The Chain and Porcupine, famous for its Spicy Beef

Some of you know about Abulafia, which is a page of automated random generators. Some of you don't. Except now all of you do.

Though slower than dice tables, some of these are pretty good. Unfortunately a lot of them return pointless results ("Winddale""Sun Port") or randomly generate things it's hard to imagine needing in the kind of volume that'd justify going to a webpage just to make ("A doublet made of worsted wool emblazoned with an image of a red Orc").

For your edification and convenience I have gone though and picked out the better ones (locally defined as: 'ones which have produced at least one useful result for me on the first go'). They work fairly well to get the bones of a decent adventure, or (more likely) to flesh out something you've already put together which needs background details or secondary hooks.

The ones marked "oracle" are technically for use with "In A Wicked Age" but serve just as well as random D&D situation generators. Some have a tab marked "view source" which lets you see all the options and might actually be more useful than hitting "refresh" over and over. The ones not marked 'oracle' generally give you a few dozen results, a handful of which are usually decent:

A Nest of Vipers Oracle "A precocious child disputing with philosophers and declaimers."

ArcaneBooks "Concise Theory of Chaomancy"

Arcane Books "Experiments with Ether of Fate, by Rewan the Wizard"

Art, Grace, and Guts Oracle "A corrupt guard, turning a blind eye to the illegal businesses that have paid him off."

Conan Oracle "A mysterious cargo, arriving on a caravan from the far South, watched by many covetous eyes."

Elder Scrolls: "The dark moon rises, the goddess of murder gathers more power."

Experimental Fantasy Generator "Fountain of the Hundred Corpses"

Fantasy Place Name "Brixstead Mire"

Fantasy Scenario Generator "The story takes place in the Jagged territories. The scenario begins with a circus. The trouble is a direct attack against the adventurers caused by snake people pirates. To solve the problem, the adventurers must destroy/kill an object or individual. If a big fight happens, it'll be at Heavysky Bridge."

Fantasy Town "The Sign of the Laughing Juggernaut, famous for its Herbed Oxtail"

Fantasy Town Event "A city watchman was stabbed in the back near the St. Florus's Church but is expected to recover from his wounds."

Fantasy Town Feature "Bedthorpley Crossing"

Fantasy Town Feature Description"Crocodile Tabernacle is near The Sign of the Roaring Cook, which is frequented primarily by scribes."

Fantasy oracle compilation "A hermit priestess, practicing obscure deprivations."

God Kings of War Oracle "A prodigy-mage, still a maid, drunk with occult power."

Heavy Metal Fantasy Oracle "A mighty six-legged feline, wicked and feral, acid saliva drooling from it's fangs."

Pirate Oracle - Black Sails on the Horizon "A pet monkey, trained to do tricks."

Pirate Oracle - Cutlass and Dagger "A smuggler's ship, with lights showing low on the water, signaling her contacts."

Pirate Oracle - Letters of Marque and Reprisal "A fast ship, sloop-rigged and lightly armed, running before the wind, trying hard to escape pursuit."

Pirate Oracle "A rapacious kraken, devourer of the mistress of a burly roustabout."

Traps "Scorpions inside cleverly hidden pits - clouds of steam are produced, lightly obscuring vision"

The Treacherous Seas "The aunt of a mighty priest, on the trail of a lustful nobleman."

Ok, I'm Confused

I hate to step on Raggi's toes and steal his "let's discuss this discussion" thing, but this one honestly, honestly has me baffled.

Is Vornheim really that weird?

I mean, the only real difference I can see between it and other city supplements like it is they go:

"This neighborhood has the fish market. The fish market has fish. Boats with fish on them sail in and out of this neighborhood. In the words of Granar Blazonhelm 'I smell fish, I must be in Fishinghood'. There are many adventures to be had in this place--you might not realize it, but boats can be exciting! Sometimes there are things on boats in addition to fish! Like cargo! Cargo comes into this fishing neighborhood from all over Worldimadeuppia, from as far as Vaguelysketchedoutjapanequivalentium. NPCs you might meet in this neighborhood include people who sell fish, people who buy fish, people who pilot boats, people who are riding on boats and people who fix boats. Here's a picture of a boat."

And I don't.

