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Never Run Out Of Dungeon...

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I draw these on the backs of index cards. I've got like 20 of them so far.

Each one has 4 exits on the outer edge so I can just line up another random card if the players walk off.

They're good for when the party goes past what you've got planned--I stole a lot of these ideas from Undermountain.






Vornheim, Stonehell, Eldritch Weirdness, The God That Crawls, Warm Inner Glow

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The Bundle Of Holding has packaged up some DIY D&D classics--and that thing I wrote--to sell them to you and help those in need while doing it.

In order to get Vornheim you have to pay more than average for the bundle--so more than like 12 bucks or so at the moment. But the faster you do it, the cheaper it is.

Also in the bundle:

Swords & Wizardry and Adventurer Conqueror King (no need to pick your clone! Mash 'em up)
Matt Finch's Eldritch Weirdness (the most inventive and inspiring collection of spells the Old School's produced)
Tomb Of The Iron God (also by Matt Finch so probably awesome)
Stonehell (the only big dungeon you can actually use at the table!)
The God That Crawls (cute map tricks and bad blobs!)

and more...

So, yeah, if you've ever had any interest in any of this stuff, I recommend doing it now, while it's cheap and helps people with cancer and feeds the homeless.

Only 4 days left...

And now, the best promo video in the history of selling stuff

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Absolutely Sublime And Unimprovable

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Sometimes someone will try to devise games or ways of playing games by starting with their problems (not enough gamers, games make people cry, games are in my butt, games bit my sister) and trying to fix them. But you can't do this if you don't have or care about these problems.

Still: it might be nice to have some principles.

In philosophy you can develop goals and ethics by imagining the perfect end result and reasoning backward from there, toward all the conditions that would be required to make that thing come true.

So, in games, could you imagine the most perfect possible moment in a game and back-engineer everything you need to try to do from there?

Hey, maybe.

Some ground rules:

I'm looking at the perfect moment--the absolute ecstatic apex--not a very good moment. This list will be extreme. These aren't things that have to be there for the moment to be good--they're things that have to be there for the moment to be perfect.

On the other hand--moments that are awesome but could have come about without playing the game--very good owlbear jokes, the entire session collapsing into a GGGGB orgy--don't count.

Although nongame things (decor, snacks) can be part of a game moment, at a perfect moment, or even just a really good one, those things cease to be present, the way peripheral awareness melts away when you watch your freethrow roll on the rim before it sinks in the net.

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So, the Perfect Moment:

I don't remember what was going on when that photo at the top of this page was taken--it probably wasn't the perfect moment, but from all the evidence in the picture it could have been. Let's assume it was and describe what's going on.

Start with a pair of easy ones:

-Good People

There have to be other people there for there to be a game. If it's perfect: it's all people you like.


-Physicality

Real life games, assuming all other things are equal, beat online games. And let's assume you're comfortable, undistracted, and well-snacked while we're at it.

Now the crunch:

-Simultaneous visualization

In the perfect moment, everyone there is imagining the same thing, or at least all simultaneously imagining something that's close and very good ("good" in every sense--we'll get to that later). The perfect RPG moment is a shared moment.
The ability to do this isn't unique to games--most kinds of oral storytelling can have this quality, including stand-up comedy--you all summon the same mental image at the same time, you all react to it at the same time, and you also all enjoy the feeling of everyone around having that simultaneous reaction.
It is an unusually focused and rapid kind of collective effervescence and possibly at the heart of the sympathy between cult-like behavior and RPG behavior noticed by False Patrick.

-Creativity

In the best possible moment, the moment everyone is imagining is original (so far as all the participants know), and exotic.
So the moment where you fell the giant with an axe is ever so slightly inferior to the one where you fell the giant with the axe made from his father's tooth.

Creativity exists in a certain tension with simultaneousness--if the word picture painted is too obscure (the giant killed by the soundwaves from the collapse of a baby universe teleported into his ear)--you might have an imaginability problem--everybody's got a different idea of what they're seeing and in most cases all the images aren't equally good.
You have to pave the way for imaginable creative moments during play, build up the picture, get people on the same page.

-Victory (with loophole)

I'd argue victory is what's going on in the best moment by logical deduction:
It's self-evident that, in the best moment, all the people at the table should be people you like.
It's self-evident that you would want the perfect moment to be untainted by any vague empathic assumption that any of these friends might not be having an awesome time.
While everybody has a wide variety of aesthetic experiences they might like (I like lots of depressing movies), it is also true that, if you're looking for a definite overlap: everybody likes to win.

There's a loophole:
Maybe you know for a fact (before the perfect moment happens) that everyone at the table loves it when a player gives a fantastic spontaneous death speech--even more than they love winning. I'd say ok: what you need is not necessarily victory but a moment of some other thing that you are 100% sure ahead of time everybody at the table agrees is a good thing to have happen. Achievement of a thing so locally agreed-upon as cool you could call it a goal. Which sounds a lot like a kind of victory, come to think of it.

-Earned

Beautiful moments in games can have a quality that beautiful moments in no other medium except real life can have: they can be earned. Hamlet can, technically speaking, avenge his father whenever Shakespeare wants to write it into the play. Hamlet as a PC, however, is restricted from doing so until all the rules have been satisfied. An earned moment is one that could not have happened that way had a specific set of previous, not-guaranteed events taken place.

A game makes it possible for the feeling that it's not just that the wonderful moment happening it's also the simultaneous sensation of seeing all the old pieces retroactively falling into place so that it could. The sudden appearance of order from a previous disorder--if we're talking blue-sky moment, we might as well throw that in.

Earning is kind of the opposite of foreshadowing--realizing significance after the fact.

-Real Exercise

By the above definition, a moment can be earned by pure chance--this die roll, then that, then the other--and that can be fun. But in the perfect moment the players have had to stretch their minds into new places in the course of earning the moment--and thus actually become a little bit better at thinking--during the course of the game.

This can be done in more than one way: creative problem solving is one way, but any other time-crunched creative moment--like suddenly making a great speech, or devising a great plot twist--is a kind of exercise. You had to extend yourself to do it--it tested you.

(I have heard the theory that games should offer moral exercise--that is: they should help people extend their ability to feel sympathy and imagine the lives of other people. I have seen great novels and movies do this, so art can do it. However, since every attempt thus far to do it in games assumes players are all Louisiana sheriffs circa 1958 and must work toward greater moral understanding from there, they seem to offer less moral exercise than just interacting with the actual people in the gaming group does.)

-Surprise

Many of the details in the best moment would be unanticipated. This forces the moment to be explosive--revelation comes all at once. Ok, what AC am I trying to...NATURAL 20, BITCHES! Surprise can be a result of real exercise and creativity, but it can also be provided by purely mechanical randomness. All three is the best, of course.

-Foreshadowed

The best moment would also be, at least in some details, anticipated. This paradox is familiar to anybody who writes any kind of story or joke--you create an expectation and you do something with it. Not always fulfill it, not always frustrate it, but, like a good punchline, you find a way to do both.

The tension built up feeds the payoff.

-Stakes

If winning is good, winning a lot is better. Personally, I like death as the stake: if you like a game, there isn't a higher stake than your ability to keep playing the game, at least with that character, in the way that character allows you to play it.

Other staked consequences, despite being more creative, always either aren't harsh enough to create that tension or they simply threaten to render the character less fun to play (you're three years younger and made of fish flakes! Congrats!), so that giving up and rolling a new one--as if you'd just died--is preferable anyway.

Some people will tell you this and I believe them: the pleasure in the cathartic moment of beating death is offset by the anxiety of worrying about dying up until that moment comes. I can't help them. They'll need a game I can't run.

Knowing the stakes shades into foreshadowing.

-It's The Middle

You'd think, what with all this talk about climaxes and victories, the best moment would be the last moment, but I don't think so--because that is always going to be tinged with the regret at the campaign ending.

In a perfect moment you unconsciously expect many more like it around the corner--so the moment's as earned as possible and so ties up as many loose ends as possible, but promises more possibilities suddenly open up.


-Participation

In the best moment, everybody at the table would not only imagining the same thing, but contributing in that moment to that thing. This quality isn't easy to achieve, and it's probably the one existing games are least set up to support in the most literal sense--even if one person is holding the giant weasel and the other is punching him or in a game like Tunnels and Trolls where combat value is a sum of everybody's scores, you still only have one person rolling the last killing die in that moment.

Makes me want to invent a everybody-roll-at-once-matched-attack-rolls=crit mechanic


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In a few days, if it still seems like a good idea, I'll write about what you have to do with games to make sure these moments can happen.
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Congratulations, It's A Mousetrap.

