Flavour is the ‘taste’ of a setting or location, it’s what results when you successfully convey the theme or mood of a setting or location, even a person, with a short and effective description.
Believe it or not, this is one of the few things that Twitter is actually good for, learning the skill of brevity. Florid descriptions are all well and good, if you’re HP Lovecraft, but in a game you need to quickly establish things and get to the actions and interactions.
With a touch of flavour you can completely alter what might otherwise be an ordinary, run of the mill encounter.
Let us take the prototypical: “You enter a 10 x 10 room, an orc is guarding a chest.”
The door opens into a cozy little room. Dancing firelight from fresh torches makes shadows dance upon the stone-lined walls. Full centre in the room is a large wooden chest of polished wood, bound in brass and polished to a gold-and-chestnut shine. The tiles on look fresh swept.
The door creaks in its frame, wormy wood crumbling along with orange dust from the hinges. Within, the room is a black pit. Your lanterns shine, but reveal little, the walls are stained black with generations of soot. All you can make out is a chest, squatting in the darkness.
The ice around the portal gives way. Inside is a frosty chamber, barely lit by dying torches. In the centre sits a large chest, as frigid as the rest of the room. Incongruously puffs of steam emerge from behind the chest in a regular rhythm, slowly dissipating in the air.
As you approach, the door smashes open, hanging off a single hinge and shedding splinters as it smashes into the wall. A green-skinned brute comes roaring out the chamber, a rust-pitted and filthy axe in his hand. Behind him your practiced eye spots there is a chest in the room.
Bees emerge as blind worms from the flesh of rotting cows. The cockatrice is hatched from the eggs of black hens that have been corrupted by sorcerers. Kittens born in the month of May should be killed immediately since they will surely bring misfortune to the household. The caladarius bird dwells in the palaces of the great and by its gaze reveals whether an invalid will live or die. The Bestiary of Sundry Creatures sets out pre-modern people’s beliefs about many of the creatures that populated their world and their imagination. In addition to providing OSR (and Mork Borg) compatible statistics for these animals, it includes scholarly opinions and rustic folklore about the temperament, behaviour and medicinal and magical qualities of these creatures. GMs can use this material to make their medieval and early modern fantasy worlds richer, weirder and more immersive.
Something that has been a bit lost in NuDnD is the idea of characters settling down and taking on responsibility. Of warriors taking on castles, attracting followers and marshalling armies (something that made up for Fighter’s slightly less powerful rolee at higher levels. Mages could invest in towers, Clerics in temples, thieves could buy themselves headquarters and so on.
The nature of an RPG changes when you do this, but it doesn’t have to stop anyone roaming around on quests, it just gives them a headquarters, a tie to a particular area of land, perhaps even a title and a relationship with an appropriate hierarchy (nobility, church, guild).
The first thing you’re going to need is a stronghold or fortress.
Holdings
Holding
Cost
Rent/Year
Note
Castle
250k+ GP
N/A
Big, stone, with room for up to 1,000 people.
Dungeon
750k+ GP
N/A
A sprawling dungeon with as many as 50 chambers.
Cottage
400+ GP
20 GP
Very basic, single room, thatch, dirt floor, wattle and daub walls.
Gatehouse
6.5k+ GP
N/A
Gate towers, double portcullis, rooms for 5-10 guards to garrison.
Keep
75k + GP
N/A
A standalone fort, like the central building of a castle complex.
Mansion
40k+ GP
N/A
A large house for nobles or courtiers, also suitable for guildhalls or temples.
Palace
175k+ GP
N/A
A lavish official residence, dripping in luxury. Could be a cathedral.
Border Fort
25k + GP
N/A
A dirt-&-wood fort with simple wooden walls, room for 50 families.
Small House
1k+ GP
50 GP
A simple house with a kitchen, parlour, two bedrooms and an attic.
Townhouse
3k+ GP
150 GP
A house/work/shop with a 1200sq/ft footprint, two floors and an attic.
Tower
3k+ GP
N/A
This is for a 1 floor. Higher towers cost more, (floors x floors)x100 GP*
Wood House
1.5k+ GP
75 GP
1200 ft footprint, two floors. Suitable for a tavern or farmhouse.
