Sandbox mission generator: Location ("Where's the thing?")

There are a ton of solutions out there for generating jobs/quests/missions/etc., but not many of them seem to give advice on placing the object of the quest in question. Here's one solution, tailored to a Mediterranean-sized wilderlands hex map (possibly one featuring high fantasy), and assuming a 6 mile hex (it'd work well with a 5 mile or 8 mile hex, more or less, if you're not fussed over the math getting weird). You can work out the distances in miles or hexes, whichever is convenient.




Where's the Thing?

d10
1-2 Here (local / in town)
3-5 Near (within a day's ride / 50 (1d6x8) miles / 1d8 hexes)
6-8 There (within 300 (1d6x50) miles / 1d6x8 hexes)
9-10 Far (within 1000 (1d10x100) miles / 1d6x30 hexes)

Modifiers: Thorp or Hamlet -1, Town +0, City or Metropolis +1

Placing: Chop the distance indicated above in half. Roll 1d6 for a hex side facing (1d6 clockwise starting with the north face), move the (halved) distance indicated in this direction. Halve the remaining distance, roll for direction again. Stop once the subdivisions are smaller than a hex, or once you're sick of doing it.

Art note: Creepy wizard by Peter Andrew Jones. Where's this guy going?

- DYA

Random Plane Shift Destinations in Mutant Future

Mutant Future characters with the Plane Shift mutation might be able to escape the world (and the game) entirely, but when the ability is first used (and any time it's used without a prior destination in mind), the GM needs to come up with a random destination. Conversion notes for almost any system that isn’t D&D-based can be found in the Thieves' World boxed set. A sampling of the other dimensions one might access with this ability:

Random Plane Shift Destinations
1 Sigil, the City of Doors (Planescape)
2 Wildspace (Spelljammer)
3 Ravenloft (beware, this trip can be one-way)
4 Mystara (see Comeback Inn)
5 Blackmoor (see Comeback Inn)
6 The Forgotten Realms (see World Serpent Inn)
7 Greyhawk (see World Serpent Inn)
8 The Wilderlands of High Fantasy (Judges Guild)
9 The Realm of Faerie (Planescape)
10 Wonderland (EX1 Dungeonland, EX2 The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror)
11 Oz
12 The Third Imperium (Traveller)
13 Earth-616 (the Marvel Superheroes universe - Dr. Strange will eventually show up for a chat)
14 Earth-1 (the DC Heroes universe - The Spectre will eventually show up for a chat)
15 The Warden (Metamorphosis Alpha)
16 Known Space (Star Frontiers)
17 Eldorado County (Promise City, see Boot Hill)
18 Seattle (Shadowrun)
19 The Palladium Megaverse (see subtable)
20 A bar (see subtable)

Palladium Megaverse subtable
1 The St. Louis Rift (in the Magic Zone of Rifts Earth’s North America)
2 Phase World (a multidimensional city connecting the Three Galaxies)
3 New York (TMNT & Other Strangeness)
4 D'Hoonib (in Federation Territory, homeworld of Fugitoid, see Transdimensional Turtles)
5 New Yak (After The Bomb)
6 Gideon E (Mechanoid Invasion - this could result in a Mechanoid Invasion of the Mutant Future!)

Several of the dimensions accessible in this way are bars:
1 The World Serpent Inn (OP1 Tale of the Outer Planes)
2 The Comeback Inn (AKA the Inn Between the Worlds, see DA1 Blackmoor)
3 The Laughing Beholder (on the Rock of Bral in Spelljammer’s Wildspace)
4 The Cafe of Broken Dreams (at a random location in Fallout's New California Wasteland)
5 The Floating Vagabond (of comedy RPG Tales from the Floating Vagabond - all of the bars below should use the rules found here)
6 Callahan’s Cross-Time Saloon
7 Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe
8 Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille

There are definitely other additions that could be made to this - it's largely based on my game collection, and I simply stopped when the number of table entries looked nice and round. Note that some potential additional destinations (such as Krynn, Athas, or Tekumel) are specifically sealed against casual extraplanar entry / monitored for same by higher powers, but even these might be accessed by some of the "hub" planes listed here. I kept the Palladium worlds on their own subtable because a) if you have one you probably have more, b) they're all easy to travel between, and c) if you're not into Palladium games, you can easily replace #19 on the main table (one possibilty is Narnia's Wood between the Worlds).

