Freaks and Oddities

[RPG Post]

Oddities, Grotesqueries and Chills

The Discovery Channel has a new show, Oddities that can add horror, humor or just new color to your rpg campaign. The store, Obscura Antiques and Oddities in New York, carries, well, everything from medical artifacts, body parts and fossilized dung to guitar playing frogs, mannequins and hand grenades. Just browsing a shelf gives me tons of story ideas (does anyone think the pregnancy test commercial Discovery put in front of this video on pustule peeling is wrong?)

Somehow related but from a complete different search, Ralph Eugene Meatyard is a photographer. Of the surreally creepy. A Google search on his name pulls up some evocatively disturbing black and whites, some NSFW. If you're looking for that through the cracked looking glass something special, check out his work.

The real world is full of unreality.

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Freakshows and Freaks

If you are running a pulp adventure, a horror campaign or a one-shot in need of the different, besides Meatyard and NSFW Joel Peter Witkin there are tons of artists and photographers that focus on the grotesque. Remember to search for “grotesque” not “gross” or you are likely to end up with [absolutely with no conditions NSFW, so no link provided] Tub Girl, Stile Project (now mostly hardcore) or Three Sixes, which may require brain bleach after viewing. I look so you don't have to.

Youtube has many videos of 20th and 21st century Freak Shows.

The Jim Rose Circus and Coney Island Circus Sideshow both have some performers with styles to drop into your game. You might mine the FreakShow Delux too for some carnie delight. And Google Images, of course, has infinite jumping off points to add that special something eerie to your campaign.

Tod Browning's Freaks has been slammed as exploitive.

It has been hailed as revolutionary. It destroyed Tod Browning's career. It does use real handicapped human beings, but exploitive? Browning cared about them the characters. He gave them lives and dreams and personalities. His years with the circus gave him a better perspective than most of his viewers, and in the end “We have met the enemy and he is us.”