Go to Part 1

THE BRAND OF AVARICE

The first brands of avarice was crafted by the Sorcerer Prince Ajan. The tributes paid to Ajan by his lords were being constantly jeopardized by the legendary rogue Ser Kella. Attempts to capture Kella had failed, even when aided by Ajan’s powerful magic. So Ajan crafted a brand of avarice for each of his lords — with each bearing the seal of the lord for which they were destined – and commanded them to include their brands with all future tributes as a guarantee of their payment. Ser Kella, after falling prey to the brands at least twice, abandoned his depredations upon Ajan’s tributes.

Today the brands of avarice are a relatively inexpensive form of magical protection against theft: A wizard or sorcerer will enchant a normal gold piece and place it within a pile of similar or identical coins. The owner of the coins will know to avoid this particular piece (which is usually identified with some minor marking and can be removed safely by anyone wearing a pair of gloves). However, the moment it is touched by bare flesh, the brand of avarice will bond itself to the person’s flesh and will resist all physical efforts to have it removed short of amputating the body part affected.

Depending on where the brand attaches itself, the character may be subject to a penalty on any affected ability or skill checks (this may include spells with somatic components – including dispel magic). For example, if the brand is grasped by the fingertips (as is quite likely) their manual dexterity will be affected. A common mistake is to then attempt to pry it loose with the other hand (thereby binding both hands to the coin). DM’s should use their best discretion as to what types of penalties to apply (and just how badly a character can get stuck to himself – or others).

Also note that the brand is capable of acting on more than one individual at a time. Thus if another PC, NPC, or monster were to touch the brand (or if the affected character were to touch another PC, NPC, or monster with the brand), the brand would effectively bind the two characters together at the point of contact.

The easiest way to remove the brand is through the use of a dispel magic spell (wealthier patrons will usually have the brand created by a high level wizard – making it comparatively more difficult to remove). However, even this will still leave a physical imprint of the coin’s surface on the victim’s skin. This mark will not usually impair the victim’s ability to take normal actions (although the DM may decide otherwise under special circumstances), but will continue to identify the character as the victim of a brand so long as it is visible.

Caster Level: 5^th
Prerequisites: Craft Wondrous Item, make whole
Market Price: 4,000 gp

COIN OF ALARUM

Another device for theft deterrence, the coin of alarum is more direct in its methods of persecution: When brought near coins it hasn’t been near before, it will sound a klaxon-like alarm. Typically the coin of alarum would be placed unconspicuously among the other coins of a house’s wealth, so that when a would-be thief placed it next to his personal wealth the alarm would sound.

However, as an added security measure the sound of the alarm does not appear to emanate from the coin itself – instead seeming to simply fill the air around it. The thief will assume that he has triggered an area affect, and flee – never realizing that he is carrying his own accuser with him. It may take quite some time for the victim to finally discover why the klaxon returns every time they add change to their coin purse.

The coin of alarum takes fifteen minutes to acclimate itself to a new coin. The klaxon will stop as soon as the acclimation process is finished. If a coin is removed from the presence of the coin of alarum and then returned, the acclimation process must be repeated. The coin has also been enchanted in such a way that a dispel magic spell will not only work automatically, but will also have a duration of fifteen minutes (the spell can be used to acclimate the coin without having to live with an alarm sounding). Spells such as silence will also work to quiet this pernicious little item.

Although coins of alarum can be commonly found just about anywhere today, they were originally a creation of the dragons – often serving as triggers for more elaborate magical defenses or traps. Many dragons continue to use the coins to this day, using the sound of the alarm as a trigger for a contingency spell which teleports the rest of their treasure safely away.

Caster Level: 5^th
Prerequisites: Craft Wondrous Item, alarm
Market Price: 100 gp

Go to Part 3

Here is a thing which I forgot existed. Back in June 2002, Campaign Magazine published “Gilted Fiends”, an article I had written which contained a number of cursed coins for D20 fantasy games. Back in 2011, I archived that article here on the Alexandrian. What I had forgotten is that I had actually written a direct sequel to this article which was never published because Campaign Magazine went out of business.

Without further ado, here is that article — never before seen — providing more mischievous and dangerous coins with which to plague your PCs.