If there is something actually confusing about the book--let me know. If I ever do anything other RPG stuff I'll change it.

Their World At War

-Jeremy Friesen whipped up this neat Wartime Village generator. Since I'll probably use this for the Dracula/Bathory War thing I made a split-column version of a few of the tables in the Vornheim format for faster village-making (read once and read straight across or roll 5 times). The "interesting events" part isn't on here, but that's the best part, so definitely check out the original post.


I do think the indie gamer only-using-d6s thing is hilariouscute.

Lingua Necrotica

...or plague tongues are hideous rotting servants of the Gods of All Flesh. They stand 3-4 feet above the ground, may be summoned by clerics of that faith singly or in cohorts of up to 20, and their pale, glabrous touch does d4 damage and (failing a save) transmits an unspeakable disease.

This malady causes the sufferer to be seized with the desire to lick the nearest living being. A successful grapple causes a network of thin yellow filaments to spouts from the sufferer's skin, attaching the plague victim to the unfortunate target of his or her affections. If left unbroken, these growths will eventually grow together into a viscid coccoon connecting and entombing both parties and transforming them--over the course of days--into a new cohort of lingua.

A Perfect World

To start off

The Platonically Perfect Sandbox would have the following characteristics:

1. The places are interesting.

2. The places are distinctive enough in the DMs mind that s/he can refer to them and think up details about them when they're off-screen. S/he knows what each one is "about". (This can be either because s/he is intimately familiar with them or because they are based on ideas s/he can grasp "This is the place that's like Vienna", "This is the lava dungeon").

3. Travel between any place and any other place involves going through another, equally interesting, place.

4. There are at least 2 choices about how to go on any trip and both/all are attractive for different reasons. There are, however, few enough choices that the PCs--as a group--can parse them.

5. Every place contains at least one good reason to visit every other place.

6. The NPCs are interesting, but--more importantly--each has as many connections (possibly hidden or through intermediaries) to the other NPCs as the players' suspension-of-disbelief will allow. (Practically speaking this number is very high since the players will probably not find out every connection for every NPC.)

7. There are enough locations and NPCs that the players don't exhaust them and new ones never have to be made up (the possible relationships are already latent in the places and people from the point of creation, meaning the DM never has to tweak), yet there are few enough that the DM can call them all to mind whenever necessary and the PCs--while not needing to be able to remember all of them--can keep track of enough of them that they basically know what's going on and can make decisions. (This is, in most cases, impossible.)

________

How I got there and some related ideas:

So I was thinking about how well this worked out.

Another Dispatch From The Department of Obvious:

When you're DMing, things you can remember are good.

Whenever you hear about someone rolling with Professor Barker or Ed Greenwood or some other pillar of the hobby, they always talk about how the person just seems to spin it all out, noteless.

This is because they know how the gameworld will respond to PC actions. Because they know the gameworld like the back of their hand (better, actually. How bored do you have to be to know the back of your hand?). Because they wrote the gameworld.

Those of us who do not have time to write an entire gameworld will take solace from the knowledge that these folks also know it because it tends to act like earlier analogues. Ed Greenwood knows Waterdeep because he wrote it but also because it acts a lot like Lankhmar which in turn acts a lot like noir-era Manhattan wearing Medieval London's clothes.

Details you can't remember and must write down are not bad: they often indicate (say, in a dungeon puzzle) a level of interesting complexity. However: the more you can remember, the more you can improvise, so rememberability is essential in a sandbox.

Here's a formula that's, again, obvious, but is useful to lay out at this point:

On any given game day, the value of whatever worldbuilding was done behind the setting you're using is equal to all the details you can easily access on paper for where the PCs actually are plus anything you can remember that day.

An example of often useless (in a game sense) world knowledge: the extended Cthulhu mythos in a Call of Cthulhu game. While conceiving the adventure it might be useful to know or have access to which Lovecraftian power has which modus operandi, but while actually running a given session at the table all you really need to know is what's going on with whatever single aspect of the Mythos you are trying to freak your PCs out with that day. Knowledge of offscreen pantheon (or panexodemoneon) elements doesn't come up much since Cthulhu is basically a horror game, not a game about magic and astral exploration. Usually.

