Go to Part 1

Now that we’ve discussed the totality of making a ruling from beginning to end, I want to discuss a handful of advanced techniques – various tips and tricks I’ve picked up or created over the years.

We’ll start with fortune positioning. As we’ll discuss in detail in a moment, this is a really valuable concept revolving around the point at which you roll dice (the fortune) during the process of resolving an action, and what happens before and after you roll those dice. Before we begin, however, I need to briefly discuss the history of this terminology to clear up some difficulties.

The basic principles of fortune positioning were first laid out by Ron Edwards, who coined the terms fortune in the middle and fortune at the end to describe unexamined practices that had been hanging around the hobby for decades. They were useful terms and they caught on. A few years later, however, Ron Edwards decided to redefine the terms because he’d decided that it didn’t actually have anything to do with mechanics (despite the use of mechanics being in the damn name). Around this same time period, he also decided that fortune at the beginning didn’t exist (which, as we’ll see, is also wrong). The result was a complete muddle, but since Edwards had coined the terms his nonsense follow-up held a great deal of sway. People tried to solve the problems Edwards had created with various patches (you’ll see people using terms like “with teeth” if you go poking around), but this just sort of added to the confusion and debasing of the terminology.

With the terms being thoroughly mucked up, therefore, I had to make a decision about whether I should abandon them entirely (and try to come up with new terms to cover the same territory) or just clarify that people should ignore the later nonsense. After considerable thought, I decided that the concept of “fortune positioning” was too intuitively obvious to discard, so I’m sticking with it (and you get this preamble explaining why).

Final note here: Any time I talk about “fortune” or “rolling the dice”, that’s shorthand for any sort of action resolution. These concepts are generally most applicable to mechanical resolution (whether that involves rolling dice or not), but they have some applicability even on the spectrum of GM fiat.

FORTUNE AT THE END

Fortune at the end seems to be what most GMs and groups default to. (I’m not sure if that’s because it’s actually clearer and conceptually simpler, or if it’s just a legacy of D&D’s wargame-derived mechanics and familiarity makes it seem more natural.) With fortune at the end you:

• Establish method.
• Check the fortune.
• Describe the result.

You say, “I want to shoot the blade runner!” (Establish intention.) You make an attack roll. (Check the fortune.) And the mechanical result tells you whether the intention succeeded or failed. (You either hit the target or you miss them, which means you can now describe that end result.)

FORTUNE AT THE BEGINNING

Fortune at the beginning is a technique in which you ask the mechanics what happens and then you use the mechanical result to decide what you attempt. To put it another way, fortune at the beginning means putting the mechanical resolution between the statement of intention and the statement of method.

• Indicate intention.
• Check the fortune.
• Determine method.
• Describe the result.

Whereas fortune at the end has a player activate character expertise to determine whether or not the method they’ve proposed succeeds, fortune at the beginning has the player activate character expertise to tell them what method the character would use to achieve a general intention.

This can be useful when playing out a social situation: You state your intention (“I want to convince the Duke to give us troops”), then make your Diplomacy check, and then use the outcome of the Diplomacy check to inform how you roleplay the scene.

Fortune at the beginning is often used in personality mechanics: You make a madness check or you make a check to see if you can resist temptation, and if you can’t that determines how you play the next action (whether it’s running away screaming or turning away from Madame Shadow’s insistent kisses).

I also often see players do things like making an Intelligence check to see whether or not their character is smart enough to think of the idea they just had. (And if they fail, they won’t share it.)

FORTUNE IN THE MIDDLE

Fortune in the middle means that your first action check determines the initial momentum of the attempt, but then the player/character has another choice that can affect the ultimate outcome. So you might make a check to resolve a social encounter, discover that you’ve made a bad first impression, and then have an opportunity to recover from that. (Or just shoot the guy in the head. “It was a boring conversation any way.”)

Basically, fortune in the middle creates an additional decision point in the middle of resolution:

• Establish method.
• Check the fortune.
• Make a secondary decision.
• Check secondary fortune.
• Describe the result.

