Flying Monsters

In a recent session in the Castle of the Mad Archmage, the Muleteers went to retrieve the bodies, dead or alive, of a couple of rival party members who had gone missing, sent running by a fear gas trap in the middle of a series of rooms full of bats. This meant fighting giant bats, lots of bats. It was actually my first time dealing with lots of flying attackers and I improvised, inconsistently, a number of rules solutions to represent their menace.

After thinking things through I created this one-page rules sheet for the 52 Pages system. It covers where and how flyers can move, and what happens when they attack. Their ability to charge and overfly, surround and disorient, add to the tactical challenge.

One other things: a critical hit that wounds a flying creature in "arm"or "leg" brings it down for good, showing up the greater vulnerability of wings.

Release the bats!

Tekumel: The Island

Yesterday a group of four players started my Tekumel campaign. In the great tradition of "barbarians coming to the big city and learning the setting" they created characters, members of an island tribe. They each took party roles.

The Speaker (caller in social situations) was a necromantic shaman with a blow-gun, who contributed that the tribal totem was the Wild Dog. He follows He Who Sets the Night In Order, lord of the moons and planets, ordainer of bad fortune, and casts fortunes by scattering bones in moonlight.

The Rememberer (note taker and mapper) was a not particularly competent hunter. He decreed that the rival groups on the island were the Wild Cat tribe and a group of Hlutrgu frog-men, all separated by mountain ranges and a dormant volcano.

The Keeper of the group's resources was a blind healing shaman ("Can I be blind like Daredevil?" "No, you're just blind"). He determined that what the tribe trades with one Captain Tarshar, boss of that big canoe with wings, is red-flecked volcanic obsidian in return for trinkets, hatchets, cloth and food.  He became blind by staring too long in search of She Who Hides Behind The Sun, ordainer of good fortune.

The Defender, lord of military strategy and the initiative die, was a strong and resilient barbarian warrior whose weapon of choice is a big rock on a rope. To him fell the invention of why the PCs, their zero-level followers and about 20 other tribespeople had to leave the island. Famine, due to increasing heat and decreasing water, was the answer. The other three were among the least necessary members of the tribe. The other twenty also had less desirable qualities -- lazy, complainer, drunk, quarrelsome -- and somehow got the short end of the "random" selection by lots conducted by the Wild Dogs' elder shaman. The Defender took pity on them and decided to accompany them. The tribal legend says that across the sea, in a place where people build mountains and live in them, is the Greater Eye of Shaping the Earth, relic of the dawn age, which can bring prosperity to the most ravaged land.

The elders decide that Captain Tarshar, whose seasonal visit comes any day now, must be convinced to take the surplus tribespeople to this built-mountain-place. The quest of the Eye seems like a good use of these exiles. How big, after all, can the world be?

Next: The Hunt

New Edition of 52 Pages

I haven't been blogging, but I have been running the game every other week, squeezing out text for the ol' megadungeon, and putting the final touches on some revisions to the rules I use. They're now in a position to share at version 2.0, so you can download them from the link on the right, or here.

I'd say that after some five years of playtesting, the new version works pretty darn well, at least for the "basic" levels 1-3. There have been a few issues with higher level powers and spells, and some of the variant classes I want to release, but with more experience (now going on a couple of years, having run two higher-level campaigns plus a number of convention games) I think I can fix a lot of those issues.

Accordingly, things are looking good for releasing an extra "26 pages" soon, focused on character development and advancement for levels 4-6 and new classes. The other 26 would have been campaign development, but I find the campaign structure in 52PP is the thing I least use in actual play. So my ideas about wilderness exploration, city campaigns, etc. are probably best put in a different, system-neutral volume.

Anyway, enjoy!

Improving 52 Pages: Overkill and Monster Experience

So if we are going to be handing out experience for monsters, and the 100 xp per hit die rule is generally good in my experience, there is one situation where it appears to fall down: overkill, where a higher-level party gets an overly large amount of experience for an encounter with six giant rats that is trivially dealt with.

To put it formally, a group in control of tactics is going to have a much easier time dealing with 8 x 1 HD orcs than 1 x 8 HD giant, for any number of game mechanical reasons. The danger ... the bad player behavior that you don't want the rule to encourage ... is that players will seek out weak rather than challenging combats in order to advance. And even if they don't (because that is a rather dim view of what they want in the game), they will have a weak encounter and realize it gave them quite a chunk of experience and wonder why the system is not pushing them toward the more exciting kind of play.