An example of useful world knowledge in Cthulhu would be: knowing what the 1920's were like. Every single detail you have about the era--its politics, technology, social patterns--might come up if the PCs start getting creative. If you know the world, you can counter-punch confidently.

To some people, history is memorable to begin with and things that happen in real life constantly reinforce various historical facts ("Hitler was bad and his friends wore leather"), so it's easy to remember. History really all does weave together seamlessly so if you can manage to remember it you can get a lotta mileage out of it. A more interesting test-case of what makes a world-as-sandbox work is when the world is fictional.

As a thought experiment, here are some fictional things I can remember and how useful they'd be as templates to re-skin for use as D&D sandboxes or (more likely, at least in my case) parts thereof:

-The basic Lord of The Rings set-up. Not as useful as it seems at first because many interesting things about it are already integrated into the game (dwarves v. halflings for instance) and most of the other relationships are so powerfully centered around the central Evil Empire Vs. Everyone conflict that most locations don't relate powerfully to anything but that. Exceptions: Gollum is swipable (creepy NPC wants magic item even more than you and the Big Bad do) as is Denethor, the steward of Minas Tirith (NPC in temporary control of an important place doesn't want to give it up and is father to two PCs or good NPCs).

-Lunar: Silver Star Story, the video game. Very useful because the games's made up of a set of "themed" areas that are interconnected in ways that are pretty easy to remember if you played the game as well as several broadly-drawn NPCs that likewise are all inter-related. Plus it's already a fantasy setting. You can take the idea of like "High Priestess of a local vanilla religion who turns out to be a member of an evil humanoid race and ally to the big bad" and every other element in the setting has a relationship to that built in.

-1001 Arabian Nights. Not so useful because really no-one in the stories is connected to anyone else and no place is connected to any other place. It's full of good ideas, but none of them automatically imply any others.

-Alice's Adventures In Wonderland & Through The Looking Glass. Kinda useful because I can remember the "schticks" fairly well but limited because: 1-Most of the problems aren't "weaponized" (like, the Mad Tea Party is great, but turning that into a D&D scenario is as complex a problem as simply inventing one from scratch)(which problem you see graphically illustrated in the Dungeonland module whose solution is: everything is a monster you fight) 2-The relationships are fairly simple: everyone either works for a Queen or escapes her notice. Outside the opening shrinking/growing chapters, the geographical relationships aren't interesting.

-The original Star Wars. Somewhat useful because, unlike LOTR, the relationships aren't solely built around the Empire vs. Everyone axis. Like if I said "Do an adventure that's basically a fantasy version of what happens on Endor" you could pretty much write that adventure yourself: PCs sent to sabotage baddies in their base, notice or are noticed by superstitious natives, must recruit natives to help them (or succeed despite them). If I say "Jabba the Hutt but in the Middle Ages" you've got a bad guy, his characterization, a location (with a trap, a kind of monster, and some of the map), an environment, a plot (revenge against your party's rogue). However, unlike in Lunar, Jabba and the Ewoks aren't really related to each other.

-Game of Thrones. Semi-useful. The locations are really just based on real-world analogues or familiar fantasy archetypes, so they don't provide details you wouldn't have already like: how would a random encounter in King's Landing be different from one in Lankhmar? Exception: maybe The Wall. The castles are interesting but not, mostly, in a this-dungeon-is-unlike-that-one sense. The NPC inter-relationships are kinda useful but half of them are fairly good guys with uncomplicated desires, which doesn't give a DM much to go off of in terms of adventure fuel. The "bad half" of the cast is pretty good. If I put on a random encounter chart: "this NPC is basically Cersei Lannister and everything that implies" you basically got a whole gob of plot to play with, plus several NPCs with reasons to do things. Provided you can keep it all straight in your head.

-Shakespeare. Inter-relationships: good. Geography: bad.

-Superhero comic books: Most comics I can think of have simultaneously too many and too few relationships between characters: like Doctor Doom has been both ally and foe to Reed Richards many times but basically one's bad and one's good and that's that. They're probably related by marriage somehow at this point if you count future continuity, but not in any way that seems actionable over-all. The good guys are all allies, the bad guys are (often) all allies. The thing to do would be to zoom in on one story arc and use the relationships there. The individual bits of geography in comics are interesting, but movement between them is not really an issue so there's nothing to build a sandbox structure out of.

