D66 adventure generator

I've started a new project. I'm tired of all my sideways books of tables that are too complex. So I'm doing my own Judges Guild style take on Ready Reference Sheets. The first is below. Roll a few times on it with a d6 for a tens digit and another for a ones digit. 

d66 Adventure Instigator 

Incident  11 Dream or sweven 12 Last will and testament 13 Town crier 14 A contest 15 A drug-induced vision 16 A map 21 A mysterious coin 22 A trap has been laid 23 A noble 24 A curse 25 An anniversary 26 Overheard conversation 31 A juicy rumor 32 Creatures stalk the night 33 Someone has gone missing 34 An apparition is seen 35 Three witches doth prophecy 36 A crazed monk 41 The council has decided 42 A friend in need 43 You are not the father 44 An odd item has been found 45 A disease is spread 46 A survivor limps into town 51 Bad guys ride up 52 The sheriff is missing 53 Someone is on the lamb 54 Previous baddie toppled 55 Monster of the week 56 A secret society plots 61 Something has been unsealed 62 Someone has been framed 63 A secret must be kept 64 A group comes through town 65 An old friend is here 66 Rent is due 

Mission 11 fight the power 12 find the mcguff 13 catch a spy 14 finger a filcher 15 get there first 16 prove something 21 restore status quo 22 eradicate baddies 23 nip threat in bud 24 seduce 25 scare off 26 fulfill dying wish 31 find heir 32 unite the tribes 33 solve mystery 34 seven samurai 35 plumb depths 36 act as entourage 41 play bodyguard 42 accompany girl 43 renew/undo seals 44 hunt down 45 scavenger hunt 46 find cure 51 solve riddle 52 hold the fort 53 survive disaster 54 restore item 55 reconnoiter 56 give message 61 reclaim area 62 explore area 63 execute geas 64 break bonds 64 find ingredient 66 save the king 

But also deal with 11 g-g-g-ghosts 12 aliens 13 a double agent 14 false info 15 something broken 16 reluctant NPC 21 conflicting patrons 22 factions 23 other adventurers 24 barbarians 25 disease 26 curse 31 a dragon 32 long journey 33 sewer side-quest 34 being tailed 35 cultural faux pas 36 invincible foes 41 sky-island 42 sexy wizard 43 demonic agents 44 Fiend Folio roll 45 lost entrance 46 awakening volcano 51 you mom’s coming 52 two dates at once 53 terminator 54 someone’s body 55 fey trickery 56 one way journey 61 lesser evil 62 time constraint 63 complex ritual 64 preserve virtue 65 Sophie’s choice 66 big bad’s minion 

Journey & Destinations 11 snakes 12 strange thorp 13 guests of royalty 14 witch’s hut 15 three princes 16 cemetery 21 gassy bog 22 strange fruit 23 way too cheerful villa 24 cursed land 25 Moria shortcut 26 bustling burg 31 to the moon! 32 in the underworld 33 a dark dark wood 34 a series of forts 35 a castle 36 an abandoned keep 41 a haunted lagoon 42 micro-world 43 elemental plane 44 underwater 45 seven heavens 46 six hells 51 a doomed manor 52 the big city 53 winding canyons 54 a desert 55 a cave 56 the three vales 61 incognito 62 through a body 63 planes of dream 64 to a lonely isle 65 to level X 66 inside PC’s memories

 

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[MAP] Tomb of Horrors for DCC funnel play and beyond

Green devil nipples ahoy! Click that map to embiggen even more. All the $ signs are for secret doors, and they tend to point to where they are with their bottom stroke.

When you click this, it is gonna take you to a huuuuugely detailed file file.

First, have another map. I know. I make a lot of these and they are kinda my proud moments. 

This time, it is a North to South reversed take on the infamous Tomb of Horrors. I ran some dudebros' DCC zeros through there, and the results were very fun. I noted the upside down compass rose all over the place to remind myself, because Uncle Gygax's description used cardinal directions a lot, but it turns out that I can pretty much run the place from memory/ad libs (improvisational changes happened because I wanted to change it quite a bit and when I map out an area I can't help but change a few things). 