Sometimes this decision point is actually baked into the mechanics. The use of Fate Points is a simple and common example. Apocalypse World uses a number of “moves” which are resolved with a 2d6 roll in which there is a failure range, a success range, and (between the two) a range in which the PC has to make a secondary decision between consequences and/or partial successes.

Speaking of partial successes, a GM can often resolve a partial success by asking for a fortune in the middle response. They can also be used in other situations: For example, after a successful Dodge roll the GM might ask, “Do you want to duck through the door on your right or behind the wooden crate on your left?”

The resolution of the secondary decision may not require another action check; i.e., whether you duck through the door or behind the wooden crate success is automatic (the GM is defaulting to yes). Alternatively, the options could easily require additional mechanical resolution (and choosing between the form of mechanical resolution could be the primary difference between choices). It’s also possible that only some of the choices would require additional mechanical checks (you need to make a Strength check to bash through the closed door, but you can duck behind the crates automatically).

And, of course, the GM doesn’t have to be the one to come up with the options. “Okay, you succeeded on your Dodge roll. Where do you want to seek cover from the hail of machine gun fire?”

MULTI-STAGE RESOLUTION

The principles of fortune in the middle resolution can be extended to include multiple decision points, opening up the potential for a variety of multi-stage resolution methods.

In my experience, this is a poorly explored region of mechanical design. Probably the most prominent example are the skill challenges from 4^th Edition D&D, and those were absolutely terrible to the point where the designers had to completely rewrite the mechanics multiple times within mere weeks of the game being released… and still didn’t fix it.

Dice pool systems have fared a little better because the ability to count a variable number of successes in each dice pool allows for a simple complex skill check mechanic (continue making checks until you’ve achieved X number of successes).

But much like Apocalypse World, other games have begun making specific mechanics which exploit fortune in the middle resolution principles, I think there’s a real potential for more specific multi-stage resolution mechanics (particularly if you start allowing for decision points by those opposing the character or characters carrying out the multi-stage resolution).

But I digress.

What distinguishes multi-stage resolution from simply being a series of discrete actions? Because there’s a single intention and each stage of resolution carries you towards discovering the ultimate outcome of that intention, either through a variety of methods or by the progression of a single method through discrete steps.

USING FORTUNE POSITIONING

Over the years I’ve seen a surprising amount of one-true-wayism when it comes to fortune positioning. This makes little sense to me: The ideal fortune positioning varies by both type of action and the situation in which the action is taken. And even people who aren’t familiar with the terminology will often freely flow from one to the next depending purely on the instinct of the moment

Fortune at the end has simplicity to its advantage: You ask a question of the system, the system provides a yes-no answer.

Fortune at the beginning allows the mechanics to provide you with an improv seed that you can then flesh out accordingly. (This makes it particularly good for determining the outcome of larger actions: The more specific the action the more awkward it can become to resolve with fortune at the beginning. For example, if your mechanics resolve a single attack, fortune at the beginning generally isn’t useful. If they’re resolving an entire fight – or, say, a jousting pass – then they become more useful.)

Fortune in the middle is more complicated, but allows for a richer interplay between the player and the mechanic along with a greater range of potential outcome. It can also focus your attention on the action being resolved, signaling that this particular action is more significant than others.

Each of these has its place. And, as I implied before, trying to rigidly define that place is not always the best answer. (Maybe this time you roll the dice to see how your negotiations with the Duke will proceed before roleplaying it, but next time you’ve got a “surefire” idea for how to seduce the Duchess.) But they’re incredibly useful tools for expanding and varying the experience at the game table, and if you find that your rulings are generally limited to only a single fortuning position, you may find it useful to practice using others until you become comfortable and familiar with them (whether that involves playing games with explicit fortune positioning in their mechanics or simply challenging yourself to explore a particular type of fortune positioning for the next few sessions).

Go to Part 11

Go to Part 1

One of the great things about a well-executed location-based scenario is that each keyed area is effectively “firewalled” from the other areas: The GM generally only needs to process and manage a single chunk of material (the current area) until the PCs move on to the next area (at which point the GM can simply look at the new chunk of material). This makes a location-based scenario very easy to run, particularly if the key is well-organized, because everything you need is right there at your fingertips.

