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Weird, Whimsy & Wonder: fill your TTRPG sessions with awe!

Created by Cezar Capacle

A playful tool to make your TTRPG moments weird, whimsical, and wondrous. Skip the tired tropes and turn any plain creature, place, event, or item into something worth remembering!

Latest Updates from Our Project:

Help Me Choose What to Draw (and Colorize!) 🎨🍄🦒
6 months ago – Tue, Nov 04, 2025 at 03:11:06 AM

Hello folks!

Time for your weekly update!

There’s been a lot of unsexy layout work happening behind the scenes lately—nothing too exciting to show yet, though it’s all crucial progress. But while that’s cooking in the background, I’d love your help deciding what my next full-page illustration should be.

I’ve picked out two public domain images that I plan to redraw and paint using the book’s color palette, and I can’t decide which one to tackle first.

Option 1: a giant mushroom forest, one of my favorite tropes in weird fantasy.




Option 2: a giraffe-unicorn-spiral hybrid (yes, you read that right).

So—what do you think? Which one should I work on next? Cast your vote in the poll below!

💥 Shoutout: Dirt City Blues


Before I go, I want to give a shoutout to my good friend Raffaele, who launched his new game Dirt City Blues on BackerKit — and he’s only got 7 days left to wrap it up!


If you’re into Tarantino-style chaos meets Sin City grit, this one’s for you. It’s a neon-soaked noir TTRPG set in a city that never left the late ’80s, full of burned-out badasses, bad decisions, and beautifully messy redemption arcs.

The game looks incredible (and knowing Raffaele, it’ll play just as sharply). Go check out Dirt City Blues on BackerKit and show him some love before the campaign closes. It’s pure pulp energy, and I couldn’t be happier to see it out in the wild.

That’s it for today — much love, take care, and talk soon.
—Cezar

New Art (and a Shoutout!) 🎨🤠
6 months ago – Tue, Oct 28, 2025 at 09:16:35 AM

Missed the campaign? No worries! The pre-order store is now open. You can grab Weird, Whimsy & Wonder and all the add-ons that were available during the campaign right here.

Hello folks!

Time for your weekly update!

As I mentioned in the last one, I’ve been focusing more on the art side of things lately. Between a bunch of sketches and works in progress, I’ve got two finished pieces I can finally share with you today.


🎨 Whimsy Chapter Page

This is the Whimsy chapter opener! You might remember I started this one weeks ago but had to pause because of a pain flare-up. In hindsight, that break turned out to be a blessing—it gave me time to let the concept mature.


It’s the first piece where I’ve tried watercolor-style brushes with charcoal hatching, and honestly, I’m really happy with the result. It’s playful, light, and a bit silly—exactly what Whimsy should feel like.

Illustrating a full book for the first time has been a journey of discovery, and each new page pushes me to experiment with techniques and styles I’ve never tried before.


🌀 The Infinite Echo

The second piece is one I’ve been sitting on for a while: the art inspired by the “infinite echo” incident from our campaign launch livestream. Someone suggested turning that bizarre moment into a painting—and after many weeks of letting it simmer, I finally found a way to bring it to life.


This one leans more surreal and eerie—old monitors in a desert, each screen holding a head with different astonished faces. It captures that disorienting weirdness of the echo loop perfectly (at least, I hope it does!).

I’d resisted mixing styles across the book for the sake of visual consistency—but then I realized: this is a book about breaking expectations. So, why not embrace that? Each page can have its own tone, its own experiment, its own flavor of weirdness. Now that I’ve accepted that, I feel free.


❤️ Shoutout Time

Before I go, I want to give a quick shoutout to Critical Kit, who are currently crowdfunding Death Valley, a horror western TTRPG by Aaron Bryant.


You play as the undead wandering the desolate West. If that sounds like your vibe, check it out here. It looks super rad.

That’s it for today! I’ll be taking a short two-day break to rest my arm and do some layout, but I’m already excited to get back to the drawing table after that.

Much love, and talk soon,
—Cezar

How Do You Use Shifts?
6 months ago – Tue, Oct 21, 2025 at 04:00:37 AM

Top of the morning, folks!

Can you believe it’s already been another week?

Psst! Hey—you! Have you answered your pledge survey yet? No? Well, 95% of backers already have! Don’t miss out. Check your email, and if you didn’t receive it, just click this link, enter the email you used for the campaign, and BackerKit will resend it to you.

Now—back to the update!


⚙️ Shifts: What Are They, and How Do You Use Them?


On the last update, one of you mentioned that a deeper explanation on Shifts would be helpful, since they can feel a bit abstract. And I completely agree.

