Gail's Ghost

Received: Today 5:01 PM
To: Gail Greene
From: Ghost

My Dear Gail,

As promised, I compose my first missive in what I hope is an illuminating correspondence. I believe this is after your scheduled work time, so I hope you have a few minutes to spare.

I would like to apologize in advance, as I deal with information from a wide array of sources, and some of that information pertains to you. I try to preserve your privacy, but I feel I must share one thing: your penchant for coffee, particularly the overpriced and additive-laden swill from Starbucks, shall cause your demise. I realize it’s an extra block’s walk and you strive to increase your Fitbit step count, but the extra half mile to Whole Foods would do you even more good and net you a tastier cup of stimulation.

In any case, I implore you to limit yourself to two cups per diem.

My first question: Why banking? My father was a banker back in the day, and I can’t imagine a more mundane field. For someone with your obvious talent and brilliance, it strikes me as extremely limiting. True, the occasional opportunity to match wits with an interloper alleviates the monotony, but the sheer inanity of dealing with monitoring security and keeping your utilities patched would drive me into an asylum. I should need a cadre of friends to extract me before the treatments I received cause permanent injury. But I digress.

Little wonder you’re a coffee addict.

Would you be amenable to alternative employment should the opportunity arise?

Now with the unsolicited advice far in the past and an interrogative outstanding, ask me what you will.

Yours,
-Ghost


Sent: Today 5:37 PM
To: Ghost
From: Gail Greene

1) Stay the hell out of my coffee.
2) Aren’t you taking the supernatural thing a little far, “Ghost”? I mean, really.
3) How the hell did you remotely hack a camera? It doesn’t have a network connection.
4) Are you offering me a job? If so, doing what?

g


Received: Today 5:38 PM
To: Gail Greene
From: Ghost

1) Fair enough. I share out of concern, but I shan’t bring it up again.

2) I used to be fascinated with supernatural phenomena. Suffice to say that fascination has become somewhat more serious of late.

If you wish to discuss this topic further, I would much prefer to visit in much the way we interacted before, though perhaps in a more personal setting. You have done well with your bank’s security, and dealing with it drains me somewhat. Words fail to capture the details and magnitude of my situation. A demonstration may have greater impact. Please let me know if you’re willing and we can schedule a time for us to meet.

3) Electronics are electronics. If I can reach them, I can modify the firmware, software, and stored data. I have been programming since before you were born, so I have access to a few techniques you may not have seen before. Also, my current situation allows me to break some rules and reach far further.

4) I believe I am. Details forthcoming as I get the organizational pieces in place, but suffice to say that you would never be bored. Given the size of the charitable donation from the last time we spoke, I know you will trust me when I say you would want for nothing. I imagine development tasks, bolstering computer security, and the odd infiltration should you desire some distraction.

This may take me some time to set up, but please forward me the salary requirements of your furthest-flung dreams and I shall make the numbers work.

Yours,
-Ghost


Sent: Today 5:42 PM
To: Ghost
From: Gail Greene

OK, I’m intrigued. I’ll need some time to rediscover my “furthest-flung dreams”, but I’ll get you a number. And I want 50% of that number as a signing bonus before I give my notice.

And yes, let’s talk in real time.

Just who the hell are you, anyway?

g


Received: Today 5:42 PM
To: Gail Greene
From: Ghost

I shall give you a hint as to my identity, as games surely keep the mind sharp.

A bonus shouldn’t be an impediment. It’s all just numbers in this modern age, and electronic ones at that, so money is quite literally no object.

I have somewhat extensive plans. I would be remiss if I didn’t share them with you before you made your decision. Money is well and good, but it hardly forms the basis for a meaningful and lasting professional relationship.

Your idealism should be a great asset in this endeavour, but I shall reserve specifics until after we meet. I assume your calendar is up to date?

Yours,
CB

Lurk's Workout

“I'm working out and then having drinks, honey! Don't wait up!”

I close the front door behind me, not waiting for an answer. I'm still in my office clothes, and I have my workout bag, which weighs a ton. It can't be helped, with the lead lining and all. Suffice to say I work as an anonymous health care administrator in the city, but I do all right for myself. Especially after hours.

Becky still thinks I go to the gym. I still do most of the time in case anyone checks up on me, but my workouts lately make the toughest cardio class look like a stroll on the beach. I'm never sure I'll even survive.

I swipe my card at the gym and duck out through the locker room. It's a three mile run to the containment facility, and if we're very lucky nobody will ever know we were there.

