July 2023 RPG Blog Carnival wrap-up

 Apologies for the lateness of this post, I've been AFK for the last week or so.  Also Blogger seems to be marking comments as spam a few days after I approve them, which makes them disappear, so I had to work that out and bring them back...

Thanks for the contributions to the July 2023 RPG Blog Carnival topic of Terrain, Seasons, Weather:

Image credit: skyscapeparadise

Sea of Stars RPG writes about unusual weathers and their use in our games:

"Like all things, weather should be used to make the world more interesting.  Bring it in when it heightens a scene or mood, and minimize it when it is not important to the action."

Seed of Worlds gives us a d8+d20 weird weather generator for weird terrains:

"For this post we are looking at this from a 'wind off the plane of horrors' angle; roll this to see what kind of weird weather-related effect you are getting and then snap that together with known local weird locations in your campaign or go to the bottom table for some ideas of what those strange locations could be." 

Beneath Foreign Planets gives us a system for random weather and some seasonal examples:

"I've wanted a weather system that possesses the following qualities: is simple enough to be memorable, allows for the weather to be naturally and randomly changeable AND stay the same for long stretches, to show weather patterns/trends within a season and most importantly allow for the weather to become 'weird' so that the players can experience wild or dramatic weather phenomena (but not too often) and to try to do all this with as little die rolling as possible."

And my own submission reviewing A Visitor's Guide to the Rainy City, here.

The Carnival has moved on to Codex Anathema for August, where the theme is "Cabals and Congregations" - I hope to see you there.

For more information on the Carnival, or to check out the 15 year archive of Carnival posts, or if you want to host on your blog, then check out the hub at Of Dice And Dragons.

Seedy Sci Fi / Cyberpunk bar generator

As I'm currently enjoying running Mothership as much as I used to enjoy running Stars Without Number, and this month's RPG Blog Carnival theme is "Taverns, Bars, and places to meet", I thought why not combine my old love of one-roll generators and my new love of spark tables into a bar generator for your favourite SF TTRPG?

Image credit: Pazuah on DeviantArt

So grab a fistful of polyhedrals and let's see where the party ends up:

This place is:

d10 tens	d10 units
a backstreet or spaceport hotel bar	filled with noisy arcade machines
a streetside kiosk in a shipping container	selling local moonshine
a laser-lit all-night club	rumoured to have a secret back room
a trendy wine bar in a respectable 'hood	tended by an AI/robot/alien
a high class cocktail lounge	with live music playing
a trucker / hauler / biker bar	hosting an open mic contest
a pop-up bar in someone's hab block	allegedly run by the mob
a snug in the back of an ethnic restaurant	with the best bartender in town
rooms in a church, mission, or similar	with plenty of under-the-counter goods
a motel bar in the middle of nowhere	with a priceless bottle under glass

Current patrons (reroll each day / as needed):

February Blog Carnival wrap-up, and #dungeon23 sparks for March

First things first, let's wrap up the February 2023 RPG Blog Carnival!

Alesmiter brings us procedures for speeding up wilderness travel - "Let's see how we can accelerate this if we stop asking the dice if an encounter has occurred and start asking them when the next encounter occurs."

Sea Of Stars brings us a procedure for generating ships coming into port - "Ships are arriving in Port Imperial all the time. So, for inspiration for such ships, we have another random table!"

Image credit: mcrassusart

Seed Of Worlds brings us procedures for generating encounters by rolling overloaded dice on unlockable encounter tables - "So together we get the below - a flat chance of it being the type of encounter from the d6 and the probability curve of it being whatever is out there wandering about."

RPG Wandering brings us hexflower-powered procedures for tracking any kind of progress - "The basic idea of a hexflower is a random table with a memory. The next encounter/location/treasure rolled depends on where you currently are on the grid. This appeals to me as a way to track the PCs progress on all sorts of long-term projects, from inventing magic items, to tracking down an old ruin in the wilderness, to investigating some long-forgotten lore."

I wrote up a review of Skycrawl, an indie setting with a whole load of interesting procedures, and have started working on a spark-table-of-spark-tables for procedurally generating dungeons - more on this below!

Working on a #dungeon23 meta (mega?) spark-table-of-spark-tables

As you may know, this month I am very much thinking about procedure. Being a fan of procedural generation generally, and spark tables specifically, I'm building up a mega meta-spark-table where each entry references another spark table (or set of spark tables).

