Weird events and traditions should be in every world as it is not just more fun, it's more realistic. For example, during the Battle of Ager Sanguinis, Crusaders and Arabs fought against... Crusaders and Arabs; and in 1739, the British went to war against the Spanish over an ear. Weirdness in a world makes it more interesting, inviting, and alive.
The Battle of Ager Sanguinis
On 1119, near Sarmada (modern Syria), two armies lined up against each other and marched towards total annihilation in what would be known as the Battle of Ager Sanguinis. People remember this battle for a peculiar reason: Crusaders and Arabs fought on both sides.
In context, it makes sense. Crusader mercenaries fought for the Arab leader Ilghazi for a range of reasons: some were former prisoners; others were bitter at corruption and broken promises; Arab leaders often paid better; or they felt more loyalty to the local army.
In the same way, Arabs fought for Roger of Antioch because some had been fighting for the Crusaders for nearly 25 years; very loyal troops could earn more than regular soldiers, but it meant sticking with one leader. Additionally, converted and native Christians were in their ranks; they preferred Christian rule to Muslim law.
Events seeming strange from a distance are more common than you might think.
The Assassins' Plot
During the same war, the Order of Assassins tried to sell out Damascus to the Crusaders, a vital city that could've solved critical shortages. Yet, this group wanted to give it away to their most obvious enemy.
Perhaps the Assassins saw an opportunity to strengthen their own power base or they saw the Crusaders as a tool for punishing misbehaving allies. Maybe it was a bit of both. Regardless of the reason, they were unsuccessful as the local leadership stopped the plot.
Context is important, but it only makes sense after careful consideration and most people only focus on the main characters. Everything else becomes secondary (e.g. politics, intrugue, war, etc.), it is all about the way it affects the characters they care about.
Low Engagement
Many gamemasters (GM) complain that players don't engage with their world. Sometimes, this is a valid complaint that needs discussion outside of the gaming session. But other times, it is unrealistic to expect engagement over unusable information.
Passive gameplay is difficult. So, unless players' characters (PCs) have influence over the world and get rewarded for their troubles, they have very little motivation to seek it out.
In their advice section for Apocalypse World, D. Vincent and Meguey Baker recommend putting everything in the crosshairs. What this means is that everything from villages to kingdoms and even the gods themselves should be changeable as long as the players work hard for it.
Making the world weird is a good way to guide the players to certain places or stories. Building a world on perfect logic is tempting, but it is the unusual that stands out: legends and myths are memorable because they break this expectation and demand your attention!
A perfect world is an enemy to change and interaction.
Of course, logic and consistency are the base, but the weird makes the world feel alive. For instance, if a kingdom hunts down magic users, it becomes much more interesting if the PCs discover a non-player character (NPC) who hides and protects warlocks.
Love the Goddess of War
Then there is emotion.
The ancient Greeks feared Aphrodite above all other gods. The hunter Hippolytus, the enchantress Medea, and the city of Troy are just a few that ended in disaster due to Aphrodite's anger. Even Zeus feared and envied the goddess' ease at influencing events.
Aphrodite’s rival was Athena. Or, put another way, the enemies of love were strategy and wisdom. The ancient Greeks were well aware that love could end a dynasty overnight: fall in love with the wrong person, and all logic gets pushed out the window.
Emotion is hard to sustain as an ongoing cause for long, but it makes a fantastic trigger.
The War of Jenkins' Ear
In 1731, British Captain Robert Jenkins was sailing in the Caribbean. Spanish guards stopped and a fight ensued, resulting in a Spanish soldier slicing off his ear. The story goes, Jenkins presented his ear to the Houses of Parliament and they started a war with Spain.
Aphrodite might have had a hand here, too. In some versions, it was Jenkins’ wife or lover who showed the ear.
Factually, the war started 8 years after the initial fight. Consequently, it’s hard not to see problems with the story.