Cursed items are a long-standing tradition for D&D, for a very simple reason: They’re a lot of fun. A character plagued by their cursed possession not only has the challenge of overcoming the difficulties created by the curse, but also the long-standing problem of getting rid of the curse permanently. Cursed items serve as a source of conflict, challenge, and storytelling.

But there’s a problem: Players are paranoid. Hand them a sword carved with cryptic runes and the identify and analyze dweomer spells begin to fly. They have no intention of being caught flatfooted – and nothing magical is going to escape their careful analysis. If they’re looking for it, they’re going to catch that curse before it ever gets close to them. As fun as they might be, cursed items never really get a fighting chance.

Wait a minute, though. What if they don’t think to look? Sure, the first thing they’re going to do with a dragon’s hoard is start looking for magic in every sword, staff, ring, and scroll. But…

Who casts detect magic on a pile of coins?

Nobody. When they kill the orc and loot the body, no one ever stops to consider that the bent copper piece they found was actually a Lucky Penny. And as frustrating as missed magic might be if they ever realize the truth, imagine their despair when the gold coin they liberated from the ogre’s lair turns out to be the greatest bane of all…

Enchanted coins, though, offer more than just the opportunity to slip a good curse under the character’s defenses. They can also provide the fodder for a variety of adventure themes – ranging from “good things come in small packages” to the almost ubiquitous “money is the root of all evil”. Money is a part of everyday life – for the characters and the players – so don’t hesitate to use it as a story element or adventure seed.

That being said, here are a few dirty tricks to slip into your PCs’ money pouches…

WEALTH BANE

The wealth banes were created by the Scarlet Coven – mad mages convinced that the plight of the poor would be alleviated if only the gold of the wealth was disposed of. It took the coven nearly a decade of effort to gather the wealth necessary to create the banes, and it is whispered that the treasure troves of three mighty dragons – Silvermane, Harshfire, and Blacktongue – were consumed.

In the end, the coven was successful. The result, however, was not as they intended. The wealth banes were quickly detected, and decisive action was rapidly taken against the coven. Although the coven’s leader, Kesand, would not be captured until almost nine years had passed, the “glorious” vision of the Scarlet Coven never came to pass.

A wealth bane appears to be a normal copper coin, but when placed in close proximity to a platinum, gold, or silver coin the wealth bane will transmute their metal into common copper. For every hour that a wealth bane is kept within a foot of other coins (for example, within a coin pouch) there is a cumulative 10% chance that the other coins will be transformed into copper.

Most of the wealth banes were either destroyed or are now kept – carefully – in private collections as curiosity pieces. Others, however, followed the whimsical paths of commerce and disappeared into the far corners of the globe. Often their victims never become aware of what caused the strange transformation, and end up spending the wealth bane as if it were a normal coin – passing it on to some new victim.

Caster Level: 15^th
Prerequisites: Craft Wondrous Item, polymorph any object
Market Price: 150,000 gp

Go to Part 2

Go to Eternal Lies: The Alexandrian Remix

Tim Höregott is providing a German translation of both the Alexandrian Remix of Eternal Lies and the system cheat sheet I designed for Trail of Cthulhu. He will not be translating the handouts (he intends to use the originals), but will be translating all the various guides and cheat sheets. (If anyone else is interested in translating the handouts, please feel free to contact me.)

Tim is also the author of the Listen to the Gods blog (which is not in German), so make sure you check that out.

ETERNAL LIES REMIX (GERMAN)

1.0 Kampagnenübersicht
1.1 New York
1.2 Savannah
1.3 Los Angeles

TRAIL OF CTHULHU CHEAT SHEET (GERMAN)

(click here for PDF)

Something I like to occasionally do during a session is to speak in tongues. It can be a nice touch of flavor to have one of the orcs the party is talking to turn to their comrade and whisper something in unintelligible orcish. Or to have an elf lord curse at them with silken invectives. Or have the strange, angelic being woken from an elder age quiz them in the stilted tones of a forgotten common tongue.

When I do this, of course, it’s not actually important that what I’m saying actually means anything. (If you actually know a fantasy tongue like Tolkien’s Quenya, that’s fantastic, but not required for this technique to be effective. And sprinkling in established words from a fantasy language as a sort of slang is a different thing, albeit also cool.) What is important is that the content flows, varies, and has a consistent tone. In other words, it needs to sound like someone actually speaking.

