Sorcery World

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

Sci-Fi World

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

Star Wars, Dying Earth, and the Programmed Setting

This contains discussion of Star Wars VII, no major plot spoilers but some general criticism. (Also, it's five weeks in, so see the damn film already.)

Robin Laws' Dying Earth RPG is not just a role-playing game set in Jack Vance's literary world. It also tries to codify the essential elements of that world - game as criticism. According to Laws the elements of a Vancian picaresque tale are: odd customs, crafty swindles, heated protests and presumptuous claims, casual cruelty, weird magic, strange vistas, ruined wonders, exotic food, and foppish apparel. The system also handles such Vancian happenings as being persuaded against your better interest, and winning great wealth only to lose it all ("All is mutability!")

And Episode VII for me was also a recombination of the elements of "Star Wars": you could see the boxes being checked off, with "doomsday machine", "terrifying monsters", "lightsaber duel", "alien cantina" and so on. But really that is nothing new. I remember reading more than one Star Wars novel in the 90's that seemed like a reshake of elements from the first three movies. Kevin J. Anderson's Jedi Academy trilogy featured a doomsday device called the Suncrusher. There were monsters, dogfights, lightsaber duels and star lowlife a-plenty.





Also: if you tried to do a love story, a police procedural, a picaresque in the Star Wars universe, it might work, but would it be "Star Wars"? The hesitation in the answer reveals that, like the Dying Earth, Star Wars is a programmed setting. It not only provides character types, artifacts and settings, but dictates the plot and action. Compare this to a setting that has become unprogrammed, like the Wild West. While at one time there might have been a stock plot for the cowboy yarn, over many generations its expansion and reinvention has left room for social commentary, horror, preposterous steampunk action-adventure, etc.

Meanwhile, things might have gone differently if the second Star Wars trilogy's attempt to expand the repertoire with political drama, noir elements and romance had been at all convincing. But it wasn't. George Lucas caused a lot of buzz recently defending that trilogy and how he populated it “with different planets, with different spaceships – you know, to make it new.” It's a shallow view, but one that by omission acknowledges that the other "new" elements were failures, that the only things that stand up in those films are the laser duels, space battles, and spectacle. This is probably what sent J. J. Abrams running back to formula, from the potential of a universe to the safety of a program.

I think there's also a reason for the greater popularity of programmed settings over unprogrammed in roleplaying. The Standard Renfaire-Tolkien Setting, with its cozy taverns, dour dwarves, righteous paladins and hen's egg sized diamonds, is a convenient backdrop against which the slightest departure from custom - be it to invoke a different culture, a different genre or just something different - blazes forth like a star of creativity. And on the players' side, a solid and well-known backdrop gives a basis for their own creativity and improvisation.

Dragon World

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

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

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

d20x3 Genre Tables: Water

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

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

Fire World

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

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

Air World

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

Gotcha World

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

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

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

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

Where All The Tables Dwell

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

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

The "became" verb needed a little finessing.

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

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

ALL THE TABLES so far, jamming together...

Other tables

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

Bag of Tricks II

General Dungeon Room Contents

Random Treasure

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