I change into my workout clothes. It's harder to sneak around wearing a filter mask and lead-lined suit, but tonight I'll need the protection. Liz should be inside already, distracting this week's boyfriend. I can hear Father Cutter singing drunkenly around the corner to keep the guards busy. I pat Bulldog's head on the way by. She nods, starts mouthing the words to the Piña Colada Song, and lowers her eye to the scope, looking for trouble to eliminate with her whisper-quiet rifle.

Whisper to a Scream

Public Domain
via Wikimedia Commons

I know Teddy Roosevelt, but I'm a nobody and it's a hundred years after his death so nobody believes me. I see him when others can't, and occasionally I let him have a ride in my body. Like today, as we wait for the train to get out on the bridge.

He said he came home to New York after his death. Even dead, he's larger than life. He's brave, loud, overconfident, and he gets me in trouble. He's sill kicking himself that he didn't run for reelection. His heart's in the right place, though, and he's just a stand-up dude. Which is why we're starting something in about 2 minutes.

He tells me he can't abide seeing decent people shackled to someone else's work. He tells me we can do something. He tells me that after we free a few, they can help us to free more. He tells me he knows what to say to get them on our side.

We chose the train because the etheric detectors can't quite discern what's train power and what's raw spirit. They say the detectors will find terrorists with etheric bombs, but everybody knows that's total bullshit. They're looking for escapees and for the people who help them, like me.

The Letter That Gave Us "Whisper"

Dr. Arthur Twitchell, 1883 [1]

25 September 1883
Red Building, Pembroke College, Cambridge

To: Arthur Twitchell PhD, Research Fellow
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA, USA


Dear Sir:

With the commencement of the academic year, it has come to my attention that you have published a letter pertaining to the supposed source of Etheric Power in the 03 August edition of the fledgling journal Science. Your assertion that we “capture the souls of the dead and press them into the equivalent of postmortem slavery” to fuel the current industrial revolution in both our countries is not only wildly inaccurate, but irresponsible to the point of madness.

The Right Tool for the Job

I wanted to cut my hair, but I'm terribly lazy about scheduling something with my hairdresser. And since I'm keeping my hair short, it seemed like an easy thing to start doing myself.

Before. Let's do this thing.

So I took my trusty beard trimmer (it works just like hair clippers, yeah?) and had at it. 30 minutes later, the battery died and I was about 1/3 of the way through. Luckily I managed to get the front fairly even.

I may be a bit liberal on my assessment of "fairly even".

The City Guard Campaign

We all know the powergamer creed - once you're powerful enough, you're totally above the law. The City Guard ranks swell with people who want to make a difference, but can't quite get the Adventuring thing under control. Those who can't face down Tiamat end up keeping the peace in Nowheresburg.

"Snowy Guard"
by symatt

What if we flip that on its head? What if your party is the City Guard version of a SWAT team? What if the campaign involves keeping the peace and getting rewarded for creative problem-solving involving vastly superior antagonists?

Your standard City Guard playbook reads like this:

Step 1: Restore and maintain the peace.
Step 2: Figure out the situation.
Step 3: Make things right.

But within that framework lies worlds of possibilities.

Holiday Traditions

The winter holiday comes upon us quickly. It's a time of preparation, celebration, and tradition. What traditions do you observe? What traditions have you given up? What is "normal" for our culture, and how do we justify our deviations from that cultural norm?

Earth has as many holiday traditions as families. Some decorate fir trees with burning candles, while some celebrate a religious figure's birth at midsummer with dances and drink. Some jump over bonfires to invite the sun's return, while some dig through their closets for the tackiest in winter-themed cardigans. Some burn candles in the windows, while some share mulled cider and spiked egg nog with friends and family. Some make their yearly visit to church, while some play games for a week straight. Your mileage may vary.

These little traditions that persist without question lend authenticity to experience. What better way to bring a game world alive than to pepper it with these cultural hallmarks?

Start with a tradition from our world, then start asking why it began. For example...

The Boar's Head Feast

The boar's head, as I understand,
Is the rarest dish in all this land,
Which thus bedeck'd with a gay garland
Let us servire cantico.
    - The Boar's Head Carol, verse 2

Men have hunted boar since ancient times for meat, to prevent crop damage, and for the challenge of it, as an aggressive boar can cause a massive damage with a single charge. Ancient Romans regarded a boar hunt as a struggle between light (humanity) and darkness (the nocturnal, dark-haired boar). Christianity changed this symbolism into the Christ child's triumph over sin. The Norse sacrificed a boar to Freyr at midwinter to bring back the sun, which probably influenced the timing of this Christmas tradition.