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Have you heard the news? Changing the rules changes how the game works!

I know I've heard the news--pretty much every single day since I found out people talked about games on the internet.

You can hear about it on DIY D&D blogs like this one where people talk about how having low hp makes the game more about outside the box solutions, you can hear about it from game designers when they talk about how their game cleverly incentivizes this or that, unlike all previous games.

And this is worth saying--if it's worth talking about games, you might want to talk about how they work.

But you know what changes how games work way more than changing the rules?

New ideas about what kind of fun things you could have in the game.

I have a game. It, like all games, was not custom-made for me and therefore is flawed. But with a couple kicks, it does exactly what I want it to do. That's a trivial problem. What I want is ideas about what to do with it.

Matt Finch put out Swords & Wizardry--as game design it's fuck-all, just a retread of what's already in D&D, and Matt will readily admit that: it'a just a tool of convenience.

He then got on to the much more relevant business of producing new ideas--Spire of Iron & Crystal, Tome of Adventure Design. That's where the innovation is.

Same with James Raggi: Lamentations of the Flame Princess has a few clever updates to the D&D Basic rules, but the supplements have hundreds of useful ideas of what to do with any game once you have it going.

The ways changing the system changes the game experience are harder to explain than the ways changing the content does but they aren't actually more important.

You found out a new, better, way to tell a player, in game language "You can play a wizard with a sword". Good on you! Now it's time for the first session, and the one after that, and the one after that and the one after that for a year. Do you have any ideas about how to fill all those hours?

I wonder about the personal gaming experiences of people who spend all their time under the hood trying to build a better mousetrap and apparently no time building new content.

If they're designing tabletop RPGs, presumably they've been playing them for a long time. And if they've been playing them for so long, why are they so convinced games are in crisis and that the best use of their time is addressing this crisis?

-Have they just, for a decade or whatever been unable to figure out how to make existing games work for them? Despite continually playing them?

-Are they designing for some imagined audience they don't belong to? Is that why so much of it seems so passionless and condescending?

Y'know Kenneth Hite? Mr RPG Creativity? That guy runs straight up Call of Cthulhu. All that time hanging out with  Robin Laws and he's still just playing that old thing. Because he's busy thinking up what ideas to put in the damn game, not endlessly replacing hubcaps.

It's like the Dungeon Bastard said: what edition should I play? Whatever fucking edition is there, man.

Y'know that guy who spent all that time ten years ago talking about how System Matters? The best games yet produced by all the people who believed him all basically just say "Here's a new system to do that thing You Always Had Trouble With. Now go make up your own content".

Well thanks, but you did the easy part and went and left the hard, interesting, infinitely-extendable part up to me.

If the game's got three rotating groups fighting each other on a jewel-tinted Salvador Dali landscape of war machines vat-bred from the cast-off DNA of titans who died defending the planet from the eminent return of demons that rewire physics by modulating the screams of their sacrifices who the fuck cares if it's a skill system or race-as-class?

If it's out of tune: by all means tune it.

But then if you don't fucking go somewhere in that car? Why even bother, Captain Slow?

Innovation is great, but most of the real and useful innovation I've seen hasn't been "Oh let's count d6s instead of d100s, that'll pack 'em in!"--the translate-and-die tricks in Death Frost Doom, the game-changing, plot-derailing things new spells can do in Rolemaster and Dungeon Crawl Classics, the way the One Page Dungeons organize content and deliver a dungeon, and the cool knock-on effects of Jeff's Party Like Its 999 table--there's some innovation I can actually use, not a patch for a problem I never had. They assume the pencil works and then go and draw something with it.

Here's a double dog dare:

Let's see a Dungeon Dozen-equivalent for a game like Dread--new, interesting set-ups and hacks with twists for that game every day.

Let's see a blog dedicated to new ways to use Shock for long term campaigns. See if you can cross-pollinate with the Traveller and 40k ideas the DIY D&D community spits out three times a week like it's no thing.

You like tactical combat in 4e or 13th Age? Let's see some One Page Dungeon-style accessible crazy fucking over the top set-piece encounter madness--like WOTC's Dungeon Delve only not totally mundane and flavorless and pointless with like a Master BoneEater Ghoul and 3 Slavedull Ghouls and a candlestick. Like gimme a dungeon room encounter I can pick up and it's just evocative, beautiful, useful and nuts.

Just assume, for once, we actually all managed put the key in the ignition, turned it, and the car started rolling. Where are we going, you guys?
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100 Problem & Puzzle Set-ups

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Entries marked with a * are variations/extensions of the entries above them.


1, Foes rely on each other for completion of a multipart plan--if all foes die/are stymied, it's even worse for the PCs than if the foes' plan went off perfectly, so the PCs must carefully decide which to bump off.


3, Essential key to essential area isn't there, it's somewhere else in the adventure

4, *Roaming monster has it

5, *Key has pieces/multiple keys required

6, Map trick allows for prediction of secret door

7, *Realistic floorplan has obvious missing area

8, *Floorplan alternates in pattern (door on left, door on right, door on left…) missing part has secret door

9, *Floorplan's eccentric but symmetrical

10, *Floorplan's obviously shaped like some familiar object: star, hand, etc.

11, *-Shape is sacred to inhabitant/architect culture

12, *-Shape is worked into decoration of rooms

13, *-Shape is present by omission (nobody in the dungeon has a hand, shaped like left hand, etc)

14, Monster is only way to kill another monster

15, Monster is literal key to inorganic puzzle/door

16, Object is secretly key to defeating monster

17, Trap, once sprung, has key to important bit elsewhere in adventure. Success requires springing it

18, Verbal clue (found note)--puzzle clue hangs on secondary meaning of word

19, Haystack puzzle--there are tons of monsters, one has the thing

20, *Narrowing haystack--each defeated monster offers one clue to next monster

21, *-Narrowing ticking clock haystack--the longer it takes the more difficult the final showdown becomes

22, Monster only reappears worse when it dies unless some vital thing is done besides just hit it

23, Something that doesn't appear to be a map is one

24, Nonhuman intelligence (goblin, demon, etc) is expressing itself. What it thinks is very clear (verbally or leaving a note), but it only makes sense if you know/remember about their culture/mentality. For example: when an ogre says "food" it might mean something else…

25, *Ancient "emoticon"--turning message sideways or upside down makes sense of it. Show players a picture.

26, Picture clues: there's a specific and detailed picture you show the players, with clues in it. Noticing them reveals stuff.

27, An apparently random agglomeration of words uttered by some NPC (dying? insane?) is an address

28, Some monsters can get through a door, some can't. The players may notice all the ones on one side or able to traverse it have some distinguishing feature/mark--mutilated ear, etc. Doing that allows you through.

29, A given color is always an illusory surface with something through it/portal to another world

30, *"Key" color shifts round color wheel, so the first is red, then the second is orange, then yellow, etc

31, *"Key" is mixed with color of user's eyes (include mirror)

32, Lock/door responds to quantifiable element of character (age, eye color)--the closer to the desired value, the more the door/lock/gate etc responds (one door opens, two doors, three) because of some flaw in the manufacture

33, Monster is actually part of a monster. Make it a whole by combining monsters. It must be whole before it can be killed.

34, *Once it's whole it's no longer evil

35, The weapon you use against the monster changes the nature of the monster.

36, Deducing the creature's mission allows you to predict its actions. Predicting its actions is the only way to avoid or kill it.

37, A thing changes states: from trap to monster to treasure to clue etc. Observing the pattern allows you to stop the cycle at a desired moment.

38, *All monsters of a given species do this as they die--the trick is to kill them at the right moment

39, Creatures or mechanisms identify creatures by behavior not appearance. Can be fooled.

40, Creatures or mechanisms mirror party behavior.

41, Intercepted communication in simple code.

42, Simple vulnerability/key (earth, air, fire, water, blood, etc)

43, Magnetic trap not immediately obvious as magnetic trap, especially to victims in armor.

44, Babelfish/Apollo 13 trap: problem, apparent obvious solution, each obvious solution creates a new problem, until the chain finishes. Things needed to solve the problem are scattered throughout the location.

45, Killing monsters or taking treasure creates a problem--some subtle area denial weapon like gas or oil or disease or undead is released. This isn't noticeable immediately but the more you adventure the harder you make it on yourself.

46, The large door mechanism's broke: you have to do some precarious thing while someone else in the party does some other precarious thing in order to open it. Of course while you're doing that the monsters come.

47, You need to kill the boss monster but leave some vital part intact, so certain attacks are off the table.