The drawback of this approach, however, is that it results in static scenarios. The firewall works both ways: It limits the amount of information the GM needs to process at any given time, but it also isolates each chunk of content. Furthermore, because the PCs generally control when they decide to move into a new area, this approach also grants the players near-perfect control over the pace of the scenario (which not only results in monotony, but can also create all kinds of tack-on problems like the fifteen minute adventuring day).

What’s needed is a dynamic element. Sometimes you can accomplish that with some sort of gimmick (moving chambers or the like). Random encounters, particularly those on a regular and aggressive schedule, also work. Ideally, though, we’d like to have the location come alive in an organic way that can allow for strategic depth. We want the ogre in Area 20 to call out for help and have the goblins in Area 21 to hear it and come running.

That seems easy enough. You can just slide your eyes down from Area 20 and notice that there are goblins in Area 21. It gets complicated, though, when you’ve got, say, seven or eight locations within earshot. And it gets even more complicated if you hit those sections of the map where non-sequential numbers bump up against each other:

This area from the Temple of Elemental Evil, for example, would involve flipping back and forth between 8 different pages in the published module. At this point you’re trying to juggle a lot of different information, and you’ve probably lost almost all of the advantages normally offered by the “firewall” of the location key.

And this is still a relatively simple example: What happens when the alarm goes up and the entire compound begins mobilizing to hunt the PCs down?

For example, here’s the map from Secret of the Slavers Stockade:

(click for larger version)

This is a fortified facility with a well-trained guard and a clear chain of command. If someone mounted an assault on the stockade, you would expect a well-coordinated response. But in order to run that response, a GM would need to smoothly manage information from basically all thirty-five keyed locations. It’s impossible.

ADVERSARY ROSTERS

The solution is to separate the occupants of a location from the location key: If they can move from one area to another, then they don’t belong in the key for any specific area.

This can be achieved through the use of an adversary roster (with a map from Dyson Logos for reference):

2 Orc Guards	Area 1	(disguised as humans)
4 Common Orcs	Area 2	(playing dice at well)
4 Orc Guards	Area 3
6 Orc Guards	Area 4*
2 Goblin Stableboys	Area 8
4 Common Orcs + 4 Orc Guards	Area 9	(drunk)
Captain Gnarltooth	Area 9 or Area 16
Lieutenant Uggtusk	Area 11 (day) or Area 15 (night)
2 Orc Guards + 8 Common Orcs	Area 14
Eyegrasper (Orc Wizard)	Area 19 (80%) or Area 6 (20%)
Eyegrasper's Coterie: 3 orc apprentices	(with Eyegrasper)
Fingerwaggler (Orc Wizard)	Area 20*
4 Caravanserai Guards	Area 21
Lady Starhuo	Area 23
Brother Jameston	Area 25
4 Caravanserai Guards	Area 25	(injured)

(click for larger version)

This does increase the complexity of running the scenario, but it’s not an exponential increase like the one seen in trying to run the Slavers Stockade. The GM is no longer looking strictly at the current location key, but rather than trying to cross-reference thirty-five location keys all at once they can generally limit themselves to looking at just the current location key and the adversary roster. Two discrete chunks of organized information instead of a multitude.

The fundamental building block of the adversary roster is the ACTION GROUP. Generally speaking, you don’t want to track every single goblin individually, so you group them together for easy management. (Although some of your action groups will probably consist of a single individual.) Most of the time, an action group will consist of all the adversaries in a single location. In some cases, however, you may want to split a large group up into smaller units. You can think about this purely in utilitarian terms: Do you think that the group is likely to split up and take independent action? Then it should be two action groups. (For example, if you’ve got twenty orcs bunking in a barracks, you might split them up into four action groups with five orcs each so that they can split up or be sent as guards to different areas of the compound.)