Random-er Encounters

Haven't posted in a while, here's a thing. Crossposted from a 1e group on the Book of Faces:

I dig my little subsystems, and random encounters are no exception - randos are great because I get to be surprised by the events that transpire in play, same as the players are. Here's my formula(e).

For wilderness encounters, I use the check frequency and dice described in the DMG (frequency depending on terrain, die type depending on proximity to "civilizing influences," and 25% of encounters in patrolled areas "converted" to a patrol encounter), but I roll randomly (on my trusty d24) for the actual hour when any encounters occur. In dungeons, I'll default to the "1 in 6, every two turns" frequency from Basic, more or less depending on the location.

In addition to the normal "Monster Manual encounter" on a result of "1," I have further possibilities for encounters on the die - I don't have the actual table in front of me, but it's something like "hunting/animal encounters on a 2, "interesting flora" on a 3, noteworthy natural scenery on a 4, trail/wagon/animal "incidents" on a 5, a new "Ravaged Ruins" result from the Wilderlands tables on a 6, so on and so forth. (These really help the druids and rangers come to the fore in wilderness travel, I find.) Plant and animal encounters rolled from CDD#4 Old School Encounters Reference.

Encounters on roads are a special case - I roll an extra chance every hour (1 in d6 on an actual Roman-style road, 1 in d10 on a trail) for a "road encounter" (I use the list from CDD#4, but there's a great list in Dragon #105, published as "Travel Works Both Ways"), in addition to the normal wilderness roll.

On top of all this, for ANY encounter, once I've determined one is occurring, I roll the same chance to see if there's already an encounter with another party (monster, NPCs, etc.) in progress. If so, I'll roll some quick reaction rolls to see whether it's a fight, ongoing negotiation, or what. (Note that on the wilderness rolls, with the expanded stuff I'm using, this could totally end up being "ogres picking daisies for pret-ty ogress" or something, haha.) This extra roll can result in some really interesting situations, for what it's worth, I recommend you try it in your game - the "situation in progress" stuff can be a great opportunity for interesting roleplaying.

Finally, if I'm not using an existing local table, I'll throw a quick d6 to decide which book I'm rolling out of (1-2 is using the table from the DMG, 3-4 the tables from Fiend Folio, and 5-6 the tables from MMII), and, generally speaking, if the first result doesn't really blow my skirt up I'll do a quick scan of my notes/maps to see if there's a "locally-sourced" encounter to use in its place. (This is where those monster grudge matches come up - "Soooo, remember last time you came this way, and you webbed the hill giant chieftain in place while the thief braided his toe hair? Well, so does he.")

- DYA

Dark Sun Random Cargo Table

First post in a while, let's not make a big thing out of it.

This isn't brain surgery, just the list of cargoes from the Dune Trader supplement, hammered into percentile table form. I attempted to put some weight on the cargoes that a) were listed on the big Trade Route Map from that supplement, or b) I thought merited them.
For a single caravan: My rule of thumb for the moment is d6-2 cargoes (minimum of 1).

1-2 Ale
3 Amber
4-5 Armor
6-7 Beer
8 Bronze
9 Candy
10-11 Ceramics
12 Chalk
13-14 Chitin
15 Cider
16 Cinnabar
17-18 Cloth
-Common
-Fine
-Rich
19-20 Clothing
21-22 Coal
23-24 Copper
25 Cosmetics
26-27 Cotton
28-29 Crodlu
-Riding
-War
30 Dyes/Pigments
31-32 Erdlu
33 Feathers
-Rare
-Common
34 Figs
35 Fruit
36 Furs
37 Gems
38 Glass
39 Gold
40-41 Hardwood
42-43 Herbs
44 Incense
45 Inix
46 Ink
47-48 Iron
49 Jade
50 Jewelry
51-52 Kanks
-Trained
-Untrained
53 Kank Nectar
54-56 Leather
57 Marble
58 Medicines
59 Mekillots
60 Mirrors
61 Nuts
62-64 Obsidian
65-66 Oil
-Flammable
-Lamp
-Cooking
67 Paintings
68 Paper
69 Perfume
70 Resins
71-72 Rice
73 Rope
-Hemp
-Silk
74 Rugs
75-75 Salt
76 Silk, raw
77 Silver
78-80 Slaves
81 Songbirds
82 Spell books
83 Spell components
84 Spice
-Exotic
-Rare
-Uncommon
85 Statues
86 Sugar
87-88 Tools
89 Vegetables
90-92 Water
93 Wax
94-95 Weapons
96-97 Wine
98-100 Wheat