However, this can be difficult to smoothly achieve. To assist with this effect, I’ve created a tool I refer to as a Fantasy Lorem Ipsum: For each fantasy language, I have two pages of pre-generated text (which can be printed on both sides of a single sheet of paper). When I want to “speak” in that language, I can simply choose a location on the sheet and begin performing from it. You can also use these sheets to quickly generate handouts by copying and pasting a chunk of text. (You can then provide the “translation” separately if one of the PCs knows the language.)

Ancient Common
Dwarvish
Elvish
Halfling
Orc

Go to Part 1

The key element in organizing your open table is figuring out how you want to schedule sessions. For an open table, events tend to break down in two categories.

OPEN CALLS: For an open call, the GM simply announces the date and time of the game. Players then RSVP.

An easy variant of the open call is the regular session: Maybe you play every Tuesday night, for example.

SPONSORED SESSIONS: Alternatively, specific players (or groups of players) can “sponsor” a session by approaching the GM and requesting it. I generally tell players that they should offer me a range of dates and then I can figure out which one works for me. It’s up to them whether they want the sponsored session to also include an open call to fill any empty seats or if it’s an “exclusive” event just for them.

The reasons for sponsored sessions can arise from either the game world or the metagame. For example, I’ve run sponsored sessions in order to “explore the Temple of Elemental Evil”, “retrieve Varla’s corpse”, or “to go back for the rest of that treasure before anybody else snatches it”. I’ve also run sponsored sessions because Steve was in town, for a bachelor party, because we all happened to be drunk at the time, and because somebody was bored and wanted something to do on a Tuesday night.

COMMUNICATION & COMMUNITY

Mass e-mails are perhaps the most straightforward method of making open calls and otherwise communicating with your pool of players. But they can also be something of a blunt instrument.

My group experimented with a wiki for awhile, but the participation rate was low and it was ill-suited for event announcements. (I’ll probably experiment with supplemental wiki support for open tables again in the future, but for the moment I’ve lain them aside.)

What I have found effective is a Facebook group. (Why Facebook instead of G+? Primarily because too many people from my player pool aren’t on G+. If yours are, then G+ groups have a lot of advantages.) Everybody can sign up. Everyone can talk to each other. Creating a new event is as easy as pressing a button, and it’s easy to track people’s RSVPs. You can also use the group to host basic information and orientation material.

TABLE CAPS & WAITING LISTS

My first forays with an open table featured a simple, “We’ll play with whoever shows up!” ethos. As the popularity of the open table grew, however, this quickly became non-viable: I had one session in which I GMed for ten players running something like twenty-two total PCs and hirelings.

Then I imposed table caps.

The system is pretty simple: I cap the number of players at a certain number. These slots are filled on a first-come, first-serve basis. Once the cap is hit, that’s it for that session.

To prevent highly active players from monopolizing the slots at every session, I also instituted the concept of the Waiting List: If you signed up for a session, but couldn’t play because of the session cap, then you were given preferential placement for the next session.

The Waiting List also helps cope with the problem of last minute cancellations (because you can call up the next person on the waiting list).

The size of your table cap is almost entirely up to you (and possibly the comfortable limits of your playing space). For example, I know that I can run 5 players comfortably, 6 players are usually manageable, and with 7+ players the quality of the session will usually begin to decline. So I set my table cap at 5 and occasionally have a sixth player join (usually the significant other of the fifth player).

CAMPAIGN TIME MANAGEMENT

“YOU CANNOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.”
– Gary Gygax, Dungeon Master’s Guide

You’re going to have a lot of different characters doing a lot of different things in the setting, and a couple primary questions will arise:

• What happens if I go to Dungeon X while Character A (who isn’t playing tonight) is still there?
• If Character A and Character B go on an adventure together, and then Character A goes on five more adventures, and then Player A and Player B sit down for a session together… what do we do? Character A is weeks ahead of Character B!

Easiest solution: “I don’t care.” Just handwave these things away and don’t worry about it.

But there are reasons why Gygax said what he said. It was an attitude shared by a lot of the early pioneers (including Dave Arneson, M.A.R. Barker, and Bob Bledsaw among others). And you’ll quickly discover for yourself that without a more concrete handling of the passage of time, there’s a lot of potential activities and consequences and fun things that won’t be possible.

