I have this big-ass Shadowrun campaign I designed and wrote up backstory and shit for all the big players in it but nobody in my group wants to play Shadowrun so they haven’t even discovered the surface level lore. 🥹

“Players, what obscure lore has your GM just discovered?”

It took 2 years and a player pointing out that the main cult in the scenario was a white supremacist cult.

There’s a talking dragon waiting to share their wisdom and power with the party. He is, like, a couple hours away from the city everyone spends like a few sessions in, preparing to be sieged. NPCs are all talking about how great were the legendary times when dragons were helping dwarves with defending the city. There are dragon claw marks on the city walls. A geographer sponsored by one of my party members tells stories like:

“There was once a cavern just here, near the city, where lived an ancient dragon. And you know what? People don’t talk about this place anymore, it isn’t on any recent map and nobody goes here. Ever. What could be hidden there? Who knows? If only someone could, like, walk in here and take a look”.

Nope, never happened. My party destroyed the whole damn dark forces army all by themselves and left the city. They are now heading to the cooking contest organised by a pixies queen.

A recurring villain and an ally to the party were identical twins.

It seemed obvious to me. But I figured it’s a classic, and likely to briefly amuse them.

The party was great at ferreting out all kinds of mysteries. This would give them a quick mystery followed by a nice “spare my brother” moral dilemma to decide.

But the party did not give a shit.

The party blew right past a villainous monologue about “my brother” and similar movie tropes. They decided it was one dude with a personality disorder, and ignored all further information.

I had a big reveal planned, but it’s their world, and they had grudges against another villain so I promoted that villain to be more central to the plot. I finally fully sidelined the twins to focus on other NPCs that the party was more engaged with.

So they finished the entire campaign without figuring it out.

It’s no big deal, but still funny. I never know which NPC will resonate with the players and which won’t.

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I ran a game of “Index Card RPG” with the setting “Blood & Snow”. The setting includes an adventure seed where Cavemen have to search for ancient relic pillars every generation to stop an Ice Age. I never told my players, but in my mind we were playing a Warhammer 40k game and this was a world a space marine chapter used to recruit those who were strong enough.

One of the player characters is a clone that was grown in a mindflayer laboratory.