Topic: Refereeing weird fantasy (esp. of the historical sort)
After reading a few adventures, articles, and deciding that I really want to set up a group to play LotFP with, I am struck with a bit of, well, uncertainty. As in "okay, here's all this delightfully horrible stuff, now what am I supposed to do with it".
As Zak S. explained awesomely in an older post, the best DnD campaigns should be like a picaresque, with interesting heroes tumbling from adventure to adventure, and becoming even more interesting as a side effect, or dying in an unceremonious and sometimes funny way.
My uncertainty comes from the fact that all LotFP adventures I've read so far are extremely heavy, extremely weird (or should I say "fucked up"), and make a TPK an extremely likely occurrence. Not that I'm complaining, but if this is all the characters - and thus the players - ever see, it becomes commonplace. And I'm not sure if it should become commonplace.
However, I am at a loss about what could comprise the "filler episodes" between occurrences of major crazy.
In a DnDesque fantasy world, I'd just throw minor dungeons and semi-weird magicians in their way, some robberies, some exploration that yields strange artifacts that only hint at fucked-up things (instead of throwing them in the players' face), etc. And then drop the nuke.
In a semi-historical setting, I'm not sure how that would look. Fighting regular human robbers, and looting perfectly regular castles of regular corrupt noblemen under the veil of the night might be too unfantastic, but adding magic without the seriously weird and fucked up feels like watering down the "weird", and just getting some random historical fantasy.
How do you guys handle this?