The One True Table, First Draft + Reader Participation

So here's my first draft of The One Table. Theory is, it'll generate adventures.

Use it like a magic 8ball and ask it these questions, then roll d100...

Where's the basic plot of this thing coming from?

With a side of what?

Where am I going to get an idea for the big, crazy fight?

And the totally incongruous element?

The multivalent trick the PCs can fuck with and turn against the adventure?

And the new monster?

Dumb prop/DM gimmick?

Nondeath situation-altering punishment a PC might face?

___________
1-The Return of...whoever you just killed, or offended or...

2-Frank Miller Daredevil (Run 1--fall in love with someone who wants to kill you.)

3-Frank Miller Daredevil (Run 2--you wake up to find your greatest enemy is slowly destroying your life for fun using his/her political influence.)

(A foe under some taboo or restriction or in some legal bind preventing him/her from physically harming the PCs is probably the most interesting situation here.)

4-Groundhog Day. (You just have to set it up so the players don't hate you once they realize they have to do something all over again.)

5-Cannonball Run.

6-Apocalypse Now (Notably, despite his instructions--"learn what you can along the way and terminate his command"--Martin Sheen learns almost nothing along the way about Colonel Kurtz except what he reads in his dossier he brings with him. It seems like in a game the thing to do would be to seed information about the final target around different places on the way to finally meeting the bad guy and to seed it in such a way that getting certain pieces of information at certain times might make the PCs want to back track a little and to decide to maybe revisit certain places since, for example, they find out the bad guy is half slug they might wanna go back to the salt mines of Arturas and steal a sodium cannon.)

7-Angel Blade (This is a japanese sci-fi porn cartoon. The main premise involves a totally un-futuristic looking girls school menaced by an evil monster queen. I just like the idea of having my players in a girls school, I think.)

8-Genesis Pits

9-The anti-life equation.

10-Secret Wars (the original) (Alien intelligence seeks to understand the nature of humanity. So he makes you fight dozens of weirdos on a "battleworld". Ok, so there's that (incidentally this comic book is the one Sasha Grey's boyfriend can be seen reading in the backround of the first few episodes of Axe) other than that premise which is pretty good by itself the thing I liked about Secret Wars and several similar comics was you got to see the villains bickering with each other. This is something hard to get across in RPGs since the traditional model is first person but it might be worthwhile to sit down for a bit and invent some devices allowing the PCs to spy on the internal pressures of their foes.)

11-Gravity's Rainbow (You're an experiment on a self-imposed quest to find out something about yourself which everyone but you seems to already know.)(The idea of setting up elaborate secret backstories for the PCs that they themselves don't know anything about and then building the campaign world on top of that seems to have legs. This is kind of the reverse of places like Greyhawk where things that the DMs old players constructed or invented or became at the end of their lives are littered about the place. In this model every single thing about the campaign world could be generated out of things you learn or decide about the PCs like, Mandy knows her cleric is part demon and was found on the doorstep of the Temple of Vorn and there's about a million different directions you could go just to explain that.)

12-Bend Sinister (Imprisoned by surreal bureaucracy for incomprehensible crime.)

13-Pale Fire (There's a work of art. Properly interpreting it provides valuable setting information. I very much like the idea of taking something like Mad Meg or Fall of the Rebel Angels and somehow hiding everything single thing the players could possibly want to know about the game world in the painting.)

14-London Fields (Someone will be murdered. We know who the victim will be. There are two possible murderers. Two suspects present themselves but they're both valuable to the PCs. The victim may actually want to be murdered. Taken broadly (it doesn't have to be murder it could be pretty much anything) the trick is having the PCs care enough about any NPC that they wouldn't just off him/her immediately. But it's possible the get around this by attaching some sort of dire consequences to making the wrong choice. Again you could fit this into pretty much anything at any time, for instance, there's a room the room has a treasure one of the inhabitants of the dungeon will pursue the PCs unto her/his/it's last breath if they steal the treasure the other one won't but will curse them forever if they kill it or otherwise fuck with it.)

15-Silence of the Lambs (Only clues to find or defeat a foe are given in the form of cryptic koans from an even deadlier foe. In the book and movie Lecter is conveniently held in an asylum so the FBI chick can go talk to him whenever obviously in a game you'd want to complicated this situation a little. Put it so that if the players want to know something they have to brave perils to find it plus figure out what the psycho savant wants.)

16-The Triumph of Death painting by Breghel (Basically, the bad guys run everything but the thing is in order to be interesting they have to actually run it. Like make it work. I've touched on this idea before when I was talking about the roguish work ethic but if you put the PCs in a guerilla war type situation vis a vis the bad guys and you make the bad guys hierarchy complicated you could make it so the players can get all strategic about which targets to hit and loot. Like, if we loot this tomb then we get that thing and if we loot this armory we deprive the enemy of that resource it could become and interesting sort of anti-sandbox where you not only kill things and take their stuff but each time you do it it has some dramatic effect on the rest of the world or just the rest of the dungeon.)