Generating a cargo or two can tell you a lot about the caravan shipping it - whether it's a ponderous mekillot train bearing salt and hardwoods, or a swift crodlu phalanx carrying spices and silver (and maybe some spell components disguised as lunch, who knows?).
- DYA

So I Got Level Drained Tonight

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

and I'm over it.

Since I'm usually the one running games, and have been since I was a kid, this has actually never happened to me, before. (I've had it happen in my games maybe a handful of times, and only one time that I can think of where it didn't just end up killing the character in question.) The bitch of it is, I saw it coming. We (the Fear Böners) are up in the eastern mountains, having somehow (against high odds of getting seriously squished) negotiated an alliance with the frost giants, but the whole thing hinges on our clearing out a cave system full of ghostly insubstantial nasties (the giants being too big to fit into the cave, you see). We were riding high on luck and smooth talk, having already survived a scrap with a roc besides the giant armistice, and honestly it was going to have turn sooner or later.

We fought a couple of relatively manageable beasties ("breath stealers", which do what it says on the tin, killing by suffocation), but when we entered the cavern with the ghostly-form-superimposed-on-skeleton sitting on the throne, I kinda knew it was time to pay the piper. The (mid-level) party cleric called to Kurdan and attempted to turn, no dice - and while my character just knew enough to be freaked out, the DM in me is already mentally rolling up a new guy. The apparition screeched and charged, taking a single spear hit from my fighter (Ordrick of the Hill People) before falling on him and SUCKING OUT HIS DAMN SOUL. Oof. Two levels, from 3 on the cusp of 4 to HELLO FIRST LEVEL FREDDY. (Unconscious, to boot.) Luckily, the next round our dwarven badass hit with a 20 for full damage, banishing the spirit, and we avoided a fate far worse than death (NO NOT THAT, c'mon, don't be gross).

Again, the DM in me knew it was a spectre, and that we got off EASY. It actually missed its first attack, and didn't get a chance to make a third. Beyond that, we were rolling well enough. (Although our thief sent one of his dogs to attack the thing, which had predictably tragic results for the animal lovers in the house (and probably tragic for us, later, since the words "spectral dog" were tossed around).) And, let's do the math: While being back at level 1 stings (SHIT FUCK GODDAMMIT), with the XP I'll net from treasure in the last couple encounters (and for surviving the encounter), I'll be back at 2nd the next time we can train, and at the level we're punching at as a party, 3rd a session or so after. Even until then, I'm sure as hell not equipped like a first level character. I've got plate mail and two well-trained (well-armored) war dogs. We netted a nice haul from the spectre, still to be sorted, and I've voice my *ahem* strong suggestion *cough cough* that I be first in line on that, namely on any spears or armor that come out of it.

Still - damn, that shit stings.

But fuck it. Some stuff is supposed to be SCARY, even to the players. And now my PC's got distinguished salt-and-pepper temples. Reed Richards gets all the girls, right? Besides, it was a great game moment - especially 'cause I was the only player at the table actually experienced enough to know that was a thing that could happen. The general intake of air when Matty dropped the 2-level bomb was priceless. The other players were genuinely taken aback (and you could see a general nervous shuffling of character sheets as everybody reevaluated their place in the game universe and considered exit strategies). And I got to experience one of old-school gaming's more "special" experiences. [Wonder Years narrator voice]In some small way, I think we all grew up a little bit that day.[/WYnv]

- DYA

In Search of Adventure (Young Lord Steakfist Goes Forth)

Well, hell, that was fun.