For ease of use and reference, you can also LABEL and/or NUMBER each group. A label is mostly useful as a keyword and reminder: If you see a “Death Squad” and a “Perimeter Guard” on your adversary roster, it’ll be a helpful reminder of how each group will behave and respond. You might also find it useful to prep a Death Squad stat sheet and a Perimeter Guard stat sheet: When the PCs run into one of these action groups, simply grab the matching stat sheet.

Numbering the action groups can make it easier to keep track of where they’re at during play:

1. Lay the adventure map out as a tablemat in front of you.
2. Take numbered counters and place them on the map in the “starting location” for each action group.

You are now ready to manage your adversaries in real time. Just move them around the map as the situation demands.

Note: Numbered counters are easy to find on the cheap. It’s also pretty easy to make your own by printing out the numbers and then affixing them to washers or quarters or something of the like.

ADVANCED ROSTER OPTIONS

In addition to that basic functionality of the adversary roster, there are a few additional embellishments you can use to enhance it.

VARIABLE AREAS: Characters on the roster don’t need to be limited to a single area. The club owner might be in his office, or he might be out on the floor. A wizard might be studying in the library or working in his laboratory. An orc sergeant might rotate through the barracks of his minions. There are a few different ways to handle this:

• Area 21 or Area 40: This approach simply states the options and lets the GM interpolate the result. (Or maybe they’ll just be in whichever area the PCs affect or explore first.)
• Area 21 (40%) or Area 40 (60%): Percentile chances can be used to randomize the group’s location.
• Area 21 (day) or Area 40 (night): The group’s location may be dependent on the present circumstances (and those conditions can be listed in parentheses). A night/day division is one I’ll commonly use.

One thing to keep in mind is that you can often simulate the activities of a compound without complicating the roster. For example, if the bouncers at a club might work eight hour shifts and then get relieved you probably don’t need to include all three shifts of bouncers on your roster. Functionally speaking, the club has one bouncer (although the name of that bouncer might be different depending on what time of day the PCs show up).

ACTION GROUP TYPES: I’ve found that there are four different categories of action groups, defined by their behavior.

• Patrols: Patrols make regular circuits through a location. They’re indicated by keying their route (Patrol Areas 1, 5, 7, 8, 9, 2, 1). In some cases I find it useful to create a separate “Patrol Roster” (if there are multiple patrols or if their routes are particularly complicated for some reason).
• Mobile: The default action group type. These are keyed to a specific location, but are generally willing and able to respond to the activities of the PCs.
• Mostly Stationary: Some action groups are unlikely to leave the area they’re keyed to. This might be a choice on their part (they won’t respond when the alarm is raised for whatever reason) or it may not (they’re dire wolves locked in a cell). Adversaries waiting in an ambush are another common variety. However, there is a possibility that these action groups might become active (most commonly because someone has gone to specifically fetch them). Therefore I include them on the adversary roster, but indent their entries to clearly distinguish them from the more active elements.
• Stationary: These adversaries will never leave the location they’re in. As a result, these adversaries are NOT included on the roster and instead appear in the location key. (Because they will only be encountered in that location, there’s no reason to clutter up the roster with them.) This might include literally immobile creatures, those simply uninterested in the rest of the complex, or creatures who are sealed away until the PCs disturb them (at which point, if they aren’t immediately destroyed, you might add them to the roster).

These distinctions – particularly those between Mostly Stationary and Stationary – are entirely utilitarian in nature. They don’t represent some deep or universal truth about the game world. Think about how you want to use a particular group of adversaries during actual play and then classify them appropriately. (If it turns out you were wrong, it’s easy enough to simply ignore the indentation, right?)

NOTES / FOOTNOTES: You can include notes as a third column on the roster and/or you can use footnotes to include additional information or cross-referencing. This can include:

• Adversaries carrying a specific item or piece of equipment. (This is useful when you’ve got a bunch of different bad guys all using the same stat block but only some of them – or one of them – is carrying X, Y, or Z. Otherwise, of course, you’d just list the item(s) in their stat block.)
• Brief tactical notes. (Stuff like “can be telepathically summoned by the mind flayer” or “will generally wait to launch prepared ambush” or “can see through walls”.)
• If they’ve been classified as Mostly Stationary, why they’ve been classified that way (sleeping, in ambush, indifferent, etc.).
• Other notes regarding their activities (polymorphed to look like prisoners, playing poker, torturing Sebastian, etc.)