AD&D, as I've mentioned before, solved this just by giving very low xp awards for low-level monsters, altogether. Combine this with exponentially increasing the amounts of xp needed to level, and you have a situation where a high-level character effectively gets peanuts even from single-handedly wiping out a company of 100 orcs. Allow me to demonstrate the special technique of statistics:

That is not a typo: a single AD&D fighter, forced to gain experience only by fighting, has to kill 138 typical 1 hit die monsters to reach second level, so I've scaled everything from there. Going up in level, this number drops to a "manageable" 53 2nd level monsters to reach 3rd, but after 7th level experience required out-climbs monster experience again. To reach 10th level, over 15,000 orcs have to bite the dust under your sword, making your share of wiping out a small orc platoon seem negligible anyway.

(As I recall from playing AD&D, we were able to level at a reasonable pace not from monsters or even monetary treasure, but thanks to the generous experience awards for magic items. And you wonder, why the obsession with taking treasure and magic items away from the party...)

Of course, AD&D being AD&D, Gygax also put in a completely unnecessary rule toward the same goal, further complicating experience awards by instructing DM's to add up the levels and HD equivalent on each side after a combat, and dock the party proportional experience if they outpowered the foe. This rule, besides being cumbersome to apply and hedged round in even vaguer clouds of subjectivity, seems to be more appropriate to the original 100 xp/hit die rule.

My concession to this logic, within the 100 xp/HD system, was to have characters gain only 10% of the usual experience from monsters they outclassed by 2 or more level equivalents, and 50% if outclassing by 1 (although I didn't really apply this last one). In practice, however, even the 10% rule created an awkward splitting of points between higher and lower level party members.

Here's my latest try, and we'll see how it does in actual play.

Rather than using division, it uses subtraction: higher level characters simply discount one or two creatures of a sufficiently lower level. Although this appears in the "basic" 52 Pages rules that only go up to third level, the intent is to increase geometrically, so that 4 monsters per character are discounted at 3 levels up, 8 at 4 levels,, and so on.

If this means that an 8th level party of 5 can plow through a regiment of 320 orcs without getting any experience ... well, after the first 80 orcs or so fall without any casualties in return, the DM is better off just calling a rout than gaming through the whole tedious sequence, hoping to overwhelm the party tanks with a slew of lucky hit and damage rolls... lest we forget the lesson of the 100 linear attacking kobolds.

Improving 52 Pages: Fighter and Rogue Combat Powers

Part of developing the 52 Pages Next, the Expert-like rules extension for my game, involves coming up with alternate powers (feats, whatever) for fighters and rogues as well as what they can do at 5th level. Well, here they are:

It bears repeating my design philosophy here: powers should add effects without adding decisions that slow down play. Most of them are either straight bonuses,consequences on things that happen anyway in combat, or "cool things that happen on this die roll." I find this is vital so as not to slow down the pace of Basic-derived D&D, where the tactical decisions should be less "which power should I use now" and more "how do I position myself and use weapons to best advantage?"

As I prepare for converting my existing Band of Iron players to the very latest version of 52 Pages - they've been playing the 2011 version for some time now - I realize that they've grown very fond of their Whirlwind and Quickshot feats - they really light up when they roll a 5 or 15 for their extra attack, even though these are underpowered compared to my new powers which give you 5 numbers to get an extra attack. So, I souped them up a little and added a couple more.

Yes, Weaponmaster is a little tribute to the old Rules Compendium stuff. I had to think hard on impaling to not create super-ridiculous archers with +d6 damage when ambushing, potential +d6 from Deadshot,and double damage (Runequest style) on top of that. I think the die minimum answer is a nice compromise.

Oh yeah, elves and dwarves now get one feat at level 5.

Improving 52 Pages: Skills

The skill system in my 52 Pages house rules is based on d6 rolls, owing a debt to the d6 system in Lamentations which itself hearkens back to the original D&D of resolving "skill" determinations as chances out of 6. Recently I've been having thoughts about it and have come up with what I think is a definite improvement. Here is the system as it stands:

After over a year of play, I've found the high levels of skill, failing only on a 1 in d12 or d20, are easily reached by a rogue or a gnome within a few levels, because those classes gain two skill points a level instead of one. I'm not against this in itself - it's good at a certain point to be reliable at such everyday things as sneaking or climbing up a building. The problem comes with trying to scale these super-skills to more difficult tasks. Even if you interpret the -2 for a hard skill as applying to skill ranks and not the die roll, a rogue who started with 3 in a skill and concentrated on it through level 3, getting 7 marks and having a base d20, can meet a hard skill with only a 1/6 chance of failing.

