Sorcery World

Five more to go in a highly irregular series of 36 d20-based encounter tables. Roll d20, read straight across, or roll 2 d20's and connect the two columns as best you can using the verbs for inspiration.The bold, italic entries are things that can be left behind in a site with currently other inhabitants. This one's about wizards and their doings. For more of these look under the GENRES tag.

Sci-Fi World

Latest in a highly intermittent series of mix'n'match d20 genre encounter/feature/treasure tables. You got your sci-fi in my fantasy; you got your Barrier Peaks in my Temple of the Frog.

Dragon World

Oh yes, I'm running games a lot .. consolidating my 52 Pages and megadungeon projects... new ideas here and there. It's just that the will to blog about them is not there yet.

Here's something I can show - another themed encounter table. I was writer's blocked on filling a whole table with dragon stuff. Then I had the idea to mix it with classic/cliche dungeon stuff as well. That let me finish it out quickly.

(As with the rest of these, the details are not quite D&D and not quite not D&D.)

Five, No Six, Weird Gem Phenomena

Follow up to the table ...

1. Looking at a particularly large piece of banded malachite that had been set as the centerpiece of a table, the land-baroness Xuvena pareidolically descried a more-or-less accurate topographic map of a tract of land she recognized as bordering between three nearby baronies. The treasure she buried there is marked on the map by a small, cross-shaped incision in the malachite.

2. The loose shell of a flail snail, irritated by a chip of crystal, dropped a pearl of like scintillating colors. Viewing it from close up does not lead to confusion, but rather a pleasant, subtly addictive disorientation. The value of this nonesuch is inestimable.

3. Gromstones and hellstones are autoluminescent green and red gems, respectively, that legend says, carry a terrible curse. Their wearer or bearer over months will grow ill, sometimes disfigured by tumors, sometimes by a suppurating rash, or else simply wasting and shriveling away. Only a lead casket, traditional remedy against magical emanations, can keep the stones safe.

4. A new aesthetic fashion in the capital, spread by itinerant philosophers of impermanence and fatalism, has got all the most novelty-crazed courtiers eagerly buying up gems with flaws. The flaws are supposed to represent the inherent imperfection of the universe. Actually, the philosophers are shill adventurers hired by the gem merchants' guild to help offload their faulty product at a premium price. Or so says the rival jewelers' guild, who hires another group of adventurers to discredit the new trend, whether by violence, unmasking, or more likely slander and mockery.

5. Dreading the denouement of a cliche, you nonetheless climb up the idol and pry out its gem eyes, two enormous citrines each worth a bishop's ransom. Your companions steel themselves, but the idol remains blissfully inert, in spite of your many backward glances on the long journey home. You wake up without eyes. The idol can see again.

6. A piece of amber, a trapped fly inside. If magical light shines through it onto a clean white wall, a tremendous shadow-fly is formed, and does its caller's will for a while before dissipating.

Drop a Gem on 'Em

Yes, this table of gems as found object is cool but it's intended to work backwards, after you've determined gem value rather than before. And running Castle of the Mad Archmage as I do, more than once I've been brought up short by a treasure description that reads just, "6 gems."

The first time, I devised some method of multiplying d20's and d10's that generated rich enough gems to insta-bump the party a level or so.

The second time, I thought "Let's roll 3d6, take the lowest as the number of zeros, and d10 as the lead digit." Then after rolling a couple of gems, "OK, lowest minus one."

(Later, I figured out that the first method gives an average gem value about 50,000 and the second, 5,000. Lowest of 4d4 x d10, however, gives an average value of about 700. All heavily skewed, ofcourse; the typical gem will be closer to 50.)

And then I really wanted a gem table, and of course because AD&D or 3e is not good enough I had to roll my own. Including fantasy gems. It's weird that all the gem tables in D&D have not included otherworldly gems. Like the glowing green "gromstones" I imagined as a teenager, or some possibilities that arise from the infrared spectrum. And there are real stones that sound like the products of fantasy - iolite (renamed here "Jolite" to stop being misread as "LOLite") and alexandrite.

The true gems are really rare (only about 6% chance) but you can bump things up for richer hoards by making some or all the dice d6, maximum 4.