I generally use a notes column if the notes are brief enough to fit on one line. I use footnotes for longer stuff.

MULTIPLE ROSTERS

It’s also possible to prep multiple rosters for a single location. I often find having one roster for Day and another for Night is useful. Normal and Alert statuses are also common, but any similar division that’s logical for the location can be used.

Multiple rosters are usually only worth the effort if the location radically shifts. If the differences are minor or isolated to a handful of characters, then you can use conditionals for individual action groups. It’s only once the conditionals get sufficiently complex that you need to switch to multiple rosters.

ROSTER UPDATES

Another great advantage of using an adversary roster is that you can trivially update a location as bad guys are killed, replaced, or retasked without needing to revisit the entire key. (This separation of NPC from location is why I’ll use a roster even if there are only a handful of characters present.)

This can also be massively useful in an open table campaign (or any other campaign) where you want to be able to revisit locations: With little or no change to a location’s key, you can completely restock it with new adversaries. For examples of this in play, see (Re-)Running the Megadungeon, Juggling Scenario Hooks in a Sandbox, and Prepping Scenario Timelines. (Reading along with the adversary roster technique in mind, you should be able to immediately see how simple the updates become.)

SIMPLE ROSTER

Sometimes you don’t need a roster with all the bells and whistles. For small, highly active complexes with a limited number of inhabitants (a half dozen or so) you may be able to just list the inhabitants and then improvise where they are and what they’re doing when the PCs show up.

(I label this simple, but it actually requires slightly more skill with improvisation when you’re running it.)

I most often use this technique if there’s a mansion (or similar living space) occupied by a number of different people. Trying to program out their ordinary, day-to-day living usually means a lot of complexity for a result that still isn’t realistic.

A hybrid approach can also work here: For example, each character might have a default location where they’re often found (their bedroom? office?) and then a percentage chance that they’re instead just “somewhere else in the house” (and you can figure that out in the moment).

ADAPTING PUBLISHED MODULES

It’s incredibly easy to use the adversary roster technique with published scenarios: Simply skim through the module and list where each occupant is keyed. Ta-da! You’re done. Simply ignore the rostered adversaries when you see them in the key.

Tip: Since ALL monsters will appear in the published key, you may find it useful to include a separate list of Stationary monsters on the same sheet as your adversary roster in order to quickly discern when you should still be using the monster listed in the encounter.

FOG OF WAR

One pitfall that a GM can easily fall into when using an adversary roster is having everybody in the dungeon immediately swarm the PCs. Sometimes that’s the logical outcome of the PCs’ actions and that’s fine (they’ll quickly learn to take approaches that don’t result in that outcome and to retreat and regroup if it does happen). But you should bear the fog of war in mind: Even if the PCs attack one action group, it doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone in the location will immediately know it’s happening. And even if the alarm does go up, some action groups may be assigned to guard other areas or simply have no idea exactly where the crisis is happening.

The adversary roster gives you the opportunity to roleplay the entire compound. So take advantage of it.

Since we’re discussing adversaries swarming the PCs, however, you may also want to take a moment to review Revisiting Encounter Design: If you’re using an active adversary roster, you need to keep in mind that multiple action groups can end up joining a single encounter.  If you’ve been building your encounters to exist on a razor’s edge of survival-or-death, then you’ll need to revise that approach. (How To Use Published 3^rd Edition Modules may also be useful.)

ROSTER LIMITS

There is, however, a practical limit to an adversary roster: Once you get a sufficiently large enough number of action groups, it becomes difficult to manage them. Generally, I find that number to be around 15-20 (and by the time I’m pushing it to 25, I’ve reached my limit). Your mileage may vary.