17-Star Wars (pursued by enemies, prison break, assault on location containing prison)

18-Empire (assaulted, pursued by enemies, swallowed, followed, double-crossed, escape)

19-Jedi (prison break, showy execution goes wrong, 3-front assault)

20-Diamonds Are Forever (disrupt smuggling operation--possibly via impersonation, acquire mcguffin, get attacked by people who think they're double-crossing whoever you're impersonating, stumble on wider plot involving high-level NPC being replaced by villain, get chased, seek out replaced NPC, gain key to whereabouts of villain, assault)(probably missed something in the middle there)

21-Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas + Legion of Super Heroes Volume 4 issues 1-24 (you must avoid the law)

22-Alan Moore's "Twilight of the Super-Heroes" (warring houses, key people are not what they seem)(problem is building up NPCs to the point where PCs care what they seem to be)

23-Grant Morrison Doom Patrol

24-Daredevil #276 (the hundred heads of Ultron)

25- Borges

26-Random metal song.

27-Random metal band name. (Eminent Throne, anyone?)(Goat Cinder?)

28-Implied backstory of an artifact or relic from the AD&D DMG.

29-The Civil War (not the Marvel comics one, the actual one).

30-Big Lebowski

31-Love Boat

32-Three Steps To Memorable Villainy method

33-First comic off the shelf

34-Alice's Adventures In Wonderland or Through The Looking Glass

35-Walt Simonson's run on Thor (Featuring hateful hosts of kabuki-colored elves in rigid masks.)

36-That Jack Vance story with the eyeball-collecting monster.

37-Viriconium.

38-Elric stories

39-Zulayka Seduces Yusef (painting by Bihzad)

40-Black Sabbath.

41-Iron Maiden.

42-Roky Erickson.

43-Barbarella.

44-Monster Magnet.

45-Aeschylus.

46-John Milton.

47-Dr. Strange.

48-Fritz Leiber.

49-H. P. Lovecraft

50-Zork.

51-Killing of a Chinese Bookie.

52-What I remember about 1001 Arabian Knights.

53-The Elder Edda.

54-The Younger Edda.

55-Bauhaus.

56-Motorhead.

57-Arnim Zola

58-Modok

59-Dr. Doom

60-Tucker Carlson

61-Larry Flint/Baron Harkonnen

62-Yi Yang

63-D4 1-Classically Surreal 2-Weird 3-Horror 4-Metal

64-Bloody Hammer

65-Giant Slorr

66-The Basilisk's Throne

67-The reigning deity here is Demogorgon

68-Irish...

69-The Greased Goat--The Sign of Denied Passions.

70-The reigning deity here is Vorn--grim grey, gaunt god of iron and of rain.

71-The Witchling Star - The Sign of Magic.

72-Dungeoncrawlesque.

73-Magical fairy enchanted horrible.

74-Such logic as reigns in the Realm of Beelzebub (mm1 v 1).

75-Petty god.

76-An absolutely sane extrapolation of what one would expect based on previous events and assuming all involved are rational actors.

77-Evil. If already evil, eviller.

78-Like Peter Jackson would do it based on a libretto by Tolkien.

79-Kafka

80-Unexpectedly epic

81-Francis Bacon

82-Hieronymus Bosch

84-William S. Burroughs

85-The mastermind here is a (random monster)

86-Backwards

87-An unsettling inversion of the expected trope here.

88-Secretly, it's a puzzle.

89-Secretly, it's a test.

90-Villain's plot here undermined by secondary villain.

91-The people who were supposed to be doing this would have no problem with it, but we're stuck with the PCs.

92-Apparent gibberish isn't

93-Roll a random monster. Build the most stereotypical situation you can around this monster. Investigate all possible naturalistic inconsistencies in said situation.

94-Composite beast.

95-What would Gardner Fox do?

96-What would Gary do?

97-What would the last blogger who updated do?

98-Stupidest idea you can think of in 2 seconds. Now make it nonstupid.

99-Fairy tale

100-Today's news

__________


Here's my first test.

Reader participation bit:
Try to throw together something based on the following results and put it in the comments...

Where's the basic plot of this thing coming from?
Aeschylus

With a side of what?
Dr Doom

Where am I going to get an idea for the big, crazy fight?
Modok

And the totally incongruous element?
Elric stories

The multivalent trick the PCs can fuck with and turn against the adventure?
Love boat

And the new monster?
The mastermind here is a (random monster). I used some online 3.5 thing and got an aasimar which is some angel-type thing, then got bored and rolled again and got a doppleganger. It's some hybrid of both.

Dumb prop/DM gimmick?
Roll a random monster. Build the most stereotypical situation you can around this monster. Investigate all possible naturalistic inconsistencies in said situation.

I rolled 'Dog'.

Nondeath situation-altering punishment a PC might face?
The anti-life equation.