Uncut gems are a cool find. Will they discover a flaw, or a rare inclusion? Can scrying magic bump your sales price?

d20x3 Genre Tables: Water

Slowly creaking back into blogging. Here's #28 in the ongoing series. There's another one coming up for salt water; this one digs a little more obscurely than the others into mythology and lore for its mixture of obvious cliches and recondite weirdness. It seems that worldwide there's an amazing effort put into creating alluring maidens, nefarious bogeymen,and dire beastsall to explain why people who can't swim drown in pools and rivers.

As usual, roll d20 on the columns jointly, separately,or have this do it for you.

Fire World

The next in the series of environment-specific, d20/d20/d20 tables. Hot enough for you? Water is next ... actually fresh water, as my plan calls for separate "water" and "sea" tables.

As a reminder, the table is also available in pop-up format.

52 Baroque Encounter Starts

Go on then, have another.

This one is not quite so teeming as the previous, more practical, but such is the nature of the rules page it was spawned from. It's divided up into a number of smaller dice tables that still add up to 52 options. I think these eight categories pretty much cover anything you might throw at your players.

Click to enlarge.

52 Baroque Treasures

Continuing the slow and artesanal release of the 52 Baroque Pages, the next production is 52 exotic treasures sorted more or less by value. Click to enlarge. Here's the generator link for instant pop-up results!

Air World

And now, pushing forward my other multi-page table project, here is the air-themed table for my 36 x 20 x 20 x 20 modular encounters (that's 288,000 possibilities, or over 10 million if you roll each table separately...)

Getting Bothered on the Street of Most Gods

In my Mad Archmage campaign I have recently found it appropriate to represent the nearby Grey City by inverting Greyhawk Grognard's reconstruction of Gygaxian Greyhawk, from several sources. However, the players had previously run across a "Street of Most Gods" that did not exist canonically, so I had to take a sparse quarter just south (formerly north) of the Citadel, draw in some buildings, and designate it thus.

"Most Gods" excludes the obviously demonic and Chaotic cults, the beast cults, nature and druidical religions (some have shrines in the park), gods of faraway nations (some shrines in the Foreign Quarter) and various other misfits. The gods themselves are a mixture of historical, fictional, and the best of Greyhawk. Some, like Crom, Ygg and various saints, have a long pedigree across my campaigns.


The key to the Street may also be used as a botherment table. Roll d% on it, with the stipulation that 31-40 involves a vicarious conflict between two or more religions (roll twice, and twice more if 31-40 show up, etc.) A result of 1-30 means you are approached by a proselytizing member of that religion, who makes a morale roll to determine dedication (low: easily dismissed; medium: moderately patient; high: dogged and annoying) and a reaction roll to determine approach (low: overbearing; medium: reasonable; high: ingratiating).

1. The Grey Goddess (One of the two patrons of the city, beloved of the common folk and of those grander folk running for office, she watches over the river side to the west. Her clergy are not against trade, but tend to support aggressive policies regarding the neighboring towns and regions.)

2. The Lake Goddess (As the Grey Goddess but watching over the lake side, and with a more conciliatory, free-trade politics. Supporters of the two goddesses sometimes come to heated discussion and blows, especially at sporting events and festivals. )

3. Ishtar (Childbirth, motherhood. Propitiated in the practicalities of bearing and raising children.)

4. The Cyprian (Love, sex, prostitution - the latter two of which are carried out as sacraments within. Unspeakable carvings and murals on the temple facade mean that chaste folks often enter the Street through the southern entrances).

5. The Iron God (Metallurgy, endurance. Little is known of this mysterious deity except for the large and curiously stylized iron statue that dwells within.)

6. Arcade of Petty Gods (Storefront chapels, rented by the month. Choose or invent an implausible yet sometimes-useful deity on the spot.)

7. The Sisters Three (Freya, maiden; Urda, mother; Yaga, crone. These are a trinity of Northern goddesses with a grim and fatalistic outlook on life, but nonetheless they help those who deserve it.)

8. Ygg (Knowledge, at any price. This Northern god of caves and valleys exhorts his followers to seek out experience and understanding, but seems to be open to all kind of legends and hearsay. Priests rise in the ranks by telling of seven wonders they have seen since their last elevation, undergoing a physical ordeal that gets tougher as they rise higher.)

