wrong? Is anyone playing D&D as a straight up medieval fantasy game?

I am running a comedic parody 1930s pulp adventure game, Indiana Jones meets Douglas Adams. We are having quite a blast!

I initially wanted to run it with every PC and NPC being an anthropomorphic animal like in Zootopia, buy the players voted for humans.

The portrait visual style is caricatures in sepia tones

Many years ago, I ran a one-shot using Paladium’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles system in a 1930s pulp jungle adventure.

I don't run a lot of modules but I purposely mashup genres for homebrewed games. I mashed up steampunk, ice age, and megafauna hunters for a group of friends. It wasn't terrible.

I usually run some kind of mashup because I get bored playing in the same worlds over and over. But they're almost always theme/genre mashups, not necessarily blending specific modules/settings. Although, as all good DMs, I steal liberally from a variety sources. GURPS books are sourcebook heaven for ideas, even if I don't run systems even remotely close to GURPS.

For a Pathfinder world, I created the main Empire where players were adventuring, and let them each create their own homeland which was either a neighbor of the empire, recently conquered by the empire, or conquered so long ago they've been assimilated into the empire. I ended up having to blend an apocalyptic land of zombie horror and a community created by the crash-landing of a sci-fi colony ship into my fantasy world. It worked out. There was lore that tied everything together. But it was nothing I ever would have created on my own.

Discword meets Warhammer. Only the orcs wild be unaffected

All the time. My ideal D&D (OSR) will always be a low-magic, human-centric, mud and blood, die in a ditch affair…

I’m pretty fussy about genre mash-ups. I dig dimension-hopping / time-travel stuff, though.

I've run Liminal (modern day UK supernatural jijinx) as an Irish Victorian era ghost story. Another favorite was running a Han Dynasty era political/wuxia game using Feng Shui (action movie roleplaying).

Ran a chapter of a game with Star Trek in Spelljammer, The Neutral Zone in Wildspace!

I always thought the Borg would make a good villain in a Star Wars game. Star Wars is "long, long ago" and the Borg have demonstrated they can travel back in time occasionally. Maybe they went really far back in time and started assimilating an Imperial outpost...You could even use the Star Borg conversion of Mork Borg to run it!

Yes, that was fun

That alien picture is terrifying. :)

I still think of doing chapter 2 and onwards!

🤣 Well, that's why you can count on the superhero team!


I actually forgot to mention that the two systems might work together. Sentinel comics is a lot about the action/scene tracker, making the stakes higher every turn, which could work wonders in survival error