How weird is your game? How weird would you like your game to be? Do you suffer from weirdness-creep? These thoughts and others have been jiggling around in my brain, frothing up to the surface every now and then. So I'm spewing them onto (not) paper so I can leave them alone for a while.
Let's imagine you can split games by the level of inherent weirdness, shall we? At one end of the spectrum you have no-weird games, things are broadly coherent, you don't get things just happening. I'm going right back to old-school times and say that Traveller is a good example of a no-weird game. OK, so we have psionics, FTL travel and aliens, but everything pretty much follows a set of hard and fast rules; they're different but not weird.
On the other end of the spectrum you have a game like the excellent Grok?! where you meet someone who turns out to be a robot piloted by a goldfish time-traveller and no-one bats an eyelid. If they have eyelids, or eyes. Or exist. It's glorious and wild.
Between those two extremes, though is a world of variation. I'm going to callously split that whole technicolour world into two camps, low-weird and high-weird, very much like low-magic and high-magic fantasy settings. Actually, incredibly like that...
Low-weird settings are where pretty much everything seems normal, but there are some weirdnesses. I'm going to put Call of Cthulhu in this category, which may sound controversial. Think of it this way; sure, there are eldritch horrors and unspeakable denizens, but most of the world is just normal. Your breakfast cereal doesn't turn out to be just eyeballs and your neighbour doesn't turn out to be a wizard without good reason. It just seems to be high-weird because your cheery little investigators are obsessed with looking for that stuff, they're courting the weird, so it appears prevalent. A bit like if you're a rat-catcher, you think the world is full of rats. Though it is full of rats, apparently, so maybe this is a bad example.
High-weird settings are where it's quite likely your neighbour is a wizard, the chef in the diner is an otherworldly traveller and that kid really is a spy for the secret services. That may sound like it's stealing turf from the gonzo end of the spectrum and there is, of course, a healthy overlap, but I'd suggest the difference is that there's a lot of weirdness in a high-weird setting but less chaotic weirdness, where the ground will slip under your feet. I'm going to suggest that Dungeon Crawl Classics is a high-weird game. There's a fertile ground of straight-out strange stuff, but it does tend to be specified weirdness rather than gonzo chaos, if that makes sense?
Why does any of this matter? Well, it doesn't, really. But I think it's interesting in thinking about the sort of game you run or play in, and what you enjoy. I've always thought that I like to live in the low-weirdness shelf when it comes to running games - not all the time, but as a default heading.
Only that's observably not true. In retrospect, and having thought about it a bit and consider games I've run back into the mists of time, my 'default' is this: start off swearing allegiance to low-weird and slowly (or quickly) move to high-weird. As an example, I ran Mausritter last year and had a blast. It started with a few odd things being there to discover, mostly generated through the hexcrawl generation procedures that are a real strength of the game. But... I embellished. The story turned from one of casual adventuring to a tale of a meteor heading on a collision course, a mysterious cave that had an astronomical clock counting down and a half-fungus owl sorcerer with a horde of strawberry-jelly amoebas to do its bidding. There were some philosopher newts as well, they were cool, I liked the newts.
What I struggle with is whether high-weird is a good thing or not. Do your players appreciate it more with a small amount of weirdness to really focus on and investigate, or is the even-the-milkman-is-an-alien approach more fun or is it overwhelming. As a mental exercise, I can see that different groups will prefer different models, but as a fretful referee I want my players to have their best game and I want to solve this knotty question.
I would probably worry this idea less if I wasn't aware (now) of my tendency for weirdness-creep. I feel like I'm a runaway pony and someone needs to step in and slow the gallop down. But maybe it comes across as fun to players? I can see me doing again in the game of The Lost Bay that I'm running at the moment; I'm really enjoying creating the landscape of this excellent 1990s suburban horror game, but I can see myself embellishing again.
Even now, I have a head full of ideas of the people inhabiting the world. Arkadi, the diner owner and Salte, who waits the tables only just entered the game (last night). But I've already got some plans for both of them. And I'm not sure if I should plunge headfirst into that, or just stick with the level of weirdness we've already got (including the effigy of a god, an underground boating society and what might be a Roman relic that's lodged in a character's arm, just for starters).
Nah, who am I kidding, Arkadi and Salte are going to fun, I can't help myself, send help!
On a final word - the pictures here were made by Roque Romero. They were part of an old-school collection that's available for a tiny fee for use in any projects. This is the second time I've used them and they rock. You should check them, and the other assets here: https://roque-romero.itch.io/old-school-revisited