-Fafhrd/Mouser stories: inside Lankhmar they're useful, ones outside are less useful.

-Zork: Hardly any NPCs. The scale is too small--basically what you get in a Zork game is a single dungeon. Not much to base a "how this world would react" algorithm on.

Ok, so taking a look at all this, the ideal "rememberable" template for an open D&D world would be:

1-It matches the requirements at the beginning of this post as well as possible

2-It has conflict, but the conflict isn't just along an axis where all the good people are lined up against all the bad ones

3-It's got pre-modern technology, so that: 1-movement between places can't be instantly negotiated by airplane or starship and 2-the obstacles don't require a lot of "translation" in order to be usefully D&Ded

4-The DM is familiar enough with it to remember it all

To me, most published RPG settings don't really fit. They are so worried about making the world real-seeming enough that they don't provide adventure fuel. Places are hard to keep straight ( like I know in real life Ottawa is a lot like Philadelphia but in a game I need them to be different, travel from location to location is barely considered (even in something like the Majestic Wilderlands, most routes between points of interest in a given area basically present similar challenges), connections between places are generalized beyond usefulness ("Dorkendale is a major trade hub for the area south of the Scrublands".

What does fit is--maybe not that surprisingly--video games. Even something simple like Super Mario Brothers punches way above its weight class here. This is what I can remember from the first game:

you start above ground
then go into a fungus-infected dungeon
the dungeon can lead to an ocean but also has 3 connections to other places, one of which is sort of Halloweeny and I can't remember the others
proceeding by the most direct route across any place gets you to a lava dungeon, one of which has an eternal-loop puzzle
there's a princess who is moved from castle-to-castle by the big bad, she is allied with fungus people
there are also cloud cities accessible via beanstalks in certain places

That's already more rememberable adventure fuel than I got reading all through the entire Forgotten Realms set. And that's just what I remember without looking at the game. Imagine if you actually went back and played and drew a map. Or, perhaps more to the point, played the Super Mario RPG and remembered that.

Maybe this seems like a depressing conclusion to you: computer RPG environments make better templates for sandboxes than anything else out there. I don't think it should be, though. The Fortress of 10,000 Mists can still be as weird or literature-damaged as you need it to be, the only thing it's borrowing from Cloud World is the plumbing. As long as it doesn't leak, who cares where the plumbing's from?

Silver Star Sandbox

Basically, the plot of the videogame Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete goes like this:

-You (3 PCs at the beginning) go around looking for adventure ("Hey, why don't we go here?"etc.).

-Eventually you run into major villains. They take away one of your PCs.

-In order to get her back, friendly NPCs explain one of your PCs must become The Dragon Master by going to 3 places and getting 3 artifacts. This'll allow you to have enough power to defeat the villains.

-You get the items. (Meeting obstacles along the way.)

-Then you meet the major villain again, who you chase through various lairs, until you finally catch and defeat him.

Since I remember the plot and monsters fairly well, and since it involves a lot of moving from place to place, I drew up these notes to examine the possibility of:

-re-skinning the Lunar world, and
-turning it from a plot-based world into a sandbox

Since the name of the game in a wide-open game is to have a general idea of what's in each area and then zoom in and add detail when your PCs go there, it seems like starting with a world I know well from spending 25 hours in it might be useful...

This map shows the connections between locations--not the precise geography, just what is accessible from where. Only places in the same box, adjacent boxes, or connected by an arrow are accessible.



Burg, a Boring Hometown containing:
Larval White Dragon (looks like a flying cat)
Annoying singing peasant girl (actually reincarnated goddess)
Annoying laconic peasant boy (fated to be a dragonmaster)
A pragmatic fat kid (fated to own a store)
A monument to the dead dragonmaster with a sword in it--it'll come out if you have all the other dragon items and will turn the larval dragon into a regular dragon
Some Wise Parents
No place to sell gems--you'll have to go to Meribia

White Dragon Caves, An Ice Dungeon containing:
White dragon (friendly)--if you lead the albino here he'll attempt to enslave the dragon and reveal himself to be the armored "Magic Emperor" and capture the annoying singing peasant girl
Wendigos/White Apes
Green slimes
Evil Flies
Crystal Monsters
A trick-the-white-ape-into-smashing-the-obstacle puzzle
An ice ring