For level 2 of my megadungeon I rolled "Fungal Wasteland" on my original d100 spark table, so for further inspiration I built some more quick spark tables, for "Fungal" and for "Wasteland" specifically:

Fungal

Adjectives: toadstool, spore, rotting, corrupted, infested, slime, mushroom, fermenting

Places: farm, forest, spore-field, giant cap

Antagonists: mycologists, fungusfolk, harvesters, cultists

(NPCs will come from the above)

Things: world-stool, spores, juice/extract, truffles

Situations: infestation, hallucination, feast, rot

Wasteland 

Adjectives: feral, forgotten, jury-rigged, wasted, disused, rusted, barren, scrap/junk

P: ruin, wastes, refuge, camp

A: raiders, survivors, prospectors, treasure hunters

T: artifact, cause (of the desolation), prophecy, scrap heap

S: collapse, ambush, awakening, restoration

Sparking

Rolling a few times on these (an Adjective from one + something from the other) gave me this little lot of potentially useful ideas:

d100 #dungeon23 spark table

Happy New Year! I've been meaning to start making some dungeons for a while now, so what better time to start than now.  Whether I actually do or not, I've thrown together this spark table for inspiration; please do feel free to use it:

1	Ancient	Childhood
2	Death	City
3	Sunken	Factory
4	Love	Touch
5	Empire	Fall
6	Heavy	Pit
7	Rural	Library
8	Darkness	Ocean
9	Bloom	Song
10	Rust	Roots
11	Noise	Bones
12	Time	Gardens
13	Excess	Portal
14	Decay	Idol
15	Flood	Door
16	Sleep	Light
17	Cold	Bridge
18	Ash	Mask
19	Meat	Rise
20	Solitude	Galleries
21	Growth	Cliffs
22	Greed	Road
23	Luck	Badlands
24	Chaos	Trench
25	Laugher	Labyrinth
26	Smoke	Passages
27	Forgotten	Junction
28	Song	Causeway
29	Roots	Caverns
30	Bones	Mines
31	Hangman	Riverbed
32	Blood	Crypt
33	Prophet	Vents
34	Stars	Warrens
35	Cut	Meadows
36	Sacrifice	Shafts
37	Incense	Jumble
38	Gold	Crawlways
39	Obsidian	Wasteland
40	Winding	Halls
41	Fractured	Canyons
42	Deep	Shore
43	Flooded	Chasms
44	Dripping	Maze
45	Sulfur	Worm-casts
46	Ice	Edge
47	Misty	Darkness
48	Artificial	Refuge
49	Crystal	Wonderland
50	Gem	Jungle
51	Endless	Arches
52	Fungal	Pillars
53	Lava	Geysers
54	Noxious	Dunes
55	Giant's	Burrows
56	Jagged	Battlefield
57	Ashen	Railroad
58	Steaming	Ossuary
59	Haunted	Nest
60	Ooze	Hunting Grounds
61	Twisted	Society
62	Enchanted	Factory
63	Antimagic	Tonic
64	Pastry	Heap
65	Highrise	Chimney
66	Loud	Debt
67	Overgrown	Crowd
68	Burnt	Museum
69	Disputed	University
70	Repurposed	Office
71	Dirty	Distillery
72	Glass	Art
73	Electric	Canal
74	Murder	Tourism
75	Paper	Lizard
76	Smoked	Graveyard
77	Bombed	Council
78	Fat	Slum
79	Luxury	Music
80	Wild	Ruins
81	Broken	Fort
82	Prototype	Market
83	Artisan	Rookery
84	Antigravity	Holy Site
85	Biomechanical	Lair
86	Cosmic	Homesteads
87	Floating	Boomtown
88	Folding	Harbour
89	Hallucinogenic	Prison
90	Hypnotic	Vaults
91	Living	Town
92	Orbital	Paradise
93	Regenerating	Rain
94	Slippery	Sea
95	Silken	Belt
96	Soul	Fleet
97	Space	Cloud
98	Truth	Titan
99	Vanishing	Worldtree
100	Wizard	Wheel

This is using the words from Sean McCoy's original expanded post, plus some borrowed or stolen from the excellent Downcrawl / Skycrawl and from spark tables I have bookmarked at both Bastionland and Prismatic Wasteland.  Plus a few words I sprinkled in as the mood or inspiration took me, or when I realised I had duplicates and needed to replace them!

