...I will be posting WAY MORE than usual, since I am in the Frozen North with the pornstar-in-laws.
But also because its Christmas, I figure we could all help each other figure out what game stuff we want.
SO:
Say below the single best roleplaying supplement you have ever seen and why--in enough detail to convince someone to try to hunt down a copy.
"Core" books (dm guides, player's guides, and monster books) are not allowed. Adventures, sourcebooks, setting books, and suchlike stuff are.
For me it'd be the original Games Workshop Realms of Chaos books. Why? The finest RPG art ever produced (particularly in the second one--Adrian Smith). d1000 random mutation table. And the last word in Metal villains. It was all chaotic and it totally worked. Demon with grenade launcher for a hand and it totally didn't break the mood. Breathtaking.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Gygaxian Democracy #2: The Many Heads of Lord Eisengeth
Yesterday's experiment in Gygaxian Democracy went very well.
Ok, I mean I always say some shit like that when I do these reader participation things, but seriously, that was some quality RPG material we got there. Eventually I'll write it up proper like a real table.
Anyway, for now, here's another...
___________________________
The Many Heads of Lord Eisengeth
Immobile and decapitated he sits, eternally preserved in the Basilisk Throne...
Basically, the deal is, the PCs have to find his head (somewhere in your sandbox) and put it back on him. When they do, he'll come back to life and all will be well in the kingdom/they'll get a lot of loot. (Depending on which School your players attend.)
Problem is which head? Though the forces of evil could not destroy the head of good Lord Eisengeth, (neither the head nor body can be destroyed so long as the body sits on the Basilisk Throne--they both become invulnerable stone) they pulled an old leprechaun trick and manufactured several false heads, each containing an isolated, confused, dark, and disoriented portion of the good Lord's soul.
So the schtick is: every time the PCs find a head, they try it. (The first time they won't know there's more than one head). The Lord stands up, stops being stone, and if it's the right head, yay, game over. If it's the wrong head, however, the PCs have to deal with the consequences. Each wrong head:
-has some unusual power/ability/knowledge/tendency that makes it a fearsome opponent, and
-possesses some clue that narrows down where the real head is
Some will be obviously the wrong head--their eyes will open red and they'll belch forth flame or whatever, but others will seem to be the true Lord, until...
Anyway, if the PCs decapitate the evil-headed lord and return the body to the Throne, the body will become stone and sit patiently while the PCs find the next head.
Also you'll need to figure out some mechanics or plot contrivances so that the PCs can't just have a whole army standing there waiting each time they try a new head, but that's not too hard.
When the PCs try a head, roll D(HoweverManyResponsesWeGet--if it's more than 20, roll d10o giving equal chances to each result)
The heads are...
1. Red eyes, murderous wrath, voice deafens all who hear it. Knows whether the true head is above sea level or not.
2. Appears to be the true Lord, but will have the PCs banished from the kingdom/castle/part of the dungeon he rules as soon as it is convenient and then rule with a cruel and arrogant hand. Knows whether the true head is north, south, east, or west of the current location.
3...(your turn)
Ok, I mean I always say some shit like that when I do these reader participation things, but seriously, that was some quality RPG material we got there. Eventually I'll write it up proper like a real table.
Anyway, for now, here's another...
___________________________
The Many Heads of Lord Eisengeth
Immobile and decapitated he sits, eternally preserved in the Basilisk Throne...
Basically, the deal is, the PCs have to find his head (somewhere in your sandbox) and put it back on him. When they do, he'll come back to life and all will be well in the kingdom/they'll get a lot of loot. (Depending on which School your players attend.)
Problem is which head? Though the forces of evil could not destroy the head of good Lord Eisengeth, (neither the head nor body can be destroyed so long as the body sits on the Basilisk Throne--they both become invulnerable stone) they pulled an old leprechaun trick and manufactured several false heads, each containing an isolated, confused, dark, and disoriented portion of the good Lord's soul.