48, Drowning or other slow area-denial trap made by accidentally flipping a switch in a big machine-room--fixing it requires realizing some unobtrusive object is a missing part.

49, Villain's backstory requires keeping a prisoner nearby. Prisoner is disguised as pet, member of court, concubine, statue etc.

50, PC failure in a certain zone/room disproportionately strengthens the enemy, so the choice of battlefield is important. (Like: dying on level 1 adds a head to the hydra)

51, Fight in minefield-like situation/Falling Rocks/Thin Ice

52, *Rickety floor but enemies can fly

53, *Certain "landmines" don't kill but instead make environment weirder

54, *Chalk circles contain spells that activate

55, *Chalk circles imprison demons, breaking chalk releases them

56, PCs' predicament requires capturing a fierce foe alive or else they die.

57, Attacks on monster activate automatic counterattack

58, Hunting foe can hide/move through a specific kind of object--can come from underneath a rug, through any open window, etc.

59, Presence of common thing strengthens foe--light, sound, reflective surfaces, hair, etc

60, Physical space mapped to chronological space--i.e. going up or north goes forward in time, going down or south goes back in time, etc

61, Time, lighting, gravity, shape of things, weather, etc mapped to disposition of innocuous object

62, Voracious foe secretly requires specific surprising food source

63, Behavior of foe mapped to "voodoo doll"-like object

64, Friend and foe's situation mapped to each other--hurt one, you hurt the other, etc

65, Two foes' situations mapped to each other. Foes aren't in the same place.

66, Controlling villain is disguised as background creature/object

67, Environment is fragile/destructible (made of spider webs, etc)

68, Foe/place has dominion over common weapon element--fire, steel, etc--that weapon, if used, will turn on user

69, Ghost or whatever has outstanding issue that needs to be handled in order for it to be put to rest

70, *Golem/iron cobra/necrophidius has a "program" which it keeps running requiring it to head to a room whose door's been bricked over

71, All actions in (sealed?) room A cause resulting actions by monsters in room B.

72, Capabilities displayed by PCs in (sealed?) room/complex A allow creature in area B to do all those things: if you ever cast fireball there, it can too now etc

73, Colors map to supernatural property of area, work into subtle room descriptions--rooms with blue in them=magic doesn't work, rooms with yellow mean metal doesn't work, etc.

74, Pac_Man-esque situation--harmless creature becomes voracious and dangerous (and physically different) when exposed to specific object/area of dungeon

75, Object/location is Dorian-Grey-style storage area for something noncorporeal or esoteric (bitterness, fat, sleep, etc) opening or destroying or interacting with it lets it all out

76, Enemy can snipe at you from a protected position. Preventing it requires finding a hidden entrance to the network that leads to where they are while being sniped at.

77, New magic item has a general, not-obviously-useful purpose (change the color of any object for instance) which is, not obviously, the key to a situation (yellow goblins at war with red goblins for instance)

78, Boss has a "boss pattern".

79, *Army has a "boss pattern"

80, *Every creature in an area acts in a coordinated "boss pattern"

81, *"Boss pattern" code is encoded in an object like a musical score--changing it changes the behavor of the boss or foes

82, Death trap-like murder devices in rooms have a pattern (reverse gravity room first, magnetic room second, etc) that can be altered by altering the object the pattern is written into. Change the "score" change the order of the rooms. (Disperse party to make this important?)

83, Rival group is in the same dungeon/sandbox/wilderness/castle. PCs made to magically monitor their progress and position from afar but neither side knows the area well.

84, Combat in cramped, physically discontinuous space like: going out the west door brings you in through the ceiling, etc. No direction is what it seems but it's stable.

85, Dungeon/monster effects strictly keyed to a specific NPC's reactions to events--happy=ceiling lowers, angry=monster appears, etc. 

86, Monsters don't want PCs dead, the room/an inanimate object present does. Attacks don't stop until it's addressed.

87, "Learning foe" starts stupid, develops Sentinel-like response to any tactic after 1 attack.

88, A trap situation is set up--the trap _will_ activate under x y z conditions (ritual summons a devouring creature for instance). Foe attempts to get PCs to fulfill the conditions w/out revealing themself.

89, Apparently irrational behavior of creature is part of complex ritual, interrupting the behavior or altering it causes the ritual to go awry in analogous way. For example: the path the foe takes through the city is the one their terrible Star God, once summoned, will take through the city.

90, Previous events erased/reversed by a magic device. Like: each of 10 candles maps to a previous combat round--extinguish the candle, undo the round, etc.

91, Time pressure: x complex task must be completed before y disastrous consequence. Approach of y is clear and on a graduated scale. T-minus 10, 9, 8

92, *Evidence of approaching consequence is not obvious at first.

93, PCs are in a situation where most actions have major consequences and they are instantly made aware (prescience, crystal ball) of consequences after taking the action. You killed that guy? Here's the duke discussing the cavalry goblins he's left to his widow, etc.

94, PCs are in a situation where any viable action will have immediate major obvious consequences. Like: any one of several NPC generals in the room has to die but each one of them is in control of a different army that will invade the dungeon if that leader does not leave alive. So the decision is which army or armies to unleash and defend themselves against.

95, *Each kind of monster has a known deleterious or warping effect on the local environment--deciding the order to kill the monsters in decides the shape of the environment for confronting the next. Like: if you kill the white dragon first, the dungeon will freeze over, if you kill the blue one first, all metal in the dungeon will rust, etc.

96, Foe has-/is composed of- a number of debilitating problems (blind, crippled, stupid, etc). Defeating the foe requires these be off-loaded onto someone else (probably PCs). Probably the best way is to give different problems to different PCs.

97, *Debilitating aspects are self-canceling if organized properly, so like if you take the foe's cowardice and recklessness they cancel each other out, so the trick is to be organized.

98, NPCs and monsters secretly react to PCs based on some obscure-but-discoverable detail of clothing/hair etc

99, Dungeon/building doesn't naturally lead to goal/exit. The space must be rearranged using some mechanism inside the space.

100, *Rearranging the mechanism can make further rearrangings of the mechanism more difficult
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Mass Battle, End Of An Era, Brain Eating Turns Out To Be A Good Idea

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So there was this army of the undead, right?


And they've been sweeping across the land like a scythe since basically forever. Since like the first ever actual play report on this blog. That's 4 years of undead army.

Once the players got to grips with the whole actually-doing-something-about-it thing (which required some minor time travel) there's a whole strategic layer where they maneuver around the map Ken Burns Civli War style and pick their battles:

Once their army bottled up the enemy in that area between the red gorge in the center of the map and the"Jagged Rox" hex northeast of it, they got to grips with actually wading in and trying to take out the boss level undead monsters at the center of the swarm. These were many and varied....

...like that's a vintage Vornheim Plasmic Blob there.


So this session was a 4-hour fight. 2 four hour fights if you count last session, when the party was almost TPKed and buried under by the first wave of the undead and a lot of gluten-free pizza.

Tonight was one of those fights where everybody contributed something cool...
clicking makes it less small

...although, like a lot of sessions I've been running lately, people do end up spending a lot of time unconscious if they're not careful--that is, if they're new or Connie.

Explaining what Connie did here takes a little doing:




For the first half of the fight, she was doing well sneaking around, backstab-disrupting bad guys and disappearing back into cover but then the Hex King got his eye on her in the same round that the undead giant natural-20'ed Laney and kicked her halfway across the battlefield leaving the group with almost no way to harm the unsettlingly magic-resistant uberlich.
Long story short: a TPK is imminent and Connie's unconscious, stripped of stuff, and one round from permanent death forever when the combined efforts of Mandy, Stokely, the part of  future Mandy's brain that Connie ate that had a Dispel Magic stored in it and one lucky die roll pull her back from the brink.
She then backstabs the everliving fuck out of the Hex King for 104 hit points and finishes him off the next round as David's insane defensewizard grapples him, bashing the archfoe to into crown, powder and lichy bits.

Decimated and leaderless and now at terrible penalties to maneuver rolls, the skeletal force is routed and driven toward the booby-trapped river. They are washed into the sea.



No more of this shit.

So.....will have to think up something new for next week....

d10 Seasonal Modules Someone Should Write

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1 Fuck This Sugarplum Palace

2 Unlimited Access To Every Single House With A Chimney And At Least One Christian Inhabitant For One Night Only

3 The Rat King Was Right The Nutcracker Is A Devouring Menace

4. Biscuits, Ice And New Machines

5 Toyhammer of the Weasel Elves

6 The Bishop of Turkey and His Six To Eight Slaves

7 Inside The Turkey Is A Duck And Inside That Is A Chicken And Inside The Chicken Is The Entrance

8 Your Grandmother's House Is Basically Wolf-Themed

9 The Reward For Your Year Of Sloth And Sin Is This Reeking Anthracite

10 Black Metal Frost Giants Of The Hatemountain Demand Toys

STARSLUGS is go

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Despite the fact that we mostly use it for D&D, the idea of the original FLAILSNAILS conventions was that you could use any character from any kind of game in any other game of a like genre.

