Low-fantasy D&D aliens?
I want to stick aliens 👽🛸 into my next D&D campaign. My idea is to have little grey men show up in a flying saucer and abduct the party. However, I’m worried that this is too comprehensible for the average #DnD character. I want the PCs to be confused, but not the players! What’s the weirdest alien you’ve ever thrown at your D&D party?
Side note, I also want to give the baddies #mechs. How do I mechanically handle this?
For your average d&d party, stuff like getting zapped to another plane of existence, potentially including literal hell or a plane made up entirely of gears, isn’t an entirely unexpected circumstance. I played in a game one where due to some crazy shit happening to us in the feywild we ended up in sort of the backrooms of the D&D multiverse with an impossibly long tapestry hung on the wall that was a physical manifestation of the weave.
Between those sorts of hijinks and flying around on spelljammers through interplanar space with crystal spheres and all of that mumbo-jumbo, aliens, space travel, and alien technology almost look tame in comparison.
I feel like your best bet to really confuse the characters is probably to have aliens simulating a normal d&d environment for them- maybe the room they wake up in on the ship looks very much like a stereotypical d&d tavern, but little details are wrong. Maybe there’s a bard strumming away on his lute but his fingers don’t quite match up with the notes he’s playing, and the bartender asks if the party would like a “brewed and fermented barley beverage” instead of an “ale”
And the clothing the rest of the people there is all strangely generic and maybe a little dated and things are just generally not adding up, like why is there a red wizard from thay happily playing cards with a waterdavian city guard, and why is that guard drinking in his uniform? and are we even in waterdeep right now? because the elf at the table over there is reading a baldurian newspaper, and also holding it upside down. And is it just me, or are there a whole lot of twins and triplets here?
But things like detect magic aren’t turning up anything fishy because it’s not magic, it’s science.
And maybe when you try to tap someone on the shoulder to ask what the hell is going on, you phase right through them because they’re all holograms. A simulation orchestrated by the alien abductors to help the party feel more comfortable and so that they can study them in something close to their natural environment.