Larger complexes can sometimes be broken down into smaller sections to make them manageable. (The different levels of a dungeon are an obvious example of this if there’s limited movement between them by the denizens. You might also choose to model that limited inter-level traffic as a random encounter check.) But if that doesn’t work, then that’s the point where I’ll swap from a “living complex” (with an adversary roster where I’m managing the actions of the NPCs in real time) and start using random encounter tables to simulate the compound’s life.

It should also be noted that the adversary roster is a technique for locations with active bad guys. Not every dungeon needs a roster. Sometimes you really are cracking open dusty tombs which have lain undisturbed for centuries and you have only yourself to blame when you awaken the eldritch horrors which lie within. Variety is the spice of life.

(Another example from my own table was the Bloodpool Labyrinth: There were a limited number of monstrous patrols in the labyrinth, but the focus of the scenario was on navigating the labyrinth and its many non-mobile hazards. As a result, I chose to run the patrols using a random encounter table instead of trying to track them in real time.)

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

I consider adversary rosters to be my greatest “secret weapon” as a GM. They allow me to run dynamic scenarios of considerable complexity on battlefields that can easily sprawl across a dozen areas with a relative simplicity which still leaves me with enough brainpower to manage varied stat blocks and clever tactics.

You’ll also find that, as the players warm up to the greater depth offered by these scenarios, they’ll rise to the challenge and respond with remarkable strategic creativity both in combat and outside of it.

And all of this will feed back on itself, permanently disrupting the staid rhythms of “kick in the door” dungeoncrawling in your campaign. Adversary rosters are also a great way for running stealth missions, heists, and covert ops.

The life and motion of a living compound will unlock a rich variety of new gameplay, keep your players on their toes, and invest them deeply into the fabric of the campaign world.

FURTHER READING
The Art of Rulings
The Art of Pacing
Xandering the Dungeon
Gamemastery 101
Design Notes: Adversary Rosters

Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos novels are absolutely delightful and frequently brilliant fantasy series which starts as a simply marvelous urban fantasy and then remarkably transforms itself into something completely different and utterly thrilling. I’ve previously reviewed the first eight volumes in the series:

• Jhereg
• Yendi
• Teckla
• Taltos
• Phoenix
• Athyra
• Orca
• Dragon

This is the first installment of our kitchen sinking series, where I’ll be using Brust’s stories as an inspiration for brainstorming for a variety of unique magic items.

RUBYGAZER: A rubygazer takes the form of a tube that can fit snugly into one hand. Each end of the tube is fitted with a lens crafted from ruby crystal. If one places the tube against a wall no more than 10 feet in width, they can look through the tube as if their eye were placed upon the opposite side of the wall. The properties of the rubygazer distort both depth perception and, for reasons of complicated arcane geometry, a sense of proper scale. This imposes a -5 penalty to Perception checks while using the rubygazer and prevents the use of magically or supernaturally enhanced senses, although the view is still generally clear enough to teleport safely.

Moderate divination; CL 5^th; Craft Wondrous Item, clairvoyance; Price 7,500 gp

GAZELENS: A gazelens can be fitted to a pair of spectacles or designed to be set directly into the user’s eye. In either case, the gazelens can be used in concert with a rubygazer that is within 600 feet, allowing the wearer of the gazelens to look through the rubygazer as if it were in their possession. A gazelens is essentially useless (although very pretty) without a gazer to use it with.

Moderate divination; CL 5^th; Craft Wondrous Item, clairvoyance; Price 7,500 gp

FLASHSTONES: A flashstone can be thrown as a ranged attack with a range increment of 20 feet. (Since you don’t need to hit a specific target, you can simply aim at a particular 5-foot square.) When the flashstone strikes a hard surface (or is struck hard) it triggers the spell effect stored within it.

Creation: Flashstones are created by alchemically infusing them with brewed potions. As such they require the Brew Potion feat. Unlike a potion, there is no limit to the level of spell which can be infused into a flashstone, but only spells which affect an area can be usefully triggered. Flashstones have a base price of the spell level x caster level x 50 gp.