Boar hunting tested a warrior's courage in medieval times, as the rules of the hunt often required killing a wounded boar with nothing more than a dagger. The boar spear had a cross bar to prevent a boar from impaling itself deeper on the spear in an attempt to gore its attacker before it died. If you managed to kill a boar, you would earn a reputation as a brave warrior, and you would ensure your family would have enough boar meat to last the winter. I'd feast to that; wouldn't you?

The "modern" tradition reportedly started at Queen's College, when a resourceful student on his way to Midnight Mass survived a wild boar attack by choking the beast to death with a metal-bound tome of Aristotle's works. The ensuing celebration involved cooking and eating the boar with great pomp, including singing many traditional carols. Last week I attended a Boar's Head performance in a church in Worcester, which involved a processional, singing, dancing, and costumes.

This one tradition has evolved from a test of bravery, through a midwinter pagan sacrifice, to the triumph of learning over brutality, to a "traditional" musical performance.

Going Off-World
Holiday traditions on Earth depend on the changing seasons. What would happen on a different world? Asked another way, would Martians celebrate Christmas? If so, when? Do colonists cling to the out-of-context traditions of their homeworld, or do they embrace their current world and find new rhythms?

What traditions would come about if winter and summer were each 7 growing seasons long? Would culture have evolved into cities or would the people remain nomadic to follow game and growing seasons around the planet? Would they have temporary palaces which could easily break down for transport?

Happy holidays. From space.

What happens when a year is made up of 157 days of 47 hours each? What would a binary star system mean for the seasons? Or a Ringworld where sundials are worthless since the sun always shines straight down on you no matter where you go?

A little forethought into planetary mechanics can tell you what the seasons would be like. The seasons provide a framework for a culture's cycles, including feasts, fasting, and festivals. Remember culture doesn't remain static, and traditions change and evolve over time. What traditions do your grandparents miss most?

By the same token, what traditions would a PC's grandparent miss in your game world? To use a permutation of the Boar's Head Feast, did they hunt boar to extinction and now need to celebrate with lamb instead? Does that anger the old warriors and make them feel less than human since they can't share the boar's strength any more? Does not eating the courage contained in the boar's heart and liver make them fear more? Do they feel shame and anger for eating a coward's meat?

On Story and Setting
Each tradition contains the story of how it began and evolved, giving you a rich history and cultural identity to draw from when building your own stories at the table. By continually asking "Why?" you can create history for the holidays in your game world. You can also create secrets, kept by societies and sects as a shadow history for your PCs to uncover.

What better gift to give than a deeper setting for your players to explore and help create?

Whether you celebrate Yule or Christmas, Kwanzaa or Midwinter, I hope you and yours stay happy and safe this holiday season.

[May of the Dead] Deadweed

This is my entry in the May of the Dead Blog Carnival. True to form, it's also a crossover piece that gives a taste of the fantasy setting we're developing over at The Gamer Assembly. How can you possibly go wrong with undead symbiotic plants?

Deadweed

(Note: I have copied the relevant passages from a letter read in a recent Cabinet meeting. Headings have been added for my own benefit. -Tobias)

Greetings and long life to Speaker Tobias and the rest of The Cabinet of the Confederacy of the Silver Charter. I trust this letter finds you in fair disposition.

Per your request, I have assembled a team of Corps researchers to study the remains of the unknown attackers recovered from the trade cog Fair Winds. We have transferred the bodies to a mountaintop facility to better utilize what magical talents we have at our disposal. The remainder of this missive summarizes our findings, though we eagerly await your summons to discuss the situation in more depth at The Cabinet's convenience.

An Undead Plant
The nature of the threat has been misrepresented. These attackers are not a new form of waterborne plant creature, at least not entirely. They look like animated humanoid bodies made of black seaweed, but we discovered two organisms in a symbiotic relationship when we started our examination: a sea devil wrapped in an almost-impenetrable casing of a strange seaweed.

So this is not an ocean version
of a Shambling Mound.
(Image from Forgotten Realms Wiki.)

We found two things of note when separating the plant from its aquatic humanoid host. First, the sea devil displayed signs of decay prior to the damage caused by the seaweed's attachment. Since these creatures were encountered far out to sea, they were too far from a controlling lich to keep them animated, especially given the magic suppression effect of the open ocean. Some of our team concluded that these are the more powerful, ritually-created Draug Zombies that can operate far from their animators. This worries us since the components for the Draug ritual cost far more than all but the richest privately-operating Necromancer can afford, especially given the overwhelming numbers reported in later attacks. If these are Draug Zombies, then there must be a well-funded nation bankrolling these attacks.