I came up with this system which I think is not just more elegant, but could be the dead-simple engine for a whole game if applied to things like combat (although Paolo camped a stone's throw away a while ago, with something that eventually became 5MORE...).

Instead of using different dice at high ranks of skill, once past 5 marks, you start adding on Reroll marks that let you reroll a failure on that skill every time you use it. Importantly, this anchors the highest level of skill at 5 in 6, with hard tasks, at -2, having a natural maximum of 3 in 6. On the other side, rerolls can be gained by getting bonuses above 5 marks; for example, if you have two marks in Stealth, but you are sneaking around in your native (background) terrain and the thick terrain makes it easy to hide, the +2 for background and +2 for easy task give you six marks: 5/6 success and one reroll in case that fails.

A side bonus is that the same die is used for all skill rolls, eliminating the confusion of switching around to different dice that I've see new players thrown off by.

If you want to set some tasks as near-impossible, they would be at -4: 1 in 6 for a master-level skillsperson, and even someone with two rerolls would be not at all sure of getting it.

The other fix is that rogues get an extra skill box per level but they must split the two, allowing more even advancement.

I'm not even sure this is entirely necessary. The two groups I game with are unusual in that they each have 3 rogue or rogue-like gnome characters, so each one can specialize (and has) and it looks like they have the whole gamut covered even at level 4 or 5. Lone rogues in a party may instead find it more efficient to spread their skills out more.

Baroque Poisons, Diseases, Stuns and Healing

Incentivized by renewed interest in our baroque spells project of last year I went ahead and completed another page in the very, very occasional series of the 52 Baroque Pages. This time the spinning die had indicated that page 33 of my 52 Pages should be given the "Baroque" treatment, that dealing with poisons, healing hit points, and the like.

Click to enlarge or read below

I decided to split the 52 items four ways, with four thirteen-entry tables that should by no means be interpreted as an attempt to somehow outdo twelve-entry tables. As before, the larger-type #13 entries are my idea of the best of the lot and may be held in reserve to substitute for a lackluster or inappoprriate outcome of the genuine d12. Not all of these, however, need be randomly chosen.

It is also my belief that all the HP recovery activities are much more fun than "taking a short rest" or whatever.

13 Rare Poisons
1.Rosy Tincture: eyes fill with blood, save or blinded, euphoric effect
2.Ingrate’s Milk: poison for baby’s lips that spares it but kills mother
3.Consensifer: paralytic, 1 hr; victims believe they just chose not to move
4.The Null Hypothesis: victim fails to see anything as important, 1 hr
5.Parrhestic Rigor: victim speaks whole truth for 1 day then dies choking
6.Implausible Gauntlets: selective paralysis of hands, feet, 1 day
7.Skuldine: shortens natural lifespan by 2d20 years; long-game poison
8.Gutwrench: too-good antiseptic, kills eubacteria in body, die in d6 days
9.Destiny Venom: kills in 7 days; only gaining 500 xp/level cures it
10.Complix: also envenoms foe’s blade on touch, hence, moral quandary
11.Justichor: medicine that cures most diseases but fatal to malingerers
12.Entheotoxin: makes blood ethereal, only cure is to shift to that plane
13.Legacy Wine: swell, empurple, die; made only from Legacy Wine victim’s last tears; paradox noted

13 Odd Diseases
1.Rust-beast Hyperaemia: if armor rusts into wound, -2 STR, CHA
2.Medusa’s Gallstones: drawback of petrification-save success, -2 CON
3.Displacer Dance: sidestep tic after teleport, -2 DEX until next level up
4.Pharaoh’s Wrack: aftereffect of mummy rot, freezes joints at angles
5.Numismiasis: infection on copper coins, crud webs fingers together
6.Hornflamm: d4-day ague from unicorn noses that neutralizes poison
7.Eargrub: infectious tune, when heard gives -4 INT, WIS for d6 days
8.Sainted Boils: -4 to all abilities, d6 weeks; sucking pus heals d6 HP/day
9.Monty’s Revenge: radiation coma from more magic items than WIS
10.Green Grippe: jealous flu makes host clean freak, spreads post-mortem
11.Esculent Scabs: can peel or bite off for d4 HP damage and 1 meal/day, food smell draws monster attacks
12.Griffon Fur Tick: bite in groin causes overconfidence, -2 to all abilities
13. Litchworm: eats maze in you, 30 days to live, magic-proof; only hope, enlarge self, send in reduced party