9. Crom (Strength and self-reliance. This Northern god is the rival of Ygg and prefers a straightforward approach, being associated with bare skin, big weapons and mountain tops.)

10. Dame Fortuna (Fate and fortune. A remote goddess who supposedly controls all manner of fates, dooms and coincidences. People propitiate her and her insane consort Tirtir of the Wheel, in spite of the general belief that doing so has no effect on the ordainments of the future.)

11. Ralishaz (Bad luck and tragedy. Often an offering to Fortuna will be followed by a visit to this temple, adjacent, to ensure the avoidance of misfortune as well as the courting of good fortune. Invoked in the same spirit as our world invokes Murphy's law.)

12. Diabolic Cathedral (Closed by decree of the Council, ostensibly because it was being operated as an untaxed saloon, prostibulum and gambling den, in spite of  -- or because of? -- its dedication to the netherworld forces that justify Law by tempting man to sin and punishing him for it.)

13. The Reaper (Serenity in death. Opposed to Chaos, demons and the undead but not strictly lawful and more than a little evil. Assassins, morticians, mourners and the suicidal are the congregation. Self-sacrifice is a common rite.)

14. Hextor (Violence, brutality, war. A god of the Great Kingdom, formerly Great Empire, to the east. The cruellest of the three gods of war, worshipped by soldiers and bodyguards.)

15. The Silent God (Commerce and crime. This huge and wealthy temple shows the effect of pitting merchants and thieves against each other to gain the Silent God's favor in their struggle. Together with Grey and Lake Goddesses, one of those deities worshipped chiefly within the Grey City.)

16. Bellona (Strategy, competition, war. A neutral presence worshipped mainly by mercenary officers, as well as by game players, suitors, merchants, and politicians.)

17. Pholtus of the Blinding Light (A Lawful god whose followers believe other gods don’t exist, and are most intemperate in their fanaticism, especially towards other "backsliding" Law believers.)

18. Hieroneus (The Lawful god of holy war, righteousness, the brother of Hextor and another Great Kingdom god, worshipped by paladins and the self-styled righteous.)

19. St. Cuthbert (A Lawful saint of tradition and determination, known for a curmudgeonly outlook.)

20. St. Gary (A strange but Lawful cult of self-knowledge that for a fee will characterize you in terms of "alignment," "abilities," "level" and other abstruse and divisive concepts. Their gospel of success and self-improvement appeals to entrepreneurs and adventurers.)

21. Great Brigid (The patron of sanctified motherhood. She is the Lawful alternative to both Ishtar and the Cyprian and her clergy pushes a judgmental, marriage-and-chastity line heavily.)

22. St. Eulena (A Lawful figure of mercy, all-forgiving, compassionate and nonviolent, which would be great except she expects you to behave the same way.)

23. Celestian (An old and benevolent if remote god, associated with night and stars, cosmic vision, and far travels. The dome of his temple is an observatory, and the spire a curious structure rumored to be a dock for some kind of aerial vessel; the interior continues the cosmic theme.)

24. Fharlanghn (God of the road and terrestrial journeys, kind but not lawful. Merchants, teamsters and adventurers honor him. His temple has many entrances, and devotion is shown by walking the paths within correctly.)

25. Tritherea (Goddess of the three beasts, which represent land, sky and sea. She promotes heroism and freedom, appealing to Robin Hood types and those who stand to benefit from such activity. Viewed as subversive by the Council, the temple stands under constant surveillance and possibly infiltration.)

26. Arcade of Dead Gods (Eerie and mostly deserted enclosed arcade memorializing gods who have died, or at least vacated this plane, due to lack of patronage. Clergy are usually lone individuals who seek to re-awaken the god through group worship.)

27. Arcade of Apocryphal Saints (Maintained by popular contribution and studiously ignored by the Church, this arcade holds chapels to popular but un-canonical religious figures such as SS. Hermas, Eracle, Uncumber, Gumption, Guinefort the Hound, Foutin, Amaro, Santa Muerte, etc.)