Image credit: midgptjourney

This is so intimidating that this might just be it for today for me. If you're looking for more then you may like my 5 room dungeon generator and this dungeon-related RPG Blog Carnival round-up post - good luck.

Comments are always welcome.  If you use this I'd love to know what you rolled, and see the results...

UVG: d11+n more reasons to travel the Ultraviolet Grasslands

The seed for one of these travel quests came from a conversation with a friend along the lines of "what if the party were all bards and the campaign was actually a stadium tour," and the rest came all at once after that.

I'm writing them down for when I come to run a game in the Ultraviolet Grasslands and hope you find them useful or entertaining, further suggestions are very welcome in the comments! 

Ah those crazy cat lords. Image (cc) maricamolesi

Sci-Fi Dungeon / Derelict Adventure Generator

I saw there is a One Page Derelict jam on itch.io and thought it would be fun to write up my first Stars Without Number adventure, set on a derelict refuelling station. If these tables give you any ideas for an adventure why not check out the jam?

Based on my seemingly popular 5 Room Dungeon tables from last year. Just roll a set of polyhedral dice and consult the tables for inspiration.

The d20 - Access is challenging because:

1. it is surrounded by space debris.
2. its automatic defences are still active.
3. it is invisible to active sensor sweeps.
4. pirates or other raiders swarm nearby.
5. it was lost due to a hyperspace mis-jump.
6. it is guarded by an alien construct.
7. all the airlocks are on emergency lockdown.
8. someone rich/powerful keeps it secret.
9. it is embedded in an asteroid.
10. it has drifted too far out of the system.
11. it requires antique access keys/protocols.
12. there are rumours that it's haunted.
13. the wreckage is under quarantine.
14. it is infested with vermin or aliens.
15. it drifted into solar storms or radiation.
16. the owning megacorp hushed it up.
17. military access codes are required.
18. a decoy hides its real location.
19. its location is known only to a select few.
20. a rogue AI guards against intruders.

Image (cc) RadoJavor

The d6 - A group of:

6 more brilliant blog posts from around the web

Some older, some newer. All worthy of your time.

First off, one I stumbled on and used in my Stars Without Number campaign: Coins and Scrolls has a comprehensive - and often hilarious - d500 mutations random table.

Image (cc) MassCreed

Bastionland makes an excellent point about some important key questions, and their answers, around how easily we are able to pick up and play RPGs and game settings.

Another great random table - there are never enough tables - this time Graphite Prime asks "what happened in that town?"

The Grave Robber's Guide asks "How can games teach themselves", which has started off an interesting train of thought in my mind...

I stumbled upon an interesting experiment in reusable dungeons over at Lapidary Ossuary which looks at a problem I am mulling but from the other side.

Papers & Pencils has a whopping SIX d100 dungeon-creation tables up - the rest are linked from this one.

Please support the blogosphere and, of course check out this month's RPG Blog Carnival which is hosted right here!

Six blog posts I should have told you about last year...

Some stuff you may have missed from the blogosphere - now I'm off to find out what I may have missed since last year!

Image (cc) Kevin Dooley

I've been pointed to some interesting starting material for OSR games at Paul's Gameblog - having started D&D at 4e and disliked 3e I never experienced "the old school" and wouldn't know where to start.  There is a lot of OSR sensibility that appeals to me...

For those wanting to add some flavour to NPCs, DIY and Dragons has this fantastic link list for backgrounds and occupations.

Thinking about both Cthulhu and Blades in the Dark, and now just in time for Hallowe'en, I was happy to stumble upon this ghostly generator at Archons March On.

Against the Wicked City imagined the Warhammer universe in the context of classic English literature - and it's absolutely beautiful!

More OSR goodness over at Slugs and Silver - a collection of all sorts of great random tables (and you know I love random generators)

I have to include this plug and play dungeon room from Sheep and Sorcery just because it's such a good idea, and well executed too.

Please support the blogosphere and let me know any great finds of your own in the comments.

Random 5 Room Dungeon Generator

I had meant to do this for the August RPG Blog Carnival but missed it due to real-life problems.  However the idea stuck in my head so now it's here, hope you enjoy.

Image (cc) miszla

This generator uses the 5 Room Dungeon model, which I always think works better as themes/areas than explicit rooms so the results are designed as hooks and inspiration so it fits better into your campaign.  As always, roll a set of polyhedral dice or use the JavaScript roller at the bottom of the post...