13 Nonlethal Damage Effects (at exactly 0 HP)
1.Subdued: if hit was with rope, whip or chain, victim obeys, 3 rounds
2.Intimidated: victim retreats, in preference to attack, for 1 day
3.Disordered: victim gapes in confusion, attacks at random
4.Opossum’d: victim falls to floor, appears dead for d6 minutes
5.Aggravated: victim attacks you at double speed 1 round, collapses
6.Ransomed: victim bargains for life with real or wishful treasure
7.Obligated: if victim is Lawful, unable to aggress against you for life
8.Agog: victim panics, flees by most unorthodox route
9.Near-Death: victim views afterlife in daze, returns in d6 minutes
10.Moonstruck: victim adopts new random persona, amnesic
11.Circle of Life: if victim is animal, it dies, another 3x bigger appears
12.Maledicta: victim throws dying curse, avoided if you spare him
13. Amen!: if hit was with holy symbol, victim adopts your faith

13 Idiosyncratic Hit Point Recovery Activities
1.Charging at an active foe with HD > your level, regain 1 HP/ level
2.Taking an hour-long stroll alone, deep in thought, regain d3 HP
3.Every 3 strong drinks you swig, you restore 1 HP
4.Meditation, 1 hour: roll WIS or under on d20 to recover d3 HP
5.Loudly denying frailty, regain your last 1 HP if 2+ others believe you
6.5% chance /hour asleep of lucid dream; adjust HP by d8-3; can die
7.Sleep in carcass of monster that damaged you for HP = its HD
8.Hot sexy love, 1 hour, exhausted for 2 more, 1 HP for coming last
9.Pity friend with 2x+ more damage than you have HP, recover 1 HP
10.1 hour hot bath with scrubbing buddy heals you like full night sleep
11.Once/week, permanently lose 1 HP to heal 2 HP/level by exertion
12.Character gains 1 HP spending 3 hours musing aloud on a theory of injury and heroism, may provoke NPCs to violence
13. Sir yes Sir! Heal 1 extra HP/day if slapped in the face by a higher level ally

Next 52: Psionicist

OK, short break from heavy aesthetic slogging. I made a psionicist class for Next 52 Pages and the rules can with little effort be ported to any other system. The spell schools are Enchantment, Divination, Alteration and Destruction (fire, force).

While making it a balanced option I have also tried to preserve the rarity and elitism of the class ("Wow, Skip! You tested psionic!") and the possibility that they open the party up to a whole new kind of attention and danger from big-brained mutations. It's not quite the long-range sensing and communication of the Hiero novels but maybe some more Divination spells in that vein could be added.

Download: 52 Pages 1.0

It's here. All 52 Pages. Download link on the right (or here if you're lazy). I even cleaned up the treasure table so it has a little more breathing room and an example.

Devil on the cover makes it Old School.

At the end, all I can say is that there are many rulebooks out there for this kind of stuff, but none like this. Enjoy.

Damn Halfling Birthday Present

It's my birthday today but I have a present for you, Bilbo Baggins style. I finished the last of the 52 Pages. There will follow a phase of tidying and editing and then the final pdf will be released on the world.

Click to blow it up

This one's the sample adventure - text a little condensed but I had to respect the artistic vision. I meant it to show a good intro-level adventure, nothing too idiosyncratic, but with some interesting hooks, clues, and challenges. Of possible interest - I de-cliched the last two encounters, originally it was the mirror that possessed you but I switched the function, so now the demon jumps out of the mirror while the dead guy possesses you.

Those damn halflings!

One Page GM Advice

Here is page 52 of the 52 pages. (Page 51 still needs to be finished, the sample adventure, but we are almost there folks.)

Anything obvious I left out?

Sample Setting in 32 Encounters

This is page number 50 of the 52 pages. It's a slightly less-than-generic medieval town-to-village-to-dungeon of the kind I describe on this other page. Page 51 will be the sample dungeon. I wish I could put an example of play in as well but I think page 52 will have to be more general GM advice.

What's important with these encounters is to make most of them lively - to work implicit action into that short one-line description. One last-minute feature I thought of: instead of d8, roll d10 or d12, and on a result of 9 of higher roll 2d8 and have the party walk in on an encounter between those two.