Up until now, all you had was a list of 18 verbs—and no clear direction on how to apply them. It’s easy to overlook how integral those verbs are to the whole procedure, and how much they help you hit the tone you’re aiming for.

I’m happy to report that the Shift Table is now done! It includes not only the verbs, but also prompt questions to help you think about what each shift could mean in context.


If you need a quick refresher: to transform something using the tool, you start with something ordinary, choose what to change (a Trait), and then choose how to change it (a Shift).

So, for example, if you pick the trait Material and the shift Combine, you might—using your Seeds as inspiration—combine two different materials into one creation. That’s the basic idea. But some combinations aren’t as straightforward as that, and that’s where interpretation comes in.

To help with that, I added two pages explaining the three main ways I approach combining Shifts and Traits, using a sword as an example. (Layout still in progress!)



I think this will give you a solid starting point—but, of course, nothing replaces practice. The more you use it, the more your creative muscles will flex, and the easier it becomes to craft something truly original. Speaking of practice... 


🧠 Examples Are Done!


I don’t think I realized what I was signing up for when I started writing the examples. I wanted six examples for each of the three flavors—Weird, Whimsy, and Wonder—for all twelve subjects. That’s 216 examples total.

Why so many? Well, firstly, I wanted enough to illustrate how you can interpret and bend the results you get from the tables. But besides that, there's another advantage: the examples themselves became another random table.

That’s right—you can roll directly on the examples! You’ll get 216 ready-made entries you can use as inspiration or drop straight into your game. Even though that’s not the main purpose of the tool, it’s a neat bonus for anyone who wants a quick spark without starting from scratch.

By the end of it, I was honestly feeling like I’d never stop writing—but I’m thrilled with how it turned out. The breadth and variety are wild, and while I’m mentally exhausted, I couldn’t be happier with the results. (All that’s left is one last revision pass before layout.)


🎨 What’s Next


Things are moving along nicely! Over the next few weeks, I’ll be shifting gears to focus on art—full-page pieces, margin illustrations, and everything in between. I’m preparing myself (and my spine!) for a drawing marathon, and hopefully my body will cooperate this time around.

(Side note: I've heard somewhere that using emojis on titles is considered an AI thing?? I'm just... millennial. I think they are neat! I'll keep using them—and my beloved em-dashes, thank you very much.)

That’s it for today! Don’t forget to fill out your surveys, and as always, thank you for being part of this weird, whimsical, and wondrous ride.

Talk soon,
—Cezar

A Table You Can Use Today (Plus Examples!) 🎲
6 months ago – Tue, Oct 14, 2025 at 04:05:02 AM

Greetings, everyone!

Time for your weekly update on the development of the book!

This week I’ve got something special to share: one of the tables from Weird, Whimsy & Wonder that you can use right now in your games.

I say this several times throughout the book: crafting weird, whimsical, or wondrous details is one thing, but for them to truly land, your descriptions need to carry them.

I don’t know about you, but I often fall into certain habits when describing scenes. Some aspects come naturally (like color or light for me) but I tend to forget others that could make a moment really come alive. That’s where this table comes in.

🎭 The Framing Table

The Framing Table is designed to help you enrich your scene descriptions. It’s divided into three layers—you can roll a d6 for each column to build rich, multisensory details, or pick and mix the ones that inspire you. Here it is (not final layout):



It’s not meant to limit what you should describe; instead, it’s a gentle nudge to look at parts of the scene we usually overlook. The first layer deals with what’s immediately perceived, the second dives into subtler cues, and the third explores what your character (or the "audience") might feel or understand beyond sight.

Best of all, it’s universally applicable, so you can use it in any game, right now, to help with prepping your next session, or if you're playing solo and want to make things feel more vivid.


✍️ Examples in Progress

Besides finishing up the tables, I’m now working on adding examples. At this point in development, I’m so close to the tool that everything feels obvious to me—but I have to remind myself that for most readers, this will be their first encounter with it (unless they’ve already tinkered with the online demo). And even though the procedure itself is simple, it’s also quite a peculiar way of approaching scene creation—especially when it comes to interpreting all the combined elements like Seeds, Traits, and Shifts.

That’s why including just a single example in the procedural section wouldn’t be enough. From the beginning, it was always part of the plan to offer a variety of examples that you can not only use as plug-and-play ideas if you wish, but more importantly, as windows into the thought process behind using the tables. Each example shows how you might interpret, bend, or even ignore a rolled result and instead follow whatever sparks your imagination.

I’m writing examples for all twelve Subjects in the book—people, creatures, locations, events, and more—across all three flavors, showing the random rolls I started with and how I shaped them into a finished piece.