BLAH BLAH TRANSITION TRANSITION ELEGANT CONVERSATIONAL SEGUEWAY

...the Traveller-specific sci-fi version of FLAILSNAILS is called STARSLUGS and, as of last night, is fully operational--we did indeed successfully kill Astrozombies from The Galaxy Of Fear with a Astrogrenade From The Space Cantonment.

That is: Evan died in Chris's Classic Traveller game but in the process inadvertently enabled us to get our hands on weapons Chris' party then used against the monsters in Evan's Mongoose Traveller game.

Original Traveller supports a build-what-you-like setting and a simple 2d6-roll-high system with all the usual space-suspects for skills and so is so generic so I'm having a hard time thinking of any reason you shouldn't just bolt any old sci fi game you happen to have lying around onto it and start running games for any space pirate who wants to roll up.

There are probably people who'll tell you Traveller is a poor fit for yyy setting because themes or something, but people who say stuff like that are usually wrong about everything and have ugly children or smell bad or both and are far too defeatist for the gaming life.

So let's see your Star Wars, Warhammer 40k, Carcosa, Mekton, Gundam, Gigacrawler, Stars Without Number, Cthulhutech, Eclipse Phase and Dr Who STARSLUGS games--rolling 2 is bad, rolling 12 is good, rolling 7 is average and...that's all you need. So get on it like yesterday. 




























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HIGH LEVEL D&D IS WEIRD YOU GUYS

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First day after the big victory.

Mandy's after-action report in italics, me in regular print:

Survived today's encounter with a beholder 

FINALLY GOT TO USE THE BEHOLDER MINIATURE!!!

and Cyanotica Bast.

GOT TO USE THE CRAZY WIZARD THE OTHER GROUP LEFT ALIVE!!!

Developed big glowy stag eyes and hooves to add to my horns and claw-like fingers.

Found out Tizane is the daughter of Belphegor the Beast demon of Envy and a long dead Sister of Vorn called Brunehilde. Asked the Wyvern of the Well.

GOT TO USE THE RANDOM DEMON ATTRIBUTE TABLE!!!

Got a fancy house in Vornheim with servants and shit and all the important people are afraid of me. 

AFTER 4 YEARS--DOMAIN TIME!

My clone however did not survive the battle to save Vornheim.

SHE ROLLED POORLY!!!

Had an amusing conversation with the Masticators

THEY RESPECT 14TH-LEVEL TIEFLINGS THAT ROLL WELL ON CHARISMA CHECKS!!!

Hung out with Anaxorchas for a month with no ill effects. He told me dad has 3 heads, a stag, a serpent and a crow. I do look a bit like him apparently.

Found out dad's in league with Tiamat and that in my second adventure ever I prevented him from being summoned. Oops. 

IT'S ALMOST LIKE I PLAN THINGS!!! ALMOST!

The witches Thorn, Dread and Frost work for him and Tiamat. Anaxorchas is cool with dad but has beef with Tiamat. The witches have been out to get me for ages. They each need to be killed 3 times to stay dead. I've gotten 'em or one at least once so far. 

I'd rather it were me who summons Belphegor. Fucking upstart witches.

I now absorb bits of souls when I heal my friends up from zero or resurrect them. Anaxorchas approves and dad would too. 

THIS IS A WEIRD DYNAMIC.

Resurrected our highest level wizard Brian the Slayer of Ferox the Incinerator after he got in the way of a death ray while us clever adventures ran the fuck away.

I WAS LIKE FUCK THERE GOES ADAM...OH YEAH THEY HAVE RESURRECTION NOW!

Advice With Connie

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So, remember this guy--Hex King--Archlich of Bellet Osc? Scourge of the Bleak Continent? He of The Unspeakable Crown?


 This is Connie:


 She killed him. Righteous Might, mace to the back. Not two days ago. A credit to 10th level thieves everywhere.

Also, she drew this unicorn...


Now you're thinking:

Holy fuck, Zak, this Connie sure is an incredible woman, but how can I put this raw force for justice and badassness to work for me?

Funny you should ask! For today on this lazy Thanksgiving Eve we here are introducing a new feature here on Playing D&D With Porn Stars....

ADVICE WITH CONNIE!

Here's a sample:

Dear Connie: Why am I up this early craving Orange Juice like a fucking madman. Is that some sort of allergy?
Sincerely,
W

 No, that is your body telling you what it NEEDS.  Did you smoke any pot tonight? I don't think you're allergic to anything, but you might want to start keeping orange juice in the fridge. Also, late night/early morning trips out into the world for things like OJ can be really fun and rewarding.
~Connie, M.D.

Yeah, I did smoke. And you're right, went the distance to find a 24-hour Kroger. It is cold. I like the music I have playing. I can see my breath singing. Will remember. Thanks.

So, here you go--ask anything about love, food, feelings, career, gaming, moving silently, using rope, whatever--- CONNIE WILL SOLVE ALL OF YOUR PROBLEMS!

Place your questions in the comments....
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Drownesia, Day One

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So the girls finally reached Drownesia--the penumbral and drow-haunted Isles of the Chimera Moon. 
Mostly on the strength of: they heard there were dinosaurs you could ride.


This turned out to be true. Ranger Laney went hunting atop a utahraptor with Prince Viswanathananand of Viswanathanananda Palace and brought down a bird of paradise. (An utahraptor?)

Meanwhile Connie stole 250 gp worth of gilded penumbral treasure from the palace.
Stokes acquired some powder of the white lotus from the gardens of Warmistress Parvathra.
Then everybody remembered they were playing D&D and decided to rob a caravan of goblin brigands. 
 Because, hey, they're goblins, right? Also they had some stegosaurs.

Preliminary ranger investigation reveals the 26 goblins are taxing everybody who comes down the road through the orchid-choked jungles.

So I clear the table and lay out all the goblin minis. I count them out and go "Oh wait, there's 30" and Connie's like "Wait, 30? Ummmm..."

But, fuck it, they fought 30 goblins.

It started alright--Connie backstabbed the leader within an inch of his life and Stokes fireballed 15 to death, but, a round or two later, Laney and Stokes had been carried off, Mandy was webbed at one hit point and Connie had been turned into a pig.

Another one of those near-TPK days.

They pulled it out, thanks to bold hog action, Defense Wizard David, and a magic item stolen long long ago from the Goblin King of Gaxen Kane.


He wants it back really bad.
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Night's Black Agents Player-Vs-Player-By-Post Orientation

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Welcome to Sofia!

If Australia was smaller, made of water, and in the middle of Eurasia, it'd be the Black Sea. Bulgaria is a country on the west coast of it. Sofia is the capital of it.

You are either one of a handful of people playing a game of player-vs-player Night's Black Agents set there or are one of thousands of people reading a message to those people about a game you aren't playing.

(For the latter: I'll try not to make a habit of this.)


АлоОткачалки!

The big news this week is, around midnight on a Friday, Viktor Gavrilov--portly, mid-fiftyish owner of several exotic dance clubs in the city--appeared sweating, crying and dancing on stage at his very own Club Nefertiti wearing nothing but his headset cellphone.

Rumor has it this was because one of the Russian mobs moving into the city was telling him, through that very headset phone, that they had his daughter and were going to kill him if he didn't.

This incident is just one of many lurid acts of intimidation and violence perpetrated by Russian gangs in Sofia recent months.

What does this mean for you? Who knows? Depends on who your PC is--gangster, spy, waif, diplomat, and what your PC's secret goal is. That secret goal I've probably already given you along with your character sheet.

Achieve your goal and you'll win!
Die before achieving it, or be placed in such a position where achieving it is impossible and you lose.

There will likely be multiple winners and multiple losers.

Since this is a play-by-post game, you each have been given a private channel to talk to me on, but you may talk to each other or to everybody if you like, just remember to add me in.

Some of you have characters completely made that I gave you.

 Some of you will need to add some details using the handy reference below...

click to enlarge
Either way, here's the important stuff...

That grid of numbers at the top is your health. You know what that is. Most bullets do d6 damage.

Everybody ignore the stuff about the size of your group.

If you already have a pre-made character I gave you, don't worry about buying points of stuff in red and blue. You already have points in stuff.