The Weird Woods, A Forest containing:
An impenetrable mist that can only be dispersed by magic
Trapped treasure
Evil bugs
Evil plants and fungi
Hobgoblins
Poisons and antidotes
An ancient drag0nmaster, reincarnated with a beret

Saith, A Port Town containing:
A drunken sea captain who lost his sea chart to a gambler
Said gambler, who traded said sea chart to a hag
Sea captain's boat, which is being menaced by a ferocious bubble elemental

Hag's Forest, A Forest containing:
Evil bugs
A helpful hotshot wizard (lightning specialist)
Traps that suck
A hag's hovel
A hag that will trade items with you for a bit, then get annoyed and curse you.

A Boat, containing:
Fuck all


Meribia, A Big City containing:
A boisterous but friendly bruiser--a beastman--who is in charge of the city, father of the priestess in Lann
A street of magic stores, including...
A fortune teller who is also a mysterious femme fatale with a tattoo over one eye who knows and works with the helpful hotshot wizard
(Triggered event: if the albino is turned into the Magic Emperor then the city will be overrun with gargoyles and weird floating evil wizards and priests and the doppleganger sorceress will show up and try to turn anyone who opposes her to stone)
A bar where the waitresses wear Playboy bunny outfits
An unscrupulous owner of said bar who will try to steal your stuff and flee into a sewer dungeon

Beneath Meribia, A Sewer Dungeon containing:
Bridges operated by hidden switches
Shrimp/water-insect monsters
Floating biting white-flame sphere monsters
Fat toad/snakes
Evil hopping fish
A sludge dragon controlled by the guy who took your stuff

Althena's Shrine A Church containing:
Healing
Gossipy priestesses
A secretly evil high-priestess

Spring of Transmission, A Magical Spring
...allowing teleportation up to Vane, a floating city, via the...

Cave of Trial A Magic Cave Dungeon meant to test your magical prowess containing:
Evil bugs
A guy whose head is a big eye that shoots lasers
Fungus monsters
A really big fungus monster with tentacles
Some kind of magic restriction preventing you from using any items (but not weapons)
Once you've gone through this place once you can go back and forth between the Spring and Vane without going through it

Nanza Pass, A Wasteland surrounding Nanza in all directions containing:
Trapped treasure
Sleep moths
Giant ants
Fire-breathing mud heads
Stupid dog monsters

Nanza, A Bandit Outpost controlling access to Marius Zone to the south, the Eastern Sector, and Lann, to the west, containing:
A helpful but drunk bandit prince who rules the place and is in love with a priestess who is in Lann
Some gargoyles led by the femme fatale from Meribia who tries to kidnap him while he's dressed as a girl
Several useless fucks
______________

Marius Zone

Reza A thieves' guild town containing:
Several jackasses who will try to steal your stuff
(If you are a member of their Theives' Guild they have to give it back)
A hidden black market where you can find anything that was stolen from you plus hot air balloon blueprints and hot air baloon spare parts
Houses connected to each other by tunnels
A singer in the midst of being captured by the femme fatale.
A guy at the bar who will allow you to get hot air balloon parts for free

Althena Springs Magical healing springs

Meryod Woods
A spooky forest between the Marius Zone and Meryod containing:
Evil insects
Evil Plants
A floating sort of shrimp thing with a giant eyeball and mouth called a brain-licker
A sort of cross between an eye of the deep and a fish
Evil fake versions of anyone turned to stone so far who will fuck with you
The Femme Fatale again, who will appear and try to turn you all to stone

Meryod A town built on stilts over water, connecting the Marius Zone to Lyton, containing:
A bridge that'll break as soon as you step on it
Dumb hicks
A guy who administers the thieves' guild test: the current test is to steal something from Damon's Spire. He'll give you the password.