Here are two samples:

Subject: Event
Flavor: Weird
Seeds: Isolated – Lens – Potion
Trait: Costs / Requirements
Shift: Disguise
Framing: Smell / Taste

The apothecary closes the square and passes a single brass lens. Only through that lens does each potion show its rightful drinker—colors and scents shift until one recipe “settles” sweet on the tongue. Everyone waits in silence; only one person may taste per turn. Without the lens, every bottle seems identical and wrong.

Subject: Creature
Flavor: Wonder
Seeds: Shiny – Bird – Road
Trait: Behavior / Activity
Shift: Invert
Framing: Focus / Angle

Mirrortail Cranes wade in shallow salt flats, their tails long, flat, and silvered. When they feed, the birds dip their heads below and raise their tails high, reflecting the sky perfectly upside down. A whole flock at once makes the plain look two worlds deep. Travelers say the gods once taught them this posture, so the world would remember how to bow.

I’m having an absolute blast crafting these. I’ve been using the tool hundreds of times now and discovering all sorts of strange and delightful results—I can’t wait for you to try it yourselves.


📬 Quick Reminder


We’re at 94% completed surveys on BackerKit—thank you! If you haven’t filled yours yet, please check your email. If you missed it, click this link, enter the email you used for the campaign, and BackerKit will resend it.

Thanks so much for reading, and I hope you have fun with the Framing Table. 

Talk soon!
—Cezar

The Hardest d66 Table I’ve Ever Designed 🎲
7 months ago – Mon, Oct 06, 2025 at 03:44:00 AM

Missed the campaign? No worries! The pre-order store is now open. You can grab Weird, Whimsy & Wonder and all the add-ons that were available during the campaign right here.

Hi folks!

Time for your weekly update on the development of the book!

This week, I decided to give my neck and arm a bit of a rest (no drawing marathons for now), so I focused on getting more of the tables into proper layout format. And while doing that, I thought it would be fun to share a peek behind the curtain—specifically at what might be the hardest d66 table I’ve ever designed.

It’s called the TRAITS Table, and you can see it below in its rawest form—no margin art yet, just the bones of it.


🧩 The Story

Since the very start of this project, I knew I didn’t want to make just another book of random tables with prewritten “weird” entries to drop into your campaign. Don’t get me wrong—I love those books, and they’re incredibly useful. But they have two limitations:

  1. They’re not always a perfect fit for the specific moment you’re in, and
  2. They’re finite—once you’ve used an entry, it’s spent.

Instead, I wanted Weird, Whimsy & Wonder to empower you to start from something ordinary and transform it—make it weird, whimsical, or wondrous. But that led to the big question: what part of a thing should you change?

That’s where the TRAITS Table was born.


⚙️ The Design Challenge

Some aspects of things are easy to imagine changing—size, shape, color, maybe sound. But I wanted to go further. I wanted to make a list that could apply equally to people, places, items, creatures, and events. Broad enough to be universal, but specific enough to inspire.

And, wow, was that a task.

Check out some pages of my notebook with early sketches of the list:


Game design is funny like that—sometimes you can write 20 pages in a few hours, and sometimes it takes two weeks to come up with 36 words. I spent countless hours analyzing random tables from all sorts of sources (shoutout to The Weird by Monte Cook Games!) and trying to reverse-engineer what aspect of a normal thing had been changed to make it strange or awe-inspiring. Then came the hard part: merging ideas, cutting overlaps, and keeping the list capped at 36 entries to fit the d66 format.

There were a lot of “kill your darlings” moments. But eventually, I landed on a final list that I’m truly proud of.

Some entries are simple and self-explanatory; others are more abstract and invite interpretation. That’s why this table is followed by detailed explanations and examples for each entry—three per trait, to show how it might manifest in different contexts.

Below, you’ll see an early layout of those explanations for the first few entries (still without the decorative margins).



💡 Reflections

I’m proud of how this one turned out. From the outside, it might look like a simple list—but I think that’s a good sign. If something feels intuitive and obvious in the end, it probably means the hard work behind it paid off.

I hope you enjoyed this little peek behind the design process!


🧾 Quick Reminders

  • Surveys: 91% of backers have completed their BackerKit surveys—thank you! If you haven’t yet, please take a moment to do so; it really helps speed things up.

  • Didn’t receive the email? Click here and enter the email you used for the campaign—BackerKit will resend your survey link automatically.

  • Pre-Order Store: Missed the campaign? No worries! The pre-order store is now open. You can grab Weird, Whimsy & Wonder and all the add-ons that were available during the campaign right here.

Thank you all again for your continued support and encouragement! 

Have a great week—and stay weird!

— Cezar