Boathouse
2k+ GP
100 GP
A narrowboat or similar floating dwelling.
City Wall
1k GP
N/A
50 ft of defensible, reinforced, city wall.
*Towers have a 20 ft diameter. A ten-floor tower, for example, would cost 3k + (10 x 10) x100 GP = 13k GP.
Household
You can always put hirelings on retainer, but as you get more powerful and known, you might well attract other followers and companions (besides the other players).
There’s precious little guide as to how powerful retainers ought to be, or for doing decent conversions between level and CR, but you can try the following as a basic guide. Typically retainers should run from CR 1/4 upward, a budget of XP value based on that.
To get retainers and followers in your household you must have a household or base of operations, and be over level 7.
Followers: Fighting Classes get 25% extra XP Budget:
Level
Max CR
XP BudgetTotal
7
0
500
8
1/8
800
9
1/4
1000
10
1/2
1500
11
1
2000
12
2
2500
13
2
3000
14
3
3500
15
3
4000
16
4
4500
17
4
5500
18
5
6500
19
5
7500
20
6
8500
EG: Sir Roderick Von Erehwon is level 10, with a keep on the borderlands. He has a max CR of 1/2 and a budget of 1500 xp.
Weapon (any weapon that deals slashing damage), very rare (requires attunement).
The steel of the blade looks like mercury, liquid, as if frozen in the moment before it hardens. The light reflections and the dark shadows shimmer with a red reflective quality and the ring of the blade is more like a hum, or a growl. In the hands of a raging berseker the blade melts into a boiling mass of blood, its coppery tang in the air, its touch like fire, its blade cutting deep, feeding on the rage of the wielder.
Each turn, as a bonus action, a wielder with access to rage can spend a use of their rage to activate the blade, one turn, one rage activation, one bonus, up to a maximum of 6 bonuses.
Gamers come up with some peculiar tactics, from tying a halfling to a pole to check for traps, to unleashing the wrat of a flaming donkey on a dungeon complex. Occasionally they even come up with good plans. There’s something of a lack of basic dungeoneering tactics in most RPGs, which is fine when they’re narrative-based and hand-wavey ones, but spells doom for supposedly experienced knights and assassins in more hardcore games.
One of the few RPGs to really delve into the tactics of dungeoneering, was Dragon Warriors, the old Corgi paperback game that has been reincarnated in more modern days.
Here’s a few examples of being surrounded, exploring corridors, guarding against multiple opponents, etc.
I wrote a very successful set of Adventure Seeds books, which can provide endless inspiration when you need to come up with a scenario fast.
I’m famous in my more regular RPG circles for coming up with plots and ideas within about 30 seconds to 5 minutes, which is great if you’re an improvisational GM, but can be tricky if you’re not.
Here’s my top 5 ways to get some quick and dirty inspiration for a scenario…
1: PLAGIARISE
Steal ideas. It’s a game, not a magnum opus. Nobody is going to come after you for using a plot from a film, book, comic or TV series. The players might recognise it, so you’ll have to change things up a little, but even so they might enjoy playing through something familiar and applying their own solutions. Extra tip, bad films and trash novels make some of the best inspirations. Less people have seen them, and you can do a better job than ‘Sharnado’.
2: MUSIC
Grab an album, if you still buy your music impressed onto plastic, or go look at a track list for an album you like on Spotify or something. The track names and themes, the lyrics, can quickly inspire a scenario or series of linked adventures.
Let’s take the album ‘Powertrip’ by Monster Magnet for example, and see what we can make from it, assuming we’re playing a more lighthearted SF game.
Track 1: Crop Circle: The inciting incident is finding strange patterns and power signatures on a planet. Something powerful was here and may have mutated the wildlife.
Track 2: Powertrip: After their conflict with mutants or whatever, they discover some of the residual energy themselves and find it can induce mutations or psychic manifestations.
Track 3: Space Lord: We meet our villain, the Space Lord is threatening a nearby world with the same reality-warping powers they saw a hint of earlier.