Wednesday's been kind of a big deal, lately - Wednesday is the night I actually get to PLAY D&D. Like, as a player. Most of the time, I'm the one running the games. (Sure most of you know how that is.) However, over the last 6 months or so, I've gotten to try out Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, gotten into a good handful of Labyrinth Lord sessions, and even banged out a session of our buddy's mythic Greece AD&D campaign. It's cool to get some time on the other side of the screen. (Heavy is the head that wears the Viking Hat, after all...)

This week, though, a slot opened in our Wednesday night rotation, so I kicked off a new Classic D&D campaign of non-specific vintage. I'm using the Rules Cyclopedia as my reference, but the players are all using '81 Moldvay Basic books. Beyond telling the guys that thieves can't use two-handed weapons, it's close enough for government work - if anybody gets to Companion level, we'll address the differences. We're using GAZ1: The Grand Duchy of Karameikos, B1-9 In Search of Adventure, and my modest pile of B Series modules for background and adventure material. Compared to our usual Monday Forgotten Realms game (where my... well-stocked Realms library can be a double-edged sword, sometimes), this is a nice slim set of sources to work with, and of course Basic is just a whole other order of simple compared to drink-from-the-firehose-style AD&D. It's liberating.

Now, I know it's base heresy, but I am enjoying the added minute or so the GAZ1 background tables add to B/X character creation. (For human characters, it amounts to 3 rolls, less for demihumans.) We get to find out a human PC's social standing, ethnic background (native Traladaran, Thyatian, or mixed), and their hometown. I'm firmly in the "character is what you do, not what you write down" school, and I like to see players develop their PCs in play. Two-page backgrounds are not encouraged in our games, much less a requirement. But with just 3 pieces of information, the guys were spinning off all kinds of speculation about their characters' place in the world, their family structures, and their relationships to each other. Great signal-to-noise ratio - once these guys are at Expert level, and their adventures expand in scale a bit, we'll have plenty of grist for the mill. We already have the illustrious dynasty of Lord Steakfist (and their ancestral home, "Castle Planet Fitness") contrasted with the ill-fated and penniless Brownwater clan of Black Eagle Barony (poor Dunder escaped that blighted land concealed in a pig cart, got killed in the face by a giant shrew in the first encounter, and was in short order replaced by his brother Slipsun). Great stuff.

Let's talk about the source material a bit. In particular B1-9. I've seen this collection get a lot of bad press from completist Mystara folks, and on one level, I can see why. The premise is that it's a collection of the first 9 B Series adventures (I'm with you, so far), and that they're threaded together in a loose campaign - not a lead-you-by-the-nose "adventure path", but a branching web of adventure hooks that allows the players the lead in navigating (a great idea, and - even if you don't use the adventures presented - it shows how this can be done, which is an important lesson for new DMs using published material). Unfortunately, several of the adventures presented are chopped for space, and I have to question the decisions made on what got in and what didn't.

B2 Keep on the Borderlands is included, but the Keep itself (one of the most iconic base towns in the hobby) is reduced to a paragraph describing the castellan brushing off the PCs. B3 Palace of the Silver Princess (the green, published version, not the extra-spicy orange version) is included, although the "programmed adventure" Chooose-Your-Own-Adventure content is skipped. (I don't miss it - as a matter of fact, this version is in some places better-presented than the original.) B4 The Lost City is here, but only the top levels of the complex are provided - the unkeyed lower levels are missing. (This kinda sucks - for play value vs. page count, a few more pages with the lower level maps would give a DM running this a lot more potential mileage.) B5 Horror on the Hill has its mini-wilderness area amputated - while I haven't run this one, a friend is running the original for two groups right now, and he tells me this is an unfortunate omission. Tracy and Laura Hickman's B7 Rahasia is here, both sections in their entirety. (With the original Daystar West Media printings, publication as RPGA1 and RPGA2, and subsequent compilation as B7, this is the fourth incarnation of these adventures!) B8 Journey to the Rock (a tournament adventure) is presented, slightly slimmed down. B9 Castle Caldwell and Beyond (itself a loosely linked collection of scenarios) gets 4 of its 5 mini-adventures seeded into the larger work, and the 5th is dropped. Finally, B6 The Veiled Society is the thread that ties the whole thing together - all roads lead to Specularum, and any of In Search of Adventure's three main threads will bring the PCs there to deal with the machinations of the Veiled Society. It is presented with the map from GAZ1 (as opposed to B6's earlier Specularum cartography), and sans cutouts or stand-ups, but is otherwise unexpurgated.