Second, the seaweed moved on its own even though we could detect no life. It seemed to seek out sources of necrotic energy, as it attached itself to a skeleton we had animated purely for experimental purposes. Immediately after the seaweed covered the skeleton, the combined creature broke free from our control and attacked us in an attempt to escape the room. We defeated the suddenly well-armored skeleton, but the seaweed appeared unharmed as it reached out for its next undead host.

Other Experiments Performed
Cyril, whose sense of humor has obviously been affected by his time spent in the experimental chambers deep under Hallowdeep, took to calling the black seaweed "Deadweed". A more proper name will be assigned to this newly-discovered organism at a later date, but for now the common name of Deadweed will suffice.

Is this a variant of a
Yellow Musk Creeper?
(Image seen at Giant
in the Playground)

From our experiments, we found that Deadweed will only bond with an undead creature. It feeds off the necrotic energy that animates its host but provides many benefits. Deadweed seems to exerts its own will, which some of our team thinks would allow control to extend far from an undead creature's creator, much like a Draug Zombie. We have no way to definitively prove which is correct, and the debate still rages at the time of this writing, so I present you with both ideas. Neither idea brings anyone much comfort.

I have sailed the Elven Sealanes in my youth, attaining the rank of Captain, and I have bent magic to my will after retiring to the land to study. Never before have I seen an intelligent necrotic plant like Deadweed. If an intelligence has created Deadweed to extend the reach of an undead army, then we must find and eliminate this threat at our earliest opportunity. Deadweed subverts the natural order of things and will strike against every living thing at will until we no longer have the strength to fight back.

I now believe Ana-Lesh sent me her warning dream about this situation. I beseech you to treat this new threat with the utmost seriousness and quickly organize as many Corps teams as possible to find its origin before we allow this blight to spread any further. I am no longer a young elf, but I gladly volunteer to aid in this endeavor.

Yours in service to the Corps,
- Capt. Oni-Talash, Research Team Leader

Game Notes for D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder
When bonded with an unintelligent undead creature, Deadweed provides increased defenses (+2 to AC and saves, plus DR 5/piercing) and resistance to fire (fire resist 10) by feeding on the negative energy animating the undead creature (-10% hit points). As an intelligent undead plant, Deadweed controls the undead creature, allowing its creator to give verbal commands (obeyed 75% of the time) while uncontrolled. This also makes the undead creature harder for anyone else to control, granting a +4 bonus on Will saves against Control Undead and similar effects. In D&D 3.5, this effect also gives a +4 level bonus against turn attempts. In Pathfinder, this effect grants a +4 bonus to Will saves against Channeled Energy and no damage on a successful save.

Deadweed can inflate or deflate internal air sacs to move itself and its host creature vertically in the water and maintain any desired depth. Patches of Deadweed can be found floating in salt water, attracted by the residual necrotic energies given off by dead creatures at a shipwreck or battle site. A large patch can attach to a freshly-dead corpse and animate it as a free-willed zombie in 10 minutes. Any Deadweed-bonded undead creature that kills a creature smaller than itself will break off a piece of the Deadweed and animate the corpse as a free-willed zombie in two rounds.

Check out the other entries in the May of the Dead Blog Carnival!

Alternate Tech Trees

Yesterday I commented on this G+ thread, where we were thinking about durability. Should a mature spacefaring culture build for permanence or recyclability? Both? Would they leave permanent artifacts on planets they've visited or would they follow the Prime Directive and make sure anything they use would decay quickly to keep from influencing indigenous life?

And it got me to thinking about technology, since you can follow the quick energy, fossil fuel using consumer culture, or a more harmonious culture of constant reuse, or even a more oddball basis like a living biological entity as the basis for technology instead of inert elements dug out of the ground. Changing from one approach to another one causes some interesting conflicts, like Mad Max or a Dystopian Steampunk setting. But what if we change the base assumptions instead?

I love Sid Meier's Civilization, but here's my problem: it assumes we're on the only viable path for technological development. Even the mods to the tech tree in the various hacks don't allow you to stretch beyond the structure of pottery-equivalent tech must come before masonry-equivalent tech. What happens when there's no societal need for building walls? If your entire race can fly, walls don't serve any useful purpose and seem downright silly. I'll digress in a different post about the fallacy of traditional castle design in a world where you can make people fly incredibly cheaply.