So the schtick is: every time the PCs find a head, they try it. (The first time they won't know there's more than one head). The Lord stands up, stops being stone, and if it's the right head, yay, game over. If it's the wrong head, however, the PCs have to deal with the consequences. Each wrong head:
-has some unusual power/ability/knowledge/tendency that makes it a fearsome opponent, and
-possesses some clue that narrows down where the real head is
Some will be obviously the wrong head--their eyes will open red and they'll belch forth flame or whatever, but others will seem to be the true Lord, until...
Anyway, if the PCs decapitate the evil-headed lord and return the body to the Throne, the body will become stone and sit patiently while the PCs find the next head.
Also you'll need to figure out some mechanics or plot contrivances so that the PCs can't just have a whole army standing there waiting each time they try a new head, but that's not too hard.
When the PCs try a head, roll D(HoweverManyResponsesWeGet--if it's more than 20, roll d10o giving equal chances to each result)
The heads are...
1. Red eyes, murderous wrath, voice deafens all who hear it. Knows whether the true head is above sea level or not.
2. Appears to be the true Lord, but will have the PCs banished from the kingdom/castle/part of the dungeon he rules as soon as it is convenient and then rule with a cruel and arrogant hand. Knows whether the true head is north, south, east, or west of the current location.
3...(your turn)
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Gygaxian Democracy #1: Hammer of Exorcism
Had one of those revelations of the obvious today.
Why do we blog? Because thinking up DM stuff is hard fucking work and blogging about it makes it more fun. Anyway, cutting to the chase.
New feature, Gygaxian Democracy. Not complicated. Here we go...
__________________________________________________
The Hammer of Exorcism
This item appears to be a weathered warhammer covered in dried blood. It will function as such.
However, when wielded by a cleric, it can be used to exorcise possessing spirits or drive away insanity.
For it to work, the cleric must beat the afflicted individual unconscious with the hammer. (Not all blows must be with the hammer, but the final one must be.)
However, for each blow struck with the hammer, there is a chance of a side effect. This chance is equal to 20 minus the patient's constitution per blow struck...
(roll DHoweverManyResponsesWeGet--if it's more than 20, roll d10o giving equal chances to each result)
The possible side effects are as follows: (your turn)
Why do we blog? Because thinking up DM stuff is hard fucking work and blogging about it makes it more fun. Anyway, cutting to the chase.
New feature, Gygaxian Democracy. Not complicated. Here we go...
__________________________________________________
The Hammer of ExorcismThis item appears to be a weathered warhammer covered in dried blood. It will function as such.
However, when wielded by a cleric, it can be used to exorcise possessing spirits or drive away insanity.
For it to work, the cleric must beat the afflicted individual unconscious with the hammer. (Not all blows must be with the hammer, but the final one must be.)
However, for each blow struck with the hammer, there is a chance of a side effect. This chance is equal to 20 minus the patient's constitution per blow struck...
(roll DHoweverManyResponsesWeGet--if it's more than 20, roll d10o giving equal chances to each result)
The possible side effects are as follows: (your turn)
New Monsters, Items & Stuff Invented By The Table
Experimenting with The First Draft of The One Table.
Here's what I did with my results:
Where's the basic plot of this thing coming from?
Aeschylus (d8--I got Prometheus Bound)
The PCs meet a punished-type person who prophesies for them that their actions will free him.
With a side of what?
Dr Doom
The punished-type person is a schemetastic villain. The PCs will probably try to avoid having the prophecy come true. A kind of anti-railroad plot here.
Where am I going to get an idea for the big, crazy fight?
Modok
Ok, but without the chair. Just some huge bastard with an enormous head, stumbling around.
And the totally incongruous element?
Elric stories
There's an Elric story called "The Fortress of the Pearl". I can't remember what this story is actually about but for my purposes here it's a giant pearl that's also a fortress.
The multivalent trick the PCs can fuck with and turn against the adventure?
Love boat
Ok--there is a room where everyone falls in love. The villain hopes to lure a PC there.
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.