No matter how you got points (I gave them to you or you built your own PC) the way the system works is you spend them to do stuff.

Left and middle columns are investigative/autosuccess abilities--you get 20 pts to spread throughout  these 2 columns. Each thing you have at least 1 pt in means you can use it once in this game to find something out with it. You will get information. You spend these points and they do not come back during this game. Most of these abilities will have 0, 1 or mayyybe 2 pts. 3 if you're insane about that thing.

They aren't autosuccessful if another PC opposes you. But they usually won't for these abilities.

Nota bene: I am misusing this system and it isn't supposed to work exactly like this.  It'll be ok, trust me.

The 3rd column is general abilities, in combat or tense situations they work on a gambling mechanic--they can fail. You spend them, too. 8 is a lot. Basically you roll a d6 and try to hit a threshold number I tell you or don't tell you, and declare how many pts you wanna spend before you roll. These points  won't come back either.

Special/confusing stuff on there:

Human Terrain:

like anthropology and social sciences--"reading" a group or city or whatever.

Preparedness:

This is the skill to see if you have special equipment you need on you at any given moment.

Languages:
If you are making your character, you start with 1 language and get 2 additional languages per pt spent.

The following two are confusing because the points you get in them are recorded in the right column, but their specific details are recorded on the left.

Network Contacts:

These are people you know who do or know stuff. They have ratings and spend like other investigative abilities. You make these people up and assign them point values, like you can go "My brother Edgar is a 5 pt shoemaker" and now you have a 5 pt shoemaker contact. Those 5 points are in Edgar until you have Edgar spends them to do stuff, then they're gone. You can (and probably should) split your points up on multiple contacts.

Covers:

A lot like contacts--these are alternate identities you have. The more points you put in them, the more convincing they are. Once spent, these covers are useless.

You can let cover and contact points "float" until you actually need them--they don't have to make up specific people/identities they're assigned to right away.

The game starts basically immediately: you can send me private messages or your can post public behavior or rules questions in the G+ thread under this entry or you can start conversations with other players, just remember to plus me in to them.
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Oh Joy, Another Reddit Day.

Twelve Questions For The Bone Sorcerer

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1. So I hear your ally, the Eel-King, died tonight along with his pet, the giant Blindheim--how are you going to deal with restructuring your logistics profile to address that?

2. Allegedly the eelmen have no fucking clue where the party went when they fled. WTF eelmen? they were apparently all blinded by a Holy Word. How are you going to find them?

3. Do you know who you are going to use to track the party down? Any new faces, or just session guys?

4. How badly do you want to track them down? Like is this a "see if they have any stuff and then if they don't whatever" thing or is it a The Bone Garden Demands Blood-type situation?

5. How far from summoning the Anti-Paladin of the Jade Claw are you, exactly? Is that process just a matter of getting enough lotuses to the Bleak Pyramid or is it more complicated?

6. How big is the panther you ride? And how obedient? And how many attacks per round?

7. Are you pissed? I'd be pissed if some dudes snuck in a secret door to my house and got my friend so high he thought they were his counterparts from the alternate universe inside the bubbles the wall was made of and made him feel up a dress and then burned him alive and then ran right into the room they came from and hid in a Rope Trick that I totally detected and then set up like 20 guys there and a magic trap and they all escaped somehow anyway.

8. Are you gonna add any security to the Venom Gardens or the Alchemy Lab or the Eely Library now that you know you got a leaky ship? How would you go about that?

9. How much treasure are you bringing with you when you go on this hunt? Is that a weird question? Remember, Bone Sorcerer, every piece of treasure you bring with you is treasure you didn't leave at home. Just sayin'. Security issue.

10. Can you admit that hiding in the storeroom and then capturing a servant and sending him out with a platter of White Lotus powder-dosed maggots for the eel king to eat was pretty cool? I mean--it's depressing, I know but...still...you gotta admit... good plan, right? And then using major image to freak him out more...man.

11. Are you interesting? Or are you just a guy with spells and a cool name? Is this "bone sorcery" just reskinned standard spells or does it do weird shit?

12. How close were you and the Eel King? Like not implying anything--just wondering if you might be open to negotiation with these freaks, should they choose to be amenable.
(sufficiently entertaining answers may be considered canonical)
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The Lichwife

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The creation of a Lichwife requires two main ingredients: a willing she-lich and an unwilling and completely innocent good-aligned sacred virgin--human, female, cleric or paladin--of precisely the same height, build, and species.

Each is divided down the middle with an awful bone saw and the halves are fused to their mismatched twins with baleful arts. This typically produces two Lichwives--one Lich-Sinister one Lich-Dexter.

The unwilling victim remains alive and can be saved if the lich halves are slain, however, the victim-halves are physically subservient to their evil halves and typically do nothing but scream and beg for mercy.

Damage done to the Lich half is likewise done to the human half.

Allowing the living half of a lichwife to die generally has dire consequnces. Make some up.

Lichwife has the abilities of the familiar lich plus the following:

-Twice as many actions per round.

-Defenseless or successfully grappled targets may be level-drained.

-Immunity to effects granted by the "stitched" cleric's god--including turning.

-The evil half may modulate the voice of the living half to disturbing effect--anyone hearing the living half's pleas must save or cower in disgust as if affected by Fear.

-Access to all spells of the "stitched"cleric (except those which specifically and exclusively assault evil).

-The evil half may regenerate 6 hp per round by draining life from the good half.

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So You've Decided To Rest In Town Before Going Back Into The Dungeon!

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(created by Google Plus DIY D&D community in this thread) (A few notes from me are in parenthesis)

(Roll D100 once per day of rest)

1. A trading caravan arrives in town, selling unusual and exotic items from distant lands.

2. Taxman has found out about the PCs expedition, demands (roll d4) 20%, 25%, 40%, or 50% of GP found.

3. There's a fancy party and everyone important is invited, the PCs aren't.

4. Whatever passes as the town's sewer backs up and produces: (1d6)
1-3) An unwholesome encounter.
4-5) An unpleasant discovery. 
6) An unexpected windfall.

5. A group of priests on a pilgrimage is passing through. They offer (knowledge/magical healing/poison/assassination/lovemaking/skill training).

6. Another party is being feted by the local nobility for exactly the deed the PCs party has done.

7. Another party is being prosecuted by the local law for exactly the deed the PCs party has done.

8. Festival of Lies; to please the devils of deception everyone is lying today. Speaking the truth brings bad luck. (roll d4: 1-2 PCs are told immediately, 3-4 They aren't)

9. The city is re-enacting their victory against Orcish hordes twenty years ago. The city watch will be portraying the Orcs, and they're fed up with losing every year.

10. Some underground dwelling animals are collapsing one random building every night. So far 1d10 people have died.

11. Rioters are building barricades on the main street and encouraging the populace to rise up against their oppressors.

12. The dungeon denizens offer a bounty of 1.000 GP per PC, dead or alive.

13. the denizens of the town are doing their normal routines but fast asleep. Disturbing their routines makes them fall down catatonic

14. As you approach the Square of Orgos, Lord of the Dance, a miraculous site greets you. There is a hole in the center of the square. It is about 50 yards across, and, though these lands are pleasant and warm, bitter winds howl forth from the void in a blizzard of snow and sleet. From below, varicolored lights shine forth, and a pulsing, pounding beat can be heard.

15. Fox's Festivus! Folk come from farms afar for a day of sports, melee, arts & crafts, cooking, agriculture, science, alchemy, puppetry, blackmail, bribery, theft and/or foul rituals. Opposed skill check vs the best of the backward, with participants risking ridicule, injury or misfortune for gains of fame, cash and prizes.

16. The townsfolk are distraught that somebody's swiped the magic amulet off the restraining sarcophagus that stops the townsfolk from turning into vampires. It must be put back immediately.

17: A loudly proselytizing cleric steps down from his wooden crate and confronts one of the PCs telling them he has vital information that could help them, repeating some cryptic information in his tirade. Before they depart he delivers a minor prophecy of little consequence, and when the prophecy comes true later that evening afterward the cleric is nowhere to be found.

18. A local landowner starts expanding the town's waterfront. Even if there isn't a significant body of water around.

19. You Klutz. You dropped the ring (important item, key, etc.) down into the sewer! (Zak's note: I wouldn't just impose this, myself, I'd make up somebody trying to steal it.)

20. The neighbouring town starts poaching animals, goods and people. They're building some sort of giant boat/wickerman/museum.

21. The midnight wizard aspirant procession. Students done with the cloistered college life may be wooed from the sidelines to join an adventuring party.