Technology is all about solving problems at a societal and personal level. The first issues humanity faced were really big: How can we all survive lean times when we can't get enough food from our environment? Our solutions to that problem were many: granaries to store food from year to year, farming techniques for better resource planning, and domesticated animals to bring food with us as we wandered the earth. But what happens when we change those answers? How do we envision a society whose fundamental technologies are so different that humanity evolves differently and advances through modernity on a completely alien vector?

The one approach I can see is to compile a list of cultural problems and think about different answers. The most basic problems involve getting enough food to free up members of the tribe to do something other than gather food all day. We went down the cultivation and domestication path, but would it be possible to stay hunters and gather enough surplus to allow for a class of scientists and inventors? What if we went a completely different path and someone provided a replicator that created food out of thin air? What would that do to the society? Would everyone focus on pursuits other than food gathering? Would everyone live a Logan's Run-esque life of leisure? Or would people effectively be enslaved by the people controlling the replicators?

Which solution to what societal issue would you like to change? I'm just musing out loud here, but if you've done any thinking in this area I'd welcome your input.

A D&D Pipe Dream

Reading @SarahDarkmagic's latest post, named Recently Initiated Loud Mouth, made me think of the pipe dream I had after Unearthed Arcana came out for D&D 3.5e. So instead of rambling on in a comment over there, I'll clutter up my own corner of the 'Net with it. Yes, it will require some work. Yes, it will be a different approach to D&D, and it may well be unpopular. But I'll tell you anyway because I like you.

Personalized Rulesets.

Centralize and digitize the rules, then let GMs pick the rules they want to include in their games. No elves? No problem! Uncheck the box and they're gone. Want inherent bonuses to avoid the magic item glut? Click and done. Alternate hit point and healing rules? You've got 3 options, go crazy. After the GM is done selecting rules, an email goes out to the players with a link to the character builder pre-loaded with campaign-specific options and ready to print or save as a file to use on other campaign-planning sites. Also, the GM can download a PDF of the hyperlink-riddled Rules Handbook for that particular campaign, complete with simple personalization like the campaign name in the header of each page.

As new rules come out, add them to the list of options, but they won't change any existing Rules Handbooks. You could offer "pre-set" rule choices so if you wanted a bare-bones Starter Box game or a Dark Sun game, one click would get you the rules as written which you could then customize. You could even extend this idea to allow sections of user-generated house rules inserted into specific locations within the PDF. If the author wishes to share his house rules with specific fellow GMs or even with the whole community, that's as easy as clicking a button.

For the publisher, this gives incredible insight into what rules and settings are popular, and so what products would be well received. For an enthusiastic fan base who create House Rules, the community can "vote up" a particular house rule by using it in their campaign. The publisher would have access to the house rule usage stats and provide a convenient stable of new rules and content authors. The publisher could approach the author of the house rule to develop the rule further to make it an official rules option through the rules site or develop it as a full-blown adventure or setting supplement.

Truth be told, I'm a systems guy. I love tinkering with how the world operates and then turning the players loose to figure out how the world works. I view rulesets as toolboxes, as ways to express the stories and scenes I have in my head. This approach would be the ultimate toolbox. You could cover the gamut from extremely rules-light Blue Book D&D to really crunchy settings like Birthright or Dark Sun with a click and a printout.

Further, it moves the rules from static book form to a digital format from the ground up. Integration with tablets and smartphones would be easy with a smart enough API. Granted, no core rulebooks other than the Rules Handbooks the GM prints means no aftermarket for used core products, which makes me a little sad. But I think the freedom granted to GMs more than makes up for it.

What do you think about this approach? Too radical? Too practical? Like it? Hate it? Do you want your five minutes back?

Crossing Genres

I saw a post from ShinobiCow over at The Dump Stat about the May RPG Blogger Carnival. This month is all about mixing genres in RPGs. And here I am, posting at the very last day in May - just under the wire! As players of the Adris game know, mixing genres is pretty common in my games. I'll look at a couple of my game settings and see what genres we can find.

Wumpus Quest
Wumpus Quest was a farce without boundaries from the very start. I wanted to make an oddball evil game, so I had people roll up evil characters and go to town. I started the absurdity early with the Book People - each person had a book and could only speak in quotes from that book. If you lucked out with a novel with heavy dialogue, good for you. If you had a dry reference book or, say, a dictionary, good luck with that.