Damon's Spire, a (password-protected) Wizard Tower containing:
multiple floors, each requiring a riddle to ascend to the next level
floor panels that open doors
a library on the top floor
things that look like knight-helmed heads with bat wings
mummies
eyeball-head-guys
big blue bruisers with horns
some floors where monsters are only susceptible to magic and some where they are only susceptible to physical attacks

Iluk a town of crazy inventors including:
one who will make a hot air balloon for you if you can get him a certain bug
a field containing a million bugs that are kinda like the one you need but are the wrong color and have sleep powers plus evil plants and insects

Red Dragon Cave, a Lava Dungeon, only accessible by flying, containing:
A red dragon (friendly)
Blood ooze
Giant scorpions
Weirdoes wielding red-hot pokers
Fire elementals
Traps cursing you to fall from one level to the next
A thing where you have to run through fire
A pair of bronze dog statues which turn into powerful flaming dog foes
The femme fatale will briefly show up and gloat

______

Lyton a town full of horrible music, containing:
a guy who will explain the music problem is due to something going on in the shrine
a shrine which is an underground dungeon containing...
cracks in the floor which'll cause you to fall down to a lower floor
a wind-music puzzle
glowing black eyeballed floating electricity monsters
access to the Blue Dragon Cave

Forbidden Forest a Spooky Forest, containing:
Monsters that look like the monsters everywhere else but are insanely powerful
A spring where hot naked chicks bathe

Blue Dragon Cave, a Water-Themed Dungeon, containing:
An entrance that will only emerge from the sea if two people who are in love sing in unison
Teleportation pools that are the only means of moving from one part of the dungeon to the next but which are camouflaged among other pools which contain water weirds
fish-tailed "aqua genies"
blue spinning wolf/sonic hedgehog things
gelatin creatures
a blue dragon--or, if the albino has become the Magic Emperor, its spirit (which will explain that it has been captured)

________

Tamur Pass, a Wasteland connecting the Meryod-Lyton-Blue Dragon Cave-Forbidden Forest area to the Stadius Zone, containing...
Bug monsters
Plant monsters
Ferret monsters
The doppleganger sorceress, who sics dark sorcerers and evil knights on you
A pair of helpful pseudo-Sioux

Tamur, a stupid town, where people complain, containing...
the access point to Myght's Tower
a man about to be hanged by one of the righteous pseudo-Sioux--who will fight you if you try to stop him and will respect you if you win

Myght's Tower, a Wizard's Tower, containing:
An entrance that can only be accessed by solving a combination puzzle
Elevators that are part of a maze
Magic hats that attack--can only be attacked with magic
Creepy puppet monsters with wheels
Mirror monsters
Crystal monsters
An inventor who will make you an airship if you can find his lab (it'll take a few days)--if you try to follow the Magic Emperor in it, the Hotshot Wizard will try to sabotage you and reveal himself to have been a spy all along.

Lost Forest, a Spooky Forest between Tamur and Myght's Tower and Pao, containing:
evil bugs
evil plants
evil mushrooms
yetis
illusory trees making it hard to figure out how to get out of the forest

Pao, a pseudo-Sioux village, containing:
an evil voice which will attempt to put all female characters to sleep
a village elder who controls access to the Black Dragon Cave

Black Dragon Cave, a Stone Dungeon full of undead, containing:
Treasure chest traps that suck your ability to do magic
Floating balls of undead heads
Floating liches
Undead sludge monsters
Evil floating priests
Other weird undead and demonic monsters
A black dragon friendly unless the Magic Emperor has been revealed in which case its body is under his control and it attacks. If you survive, the Magic Emperor briefly appears, then heads off to the frontier.

__________

Frontier

(This area appears to have no atmosphere, like the moon. In the original game this is because the whole game takes place on the moon and only the "fantasy" areas have an earthlike atmosphere, but in my gameworld it conveniently fits the spherical-atmosphere-cube-planet model.)

Talon, a Mining Town full of evil humanoids

Talon Mines, a Stone Dungeon containing:
steampunk tanks
rock scorpions
armored guys
an injured miner guy that you can help
The evil high priestess
Healing statue to Althena despite the dominant religion being evil anyway
The evil high priestess from Althena's shrine forces you to fight the...
Shadow spectre
And each other

Cadin, an egg-like structure, containing...
Althena statue
The priestess, who relents and tells you the password for Ruid

Ruid, a Technological Tower, containing...
A space-looking guy
Tread tank with a drill
Electric wand dude with generator on back
An evil inventor
Hotshot wizard traitor in a suit that makes him more powerful
Activation switches for the Grindery
Maybe the albino, if he's been revealed to be the Magic Emperor