I decided that basically there's something someone thinks is an angel but it isn't one. Or it's a second-rate one.
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.
Dog. Fetches stick. None of our dogs fetch sticks.
Stupid DM gimmick here: The girls are always bringing dogs to the game. So: there's a guardian monster (or three) in the pearl palace. Secretly the place is laid out analogously to the actual place we are playing the game in and the movements of the monster are based on the movements of the dogs.
Nondeath situation-altering punishment a PC might face?
The anti-life equation.
Remember how the anti-life equation was supposedly buried in Jimmy Olsen's brain? (Ok, maybe you don't.) I figure the villain can bury the mcguffin formula in the PCs brain. So even if they defeat the villain, it's there waiting.
____________
Other people's interpretations of these and other results are here.
____________
I screwed around with the chart some more and came up with a few elements I like a lot:
-The Aeschylus thing above plus rolling London Fields for the dumb gimmick got me to...every time a PC does x___ (shed blood?) the villain grows stronger. The PCs have to try to do the adventure without doing x or the villain breaks loose.
-For multivalent trick you can use against the scenario, I got "Bloody Hammer" which I decided, based on the lyrics, is a magic item that can cure insanity (or possession) by pounding someone unconscious with it. Greyhawk fans might wanna re-skin it as the mace of St. Cuthbert.
-For New Monster I rolled "Silence of the Lambs". I figure: This is Monster A. Monster A will answer any question about how to defeat Monster/Villain B. However, Monster A grows in power for each answer it gives you. This monster could be the same villain from the Aeschylus thing above or it could be the Wyvern of the Well or it could be some whole other thing.
-I rolled up Basically The Love Boat With A Side of Frank Miller DD Vol 1 (The Elecktra saga). I figure: the Love Chamber from the result above works just fine, however, anyone who is loved due to the Love Chamber is then vulnerable to a geas from an Assassin Stone (or something)(in other words, if you use the love thing then that person can be made to try to kill you).
-For New Monster I rolled Star Wars. Thinking of the Jawas' robot-zapping weapon I came up with a Lodestone Golem. Which is already (Google...) apparently a Magic The Gathering monster but I figure its gimmick here is it's magnetic (oddly not a feature of the Magic monster) and crackling with blue lightning. Worse than a rust monster, if you think about it.
-For Monster--I got The Greased Goat--The Sign of Denied Passions (an astrological sign in WarhammerFRP, if you don't know) and then Bosch for Stupid DM Gimmick. I figure there's a demon called The Thwarter. It approaches in human form. In the course of an ordinary conversation it will find out what the PC wants. Then, so long as the demon lives, the PC will never get that thing (no matter how abstract). Possible addendum: The demons occupy a realm precisely resembling a Bosch painting (pick one and print it out). The PCs have to find the relevant demon, but have to avoid pissing off the other demons in the process.
____
Some notes:
-Naturally, I'd advise DMs to look at the whole table and cross out any sources/phrases they consider uninspiring and write their own.
-An "after you're sick of a result, cross it out and write your own" rule looks good.
-I generally assumed that any result could be re-skinned to fit a fairly vanilla D&D situation & got what I assumed. Other people didn't and came up with totally chaotic scenarios. Like when I got "Love Boat" I basically parsed apart every idea I associated with the show until I came up with something usable.
-After my first batch, I decided to just keep rolling new sets until whatever I had reached a critical mass of "Oh that's interesting". It may be possible to redesign the procedure to take advantage of this.
___________
So I like my results. But are they any better than if I had just sat and thought of an adventure for that length of time? Who knows, but my thought here is that it's not about the ideas being better than usual, it's about making the process of thinking up adventures fun in a different way than creation-ex-nihilo is.
Like sometimes you wanna write an adventure and sometimes you wanna sit and play Donkey Kong when you should be writing an adventure. If writing the adventure can be effectively made into a game in itself then maybe you get more stuff written and the campaign and the options available are richer for that. hmmmm...
Here's what I did with my results:
Where's the basic plot of this thing coming from?