Track 4: Temple of Your Dreams: Investigating, not powerful enough to take the Space Lord on directly, they find a ravaged trail of reality-warped planets. Only one area on one planet seems unaffected, because the monks on that world know the secret of the Space Lord’s power. A psychic-active drug that can turn anyone into a powerful supermind.
Track 5: Bummer: Engaging in pursuit of the Space Lord again, they follow a wake of destruction. Noting seems able to stand in his way.
Track 6: Baby Götterdämerung: The Space Lord has left ‘children’ in his wake, powerful mutated creatures with a fraction of his own power. They must be taken out to continue pursuit.
Track 7: 19 Witches: More aid arrives in the form of a sisterhood of sexy, orgone-powered psychics who offer to accompany the group and help shield them from the Space Lord’s power.
Track 8: 3rd Eye Landslide: They must make their way through an insane, reality-warped psychoscape to reach the real, physical Space Lord.
Track 10: See You in Hell: The final, physical confrontation with the Space Lord.
We don’t even need the last few tracks.
3: FRANKENSTEIN
Take two sources of inspiration and ram them together. This works in Hollywood all the time. ‘Alien Versus Predator’, ‘A romantic drama where the man is a bee’, ‘He-Man, but shit’. This might well be plagiarism again, but combining two stolen ideas often (but not always) can result in a mysterious alchemy where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
4: THE NEWS
What is in the news today? Constantly changing events and a 24 hour news cycle can throw up inspiration all the time. Twist it around a bit to fit the game setting and Robert’s your mother’s brother. EG:
“Turkey: Foreign tourists evacuated as wildfires threaten resorts”
An ancient Djinn has been released from its clay pot and has laid waste to the land around it. The players are firefighters, toiling to put the fires out, when they encounter this supernatural threat and struggle to survive.
5: MAKING IT UP AS YOU GO ALONG
Just start with something, anything. It doesn’t have to be original or clever. Then just roll with what the players say and do. Something as simple as a goblin attack on a farm. If they look for something on the dead goblins, let them find a note, maybe suggesting that the goblins have been ordered or paid to make the attack. Who hired them? Let the players speculate and apply the best idea they come up with, and just keep doing that until it’s over.
Ramshackle buildings of wood dominate the space of the square, skeletal and blackened, ripe for demolition and rebuilding even before the dead rose. It is like a hangover from the early half of the century, before the great fires turned people to the favour of stone and brick. It is a choked tangle of alleys, loose cobbles and filth-strangled gutters. Even if you were amongst the rotting dead, you do not think you would choose this place to spend your days. The rookeries that were once crowded with workers are now home to true rooks and crows, that put up a squawing clatter at sight of you, which brings a returning moan from the dead.
The Shambles
The whole of the square is dominated by the great wooden buildings that once housed the destitute and the poor. They are crumbling, broken and rotting wood littering the streets, the oiled paper windows of most of these verminous rookeries have long fallen away, admitting the elements to the interior and washing the detritis of people’s lives out into the gutter. A pair of rusted scissors here, a faggot of twigs there, a crudely carved doll with a mop of soggy wool for her hair, tugged by a rat along the dirty cobbles.
Rome House
Two floors high, this house seems to be amongst the smallest dwellings here, though it is squat and broad – like a trunk or crate. At some point the wood was whitewashed, but this is now stained brown and grey and peeling away in great flakes that flutter in the slightest breeze. The door hangs open, mouldering wicker and rotting scraps of leather scattered down the bowing wooden steps.
A simple hall, with steps running up one side to the upper floor, drives through the house from one end to the other. Four doors mark it, two sets of two opposite each other down its length. All their doors open. Black mould climbs the walls and the floorboards creak ominously, soft, damp and pliable under your feet.
The woodden steps are on the brink of collapse, anyone entering by the steps at the front or rear of the house must make a Dexterity Save against a DC of 10 or have them splinter and break, suffering 1d4 piercing damage.
The floorboards throughout the building are also rotten, and will give way under heavy weight or vigorous action one time out of six (Roll 1d6, it collapses under the people fighting or very heavy individuals, with a 3/6 chance of breaking through the floor below as well, suffering 1d4 damage for each floor – since the sodden wood breaks their fall).