___________


Lann, A small town containing a helpful half-beastman priestess, in love with the aforementioned bandit prince. The town controls access to an island containing:
A swamp full of poison water,
Traps that confuse you so you walk into that water,
Floating devil-squid monsters
Eyeball-head guys
More of the monsters that were in the Meribian sewers
An evil guy pretending to be a dragonmaster who actually just rides a giant toad

___________
Vane, A Floating Magical City containing:
A wizard school
A helpful ice witch, daughter of..
A sorceress-queen, locked in the dungeon wearing a magical mask that confuses her
A doppleganger sorceress-queen that rules in her stead--she wants you to check out reports of a dragonmaster in Lann. She's actually the leader of a tribe of evil humanoids. When you return she'll lock you in the dungeon.
A metrosexual long-haired Lotor/Elric-type evil elf wizard who pretends to be good
(Triggered event: if the albino turns into the Magic Emperor, you'll find a giant crustacean attacking this place--it's immune to magic)
The entrance to a tower dungeon, described below--in the same palace as the magic school and the government--the Crystal Spire.
The Silver Spire allows vane to be piloted like a giant spaceship.

Crystal Tower, A Crystal Dungeon containing:
An enchantment making it so you can only use magic, not weapons
Treasure you can see but only get to by regressive paths
Mirror monsters
Evil crystals
Floating balls of plasma
Hovering magic guys called blood lords
A star chamber where the albino (still pretending to be good) and the femme fatale, disguised priestess, and doppleganger queen will reveal themselves and then make you fight some gargoyles
After that, the albino will ask to be taken to the white dragon

Grindery a moving tech-dungeon, containing:
4 colored dragons as power sources
Floating wizard
Archmages
Flying steampunk devices that are evil--some of whom shoot bombs
Tank-treaded golems with swords
Razor cats
Teleporting tubes
A hidden garden w/healing statue and brainwashed fairyies
The priestess, who helps you by fending off the sorceress and femme fatale
A fake Magic Emperor with 4 elemental attacks
Then: the singing peasant girl turned evil and hot and the real albino laughing at you--they cause the floating Goddess Tower to appear high above the earth
If you lose: transported to Meribia while unconscious

Goddess Tower A floating multidimensional fortress dungeon containing:
Demons
Necromancers
Fat quadrupedal demons with wings and snakes curled around them
Cannons with angel wings
Floating crushing stone mouth monsters
Stone Viking Warriors
The nonflyers prevent doors opening--kill them and the doors will open
The femme fatale disguised as the peasant girl--she casts a curse: from now on, during any battle a random 2 of your party will be asleep
More monsters...
Then the Femme Fatale shows up again and fights you with witch powers
Dragon color order puzzle
Confusing door puzzle
Evil doppleganger sorceress makes you face your fears
Then you fight her head on
Then the magic emperor for real

___
EDIT:
Somehow this post got deleted, so I'm re-posting it with some comments that got swallowed

Platformyness

Now what I know about computers can be summed up as: "What you guys and Wikipedia tell me." but this (probably authentically accidentally publicly posted but no less germane to this here post if it isn't) Google employee rant struck a chord with me, once I sifted through the technical jargon.

The gist of the thing--which I do dearly hope I'm getting right--is that each little part of Googlecorp has been focusing on building ace products that work, rather than on building "platforms"--that is: architectures that anyone inside or outside of Google can use to make their own products that are Google-compatible.

His example is (don't groan yet) Facebook and Farmville. Basically: Facebook did not anticipate Farmville (the current most popular computer game on Earth, literally, I have heard), but they made their code architecture available so that a thing like Farmville was possible.

i.e. Rather than anticipating all possible products and trying to outcompete everyone to find the next product, they built their product (Facebook the website) on a platform (Facebook the platform) which products like Farmville or Mafia Wars could be designed to fit on top of and shared that underlying architecture. And they did this by assuming from the beginning that the architecture they were going to build Facebook on would be transparent.

Probably by now you're already anticipating the first point I'm going to make: D&D is a platform. Third parties have been able to design their own products and "products" (noncommercial things like custom encounter tables for strictly local use) for RPGs since day one.