I'll detail the changes and tell what happened when we ran zeros through a dungeon Gary made for high level characters. A few people asked me, when I advertised the game on Discord, "How can you have level zero people do that place?" The answer is it's super easy, barely an inconvenience. We are dealing with role-players here, people that solve impossible problems every session. Sure, a lot of them died along the way, but that is a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

Area (1): This was one of the false entrances, but I've modified the original module ones and added a few extra ones.  The players eventually explored them all. (1) was hit on a secondary outing from the town. The town was inspired by Return to the Tomb of Horrors, a TSR publication that expanded ToH into a second dungeon and added a death cult city to the tomb.

That's what the "Macrabre Misfits" part of the map refers to. The PCs are from that town, and some players really relished the role of fatalist PCs. Anyhoo, room (1). If the lever is messed with while no one is on the flushly-raised-with-the-floor, helical stairwell, it doesn't budge. If someone is standing on the stairs, the lever can be operated by someone else and the stairs will lower... very swiftly and hundreds of feet down into hellfire. Yeah, hell is under the tomb and red devils in hardhats work here.

The devils were relatively friendly in a water-cooler shlub kind of way, but not at all on the players' side. One was convinced to give some hints in order to get a PC to put in a good word with the PC's goat (devils dig the goat horns). But the devils actually have clipboards with information on how things work with special notes to give to the PCs sometimes. The notes are lies. The devils are evil after all, and PCs are like bothersome rats messing up a dungeon that the devils will have to clean and fix it again.

So here are the other false entrances. You may recognize the sliding rock one (2), which is modded with death flames for people that are insistent on messing with those knockers on the green devil's knockers.

The pincher: I ended up putting a couple daises with hand-prints on them at the two east-west ends of the room. Nothing happens if just one is pinched. Two PCs work together to put their hands on the two prints, the devil faces slide closed in a macabre make-out session, and the PCs are trapped inside until they die of hunger. Actually, if I run this again, I think I will make the kissing devils steam up the room, steaming trapped PCs to death.

I don't need to explain the rocks fall room, right?

During the first trip into the tomb, the PCs threw rocks at this statue, a god of death effigy. Some devils taking a lunch break on top of the tomb leaned over and yelled at the PCs about that. Was a good way to introduce the devils. Later an old lady made a Japanese style pilgrimage to the statue (clap and pray). She gave the PCs some advice. She was a death cultist, so it was bad advice.

So this is the actual entrance. Of note is that I put a P where the door painting is. I put PT symbols to remind me to see if PCs trigger a pit-trap as they are walking through. Since I didn't want to worry about exactly where the PCs are stepping (in the original, the path means almost nothing), I just had quantum pit traps here. The PCs detected almost all of them with guile and goats. What I did have the path do was be a Morse-code so the smartest PCs get the poem that gives vital clues to keep them getting deeper and deader into the tomb.

But before we jump through that portal, lets talk of the catoblepas. This loathsome beast wanders the swamp. PCs that walked up to it made a save. Failing would spell death (all my players were lucky), but passing the save still gave spooky glimpses of horrible deaths possible in the tomb. Nobody died in the way foretold. Doesn't matter. Was a great mood setter.

This is the place the PCs tried before they learned to love the portal. The monster was not a "mutant gargoyle" but a four armed, winged, snake demon frozen in temporal stasis till a PC opened a door. It killed many people. I forgot to mention it's necklace to the players at first, and went back and re-illustrated it. DON'T FORGET THE NECKLACE!

Okay, so once the party finally got through the portal, the entered (11) (statue room, nothing to do at first because I forgot to mention the necklace) and then the hall of spheres. I hate the name because it sounds like "spears" and we have players from around the world so we really have to take pains to use clear language. And besides, there are spear traps in the original module. Also, heck, how can you use the word sphere for a 2D image. That's a circle, man. So, to avoid at least one aspect of that confusion, I changed the spear-trap doors to the ant trap and gas trap. The gas gives super-plague buboes within moments of inhalation, and the super army ants can eat a henchman in 10 seconds flat. Both were triggered.