28-30: Grand Cathedral of Law: dedicated to the Spirit of Law, to the Pancreator, and to all canonical saints and Lawful gods without a separate temple.

Earth World

The first of four d20x3 tables with predictable themes ... if not content.

Me, I want to see me some Aristotelian elementals every once in a while: Hot, Dry, Cold and Wet. But cliches must be served!

Today You Need A Maltese Name Generator

As the action in my Band of Iron campaign promises to shift to the fake-Mediterranean island of fake-Malta

if Malta were brachiated instead of compact and huge instead of tiny and populated by dragons instead of rabbits and the battlefield between three faiths some of which have cannons and some of which have dinosaurs

here is an edited-down version of a list of Maltese surnames I found online. It is perfect for generating slightly off-Mediterranean nomenclature for memorable characters and gadabouts.

Click to generate in a pop-up. Copy and paste the link location for a peek at the table.

Thusly, your next five henchmen can be Medati, Cauchi, Segond, Ciarlo and Xuereb. Fiorentino is already spoken for; taken on for great toughness and a willingness to reconcile his own belief in the Platinum Dragon with his orthodox Militant boss' devotion to St. Gonsalvo.

Awesomeness Overload

Danger is part of the kitsch and mystique of the adventure game, as I explained previously. So is antiquity. But one thing that's medieval and dangerous but doesn't make people think "WHOA ADVENTURE" is ...dying of disease from a rat bite or plate of bad beans in a pest-hive medieval city.

Not the DMG's finest moment.

That's because disease is low, squalid, and lacks awesomeness. It's not a soul-drinking sword, a city full of dark elves, a beholder or a Tyrannosaurus or a laser gun or a rocket ship. All these awesome elements make the final piece of dungeon kitsch, of fantastic adventure overload.

It's important here to trace the slang term "awesome" back to its literal roots in the feeling of awe. There has been a lot of hand-waving and grasping at straws in psychology to explain this feeling, but its meaning and function are fairly clear. You look up, gape, eyes wide open, taking in all possible information about something that is more vast, more powerful, than you can comprehend. It is the ancient attitude of the mouse beneath the tread of the elephant: rooted to the spot, look up very carefully for the descending, unthinking foot.

Seeking out the awesome - the gigantic, the overpowered - leads in pyramidal fashion to the apex of every design hierarchy. The most powerful monsters? Beholders, dragons, liches, archdevils. The most powerful melee weapons? Vampiric, vorpal. Missile weapon? Death rays. Character class? Paladins, I guess, but they're not dangerous enough. Make them anti-paladins. Race? The drow: mysterious Monster Manual secret turned penultimate boss of the most epic dungeon adventure ever printed, with more special abilities and lost-race tech than they can really use. Animal? Dinosaur. Terrain? Mountain, or abyss, either way. Spell? Prismatic sphere - not wish; to be awesome, power has to show itself off.

Awesomeness can get mined out, though. Look what happened to that poor non-SRD apex creature, the beholder. Already given a bargain-basement undersea knockoff in the Monster Manual, things got worse over the editions as the stock got diluted so mid-level characters could have their own brush with awesomeness. Eventually things got really tragic ... yes, posting this image is hard. I'm not sure why giving the Drow a city makes them more awesome, yet giving beholders a society with all kinds of variants makes them less awesome, but the effect to me is undeniable.

Pac-Man never had this kind of identity crisis.

To avoid this dead end, there's another maneuver. The equivalent of the kitsch corner that maximizes sentimentality by combining sad clowns, big-eyed puppies, noble Natives and velvet Jesuses: the gonzo adventure.

Gonzo mines each of many different genres for its most awesome content and throws it all together. It's sometimes defined plainly as genre clash. But you won't see "gonzo" applied to something that combines Old West land rights issues, Japanese tea ceremony, prehistoric giant ferns, and science fiction moral dilemmas. You will see it applied to something that has ninjas rappelling down the Grand Canyon to fight laser-packing dinosaurs.

All this gives the adventure designer a recipe for awesomeness. Or should I say preposterawesome?