Aeschylus (d8--I got Prometheus Bound)
The PCs meet a punished-type person who prophesies for them that their actions will free him.
With a side of what?
Dr Doom
The punished-type person is a schemetastic villain. The PCs will probably try to avoid having the prophecy come true. A kind of anti-railroad plot here.
Where am I going to get an idea for the big, crazy fight?
Modok
Ok, but without the chair. Just some huge bastard with an enormous head, stumbling around.
And the totally incongruous element?
Elric stories
There's an Elric story called "The Fortress of the Pearl". I can't remember what this story is actually about but for my purposes here it's a giant pearl that's also a fortress.
The multivalent trick the PCs can fuck with and turn against the adventure?
Love boat
Ok--there is a room where everyone falls in love. The villain hopes to lure a PC there.
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.
I decided that basically there's something someone thinks is an angel but it isn't one. Or it's a second-rate one.
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.
Dog. Fetches stick. None of our dogs fetch sticks.
Stupid DM gimmick here: The girls are always bringing dogs to the game. So: there's a guardian monster (or three) in the pearl palace. Secretly the place is laid out analogously to the actual place we are playing the game in and the movements of the monster are based on the movements of the dogs.
Nondeath situation-altering punishment a PC might face?
The anti-life equation.
Remember how the anti-life equation was supposedly buried in Jimmy Olsen's brain? (Ok, maybe you don't.) I figure the villain can bury the mcguffin formula in the PCs brain. So even if they defeat the villain, it's there waiting.
____________
Other people's interpretations of these and other results are here.
____________
I screwed around with the chart some more and came up with a few elements I like a lot:
-The Aeschylus thing above plus rolling London Fields for the dumb gimmick got me to...every time a PC does x___ (shed blood?) the villain grows stronger. The PCs have to try to do the adventure without doing x or the villain breaks loose.
-For multivalent trick you can use against the scenario, I got "Bloody Hammer" which I decided, based on the lyrics, is a magic item that can cure insanity (or possession) by pounding someone unconscious with it. Greyhawk fans might wanna re-skin it as the mace of St. Cuthbert.
-For New Monster I rolled "Silence of the Lambs". I figure: This is Monster A. Monster A will answer any question about how to defeat Monster/Villain B. However, Monster A grows in power for each answer it gives you. This monster could be the same villain from the Aeschylus thing above or it could be the Wyvern of the Well or it could be some whole other thing.
-I rolled up Basically The Love Boat With A Side of Frank Miller DD Vol 1 (The Elecktra saga). I figure: the Love Chamber from the result above works just fine, however, anyone who is loved due to the Love Chamber is then vulnerable to a geas from an Assassin Stone (or something)(in other words, if you use the love thing then that person can be made to try to kill you).
-For New Monster I rolled Star Wars. Thinking of the Jawas' robot-zapping weapon I came up with a Lodestone Golem. Which is already (Google...) apparently a Magic The Gathering monster but I figure its gimmick here is it's magnetic (oddly not a feature of the Magic monster) and crackling with blue lightning. Worse than a rust monster, if you think about it.
-For Monster--I got The Greased Goat--The Sign of Denied Passions (an astrological sign in WarhammerFRP, if you don't know) and then Bosch for Stupid DM Gimmick. I figure there's a demon called The Thwarter. It approaches in human form. In the course of an ordinary conversation it will find out what the PC wants. Then, so long as the demon lives, the PC will never get that thing (no matter how abstract). Possible addendum: The demons occupy a realm precisely resembling a Bosch painting (pick one and print it out). The PCs have to find the relevant demon, but have to avoid pissing off the other demons in the process.
____
Some notes:
-Naturally, I'd advise DMs to look at the whole table and cross out any sources/phrases they consider uninspiring and write their own.
-An "after you're sick of a result, cross it out and write your own" rule looks good.