One thing to note about the secret but necessary passage that leads to the cathedral is I switched the entrance side to the other wall of the hall. It's pretty annoying to work around passages that go under other areas when you are using a virtual tabletop and fog of war. I added a pit that was bottomless and one detour loop too. Players did not really go for either, sensing rightly that it would be bad for them. There was a hand-print dais here, and the PCs wisely did not touch it.

Adding fun green devil bits was very fun for me. The players encountered this green devil ass and wisely chose to shove a whole cheese wheel up it. This brilliant move saved them from the fear gas. They killed the false lich shortly thereafter.

  a sarlacc pit, basically

I asked the players to just role-play the effects of the idiot gas here. I didn't ask for saves. They role played the heck out of this and raced to fulfill the sea-devil's demand. I was so proud of them. One sacrifice later and we had the PCs transferred to (25) as a reward. You may note the OG module's siren is missing. I relocated her to the room of despair.

(25) is where the tale ends for our adventurers, because a PC, still under the effects of idiot gas perhaps, made a wish with the monekey's paw diamond it turned the party into a bunch of atomic bees doing a plank-length vigil over the tomb's true treasure. Was a bit of a shame; I wanted them to experience the doors bleeding like The Shining's elevator. Ah well, I'll probably run it in a few years again.

Speaking of which, if you want to join any of the games on my discord, email me at claytonian at the gmail.coms and I'll send you an invite. This is what I currently run:
Carcosa 

Tokyo, Japan Weds at 08:00 JST
New York, USA Tues at 19:00 EDT
London, United K Weds at 00:00 BST
Los Angeles, USA Tues at 16:00 PDT

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Rolling on every table in the D30 Sandbox Companion (part 1)

Of late I've started to get frustrated with my tsundoku ways. Time to put my barely picked up copy of the D30 Sandbox Companion to work. I picked it up and rolled on every page with a table. Well, a few of them today at least.

P10 Adventure Generator I
Results: Manuscript, solve mystery--theft, perform ritual, outpost, machine/clockwork

My interpretation: A manuscript has been mysteriously stolen at the Mechanist outpost. Mechanists are anti-luddite religious fanatics known for their high quality clocks, which caravans still make the arduous journey to obtain by trade. The Mechanists perform a certain ritual each year at a very precise time, but the head priest recently died and the stolen manuscript has key details of the ritual. Find it or bad things happen.

P11 Oh shit this is a continuation of the last table.
Results: Energy drain (HP), eliminate species, mask, glory, ranger/dwarf

Interpretation: Okay, I'll just go full bore at the Thief Metal Age rip-off now. The Mechanists have a spell that can sap people of their energy, making them docile servitors. The servitors wear special masks that keep them in a slave-trance, utilizing gasses that if released into an area with plant life will cause a chain reaction that will bring about a biological apocalypse.  The dwarven ranger has caught wind of this loathsome practice (but doesn't know how the masks work) and has stolen the manuscript, thinking it the key to the servitor secret, but the Mechanists are actually keeping something at bay with their axiomatic machines and slaves and rituals. The dwarven ranger has made a small bandit group of rescued-deprogrammed servitors, and they plan for a glorious razing of the Mechanists soon. If the Mechanists should survive, one of their number will probably decide to bring about the mask-enabled end-times.

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P12-13 Weather (you want to or not)
Results: I think I got III on the next page then rolled a single-cell storm. I think the temp is 30 degrees; this wasn't the most intuitive table, and weather? Ug. I guess there is a chance I could have rolled a tornado or something and that chance is cool, but I dunno if I even want to leave weather up to dice.

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P14 Off Course
Results:  174 degrees off course. This is for ships, which was not obvious at first. I would still use it in a land hexcrawl I think.