Another idea: give each area a "boss" that is encountered instead of the first encounter that would be a repeat. It might be a tripping druid in the woods, a shy wererat in the village, the river god's daughter on the river, or the Baron in town. This means the setting has the feel of slow discovery as the characters settle in it.

Clever Rules Fade Away

After a languid summer I'm ready to enter the home stretch and put the final touches on my 52 Pages house rules. Scrap Princess' review reminded me that there is always a gap between the clever system you think up at home and what actually goes down at the table. Indeed, I had some stuff in there that bore little resemblance to the way I actually play, like the "encounter start" matrix that was my substitute for surprise rolls.  So I managed to boil it down to be more like guidelines than rules, and more like what I'll actually do in play - figure out the surprise status by common sense, with maybe a roll for alertness if I'm unsure of the disposition of the defenders.

Likewise for my magical treasure table, which caused some puzzlement when it first came out. I decided to make it more straightforward and more geared toward low levels - appropriately for the "Basic" style levels 1-3 focus in the 52 Pages. I might make the main treasure table more straightforward too.

Finally, I had an insight about combat where I could get it down to fewer phases if I realized that combat should go with the most urgent stuff first - not in the order that you might think things happen. So, melee first and disengaging, then shoot, magic and move, and miscellaneous stuff at the end of the round. To handle the weird gamesmanship and panzerbush situations that might arise I allowed "overwatch" to happen so you can shoot the charging guy at close range while he is charging you. In a surprise situation, by the way, you can move first then melee.

Oh and yeah, I got rid of the grid. I still play that way but I'm pretty happy with a system that looks more spacious on the page and asks people to think about the dimensions of the fight rather than necessarily making them plot it all out.

And I've made a start on the example campaign, dungeon, and play session that round out the last four pages. So some of that soon, I'm hoping.

52 Pages Tutorial Character Sheet

One of my first old school things to get attention was the Old School Players character sheet which had all the rules for rolling up a character on it. Last weekend I was getting some new players started and thought it would be a good idea to work up an overlay for the existing 52 Pages sheet that would kind of simulate this experience. It ended up as three pieces of paper that you would cut various sized holes in, with instructions for filling in the parts of the sheet that were visible through the holes at he time.

This was clever but proved a little unwieldy in practice; I probably should have made the overlays a different color than the sheet. Anyway, this gave me the idea to just go back to the old ways and produce a character sheet with the instructions on it. After some simplifications and "ask the GM" handwaving I managed to fit things onto two sides of a piece of paper (European A4, so North Americans may want to do some resizing).

Blogger is being funny about updating the links section on the right so here is the link to the shared doc. Enjoy!

52 Pages: Spells for Prophets

Like I said, the final 52 Pages version is going to swap out prophetic miracles for spells on cards that fit better with magic item generation and keeping your powers in front of you as a player.

A few things:

Flame Princess style, turning is a spell, so it's limited in use. I haven't decided yet but am leaning towards making prophets able to repeat their "miracle" casting of spells.

Restoring hit points is a separate per-day ability, so the low levels of the "gold" healing miracles are aimed at optimizing healing and managing injury, which is what happens when HP hit zero.

I resolved the "prophecy" problem by making it a level 1 orange spell, Augury, but giving it a fairly weak effect for anyone else but prophets.



Okay, now the mechanical part of the 52 pages is really done except for the tweaking. Play examples and GM advice, you are next.

One-Phrase Alignments and the New Prophet

I'll say it again: healing characters are important. My current campaign party is having the cleric ("prophet" in 52 Pages) sit out for the summer, and boy are they scared. Potions compensate somewhat, but especially on long expeditions, there's nothing like renewable healing.

From 4th Edition, Wizards' D&D has seen this as a problem and compensated with all sorts of innate healing surges and the like. For me, it's an opportunity to take a light hand in the design of the character class, because healers are so damn good anyway.

The new 52 Pages lets a prophet, on average, not quite heal up one fighter a day. Turning, Flame Princess style, will become a spell, and the miracles will also be on spell cards. This lets me, and the DM, come up with different religions having different spells and sacred weapons, folding the Druid option into "brown magic." That's the tree on the page; the cup is restoration magic, and the sun is abjuration, while the star is the wizard's divination school. Spell cards will come later.