CANTRIP STICKS: The name “cantrip stick” is something of a misnomer because these items are not limited to containing merely cantrips. A cantrip stick is essentially a cheap, single-use wand (except that they use a command word activation and can be used even by non-spellcasters). Their cheap, easy construction makes cantrip sticks somewhat unreliable, however, and there is a 1 in 20 chance when they’re used that they will simply fail to trigger. (If this happens, there is an additional 1 in 20 chance that the cantrip stick will suffer a backlash: The cantrip stick explodes causing 1d6 points of damage per spell level to the character holding it (Reflex save, DC 15 + spell level, for half damage) and expending the stick’s charge to no effect.)

Cantrip sticks are often used by armies. In the military, it is customary to snap a cantrip stick in half once it has been expelled (because otherwise someone else might assume that there was still a charge in it).

Creation: A cantrip stick requires the Craft Wand feat and can contain any spell of 4^th level or lower. Cantrip sticks have a base price of the spell level x caster level x 25 gp.

LEYRIPPER: These spiral, fluted, hollow tubes – often carved from ebony – are designed to latch onto the ley signatures in magical items and disrupt them (literally ripping them out of the item). As an attack action, leyrippers can be targeted at any potion, wand, staff, or other item which has charges within 120 feet. On a successful ranged touch attack, the targeted item (or its wielder) must succeed on a Will save (DC 18) or lose 1d6 charges. In addition, these charges are unstable and cause a micro-explosion inflicting 1d6 points of damage per charge lost to the item’s wielder. An item cannot lose more charges than it currently has. Potions are considered to have a single charge.

Strong abjuration; CL 12^th; Craft Wondrous Item, greater dispel magic; Price 72,000 gp

LIGHTROPE: A lightrope is a six-inch length of cord which, when twirled slowly in the hand, illuminates. The amount of illumination provided by the lightrope can be very carefully controlled by the speed of the twirling. During combat, the amount of effort required to twirl the lightrope at varying speeds is represented by the type of action used to twirl it (see table.

As a full action, the lightrope can create an intense burst of light which will slowly fade over the course of five rounds (as shown on the table).

Faint Evocation [light]; CL 6^th; Craft Wondrous Item, daylight; Price 8,000 gp

Action	Bright	Shadowy
Free (Burst 5th Round)	n/a	5 ft.
Free (Burst 4th Round)	15 ft.	30 ft.
Move (Burst 3rd Round)	30 ft.	60 ft.
Standard (Burst 2nd Round)	60 ft.	120 ft.
Full (Burst)	120 ft.	240 ft.

LIGHTROPE, BLACKLIGHT: A blacklight lightrope operates in a fashion similar to a lightrope (requiring a free action to twirl each round), but instead of casting illumination it creates an emanation of blacklight in a 20 ft. radius. The area is filled with total darkness which is impenetrable to normal vision and darkvision, but which the person twirling the blacklight lightrope can see through normally.

Faint Evocation [darkness]; CL 6^th, Craft Wondrous Item, blacklight; Price 36,000 gp

WEB ROPE: Crafted from the thick strands of giant spider web and alchemically stabilized for durability and long-lasting use, web rope is tacky to the touch and possesses an uncanny grip. It grants a +4 circumstance bonus to Use Rope checks and a +2 circumstance bonus to Climb checks. It can also be used as a grappling hook (with the sticky end of the rope attaching itself securely to exposed surfaces). This requires greater skill (DC 15, +2 feet per 10 feet of distance thrown), but has the benefit of weighing less and creating less noise in its use.

Cost: 50 gp (50 ft.); Weight: 2 lbs. (50 ft.)

FORM-FITTING BOOTS: Footwear modified to become form-fitting magically adjusts its size and fit to the wearer’s foot. (This is a physical process which can be felt by the wearer, often with the first boot adjusting itself even as they don the second.) This is mostly a matter of comfort and styling, but such footwear does make things a little easier on the feet, reducing the damage from forced marches by 1 point (minimum 1).

Cost: This minor effect can be placed on any footwear for 25 gp.

TELEPORTATION KEYSTONES: A teleportation keystone allows its carrier to teleport into the area affected by a teleport block spell. (If multiple characters are teleporting at the same time, only one of them needs to carry a teleportation keystone in order for the entire group to successfully penetrate the block.)