Staged or otherwise, the politicians really did seize on this performance. British politicians sought Spain's trade links and used the ear to grow anti-Spanish sentiment. However, a war over trade is boring, but a war over an ear is intriguing.
Long-Term Weirdness
![A photo of a shiba inu dog wearing a pink shower cap. Illustrates [alt text].](https://www.michaelghelfistudios.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/pexels-shvetsa-4588016.webp "pexels-shvetsa-4588016")
Weird isn’t just for the short-term. Done often enough, it gets baked into a culture. There's always logic, but culture can get so tangled up that the connection isn’t always obvious.
Consider the gods of Rome. Mars, the god of war, was also the god of farming. Cloacina was the Roman goddess of sewers and purity. Even Venus, the goddess of love, reigned over victories and battles.
Norse mythology had Odin, a war god who was the patron of poetry. Xipe Totec, of the Aztecs, covered farming and flayed skin. Veles from Slavic belief ruled over cows, wealth, and the dead. Ganesha is a Hindu god of scribes and obstacles. Then there's Sedna, an Inuit goddess of the sea and lost fingers.
Upon closer analysis, these combinations have explanations, but without context these stories grab more interest. A pantheon of deities that are all perfectly logical isn't nearly as interesting.
Leaving Space to Breathe
In one interview, Rick Priestly, one of the creators of Warhammer 40,000, describes the shift in ideas over worldbuilding. Priestly calls his approach deliberately chaotic, with lots of gaps and contradictions.
In the third edition, Priestly gave control to Andy Chambers and Chambers was much more logical in his approach. The economics made sense, the contradictions were explained, intentional gaps were filled. He made it a lot more rational.
Both approaches are valid as it is better to think of them on a spectrum than a binary choice. A GM or writer will transition between the two as they create their world.
However, intentional gaps are a must.
Gaps, contradictions, and the weird give the audience a lot to engage with. There’s space for their imagination to breathe, their own ideas to grow, and their characters to effect change.
The goal of worldbuilding isn’t to make a cool world. It’s to create a space where characters can do cool things, be active forces of change, and colour in the gaps the GM or writer has left for them.
Specific to tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs), a seamless world is the GM equivalent of a player writing a long, detailed backstory without gaps—there’s no space for others to join in the story making. A fantastic mental exercise, to be sure; however, here are some tips on how to dodge that particular problem.
Fun at the table means everyone active and making meaningful contributions to the story unfolding.
Don't Be Afraid to Have Fun with the Weird
The brilliant Terry Pratchett had a scene in The Thief of Time where two characters perform a solemn ritual to enter a monastery. They go through the formal rites of searching for a key they know they don’t have, taking turns to pat their pockets in a certain order, using call and response to declare they don’t actually have the key. Ritual completed, the door opens.
Going this deep into satire isn’t necessary, but it’s a good reminder that some traditions don't make much sense any more. Layers stacked on layers without question over the years can build up to some real weirdness. And it's amazing. It’s also an opportunity to ease in some light-heartedness, something even grimdark worlds need from time to time.
Consider, for a moment, the save symbol on a computer is still a floppy disk (actually a 3.5” diskette, #NeverForget). This is despite no one born after 1994 is likely to have seen one, much less have a clue on what to do with it (let alone have the hardware to make use of it)!
There are plenty others too; you just have to look.
Make the World Weird
Adding the weird doesn’t just make a world more interesting and more natural, it’s more likely to grab an audience’s attention and stick in the memory; it will help fire up excitement and it gives more to engage with. Weird is wonderful. So, go for it!
Good luck!
![A photo of a woman holding a lightbulb. Illustrates [alt text].](https://www.michaelghelfistudios.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/pexels-biasousa-2213050.webp)
![A close up photograph of a gold-lined medieval helm. Illustrates [alt text].](https://www.michaelghelfistudios.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/HEADERKnightEyeslit.unsplash.carlos-felipe-ramirez-mesa-X9nrbX_Scn4.webp)