[Update: I made a sci-fi RPG version too]

The d20 - The entrance:

1. is up (or down) a sheer cliff.
2. has become the lair of a beast.
3. is hidden by thorny undergrowth.
4. has soldiers camped outside.
5. has sunk underwater.
6. is guarded by a magical construct.
7. was magically sealed.
8. is guarded by an intelligent undead.
9. has collapsed, is there an alternative?
10. is haunted by vengeful spirits.
11. requires a lost key (or keys) to open.
12. is guarded by the local militia.
13. is not located where the maps say it is.
14. has been infested with giant vermin.
15. can only be accessed using magic.
16. is the home of an elemental or similar.
17. is opened by machinery that is missing a part.
18. is trapped in some way.
19. is known only to a select few.
20. is one of many, the rest are decoys or deathtraps.

One-Roll Random D&D 5e Characters

I have been working on a procedural character generator for 5e, as I find the system isn't necessarily built around making characters interesting, but it's involving learning a new language so is taking a while.  I'll post it when it's done!

Image (cc) Mikeypetrov

SO! Here's a quick generator you can use now, with a reason to take non-minmaxed stats and a life event to add some inspiration for background colour.

Why not grab a set of polyhedrals or use the button at the bottom to generate someone interesting?

The d8 - Race

1. Human
2. Elf
3. Dwarf
4. Halfling
5. Dragonborn
6. Tiefling
7. Gnome
8. Half Elf or Half Orc

RPG Blog Carnival - One Roll Fae NPCs

Since my last Carnival post I've been thinking about Faerie NPCs, what sort of things they might want and what interesting trades they might offer unwary PCs … grab a set of polyhedral dice or use the JavaScript roller below to find out!

The d6 - Type

1. Dryad or other female Fae
2. Satyr or other male Fae
3. Sprite or Leprechaun
4. Pixie or Faerie
5. Wild Elf or Gnome
6. man-beast of some kind: Faun, Centaur, Kitsune...

The d4 - It has an aspect of

1. spring - bright green shades, suggestions of flower buds
2. summer - vivid colours, suggestions of flowers in full bloom
3. autumn - red / brown shades, suggestions of fruits and seeds
4. winter - grey or white shades, suggestions of bark or twigs

One Roll Weapons of Destiny for D&D 5e

Image (cc) Blazbaros

I'm always toying with ways to tie the PCs, the world, and the story together.  These are weapons that can be found and used by starting characters but are in some way destined for the end game, and requiring the completion of a mid-tier quest arc.  Roll a set of polyhedrals (or use the button at the bottom of the post) to discover your destined weapon!

The d20 - Crafted long ago by...

1. Dwarves, from rare minerals and alloys
2. Gnomes, from fine silver woven with spells
3. Elves, from a branch of the oldest tree
4. Drow, from darkness made tangible
5. Angels, from a fragment of a star
6. Elementals, from distilled elemental energy
7. Fey, sung into shape from some organic matter
8. Merfolk, from the horn of a narwhal
9. Slaadi, from the remains of a dead Modron
10. Mind flayers, from psychically infused iron
11. Devils, and was forged in the fires of the Hells
12. Demons, from solidified corruption
13. Centaurs, from finest polished bronze
14. Yuan-Ti, from the bones of a Naga
15. A vampire, and was forged and cooled in blood
16. A lich, by corrupting a hero's weapon
17. A banshee, and lost by her in death
18. Lizardfolk, from the bones of a gargantuan beast
19. A sphinx, from a treasure of the gods
20. Orcs, by melting down the weapons of their foes

RPG Blog Carnival - One Roll Festivals

Festivals can add colour and a change of scene and pace to our games, so grab a set of polyhedrals (or roll one at the bottom of the post) and let's see what's going on!

The d4 - origins:

1. It's ancient, dating back to before the current civilisation began.  Perhaps the current rulers are trying to stop it, or perhaps it's important that the people who celebrate it don't die out?
2. It's traditional and has been practiced for generations here.  Perhaps the original meaning has been lost, or prophecy states it must run for 100 years?
3. It's new.  Perhaps the organisers could do with some help getting things set up, or perhaps someone is trying to make sure it's not a success?
4. Outsiders. It's touring.  Perhaps some mischief - or wonder - follows in its wake?