Each keystone is linked to a specific casting of the teleport block spell and has no effect on other teleport block spells. Before the teleport block spell is cast, the keystone (or keystones) that are going to be associated with it must be prepared. This requires ten minutes of work per keystone and a Spellcraft check (DC 15, preparer can Take 10). When the teleport block spell is cast, the caster can make a Spellcraft check (DC 10 + 2 per additional keystone) to associate a teleportation keystone to the teleport block. If the check fails, the teleportation keystone doesn’t function.

A single teleportation keystone can be associated with multiple teleport block spells. It only needs to be prepared once, but a separate Spellcraft check must be during each casting of teleport block.

If a teleport block is made permanent, the teleportation keystones associated with it can be simultaneously made permanent by expending an additional 50 XP per keystone.

The physical form of a keystone can be almost anything (although small, smooth, oval stones marked with runes are common).

TELEPORT BLOCK
Abjuration
Level: Sorcerer/Wizard 5
Components: V, S, M
Casting Time: 1 full round
Range: 0 ft.
Area: One 10-ft. cube/level
Duration: 1 hour/level (D)
Saving Throw: None
Spell Resistance: No

You create an area in which no teleportation spell will work, either coming in or going out.

Material Component: 10 gp worth of gold dust.

This material is covered under the Open Game License.

Go to Kitchen Sinking

One of the things I find notable about roughly the first decade of Dungeons & Dragons is that it was truly a kitchen sink of fantasy tropes. And, most importantly, it was an active kitchen sink: Anybody and everybody could dump stuff into it and it never really felt like it would make anyone blink an eye. Some of this was new and original content, but a lot of it was being drawn from whatever the author’s favorite fantasy novel of the moment was. And the resulting mythic goulash was pretty awesome with a lot of unexpected synergies

Then, at some point along the line, the D&D kitchen sink slowly coagulated into an immutable canon and it became increasingly unacceptable to add new elements to the milieu. Even when new items and the like were created, they often seemed to exist within the existing parameters of the game instead of pushing the boundaries of D&D’s fantasy palette.

One place where this is really obvious is the planar cosmology of the game: If you look at the early years of TSR modules, it’s pretty clear that whenever somebody wanted to include a new plane of existence they would just toss it on the pile and roll with it. Then, at some point, the Great Wheel was codified and that particular kitchen sink was sealed.

4th Edition kind of shook things up with new PC races and an all-new planar cosmology… but it quickly became apparent that they they’d replaced one sealed canon with a different sealed canon.

To make a long story short: Recently I’ve resolved to rip the lid back off the kitchen sink and start pouring stuff into it. I may not be able to shift the core approach of the D&D or Pathfinder supplements, but I can make it so that my personal campaigns aren’t quite so strongly defined by the “official canon” of the core rulebooks. I can infuse my game with all the cool stuff from whatever fantasy novel I’m currently reading. And I can make a point of including cool stuff in my adventure modules without feeling artificially shackled to the “known facts” of what the D&D multiverse is supposed to look like.

I’m going to be starting with some of the nifty keen stuff from Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos novels, because (a) there’s a lot of awesome stuff that’s easily transplantable in there and (b) it’s what I happened to be reading when I decided that this was a thing that I would be doing.

If you want to do some similar kitchen-sinking featuring your favorite fantasy authors (or films or television shows or heavy metal albums), throw it up on your blog or post it to a messageboard and then throw a link in the comments below.

(I’ll also be adding links to this post as my own kitchen-sinking efforts go live.)

As a general disclaimer, I will note that my goal with kitchen sinking is not necessarily to faithfully replicate the material from which I’m drawing inspiration. (Similarly, rangers in AD&D are gifted in the use of using crystal balls because Aragorn was gifted in the use of a palantir. But AD&D’s crystal balls aren’t palantirs.) I’m also going to frequently take the seed of an idea from the source material and freely riff upon it in order to create entirely new things.

KITCHEN SINKS
Kitchen Sink Brust