And poor, poor B1 - the original Basic Set module, the one that started it all, gets reduced to two half-page maps, unkeyed, and a single rumor. Not a line of the text makes it in. I can see, if I squint, where the "key your own dungeon" aspect would make it easy to lay this one on the chopping block, but I think it's a glaring omission - beyond the historical significance, these are some of the most iconicly weird room descriptions around, and exploring Quasqueton's baffling labyrinth is one of the hobby's major shared experiences. Devoting less than two pages sorely underutilizes Mike Carr's work on this foundational text.

So I can see where this collection gets its tawdry reputation from. Beyond the missing material (and make no mistake, this still clocks in with the AD&D megamodules on pagecount), the links between scenarios are tenuous - that they're not on hard rails is a feature, not a bug, but it will require a self-motivating party to navigate from one scenario to another. (The hook for B7 Rahasia, in particular, is... barely there - it amounts to, "Hey, there's this guy, an elf I guess, he wants you to play FedEx, and there's no reward offered - do you do it?") That said, there's a great campaign here if you're willing to fill in the holes. It presents Threshold (as detailed in the Mentzer Expert Set, and expanded upon in GAZ1) as the "base town" where the PCs meet, equip, fish for rumors, and return to should they ignore the scenario links presented in the "interlude" sections of B1-9. It provides some basic wilderness movement rules (nice if you're running this without access to the Expert Set and you want to handle such things in play). And the overall structure of modules is solid - a smorgasbord of Basic-style dungeons, culminating in a first foray into city adventuring. The whole thing would lead seamlessly into either the proto-Expert Set play of B10 Night's Dark Terror*, or the hardcore hexcrawl of X1 Isle of Dread. It just takes a DM willing to shore up the superstructure.

Looking at the table after tonight's game, I'm especially struck by what a complete game one could run with the Rules Cyclopedia, GAZ1, and B1-9. That's a lot of stuff in 3 books. As it happens, I have copies of B1 through B4 on hand, so I'm using the originals in tandem with the compilation material to bulk things out a bit. But you could do without.

So, I'm using my super-scientific review process and slapping a B minus on B1-9. It's just a ton of material, flaws notwithstanding. And it's worth pointing out that, of all the modules ever released, B1 and B2 are far and away the most common (and the ones that are most sorely missed here). If you're running B1-9 In Search of Adventure, spend five bucks tracking down B1 and B2, and you'll have upgraded this megamodule to a solid "A".

- DYA


* Formerly available on eBay for the price of 10 talents of gold and an orphan's heart, this classic - the last thing the TSR UK team would do before defecting to GW and creating the legendary Enemy Within campaign for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay - is now available in PDF format on www.dndclassics.com for a paltry sum. It's a great time to be a gamer.

Hex Crawling in Style

Haven't posted in a long time, but I had to recognize this.  Our Monday AD&D group finished their long-term mission last week, and this session was slated to be the "intermission" episode, so to speak.  I've been selling the guys on the whole hex crawl thing for months, now, and tonight was the night I had to put my money where my mouth was.  I had whipped up a quick player version of my local hex map (just masked out all the color for black and white printing, and all the areas the guys haven't gotten to, yet) and - since I didn't have any ink for the damned laser printer - fired off a copy via email to one of the guys to print at work.

I was expecting to get back 4 black and white laser printed sheets from a desktop printer.  Instead my roommate goes to the print lab at the school he does IT work for, and comes back with this monster hi-res poster map.  Looks AWESOME (and, man am I glad I sent him the vectored PNG rather than a rasterized JPG).  It really drove home the hex crawl concept, and the guys have already started making it their own with penciled-in notes and symbols for the crazy ruins and relics they've happened across (not to mention a big "LAND SHARK HERE" mark - yeah, they fought a bulette, lost a conveniently tasty halfling and a warhorse to it).  Without further ado, my awesome players' awesome player map (click for full-sized image):

Can't wait to run'em through this sucker some more, next week.

   - DYA