In a ...
1. gigantic mountain 2. plunging chasm 3. lava hellscape 4. humongous iceberg 5. petrified giant creature's body 6. crashed spaceship

With architecture inspired by ...
1. skulls 2. swords 3.serpents 4. spiders 5. demons 6. dragons

You fight a bunch of thematic vermin and goons, and then you come face-to-face with ...
1. a dark elf 2. a storm giant 3. a cyborg 4. a millennia-old undead 5. a dinosaur-riding 6. a death ray shooting

1. anti-paladin 2. super-sorcerer 3. arch-psionicist 4. half-demon 5. immortal leaping kung fu master 6. shadow magic ninja

Whose treasure is ...
1. a cache of ray guns 2. a life-drinking sword 3. a prosthetic hand of doom 4. a world-annihilating spell 5. a skull caked with platinum and gems 6. a cyclops idol with a single ruby eye the size of your head

Whew. To conclude the series I'll answer the questions posed by some readers, about whether the term "kitsch" does justice to this kind of game experience as lived from the inside.

Gotcha World

The "Gotcha" mentality of the Original Adversarial Game Referee is responsible for more than one in thirty-six monsters in the AD&D Monster Manual ... between mimics, lurkers, trappers, rust monsters, ear seekers, rot grubs, jackalweres (my high school dungeon had one who used the not very clever pseudonym Jack Alwere), other lycanthropes, dopplegangers, rakshasas ... later books and editions continuing the trend on well into the zone of sheer awfulness. Add to the "Gotcha!" factor all the cursed items, tricks, traps, perma-spells and situations, and we have a clear candidate for one of my thirty-six genre tables. You don't even get a verb. Just GOTCHA!

May I also remind you that the tedious process of rolling d20 on each of the three (well, here, two) columns of the table has been automated, and the results added to a gigantic generator including all (by now) 24 genre tables, on this perma-page. One, two, three ...

"Petrified tree trunk taming dubious oracular advice."
"Sasquatch living with illusion of ruins."
"Ogre mage healing a shaft to the surface."

Did I mention you should feel free to change the verb? Either that, or live happily with surrealism.

Where All The Tables Dwell

Don't mind me. I'm just messing around in the vein of the last post, putting up pop-up links to give you random results based on these tables. When the post is complete I'll add the ONE BIG TABLE with everything so far, and bookmark on the right, and maybe use this post as a placeholder for yet more pop-up random stuff of mine. How to use:

1. Click link.
2. Observe the pop-up.
3. If the verb doesn't make sense, the two things are just doing whatever makes most sense for them to do.

The "became" verb needed a little finessing.

24/36 Genre Encounter Tables (click for random table)

1. SAVAGE: Prehistoric Times
2. SWAMP: Wet Teeming Life
3. INSECT: Arthropod Overlords
4. DARK: Lightless Abyss
5. EVIL: Agents of Mortal Sin
6. MANSION: Eccentric Family Values
7. MYTHIC: Olympian Heroes
8. PRISON: The Panoptic Carceri
9. TOMB: With the Dead in Dead Tongues
10. FILTH: The Wisdom of Repugnance
11. HORROR: Monster Chiller Theater
12. ABOMINATION: Hail the New Flesh
13. BEAST: Hoof and Horn
14. PLANT: The Green Realm
15. FAERIE: Fey Arcadia
16. FUNGUS: Mushroom Kingdom
17. SURREAL: A Week of Gifts
18. HOLY: Divine Light
19. GIANT: Someone Your Own Size
20. MEDIEVAL: Days of Olde
21. NEAR ORIENTALISM: Arabesque Tales
22. FAR ORIENTALISM: Mysterious East
23. CARNIVAL: Circus of Misrule
24. GOTCHA: Adversarial Referee
25. EARTH: The Enduring Element
26: AIR: The Transporting Element
27: FIRE: The Destroying Element
28: WATER: The Transforming Element

ALL THE TABLES so far, jamming together...

Other tables

509,124 Problems and Counting (derived from Bag of Problems)

Bag of Tricks II

General Dungeon Room Contents

Random Treasure

Monster Encounter:
Characters are: 1st level | 2nd-3rd level | 4th-5th level
Category I
General * Desolate * Stronghold
Category II
General
Category III
General
Category IV
General
Category V
General