-I generally assumed that any result could be re-skinned to fit a fairly vanilla D&D situation & got what I assumed. Other people didn't and came up with totally chaotic scenarios. Like when I got "Love Boat" I basically parsed apart every idea I associated with the show until I came up with something usable.
-After my first batch, I decided to just keep rolling new sets until whatever I had reached a critical mass of "Oh that's interesting". It may be possible to redesign the procedure to take advantage of this.
___________
So I like my results. But are they any better than if I had just sat and thought of an adventure for that length of time? Who knows, but my thought here is that it's not about the ideas being better than usual, it's about making the process of thinking up adventures fun in a different way than creation-ex-nihilo is.
Like sometimes you wanna write an adventure and sometimes you wanna sit and play Donkey Kong when you should be writing an adventure. If writing the adventure can be effectively made into a game in itself then maybe you get more stuff written and the campaign and the options available are richer for that. hmmmm...
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
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.
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.
The Table
One day I will devise The Table.
Point is it will be the only table I--or anyone--will ever need.
You will roll on this table and then the whole adventure will be there. And you'll say "excellent idea, table! Let's roll."
I will never have to do any work ever again.
The details are, as yet, poorly worked out. Some things that I know will have to be worked into the table include:
-Leiber levels.
-Post-Burroughsian neoweird iteration density algorithms.
-Demogorgon.
On-line adventure generators often include some fine and gamable ideas, but somehow do not include the important things I feel are the actual hard part about coming up with an adventure.
Like: a level of aesthetic consistency that makes having 3 minotaurs in one room and a robot with flamethrowers for glands in the next room make perfect sense and feel like a luscious dark bite of a rich and chocolatey gameworld full of mystery and specialness and not just two things you rolled up.
I need a rationale generator. Lots of generators will give you 8 giant rats and a pie trap. I need to know why.
Also I need screwy inventive puzzles or dilemmas that no chart could spit out. Like that. I need a table that can invent that. I need an AI.
Point is it will be the only table I--or anyone--will ever need.
You will roll on this table and then the whole adventure will be there. And you'll say "excellent idea, table! Let's roll."
I will never have to do any work ever again.
The details are, as yet, poorly worked out. Some things that I know will have to be worked into the table include:
-Leiber levels.
-Post-Burroughsian neoweird iteration density algorithms.
-Demogorgon.
On-line adventure generators often include some fine and gamable ideas, but somehow do not include the important things I feel are the actual hard part about coming up with an adventure.
Like: a level of aesthetic consistency that makes having 3 minotaurs in one room and a robot with flamethrowers for glands in the next room make perfect sense and feel like a luscious dark bite of a rich and chocolatey gameworld full of mystery and specialness and not just two things you rolled up.
I need a rationale generator. Lots of generators will give you 8 giant rats and a pie trap. I need to know why.
Also I need screwy inventive puzzles or dilemmas that no chart could spit out. Like that. I need a table that can invent that. I need an AI.
Monday, December 13, 2010
This Dungeon Was Designed In 3 Minutes
Stitched together the 3-minute dungeon...Contributor ideas keyed as follows...
D=Duglas
TB=TrentB
CL=ChrisLowrance
H5=IHaveTilFive
R=RogertheGS
K=Kelvingreen
TC=TheCramp
Z=Zak
This dungeon is entirely vertical. (K) The bottom is down, the top is up, the left is west, the right is east.
The Forgotten House of C'ielrak
Demogorgon's realm is composed entirely of the bodies of lesser gods he has slain. This is one of the lowest houses, once belonging to one of Demogorgon's concubines (a horrific eye-creature). Largely forgotten. It intersects our reality at one point...
1.Behind a nondescript door in a nondescript alleyway, steps head up into the dungeon.K The jagged stairs are ice TC (the ice is made from frozen tears), the gates, as rest of building, are made of blocks of frozen blood CL
2.Chairs carved from giant-sized molars CL
3. Horror eye-creature (emptied physical remains of concubine) stuck to wall with spiderweb. 3 Spiders feeding off it. scuttle away when disturbed. TB
4. Sweet nothings H5 issue form this room. This room has (flesh eating) moss producing air (for the dungeon.) TC a heat-seaking nanoswarm D of carnivorous enzymes
will attack intruders. Underground stream through wall on left. Other small tunnels.