Here’s my basic suggestion: Have campaign time match time in the real world. For each day that passes in the real world, a day also passes in the campaign world. If a player can’t play for a couple of months, that means that their character was just idly passing the time. (Alternatively, you could start developing mechanics for handling the passage of time: What were their upkeep costs? How are their investments doing? Did they succeed at any arcane research? Did they join a Thieves’ Guild? Or, if you’ve got the time and your players are interested, you could engage with players through weekly e-mails to see what their characters have been up to.)

Within the appearance of this simplicity, however, you’ll discover that there are some potential problems. I’ll discuss my own experience with keeping time in my original open table campaign as an example of how you might deal with some of those problems.

IN THE DUNGEON: The early days of the campaign featured a single megadungeon. The solution of using the real passage of time was largely flawless here: The amount of time that passed in any given session was usually shorter than the amount of time that passed between sessions in the real world (and the few exceptions could be easily fudged).

IN THE WILDERNESS: When the campaign expanded into a full-blown hexcrawl, however, we began running into our first serious time management problems. Crossing unexplored wilderness could chew up days or weeks of time in the game world while using up mere minutes of table time.

The first solution I attempted was to have the clock always move forwards: If Expedition A ended 18 days in the future, then when Expedition B started the next day in the real world we’d still be 17 days in the future. The problem with this approach was that it radically pushed campaign time into the future: If you missed just a handful of sessions (which is, of course, common in an open table), you could find that months had passed for your character.

LOCKDOWN: What I ended up doing instead was to adhere to real time for the start of each expedition. Expedition A was played on March 17^th in the real world and Expedition B was played on March 18^th, then Expedition B started one day later in the campaign world, too.

This meant, of course, that Expedition A was still happening. This meant that any characters in Expedition A were locked down – they couldn’t be played in Expedition B. I would also lock down any locations that had been visited by Expedition A: You couldn’t break continuity by going to the same dungeon as Expedition A because we already knew that hadn’t happened (since we had seen those events play out with Expedition A).

CHARACTER STABLES: With that being said, I didn’t want players to be prevented from playing just because their character was currently locked down. This led to the practice of each player having multiple characters in the campaign world.

Having this stable of characters proved useful in other ways: For example, players could choose the character which was closest in level to the other players on a particular expedition. (Or, alternatively, choose to play a high-level patron whose expertise the entire group could benefit from.)

TRACKING TIME: In order to track all of this information, I simply kept a list of all the player characters currently active in the campaign on my campaign status sheet. If they were in lockdown, I listed that. I also listed any outstanding expeditions (i.e., expeditions from previous sessions whose end date had not yet been passed) and the locations locked down in association with them. In practice, this requires virtually no effort.

END OF SESSION STATUS

The other thing to consider in an open table is the end of session status for player characters. In general, for the open table to work at the end of a session the player characters need to return to their home base (or whatever position they need to be in to participate in open group formation at the beginning of the next session).

To facilitate this for a traditional D&D campaign, I created tools like the Escaping the Dungeon! table.

SEQUEL SESSIONS: I did, however, also offer an alternative: If the evening was coming to a close and the group was in the middle of something important to them, then we could continue that session if (and only if!) everyone at the table could immediately agree on a time within the next 10 days to continue the scenario. (If they couldn’t, tough luck: They’ve got to get out and they’ve got to get home.)

The reason for the strict limitation on this is that, in the interim, all of these characters (and the location they’re in) would be locked down. This creates all sorts of complications for the open table. There was one time when I set up a sequel session and several of the players had to cancel on it. Trying to reschedule proved challenging and we ended up bouncing it around for two or three months before I finally wrote it off and released the lockdowns. In the interim, however, all of the momentum in that section of the campaign had been lost: I would have been far better off immediately writing off the sequel session and allowing subsequent expeditions to be scheduled to pursue the loose ends which had been left.

CHARACTER CREATION GUIDELINES

A final thing to consider, if you’re planning on using some form of away-from-the-table character generation to resolve the lack of quick character generation in your system of choice, are the character creation guidelines you want to use.

As a tip: If your system of choice features organized play, looking at the character creation guidelines for that can often be useful. Their needs will be similar to your own, although you can often relax many of their strictures.