After that, the characters tripped across a dimensional nexus shaped like a d8 with a different portal on each nexus. They jumped through and landed in a cyberpunk world, or in a land of dinosaurs, or in the middle of the French Revolution. Wumpus quest took time-hopping and wrote it large without regard for consequences since the characters just left after causing as much damage as possible. Ridiculous fun, but not very sustainable.

Adris
Adris started simply enough as straight high fantasy - it started as my D&D 3e test game that went on for 5 years and upgraded rulesets to 3.5 halfway through. It was based on an Evil PC game I started in college that would never work since the PCs did nothing but eye each other suspiciously once they got together. can you tell I had a thing for unsustainable games for a while? So I took those evil characters and made them go their separate ways, gaining power to become the bad guys behind the next game.

Since the Adris game was my D&D 3e test game, I downloaded and ran The Burning Plague as a starter. Things went well, then I spun off in my own direction, eventually discovering the older names of the gods, cultists trying to consume the world in black flame, defeating a lich who wants to ascend to become the god of Madness, reopening the Astral plane so all the gods can contact their followers, stopping the Drow from stealing all the world's magic (changing to 3.5 rules in the process), and rediscovering the space-faring races (elves, dwarves, and humans so far). The overarching story involves collecting the seven cubes, artifacts dedicated to each of the seven gods, which I detailed a bit over here on StackExchange.

There was a fair amount of high magic fantasy heroics, but once they started fighting mechs and stopped a shuttle from escaping, the players understood just how cross-genre this game could be if they wanted. I used a fair amount of Call of Cthulhu-style investigation in my heavily-modifiied running of L2 The Assassin's Knot. The party is starting to discover interstellar politics. The last adventure involved githyanki and shadow red dragons building a nuke using magic items as fissionable material. Present-day, far future, and fantasy worlds collide in the Adris game!

Highcastle

My Highcastle setting exists on one segment of a ringworld, with a tip of the hat to Larry Niven. It's set 10,000 years after the cataclysm on Earth, and the Great Elves helped the refugees settle in way back when. Technology and magic coexisted, then almost destroyed everything when war was declared to stop the summoning of The Nameless One. One continent was devastated with magical fusion weapons, creating the Sea of Glass, and The Nameless One was imprisoned on one of the Wandering Islands. Now the elves are charged with enforcing the Pact, which prevents humanity from developing technology. They can maintain current technology, like the ultra-modern septic system under Highcastle or the antigravity units holding the castle above the market square, but new development is strictly forbidden.

So that's post-apocalyptic, space opera, fantasy, and Secrets Man Was Not Meant To Know all rolled into one game, at least in the setting history. Granted, this was my first setting and I kept adding bits I thought were cool to the mix. Maybe it's grown beyond where it should, but it exists as my own playground so I think I'll keep adding to it as the mood strikes me.

During play, Highcastle has been mainly heroic fantasy, with other elements based on the group. When 4 PCs and 6 skeletons crammed themselves into a 10'x10' room and tried to duke it out, we coined the term "Keystone Cops Go Adventuring", and the rest of that game was filled with pun names and slapstick adventures. Later games were fairly heavy on the conspiracy front with shades of Call of Cthulhu seeping through the cracks, but they had their moments of outright laughter as well. This follows the Stargate SG-1 TV series model: It's a comedy at heart that deals with serious stories.

I remember the time the PCs summoned an imp to deliver a message. This imp wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, and it couldn't figure out how to break through the magical wards around the Transmuter's house. It had to deliver its message, so it got as close to the barrier as it could and shouted at the top of its lungs.

Thinking Cross-Genre
I try not to discard ideas just because they don't fit in the main genre I've chosen. Cool and story trumps environmental constraints like genre or game rules. If it adds something unique to your game, by all means sprinkle a different setting or play style into your game. That said, suddenly introducing your D&D group to the wide world of planetary intrigue without preamble might not get the most favorable response, especially if it seems to be deviating from your story by not building on the history the PCs have witnessed or made.

My best advice? Listen. Do what your group wants. If they keep making "I want something different" noises, throw them some oddball hooks and see which ones they bite on. People disappearing on nights with falling stars? Sounds like a decent hook. Will they buy alien abductions? In an ongoing campaign, it's your job as a GM to know the answer to questions like that.

I've done a lot of organic cross-genre campaigns because I have an awesome group of players who can really roll with the punches. If you can convince your players to leave their expectations at the door, you can probably do the same thing. In any case, be very clear with your players that you're planning on taking a left with your genres and play style or you'll be dealing with failed expectations and hurt feelings.

Remember, it's a game. If it ain't fun, it ain't worth it.