The main question is whether to go with a variant of the current miracle system (shown here), where you get one guaranteed spell per day and you can keep on casting as long as you make Mind saves, or more of a standard wizard-like spell pack-out. Prophets should have fewer of these spells than wizards, so having worked out the numbers, they should probably gain +1 Mind save every level instead of every other level, giving them on average 1.4 "miracle" spells as day at 1st (with a +1 Wisdom bonus) and 3.3 at 9th. I might also let them repeat spells, unlike wizards.

Finally, the diversity of available religions has given me a neat idea: to reduce alignment to a motto. The beauty of this is that it becomes a negotiation between player and GM, where the meaning of such words as "deserving" and "protect" can be twisted in justification of the deeds of the day. Pretty much any motto you can think of will allow for shades of religious interpretation, which is how I like it.

New 52 Pages Download and To Do List

Well, now that the 52 Pages system is a fully playable document I'm making the new pdf available for download, on the right. Still, the pdf is not complete. Here is my "to do" list for changes:
* There are 4 pages still to create, dedicated to adventure examples and GM/player advice.
* I want to rework the Prophet class so they operate by spells like the others (more on that soon)
* Do something different with starting equipment so a whole page of equipment cards is not required. Most likely, a starting party will get a standard shopping basket of equipment, and new members will get a pick or random roll of X pieces from the list.
* Reduce the character sheet to one vertical page. Perhaps include it at the back, outside the 52 page count, and add a character creation walkthrough of the kind that got me props back in the day.
* Other player aids: spell lists, GM's log
* Air out the combat section, make it less dense, with an extra page.
* There have been some problems interpreting the feats of strength and magic items sections, so rework that.
* Generally proofread, standardize terms, get graphic elements lined up and clearer.

I'm not sure if the pages of rules need more detailed text annotations - I would rather make them stand clearly on their own, with maybe a little bit of RPG experience desirable to grasp the concepts.

And then it's on to the 52 pages "expert" edition for adventures at levels 4-6, including:

* New class powers and spells.
* Hybrid class options for more variety.
* Basic world creation for the GM.
* Wilderness and sea adventure rules.
* Lots more monsters.
* Building reputation in settlements toward the next party goal - gaining official status as agents of a realm.

But before that, the next project will be to clean up my wilderness encounter tables and present them together with a detailed world, weather and outdoor adventure system for any game.

One Page Magic Items

No room here for pages and pages of listings. Instead, as with monsters and treasures I enlist the Game Master's own discretion and imagination - framing the possibilities, not exhausting them. Just like spell failures in my system can involve the wrong other spell, so magic items are mostly spells in a box, removing the need for separate descriptions.

And most of the need for enhanced items at low levels can be supplied by the "special" non-magical items instead. The starred ones can even be bought in a large enough settlement. This will help overcome "blah, another +1 dagger" blues, and ensure that the really enchanted stuff shines out someway.

More powerful weapons/armor than +1 are rare (you pretty much need to roll high on a second roll to get them, or get lucky with "roll twice" results.) Again, this will help arrest the climb of the combat game to silly power levels. But every once in a while you will get a weapon that reaches artifact-level powers. Further rules for higher levels will give more possibilities.

Well, now ... this means that except for the play examples, and a few changes I want to make in previous pages (the prophet class and some other things), the 52 Pages is now a complete "basic" system for character levels 1-3! I'll have a viable download of the rules so far up for you tomorrow.

Very Quick Carousing Rules

Having reconciled myself a little more to the fact that the 52 One Page Rules are not going to allow for all the baroque splendor of my carousing procedure, or anyone else's, here's an attempt at a very short one that fills the corner of the "settlements" page:

I'm actually not unhappy with it; it offloads some of the decisions onto the GM, of course, but looks like it can produce effects similar to what my main party has experienced so far in campaign play, with the notorious cheese roll being a "contest."

Graphic Treasure Table, Take 1

Well, finally I have completed the treasure table for the One Page Rules. This is actually more like Take 3, as I went through several less worthy and less graphically intensive alternatives that just didn't look right. And it took a long time to grab up all these public domain images.

Click for larger version.

I'm just going to leave this out there and see what people think.  I should explain that previously in the rules, item weights are represented by weight icons (approximately 5 lb though adjusted by unwieldiness); armor types by the schematic shield icons; low-level partial +1 weapons and armor are made of various kinds of steel; and "depth" is my term that approximates "dungeon level/challenge level." Anything you don't understand? Could be better?

I will say that, played by my rules, it does a pretty good job at generating varied amounts and contents of treasure hoards, with a decided bias away from coins and the occasional hard-to-transport white elephant.