5 Storage of flesh (which is feed to the moss.)TC Dead end with giant worm and 500 gp R.
6 Lost children. D (they wander here, if their parents are wicked and the world does not care for them). They tend and feed the Spider Queen's (replaceable) Heads TC (if you've ever wondered where the spider queen keeps all her heads).
7 Twisty passage--chance of insanity R, due to: singing floor in this mirrored hallway TC--(step creates notes, each one a different distorting effect)--paintings of art critics
that move, critique passersby CL (carping lesser demons, banished here shortly after The Fall, they could do naught but criticize--they will savagely critique PCs roleplaying)
(secret door is behind the last painting)
8 Vortex D (force stronger than gravity pulls up, through) knives TB (inhabit the air, spinning lazily, when ceremonial sacrifice knives from aeons past rust, they rematerialize here)
Lots and lots of marbles H5 (coat the walls) insanity provoking paintings R (the critical demons have placed their favorite artworks here)
9 Three wizards (The councilors. D) in red black white robes sit contemplating. Don’t disturb! R (they are millennia-old, they are meditating on how to safely approach the upper reaches
of Demogorgon's realm) they have been contemplating bottled memories stolen from the elderly CL (former adventurers who failed) and a partially annhihlilated thaumaturgic hex sign Z
for hundreds of years. They will caution the PCs to go no further, but each has a 33% chance of being able to answer any questions about the Realm the PCs may ask.
10 A white marble Roman style bath room, only the bath is full of hot blood taken from the first monster type rolled on a mountain/snow random encounter chart K on the walls are
sentient abstract erotic paintings--peep show sex slaves TC. These slightly mobile and slightly 3-dimensional paintings entrap the souls of Demogorgon's rivals. They are forced into bodiless
states where they are forced to eternally witness such frolickings as may occur in the bath. Their moaning slowly erodes mortal minds. Only fresh bloodshed will reveal or open the secret door..
11. A slime lord 99 Z made of purple mold H5 banished here. (It will attack, may bargain for its freedom, but must devour one level from a living creature per round whilst outside this
chamber.)
12 Hall is lips. (50 gibbering mouthers)(more doomed souls) TC (careful listening will reveal) that the ones on the floor despise the ones on the walls Z killing all of ones on the floor will appease the walls and vice versa.
13 This bottomless pit (shown on map from above) is flooded. Somewhere a Sea is missing. TC 4 miles down, the mind of the dead concubine (insane)... talks a lot. D tortured eternally on
a rack of unknown and unanticipaable tortures Z the only other "living" thing here is an Undead Wererat with No eyes. Walls clawed to hell. (shredded suit and filth.)TB above the water level
are spiral stairs which open up behind a bookcase in the city library. K
14 Above: Floating Eye-blobs of darkness. Repel light. Steal Dreams. (1% chance of going mad per round spent in the chamber every time PC sleeps forever after) TB
Below is: boiling oil. Eruption chance.D (beneath the oil is the) chronogrotesquerie Z (banished here because it was too chaotically disruptive even for the Demon Prince,
it is dangerous, but its time-alteration abilities can perhaps be harnessed by PCs if they feed it properly).
15 A spherical room made of a smooth white substance (rune-covered flesh-TC) An item of great value hovers in the dead centre of the sphere. K Properly reading the runes allows
passage to another part of Demogorgon's realm. Improperly reading them causes madness. The item (an anticrystal) was dropped by His Majesty...
16 His Majesty (is a perverse mage. Chaotic Evil.)TC eating a death bone beetle beast feast Z (the mage was once one of the councillors in room 9. He became impatient
and ran ahead, went mad, and is convinced that he is the ruler of a vast empire and that this is his throne room. He fears the slime lord outside and has been "feasting"
on undead insects for decades.
