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PDFIt’s been quiet around here, thanks to some gainful employment that fries my brain on a daily business. On the good side, I’ve been playing 1e fairly regularly and am helping wrangle submissions to this year’s Secret Santicore. I gotta hand it to Jez, Secret Santicore is a real crown jewel in the DIY/OSR community.
I did write one encounter for someone’s personal use (and thus didn’t blog it) and it was an unusual one for me in that there was no magic. Just the woods, an archer and a road. I purposely avoided anything fantastic as a key element of the encounter and I was quite pleased with the results.
Being one of Santicore’s helper elves also showed me where people’s minds are in terms of what they want from their D&D and I have to say this year will be pretty gonzo. With DCC and Carcosa coming out, I’m not surprised people are in a gonzo state of mind. I’m not immune–I read and want to play in DCC and appreciated Carcosa and I damn sure expect some top-notch stuff from the 2012 Santicore.
But then I’ve been playing 1e AD&D as a fighter with the New York Red Box crew. A dumb one–a pregen in a rules-as-written campaign using a Judges Guild module. And our magic user is reluctant to cast his spells, so in a lot of ways, there’s hardly any magic in this game. And I kind of like being a simple fighter.
And then I saw 13 Assassins. There has GOT to be some sort of kick-ass adventure there. And if this doesn’t make you want to break out Oriental Adventures or Legend of the Five Rings or Ruins and Ronin, you are a fool.
And then today I get my package from Sir Raggi, which had The God That Crawls and The Magnificent Joop Van Ooms, both of which are set on EARTH (thank you) and one in my favorite foreign city, Amsterdam. The God that Crawls scratches that shambling doom sort of itch, as its name should tell you. I expect I’ll give it a try. Joop does me a real solid with a wharf encounter table with only the tiniest bit of magic or the weird and more than 40 encounters that could really have happened in 1615 Amsterdam.
To make this short story long, I’m in the mood for the non-magical. I don’t mind that most of the OSR is running solidly toward the gonzo, but I think I’m going to spend some time working out a table of brigand encounters and a dictionary of con games to run on your players. Low, low magic stuff that can be used every day and which should make your gonzo stuff stand out.
Keeping what I said above in mind, I’m going to take requests again. If you want some sort of material that is low or non-magic for your campaign, post something in the comments below. As I did last year with “Bring It”, I’ll get to it when I can, which might mean you’ll get it this year.
How is everyone doing, by the way?
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Well if you like you could create a small selection of ‘things some nonchalant 3ft ratmen pirates might be doing when they have stolen basically all of the ships/supplies and are now sitting pretty on an island off the coast which might have just been landed upon by some unscrupulous adventurers and their mysterious meatshroom tavern’?
If you’re bored or whatever =P
Members of the noble’s entourage. Interesting and dangerous characters that attend to the noble and protect him while doing in vogue things too.
I request some horror scenes for an exploration of a dwarven mine, please.
Actually I just got done rewriting CSIO to give it a slightly more low-magic, swords-and-sorcery feel. I plan to make the taverns a bit more interesting by writing a table of possible henchmen for hire, separated by the types of clientele the book lists as appearing in each tavern – so one table for sailors & pirates, one for berserkers & barbarians, one for bandits & adventurers, etc. Anything you could contribute would be welcome.
Table of wildness traps?
How about a table of 20 unique bandit gangs, a la Warriors (the movie), but with a bit more… grit.
Encounters on roads and/or rivers.
Egg sandwich mishaps table
d24 (or if you are feeling REALLY ambitious, d66) table of stuff found under a guest bed by the cleaning maids at The Silver Harp Tavern.
Mundane ideas:
3d6 table for “what is that peasant doing”
d30 bandit characteristics
d12 mundane features of a sword
d12 cantrips passed off as legitimate magic by hedge wizards
Any you get to would be great.
Let’s say you’re wandering across a post-apocalyptic wasteland, perhaps using an old atlas to help navigate, and you come upon a site, where the atlas indicates a town or city, so you look up from the atlas and find…
In other words, I’m in need of a table to determine the state of a post-apocalypse city, anything from “vanished without a trace” or “nuked to oblivion” to “mostly intact, sparsely inhabited” or “reclaimed by wilderness” to “thriving community, barely surviving” or “completely untouched/unaffected”.
Some things I’d like addressed is the state of it (is it even there, or is it just ruins) is it occupied, (no specifics needed, just yes/no, big/small, friendly/hostile) and possible resources (completely looted, or are there still some treasures left)
Having said that, I’ll be happy with anything you offer. Make it as simple or complex as you like. Feel free to discard my suggestions/concerns, and go for shit. 🙂
I’d also like a table of real-life-type physical mutations.
maybe a table for generating bits of scavenged material for a post-apocalyptic setting?
Something to let us know you’re still alive and kicking. I miss getting awesome content from you.