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P15 Foraging and Hunting
Results (foraging, temperate, winter, in the hills): Got 1 ration. It's not toxic. This takes 20 mins. (Hunting with three hunters): Nat 1 means we definitely find the thing which is (rolls) a large beast as long as we have the right weapons for the job. After like way too long, I also determined that of the 1 to 2 beasts we saw, we caught 1 one of them and used up like 12 ammo. To be honest, this got super confusing at the end. I guess it saves the time of having the players roll to hit though. We could play the encounter out with the 60 foot range I determined.

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p16-17 terrain phenomena with descriptors
Results (determined that we were in the hills again randomly; let's just say it's temperate hills in winter for the rest of this post): No phenomena (only 6 in 30 chance). Boring? Rolls: It was a crag. We saw a crag.

Nah, this table isn't bad though. I'd roll a result without chances wherever the players happen to be just so I can set the scene and get the coveted cuesta with a cliff.

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P18 Settlements
Results (for an unsettled hex square): No residents because I rolled a town result (impossible to have a town in an unsettled area). But maybe this would indicate ruins instead, so I roll at the bottom of the page and I guess we have an abandoned nomad camp.

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P19 Actual Ruins
This page doesn't worry about population.
Results: A tower. Moderately collapsed. Infested with insects. Giant wasps, maybe.

I like this page a lot. Simple, fast and evocative.

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P20 Temples
Results: A mound with timber structures and 1d6 rooms. It has 8 columns on the front and back faces.

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P21 Cults!
Results: Unity; the oracle; beholder worshiped; death to monarchs!; they sleep on beds of rocks.
The Unity of the Oracle was determined to --of course-- want to conquer the world some day.

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P22 Magical Places
Results: Cavern, of dreams. Short one, but fun page.

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P23 Pilgrim groups
Results: Lawful/good (paladins?), 60 in number and mounted, six 2nd level clerics, four 4th level, and one 6th level, the chance that there were fighters/thieves in the group was rolled at/under when the die said there were 8 of the former and 2 of the latter, so I guess we do have paladins.  

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So there you have a few pages tested. Some of them were like remembering the steps to do a math proof for me, but there are some pages I would pull out in a pinch for quick table play.


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J RPG Fluff product: Considerations of the Fantasy World

Found this lovely thing at Yellow Submarine today. It's a compilation of columns from Role & Roll magazine about misc. fantasy RPG topics by Yūya Kobayashi  (小林裕也). It's all system-agnostic stuff featuring the creatures, items, and locales one could find in your standard high fantasy setting. It's available on Amazon.co.jp.

I liked the section on mounts. Reminds me I need to include those humanoid mounts from the Dying Earth stories. Horses need to become rare in my campaign. 

Some Fantasy anatomy is explored in these pages about birdmen and centaurs.

Inviting copy from the book obi (belt, also called koshimaki)

A review of the Carcosa book and PDF

First, I'm going to show you the physical product, available for purchase here,  via a video:

Second, other reviewers make a point of saying they don't want to have any controversy in their comments section when they talk about Carcosa. Screw that. It's controversial, it makes people uncomfortable. As long as you can be civil, I don't mind you expressing all sorts of misgivings about this product. Go ahead and comment! Now on with the review!

Okay, so some history.

That guy that wrote An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge also wrote about a place called Carcosa in a short story called An Inhabitant of Carcosa that can be read for free here. Over the years, it got incorporated into the Cthulhu Mythos. Later, I had to read his less interesting stories in middle-school English Class, but I just mostly say that to evoke the pubescent atmosphere of the next part of our history tour.

Long ago there was a game called D&D. It had a few supplements that were given roman numerals and contained alternated rules. Carcosa was presented as such a supplement when it first came out a couple years back, though its creator admittedly has nothing to do with the original people or company that made D&D. I just want you to know the writer's approach of evoking nostalgia from books they obviously love.

In other parts of the 1970s role-playing universe, another game called Empire of the Petal Throne was also enjoyed by a few old school nerds. At one point they put out a supplement called The Book of Ebon Bindings. You can check it out on Scrbd, and if you do you will start to see a lot of similarities to the Carcosa product. It seems that both the modern day dead-tree edition and the text are intentionally imitating Ebon Bindings, and I think that's fine. A non-obvious homage.