22: An obviously poor woman struggling to carry two large baskets filled with dirty laundry is knocked down in front of the PCs by two teenage boys who run off with her small purse of coins. One of the boys is an important noble's son who is bored and whiling away his time with mischief.

23.  A chicken comes cartwheeling and sidewinding down the street between legs and through the crowd screaming "Help! He's trying to kill me! He already killed my brother!" and soon after a butcher comes chasing after the chicken. If the PC interferes, only he/she can understand the chicken (it has Int 8 and can speak to the PC but is otherwise unremarkable).

24. Local graveyard is vandalised. (1d6 3 times)
The locals blame:
1-3 Visiting adventurers (ie the PCs)
4-5 Undead
6 Local youths

It was actually:
1 Another adventuring party.
2 A hireling of the PCs. 
3-5 Bored local youths. 
6 Undead. 
It unleashes:
1-3 Mob of villagers with pitchforks.
4-5 An investigation by the watch.
6 An ancient and unspeakable curse. (ie Undead)

25. Ergotism outbreak - you shouldn't have eaten the rye-bread.  The ground erupts with demonic monkey-children and furniture comes to life, installing a despotic regime (1d6 dmg/day plus confusion  effects, save vs. poison once a day to come to your senses)

26. Revelers of the Goddes of Dentures volunteer to knock your teeth out but expect donations. Some of the townsfolk actually happily pay up, and tell you you will find mamtaftic demptures undr your millow the next day.
(You will find dentures under your pillow the next morning, delivered by 1d4th level thieves during the night. Their value is at about 50% of what you donated the day before. People who don't donate money will get a number of random teeth from random people (1-in-20 chance they're all yours).

27. Ergativity outbreak: it becomes unclear who is the subject and who the object of actions. After it's over, decide by die roll if the players robbed or were robbed, the townsfolk burned themselves or something else etc.

28. Witch Hunt! Foreigner/Traveling woman (PC or otherwise) accused of responsibility for fatal overnight combustion of a pair of townschildren and a portion of their cabin. Angry Mob led by militant preachers scour town for evidence/witches/occult-objects/justice.

29. Scandal in the marketplace as it is discovered that someone has been tainting the flour with chalk and other, less wholesome, substances. Fingers point at the miller, the merchant and the baker but each denies it was them.

30. A previous (alleged?) "conquest" from the player's night of drunken debauchery comes waddling up extremely pregnant, priest in tow, "How dare you leave me, you bastard!" 

31. Low level minion comes to town in disguise. Offers PC valuable help or insight if they kill his rival/boss on their next trip in. 1 in 6 chance its a setup.

32. That person you were speaking to yesterday. The one who was going to do that thing for you. Yes them. They've vanished. What's more nobody else has any idea who you're talking about. Even the ones who introduced you or were there. 

33. Weeping widows of the slain come to town and harangue PCs for their crimes.

34. PC wakes up, discovering that previous trip was actually eerie prophetic dream. Everything reset. Things may play out differently next time. (You keep the xp though.)

35. A cowled and cloaked redhead brushes hastily into a secluded PC, taking their hand and insistently pressing upon them a (d6): 1; Severed Finger, 2; Bloody Scarf, 3; Runic Tattoo, 4; Map, 5; Potion, 6; Magical, long lived worm of continual light. She whispers "Thank you. It's.... Just be careful" sincerely, before kissing said PC lightly on the cheek and fleeing from the sounds of a pursuing mob.

36. A silver man who is hard of hearing asks passersby the direction to the shop of the tinker named Dr Giraham Klark.

37. That person you were speaking to yesterday. The one who was going to do that thing for you. Yes them. They've vanished. What's more all the locals think you're responsible. 

38. There's some recruiting for the king's army going on, every healthy and able person who's not a vassal or tenant is pressed into service. War is coming.

39. Somebody (burned all crops/killed all cattle) and now hell breaks loose as everybody tries to hoard as much food as possible. Also, people (PCs) may be blamed (for disturbing monsters better left alone).

40. A group of youths cruelly harass a man wearing eyeshades and carrying a cane. They will be found the next morning slain with a long, slender blade.

41. Some slave traders arrived at the market, selling people the PCs may know.

42. A "bathrobed" prophet comes to town alone, claiming to know the answers to all your questions. However his answers are cryptic and explains away any confusion by claiming that inquirers do not really understand their questions. He gatherings a significant following and leaves with a significant group in tow. They never return but he may be encountered, alone, in other towns.

43. Agents of Continental/State authority pass through town, taking census and checking legitimacy of vagrants, bohemians etc. Illegals of insufficient evasion/bribery/bluffing skill are awarded (d3): 1; Fine D6x100gp, 2; 1D10 Lashes (1 damage each, save for half), or 3; Escorted to nearest city for processing.

44. Invasion! A nearby enemy has marched an army on the town and either a) (if walls) has the town surrounded and supply lines cut-off or b) (no walls) is engaged in a pitched battle with local guard/militia/townsfolk.

45.  While the PCs were raiding the dungeon, a party of dungeon denizens was raiding the town and stole all the healing potions/scrolls, which they will henceforth be using.

46. Local Baron/Burgermeister/Warlord demands levies of D10% of population's wealth, military service, or any able mounts for a raid/war/defence.

47. A prestigious mercenary company is also passing through, recruiting and flooding the market with bits of loot from their last campaign.

48. Community Chest! Random PC is the lucky recipient of the annual village prize, a randomly allocated Community Chest containing: 1 potion, 2D100gp, A fine handcrafted Cap/Scarf/Belt/or Boots, Glazed Ham, Fruit platter, fine scotch and a sturdy, embroidered blanket. CHA check to see if villagers are supportive and cheerful or sour and resentful.

49. The circus is in town! 

50. A group of 10d100 refugees arrives, fleeing an enemy heading this way. Denizens are (packing their stuff, too/trying to get rid of the refugees).

51. The city wall is being reinforced: 1) A moat is being dug out 2) a layer of brick is added 3) iron staffs are driven 10 feet into the ground to keep out tunnelers and sappers 4) new towers added 5) reinforced gates 6) double portcullises put in place. 
The work done is is of 1-2) questionable, 3-4) normal 5-6) outstanding quality due to/despite 1-2) heavy bribing of the work force 3-4) the burgers financing this themselves 5-6) the queen paying for the security of her subjects.

52. You buy very smelly cheese rations. Very smelly.

53. Brawl! PCs aggressed by braviards whilst vulnerable in bathrooms/bedrooms/bar etc. D6 damage to each PC (or resolve an unarmed combat against 6 professional ruffians).

54. The PCs learn that another adventuring party has beaten them to something/quest they were planning to do/go after.
  
55. A scruffy young man offers the party 10gp to paste up a stack of posters around town. Non-locals must make an appropriate skill check to realize the posters are seditious before they get caught carrying them.

56.  During the night a horse/amorous couple/stableboy knocks over a lamp in the Inn's stables.  You awake to the smoke as the Inn itself catches fire.  Grab what you can!

57. You happen to bump into an extremely important NPC who is (perhaps uncharacteristically) alone and could use some assistance. This could go very well or very poorly for you.

58. Harvest, repairs, wrangling, weird rituals or some other business needs some extra doing, offering able bodied PCs a chance to earn 2D6gp each (or more if they can save a bunch of labour with magic). CHA check to befriend some local colleague/employer.

59. A lovely moon shines down on the city tonight, and it's unusually mild and nice. People bring out benches and barbeques, and relish in a night that is as peaceful as it should be.

60. Fire! The baker's catches alight during the night and is quickly engulfed. Fire spreads quickly across the merchant district and threatens the surrounding town. There is a 4/6 chance that the fire could burn for days, dying down then rekindling when everyone's guard is down. Unless drastic action is taken most of the town could be consumed.
Rumours spread even faster than the flames that the fire is no accident. Outsiders are blamed and many are attacked by angry locals. The local Nobles send out their own agents to protect important outsiders but others are murdered in the streets. 
The PCs, irrespective of personal standing and acts of heroism, are liable to come under attack by locals during and after the blaze. 
After the fire the town eventually recovers, with a new street layout and innovative architecture. 

61. Returning to the hostel, a small crowd chokes the street, some in retreat. Loud retching can be head near the front of the crowd. 1D6 individuals stand outside the the hostel doubled over dry heaving or actively void their bowels. More stumble from the inns doors in varied states of distress. And this is where you're sleeping!