Ground Floor: Reception
This room seems to have been a place for taking off and leaving one’s outer clothing, and the muck of hard work. The floor is board, but it could be mistaken for a dirt floor, so caked in the mix of plaster, paint and mud. A half dozen pairs of shoes – curling from damp and flowering with blue mould – are lined up in front of two wooden benches, and there are hooks on the walls as well, hanging with smocks and tunics. A rusty iron heating stove stands in the middle of the room, the dirt around it stained orange and red.
Loot:
[ ]One day’s worth of coal.
[ ] None of the clothing or leather is recoverable, lost to mould and rot.
Ground Floor: Parlour
The wet wooden door is hanging off its hinges and crawling with woodlice. Past it you see a simple room, clean but soaking floorboards, two tables – a card table and a larger, square table set with bowls and spoons of wood. The parchment windows are long torn away and the damp has dissolved the deck of cards on the table into wet, swollen pieces. They’re only recognisible from the disembodied heads of the paper royalty.
A stone-lined fireplace hasn’t protected its ashes from being washed out into the room – a thin grey muck that stretches halfway across the room. The firewood teems with insects, like the door, broken down into wet splinters.
Loot:
Inside the bend of the flue is a missing brick, wherein is stashed a small bag of 5 silver pieces and 9 copper coins. A tiny key also nestles amongst the coins.
Ground Floor: Room 1 (Force the door DC10)
The next door is open but a crack, the wood has swollen with the damp, tight into the frame, though it was already open, giving plenty or purchase. A nest of twigs is tangled against the door, fragments and pieces of wickerwork.
Once you make your way inside there isn’t that much to see. A small bench with rusted tools, bundles of wet wicker, a few unfinished baskets. It seems that the person who lived here – sleeping on a rotten pallet of straw and blankets – used it as their workshop as well as their living space. Many of the people here may have been doing the same.
Postcards from Avalidad is a darkly surreal Tech-Noir game setting and adventure context for Punk (included) and Actual Fcking Monsters.
Avalidad combines cyber, bio and psi punk to create a Burroughsian nightmare world of decadence, drugs, Libertarianism, violence, glamour and oppression.
You will delve into the strange lives of Avalidad’s celebrities, fiscal royalty and seedy underbelly in this unique game setting.
You are caught between the peasantry and the nobility, neither one nor the other. Arrogant and cruel to those lower on the social ladder, bitter and resentful to those who are higher. You have carved out a place for yourself in running estates, as an advisor or majordomo, but acceptance into the higher echelons is always beyond you. With the social order upturned, you have a chance for true greatness.
Begins With: 3d6 x 10s and d2 Omens, HP: Toughness + d6
Soft Living: Roll 3d6-1 for Strength Eaten-Up with Bitterness: Roll 3d6-1 for Toughness Wormtongue: Roll 3d6+2
Abilities
You start with a single ability.
Slippery Customer: All your Defence rolls are made at +1 Cloak of Office: All your Presence rolls to interact with people are made at +1 Penny Pincher: Anything you buy costs one less silver piece. Oaf Henchman: A loyal retainer of limited intelligence but great strength. Agility -2, Presence -2, Strength +2, Toughness +2, random armour and weapon. 8 hp. Blade Henchman: A loyal retainer of great skill but also great vices. Agility +2, Presence +1, Strength -1, Toughness -2, random armour and weapon. 3 hp. Conniving Henchman: A disloyal and clever retainer, egotistical and treacherous. Agility +0, Presence +3, Strength -1, Toughness -2, random armour and weapon, 2 hp.
Previous Role (Choose or roll 1d20)
1-2 Advisor 3 Bailif 4 Chamberlain 5 Chancellor 6 Courtier 7-8 Estate Manager 9 Head Servant 10 Herald 11 Keeper of the Wardrobe 12 Magistrate 13 Marshal 14 Moneylender 15 Reeve 16 Scribe 17-18 Steward 19 Treasurer 20 Valet
Postmortem Studios 