Ebon Binding presented rituals for getting demons and the like to work for you. They described foul rituals where the caster would do unspeakable and torturous things to humans that were sacrificed to gain the attention of these infernal entities. That was in 1978.  I've not check out the entirety of Ebon Bindings to see how it compares to Carcosa on the nature of victims, but the point must be made that Carcosa is not treading new ground in terms of describing sacrifices in a role-playing supplement. I dare say that if parents back in the day had gotten ahold of the Ebon Bindings, which was much more obscure a game book than any D&D product, the moral panic of the 80s may have visited the gaming world much sooner.

But the big difference between Ebon Bindings and Carcosa is that the former reads more like an anthropology book (basically, it's a little boring) and Carcosa reads like a tourism guide to Barsoomian world (which makes it quite interesting).

No pussy-footing around it though: Carcosa mentions underage victims being sacrificed, and in one now infamous instance goes into an amount of detail that will make anyone suck in their breath for a second and cringe. Furthermore—and I don't know if this was part of the original PDF from a couple years back—in the sample adventure included in the book, the players can run across the body of such an unfortunate victim and learn that the sorcerer that did this has also found a way to keep her necrotically preserved for further ritualistic violations.

Why publish such a thing? Because it makes the stakes very high. Any self-respecting group of players will want to enact painful justice on the man that did such a thing. You want horrid villains? This book will give them to you. The most loathsome and sad beings in the universe.

On the other hand, many will point out that because such rituals are described, albeit in short entries usually no more than a paragraph or two, some players will exercise their right to carry them out in-game. Well, in my personal case, if I was playing a sorcerer (the class presented in this book that has access to rituals), I would never carry out certain of the rituals, even if it was for the greater good. I never can bring myself to be too bad of a guy when I role-play. I always have a soft spot for begging villains that promise contrition. That's how I roll. If the player to my left wanted to perform an evil ritual, my character would soon plot their character's demise. Even if they were doing something that might save the world from one of the Lovecraftian entities presented in the book.

There are more than a couple ways sorcerer characters are limited anyways. First, they have to find rituals to even have knowledge of them. Something easier said than done. I am not finished reading the 800 entries of the hex-crawl section, but I suspect the most infamous ritual in the book is not listed anywhere as being learnable in a way that PC can stumble across. So it would be up to a—dare I say it?—perverse DM to put foul rituals into PC hands. Second, banishment rituals, which would be the ideal method to stave off nightmarish beings, do not require the sacrifice of humans.

So what does the book offer outside of controversy?

Lots of new flavorful rules and goodies to play with. The latest version of Carcosa uses rules from the publisher's game: Lamentations of the Flame Princess. So there is ascending armor class and a few other quirks that are a matter of taste, but the hit-die and damage-die re-roll at the beginning of each battle system was so interesting it actually inspired me to finally make this blog and the Kill It With Fire RPG rules (don't worry, publishers, I didn't rip off your rules by any means!). I doubt most people would play the re-roll-every-time rules in their D&D/LotFP/Carcosa campaigns, but I would like to try them at least once. They add an element of caution that I would expect Old Schoolers to embrace.

Besides the new rules there are presentations for simple (and very random) psionics, alien weapons, spawn of Shub-Niggurath, plants, and so on. You will get a bit of a Gamma World feel with some things, and a lot of Call of Cthulhu with others.

The monster entries and hex-crawl sections are pretty fun. In fact, for someone like me stuck in Japan and rarely encountering other gamers, these sections are wonderful literature with which to pass the time. The adventure included in the book is excellent and flavorful as well. I don't think one can find such a rich gaming supplement very often.

I am happy with my purchase. I don't know when I will get to use its contents, but in the meantime they entertain me and that's all I really ask for.
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Edit: Also, the publisher's thoughts on the RPG and its controversy are very interesting. Link!