62. Everybody in the town is the Padre's protégé, and so are you if you stay for more than one night. Payday.

63. There are a whole heap of filthy, spiteful rats in a bunch of the town's basements, and the PCs are offered D6x50gp/XP to clear the things out. It's filthy work and no hiding it; participants must save CON/poison or take D6 damage and lose 2 from all attributes for D3 days from illness.

64.  You accidentally run afoul of a silly and ridiculous local ordinance (such as camels can only cross in the middle of the street or hats may not have a purple feather on Tuesdays).  Whether or not it is true, the watch patrol is shaking you down for a donation for the Watchmen's Benevolent Association.

65. Nuns Errant, robed in grey and rusty orange, shuffle into town, bearing censers, wagons and animals. For inflated prices they sell combat trained foxes, cruel copper spiders, clerical scrolls, foreign maps, tomes of fact, tomes of fiction, everburning candles, love potions and graceful, glorious steeds with shimmering bronze manes.

66. One of the town's priests tells everybody to cover their door posts with the blood of a lamb because an angel of his/her deity will come this night and kill everybody who didn't follow the advice. The denizens (do as told/hang the priest), the angel (does appear/doesn't appear). 

67. Census.  The forces that be need to take down everyone's name, age, and riffle through their stuff in order to estimate their worth.

68. Manic Itinerant Preacher, Edson De Villiers, employs logical fallacies and insulting rhetoric to rally impressionable youths in the town square for questionable forest cult membership (Future quest?). CHA check by sufficiently angered and inspiring PC may break up the foolishness and sway D6 youths (light irregular infantry) to join them for meagre food and pay.

69 Farmers' fair. Farmers from around six hexes come to town to show off their bestest produce. As tradition demands, the first price is a choice of an oxen or a cart full of second price entrants.

70. Villager of D100 years and random gender is dragged into the streets and savagely beaten with stikkes. Dies of wounds and eaten by stray cats/badgers in D6 hours, alone in the street, wailing and in agony.

71. A noble's wedding isn't perfect without some colorful guests like the PCs.

72. A noble's wedding isn't perfect without some colourful attraction... like some wretched, unnatural creature, dragged from the cursed depths and locked in a cage for entertainment. Reward of HDx100gp for any such creatures delivered in the next D10 days, doubled if sufficient discretion allows the noble to claim responsibility.

73: A breeding program is executed in this town, everybody with an ability score of 16+ in Str, Con, Dex, or Cha qualifies automatically and is asked for participation (10d10 gp per offspring).

74: A Freakshow Carnival comes to town! Carnival Barkers attempt to recruit all demi-humans maybe even resorting to kidnapping if they are particularly freakish. Rigged games of chance have a base  10% chance of success and 50% of the time return counterfeit coin or cursed prizes.

75: In the middle of the night, a cat wanders into where the PC's sleep, and speaks to one of them (random roll), "foretelling" her/his death the next day. Said PC must save vs fear in the first combat encounter of the next day.

76. In combination with the city's coldest month, it's also Earthquake season and a minor tremor has busted all the door locks in a particular residential district. Looters abound.

77. A band of (half orc barbarians/giants/half ogres) has come to town, offering their services for 1d10 gp/person and day. Several nobles and guild leaders are intrigued to settle their quarrel with their help.

77. It's the annual ballgame with the next closest town! 80% of the citizens are out somewhere between this town and the next. Mobs from both towns try to get the "ball" inside the limits of the opposing polity.
  
78. A random Petty God is in town, doing their thing: https://www.dropbox.com/s/s8pu4s9kliv2q42/Original%20Petty%20Gods%20-%20OPG.pdf?m

79. You "win" the Traveler Lottery. (as in: Shirley Jackson)

80. The gates are locked behind you as enter and the ward is quarantined; time to bust out the plague masks. What kind of Death is it? [1] Black; [2] Red; [3] Blistering White; [4] Divine retribution for something the PCs did. 

81. You wake up in the morning to a mob gathered outside the inn. They are (coin toss) [heads]: Devotees and would-be sycophants;  [tails]: Religious fanatics calling for your death.   

82. Enough people have gone missing that someone has noticed. Investigation reveals it's slavers from the coast, taking people downriver packed in barrels. They have that jiggly amber guck all over them, like you find in a canned ham.

83. Kensai-equivalent seeks out party warrior, demanding a duel. Beat her and (1d4): [1] You get to keep her weapon; [2] She swears fealty for a year and a day; [3] She returns in a week with her followers and kills you and everyone who witnessed her loss; [4] She dogs you as a villain for a few episodes before siding with you against a greater threat.      

84. Sellswords' Candlemas: If the PCs light a black candle for, and can recount the name of every PC and hireling that has passed since the formation of the company, they earn a +d4 bonus to Luck until the next new moon. (Miss any and their ghosts haunt you until you put their spirits to rest.)

85. Streets filled with local religious festival, potentially involving fasting (50%), feasting (70%), self-flagellation (40%), sacrifice (40%, with rolls under 10% indicating human sacrifice) and abstaining from normal business practices (80%). Festival lasts 1d12 days; participation or lack of participation are equally likely to cause offense unless the characters are charming (charisma check) or familiar with the rites (intelligence check for clerics).

86. A funeral procession for a beloved, local mage or cleric. Dozens of students, followers, henchmen, fans, etc. The crew from a rival school/church have set an ambush and will attack!

87. Doppleganger disguised as apprentice causes explosion at local pyromancer's guild. It is possible several experimental lab specimens have escaped.

88. Wolfschuhnacht - Every year on this date an indefinite number of wolves stroll into town wearing striped woolen socks on every paw. The locals know to leave at least 2 pairs of old shoes or boots outside their door for the wolves, but it's been happening so long they didn't think they had to tell the PCs about it. 

89. A 1d4-th level assassin is hired to kill one of the player characters.

90. While sitting watching the bustle of the town one random PC dozes off. They awake to find their purse gone.

91. Unintended Consequences: If the PCs engage in a interior brawl, there is a 1-in-4 chance a lantern gets knocked over. The resulting conflagration destroys d100% of the town. 

92. One of the PCs gets a sudden craving for a delicacy from their home town. They must make a save versus something Wisdom related or take a -2 to all tasks for 2d6 days or until they can satisfy their craving.

93. People see strange things in a building in town. 50% chance it's really haunted.

94. While sitting around waiting for something the party rogue finds themselves in the perfect position to engage in some petty larceny. 

95. A continuously enlarging man shouting "STERN!" tries to smash his way out of the town. A small group of adventurers pursue him.

96. While sitting together in a tavern the party are approached by an elderly man in a cowled robe. He offers them a job. (1d6)
1-3) He needs someone to do his gardening or similar chores.
4) He is a member of a secretive mystery cult and had lost a vital piece of cult paraphernalia which he needs help recovering.
5) He's mistaken them for assassins and wants them to kill someone. 
6) It's a setup. His lackeys are waiting to ambush the party at a prearranged location.

97. Damn that Ale Was Strong: Fort save, DC 10 / Save vs. Poison. On a failed save, make d6 rolls on the Carousing Table. 

98. Hellmouth. Without warning the workhouse/orphanage collapses into a pitch black sinkhole. Besides the cloud of dust dissipating from the hole, only the highest peak of the roof can be seen, everything else fading to blackness. The screams of the dying or about to die carry on the hot air pouring from the hole: "It's after ME! Help!" is heard over and over.

99. PC is approached by a mongrel (1d7) [1] house cat; [2] small but vicious dog; [3] monkey; [4] pseudodragon; [5] sad-eyed golem; [6] large rat; [7] not-quite-evil-enough imp. If treated with kindness, becomes pet/familiar. 

100. Weather changes dramatically and unexpectedly; reroll on weather table, or change fair weather to foul and vice-versa.  Roll twice on following table, once for actual cause and once for the generally accepted cause by locals:
1. Rogue wild magic in the area,
2. Spell cast by nearby spellcaster,
3. Intervention of the gods,
4. Result of the prayers at the local temple.
5. Freak weather patterns,
6. Prophecy or Seeing,
7. Previously unknown ability of a magical item the PCs are carrying,
8. A shifting of the planes blurring realities together.

__


This table exists because I needed one last night and was forced to use a a shitty one in an even shittier published product which required you to roll 2d6 2-3 times on tables spread out over 4 pages.

I really love that, right before I go to bed I can write "Ok we need a d100 table of town events while you're resting to go back into the dungeon" and I wake up and it's done, no entries need to be edited out, there's no gazebo jokes, maybe a thimbleful of typos and it's at least twice as good as the thing in the overpriced published product.

Truly a tribute to the power of knowing who to kick out of your Google plus circles.
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Thirsty For Ideas? If So, Dare Try This For Thirty Daisies, Friday Theorists

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Stuck for an idea? The anagram server knows all...