What I'm thinking about here are some ideas brought more closely into focus if you look at D&D, and RPGs in general, as platforms:

-Every time you hack D&D instead of writing your own game from scratch, you are essentially acknowledging the usefulness of D&D as a platform. Either because it works or because it's so popular that it's easy to get a group together or because you're too lazy to shop around or whatever. Point is: this is one of the keys to it being around.

-WOTC: What makes 3.5/Pathfinder not just a philosophical stepping stone between TSR D&D and Type IV is that 3.5 seems to represent the last time the people at WOTC thought of D&D as a platform. D&D Type IV, is, as I have said, fun. However, its hackability and extendability are compromised by:

*The third-party license problem (which, actually, is the least of it, and largely none of my business)

*The complexity involved in building monsters. This was already kinda nuts in 3.5 for DMs who (unlike me) were not willing to just throw feats, skills, and "yes-that-+5-attack-bonus-is-teleologically-justified" out the window. It's not that it is impossible to build the monsters with simple math--it's that it takes a long fucking time. Here's Jeff talking about how "building opposition was a chore" in an abandoned 3.5 campaign (and if Jeff Gameblog can't on-the-fly something you know it's a mess). In TSR D&D you can just go HD 6 AC 7 Atk 2d6/2d6 and you got yourself a foe.

*(Insidious and maybe beside-the-point corollary of point above:) It takes so long to build an according-to-Hoyle 3.5 or Type IV stat-block that it seems to trick many product designers into thinking they've provided a lot more content than they really have when they give you a monster.

*Though skill challenges can be cleverly designed and thought-out--they have to be in order to work. Although Type IV is designed to be "easy to DM" and it probably is in many ways, it isn't easy to make a skill challenge fun. Once a situation is re-designed as a skill challenge it takes effort to back-engineer it into a situation again and figure out what other ways could provide tension and meaningful challenge. This problem doesn't occur in a situation where a situation is just a situation.

-Platformyness isn't just about making a game hackable (all games are hackable) or about Open Game Licenses (even without them, nothing's stopping you from sharing tools with your friends or with GMs online. Unless you're playing Palladium games.)--it's about making that hacking so easy and fast that the usefulness of the game as a platform is as meaningful as the usefulness of the game as IP.

Savage Worlds seems to have gotten this idea, D20 has this idea, GURPS and Rolemaster were built on this idea--but Warhammer and WOTC seem to want to go a whole other way.

-Vornheim is a platform product--it's a thing, but it is also a set of (hopefully) transparent tools for making things--and when I keep saying I hope I don't have to write another RPG book because I hope other people look at it and make things like it, that's what I mean. Things plus platforms that can be used to make more things. Thought about in that way from the beginning.

"Half and half" books. How many times have you read on some blog about a nifty subsystem buried in an ancient module for a game you never saw? Why not explicitly design the thing that way: here is the thing I thought up, and here are the tools I used to think it up or extend it.

Since we know that hardly anyone uses these things right out of the box anyway, why not start out assuming a toolkit of extensions is step one in helping GMs use your module?

-Modularity is not exactly the same thing as platformyness but it also seems to be an idea implicit in the way we handle game stuff that seems like it could be more explicit in the way adventures are actually put together--by companies and individuals. "I took the pygmy trap from Mountain of The Devil Peach and I took the three-headed ghost from Wheel of Unexploded Fungi and..." well if we all know this is going to happen, why not put together dungeons and adventures as if we knew that to begin with?

Write a little something about why tab A goes into slot B and what you'd lose if you moved them around. Sometimes nothing, sometimes something--if you know your dungeon's going to be hacked, talk about the hacking opportunities. Make the design process transparent.

You don't lose anything by explaining that the pool is in front of the door so the rust monster has a natural barrier between it and the needle-mice. If a distinct area can be completely lifted without interfering with interactions in a module, point it out and graphic design the thing overall so it can be easily chopped into parts.

-Half the time you see a new table or chart on this blog it's because I went "Ok, for my next session I'll need a fortress--hey why don't I spend the amount of time I'd spend designing that fortress adventure making a little subsystem to generate fortresses." This isn't always the best approach but when I do it that way it generally works out--the brainstorming I do to get the entire table might give me ideas I wouldn't have thought of if I'd just been focused on building one location. And, naturally, it saves a lot of time down the road.