Weirdness Magnet for PLACES, not characters?

[vicky_molokh]

Greetings, all!

Anyone got experience with settings/campaigns where a place is a weirdness magnet? Particularly one that makes it harder and more dangerous, but not impossible, to live there in the long term.

I'm currently trying to come up with ideas for a zone of alienation, which is home for dangerous anomalous phenomena . . . and a desperate people who decided to live there nonetheless (look here if you're curious).

I'm looking for things that are weird in an anomalous way, perhaps somewhat analogous to Roadside Picnic (but I neither read the Picnic, nor do I want to make/plagiarise stuff that would be recognizably from there; so reading it is probably counterproductive). Dangerous, occasionally deadly if not treated carefully, but mostly possible to avoid or deal with if one knows what one is doing.

Ideas so far:

• Aurorae, occasional radio static, and some sort of field interfering with the setting's reactionless drives.
• Water in some ponds behaving somewhat like a superfluid despite not being supercooled.
• Plants with contact poisons that do nothing immediately, but cause chemical burns after some amount of time spent exposed to sunlight (this one taken from real life).
• Mildly corrosive rainfall (perhaps slightly cinematically so).
• Weird adjustments in the temperatures at which things change their aggregate state. Alternatively, places where aggregate states are inexplicitly skipped, e.g. ice evaporating instead of melting, steam solidifying instead of condensing.
• Gravity adjustments in strength and/or direction (duh).

Any other good ideas - either specific examples or general advice?
Thanks in advance!

[WingedKagouti]

You mean beyond IOU?

[Culture20]

Man-Thing's swamp, the Nexus of All Realities in the Florida Everglades.

[Flyndaran]

-1 darkness penalty from gloom that never seems to leave despite areas that seem like they should be fully lit.

Birds that fall silent for periods of time for no discernible reason.
Rain from blue skies aka sun showers.

Regions of soil where nothing grows well even if carefully tended and given fertilizer.

Locales where self control roles are 1 point harder, especially for certain emotions.
Anger Ridge; Weeping Hollow; Lazy Town.

(That last one's a joke on an Icelandic Kid's show.)

[sgtcallistan]

In a Supers game I 'borrowed' superteam Excalibur's lighthouse base as an idea.

My superteams' base was a Superschool in an English Country house; one that happened to have a parallel house, tower or ring of stones in numerous magical, dimensional, temporal and even planar variations.

Frex, the house as was had been used as a site to train Commandos in WWII, it also had existed as early as 1790 in it's present form, with an Elizabethan version earlier, a medieval hall before that, and so on.

In the cellar were stones that corresponded with a magician's tower in a 'fantasy' environment;
in the woods nearby was a stone that linked to a location with elves, pixies (nasty ones) and a mermaid revealed this by arriving in the swimming pool;
under the house was a WWII bunker that also existed a hundred or so years hence, when robots and supers were fighting;
a thousand years hence, the river and lake below the house were a sewer under a vast city, where archaeologists were digging up one character's collection of CD's, etc.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Greetings, all!

Anyone got experience with settings/campaigns where a place is a weirdness magnet?

Pretty much any campaign that stays at a single location has this at least implicitly.

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Pretty much any campaign that stays at a single location has this at least implicitly.

Sunnydale, California, for example. One of the vague ideas I have is that all high mana regions, or perhaps just very high mana regions, which are generally smaller and fewer in number, are Weirdness Zones as a side effect. Also appropriate for wild mana zones.

[The Benj]

Damn fine coffee.

[Jerander]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

[*]Plants with contact poisons that do nothing immediately, but cause chemical burns after some amount of time spent exposed to sunlight (this one taken from real life).

Phitophoto reactions. Not fun. My hands have finally stopped pealing (after about a month) from a chemical burn generated by lime juice. The discoloration will last weeks/months/years depending on how it heals...I kid you not...

Ideas:
1) Small stones that float in mid-air until you are about to look at them. You see the motion, see/hear the result, but don't ever really witness the stones floating.

2) Vaguely glowing mists.

3) Areas with surprisingly high densities of a type of insect.

4) Plants/flowers that leave a semi-permanent coloring when part/petals are crushed.

[Phantasm]

The Black Forest in Germany has a lot of legends surrounding it, as does the Bermuda Triangle. Either one could be mined for ideas regarding a weirdness magnet locale.