Tell me about Ravenloft, o mighty oracle.

Ravenloft  
(rvn lft)
n.

1. venal fort
2. fart novel


Too true, o device. Tell me, I'm stuck for next week, who serves the Bone Sorcerer?

Crone Orb Seer


Cool, can you give me some campaign ideas?

Pigmace naiads.

Ice magi pandas.

Pagan dais mice.

Aged psi maniac.


Ok, those are good, but I kind of wanted to start with the setting I was already using...



Forgotten Realms?

Storefront gleam

A Golfers Torment

Frost Rot Melange

Got feral monster?



World of Greyhawk?

Dark fey who growl

Why folk draw gore

Why work, feral dog?

Why dorkrage flow?

Of her gawky drow


Cute, but I can't really use any of that--what else is in there?


Dark wharf

Flaky keyword dwarf

Rowdy frog growl

Wolf ogre

Yardwork hog

Whale god



Keep on the Borderlands?

A ton of pork

A blended seedbed

A hornet knot

A bonded kestrel

Halberd orks

Resplendent bladed throne

Thorn depths

Dense desert stone

Drabnosed blatherer


Tomb of Horrors?

Throb room


Orb robot

Hobo mobs


Undermountain?

To mundane ruin


Dour nun inmate

Urine ant mound

Uranium tendon


Unmounted mediator

Dominated urn

Untrained mount

Runt dame

Inordinate Mead Inn

Daemon ruination unit

Undreamt moan

Unmade drummer

Dream domain

Minuet rotunda

Main rout rune

Round atom

Rotund moaner



Death Frost Doom?

Dread foot moths


Dated hoof storm

Hatred moods

Mastodeth Froth

Rat food hoard

Serf tooth ad



Caverns of Thracia?


Charts of variance


Rot chief caravans

Hive front vines

Ethnic avatars

Chaos froth river

Craftier fanatic archer



Vornheim-Lankhmar?


Morn hive larvae

Vermin riven rink

Liar lava

Knave ankh

Harm raven


Drownesia?

Iron roads


Drain swine

Rain or sand noise

Dinoraiders

A weird snow

Dawn wires

Rosedawn ore wand

Eon swords

Seawind drowners


Dark Sun-Carcosa?

Our dank carcass

Anus-cock radar

Ransack duo

Crack-rod saunas

Rancor aura

Sodas adorn an urn

Sunk orcas

Arson ducks

Rack road



Secret of Bone Hill?

Obscene flirt hole

October flesh line

Steel elfin brooch

Forcible snot heel

Blotchier eon elfs

Elite oreos

Heroin feline





Try it with your own setting, like so....


Nightwick Abbey?

Baby-chewing kit

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The Plane Of Shadow

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Artists frequently imply that they've seen dark and endless cities, barely inhabited. These are intimations of the Plane of Shadow.

The Plane of Shadow isn't evil, it isn't even miserable, it's just unbearably melancholy.
The pipes creak, the moon sags, you can always hear the wind. The clocks never match. There is no society, there are no wholly ordinary rooms.

There are no parties. The inhabitants are barely aware of one another.
There is disgust, but very little gore. Gore implies life and signs of life are sparse. It is city-as-dungeon. It is Dark City as if it were in black and white, long ago, and much much better. The Plane Of Shadow is very goth and not very metal. Yes, there is probably a god in an alcove.

It is cryptic, cold and--despite having no civilizations--civilized. It is as if the city took over the world and then was hit by a neutron bomb.
There are no shopkeepers in the shops. There are no beholders, but there are lone, lurking, nightmare goblins. There is no good laughter.

There is no shopping, but there is espionage and trade. This is traded for that. This secret for that knife, this mask for that hourglass. There is a thriving trade in knives, masks and hourglasses. There is no mead, ale, or beer, only wine.
There are mirrors and they are all weird. There are revenants, leopards, gnats, vampires, deformities, serpents, lizards, golems and jackals. There are no leprechauns, hydras, pixies, dragons, wolverines, zombies, ogres, or giants. The only living things are hieratic, symbolic, stylized, death-aligned--there is nothing vivid--nothing that is full of real sweat and wild life. The zoo has a rhiniceros and a mantis but not a hippo or an otter. It is surreal but never gonzo.
There is knowledge here, and treasure. Everything forever lost is there now. A lost-forever key is, for example, still in our own world (in a gorge or under a rug in a chapel), but if the Fates are assured that Ragnarok will come before that key is found, its twin appears in the Plane of Shadow, and has always been there.
It is old. Dreams send instructions how to reach it, and they'll be wrong the next day. None of the imperatives are rational--none are hunger, thirst, money; everything is some inscrutable obsession.
There are secret doors, moving walls, windows on doors and doors through windows, cubist architecture, time problems, anomalies.  But somehow it's never a funhouse.



My 9th Level Thief On The Morality of Dungeons & Dragons

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Yeah, the Lotus Monks gave us soup and detected as Lawful but in The Blighted Lands of Yeso, what is the Law?

The law is 50,000 starving refugees, poison rivers, naga cults, families selling their daughters for rice and I find out these monks have a treasure room that'd make Pope Alexander VI blush? Yeah I backstabbed them. And the wizard webbed them, and Paul killed the Muscle Lich Monk with a +3 spear just to get the diamond in his heart.

We killed them like we killed the Necromancer of the Horned Tower and the vampires of Wessex and the Cult of Anubis and the Sorcerer of Bone Hill and Baron Strahd von Zarovich (twice) and the Hill Giant King. And we took their stuff. How could you not? That's why you kill kings. They have a monopoly on stuff.

Call me a thief? Ok, well I am a thief, name level, thank you very much and it took over an Orcus worth of xp to get there. Call me an imperialist? Fuck you, I'm Robin Hood.

I get xp for stealing what the rich have--but not for keeping it. Not for making investments, loansharking, building plantations, or bribing myself into a position of power, I just get it for taking it from the 1%. After killing them for being bastards.

If the children of your world take a life lesson from that: good.

Is there a single more honorable profession, in these days of grim toil and gruesome inequity, than thief? Is there any fate for an emperor more just than to be Murdered and any act more necessary for the improvement of humanity than to Take His Stuff?

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to collect some donations for the lower Snail Quarter orphans' hospital.
Are you a homeless orphan? Click to enlarge and follow the arrow

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Intimations in the Gilded Isles

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Dear Connie,
Everybody is still waiting for your advice but, hey, I know you've been busy.

Anyway: remember that session where you ate future Mandy's brain? So you know some spells she had ready and have "erratic knowledge of the future"?

Well here's some of the echoes you hear in your sleep. Do what you like with them over the coming weeks....

Drownesia
(the tropical archipelago where our heroes currently find themselves)

Iron roads
Drain swine
Rain noise
Dinoraiders
A weird snow
Eon swords
Seawind

Drowners


Garden of the Bone Sorcerer
(the dungeon the party just broke into)

Cobra Throne
Scorn Forge
Crossbreed Ogre
Gore Drone
Crone Orb Seer


City of Asacaracc
(Dim island metropolis of bleak atrocities)

Scarcraft
Scarcity
Icy Cysts
Fey Rift
Fatty Coast


Lake Hali
(In which Asacaracc dimly is mirrored)

Alkali Hail


Black Pyramid
(Where the White Leopard Orchid zombies were taking things from the Gardens of the Bone Sorcerer)

Lick Mark
Damp=Bad
Dry=Dark
Mad Imp
Ymrik Dirk


Eel King's Library
(Recently unearthed within the Gardens)

Grey Ink Labels
Eyeball Key
Binary Layering
Liebringer
Reign of the Glib King
Realign Gallery
Bleary Girl


Viridian Knight
(Servant of glistening Tiamat, subject of great sacrifices)

Invading Triad
Divining Grid
Virgin Hive
Grinding Hand


Ot Etf'a Imit Melpa 
(One of the larger collections of spires, steps and stupas in the Drownesian jungle)

Fatal Appetite
Impale Fetal Female
Metal Foam
Temple of Tiamat


Dalafesh Opnow
(Ditto)

Flesh Wasp
Deaf Pasha
Fondled Opal
Wolfspawn
Shown A Panda
Falsehood, False Shape, Pawn
Plane Of Shadow


Lotus Sinecure
(The largest Drownesian city on the isle)

Rescue Cute Niece
Courtier Coleus
Tenuous Line
Soul Cure
Oust Tier
Nice Couture Entices
Untrue Noise
Unseelie Court
Suet Utensil
Silent Neurotic
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