If you’ve been hanging around the Alexandrian for awhile, then you know that I like procedural content generators. A few examples from the past include:

• The Poor Man’s Hex Stocker
• Factions in the Dungeon
• Breathing Life Into the Wandering Monster
• Fun With Vornheim

They’re useful for rapidly refreshing the core content of an open table. They’re valuable improvisation tools while running the game. And they’re an excellent way of getting your creative juices flowing when you’re creating content.

MAGIC THE GATHERING

Here’s a system proposed by Baldr12 on reddit recently. Take your Magic the Gathering cards (or use a random card generator) and draw five times to determine:

THE PROBLEM (Creature/Enchantment): This is the problem. It may have just appeared or it may have just gotten worse.

THE SETTING (Non-Base Land): This is the primary location. It’s either where the problem is located, where it needs to be solved, or both.

THE SOLUTION (Artifact/Sorcery): The macguffin that will solve the problem.

THE FRIEND (Creature): This is somebody that wants the problem removed or can help the PCs remove it.

THE ANTAGONIST (Creature): This is the person who doesn’t want the problem resolved. They may have been the one to cause it or they might be profiting from it.

EXAMPLE SCENARIO

THE PROBLEM (Emissary of Hope): An “angel” claiming to represent the Nine Gods is offering people absolution from their sins with the promise of immediate entry into a heavenly afterlife. Those who agree to the Emissary of Hope’s offer, however, turn up dead.

THE SETTING (Cursed Land): A place known as Devil’s Hollow, deep within the Old Wood.

THE SOLUTION (Envelop): An old holy ritual which will unknit the flames of the soulbright flamekin. Unfortunately, the Emissary of Hope has destroyed all the local holy books which contain the ritual.

THE FRIEND (Canker Abomination): These evil creatures of legend are coming out of the Old Wood. The local church is condemning them. But if the heroes investigate, they’ll discover that some of the canker abominations are speaking with the voices of those “taken to Heaven” by the Emissary of Hope.

THE ANTAGONIST (Soulbright Flamekin): The source of all this confusion and horror is a soulbright flamekin sorcerer who has taken up residence in Devil’s Hollow. The Emissary of Hope is the soulbright’s creation, trapping the souls of its victims into trees which become canker abominations. The soulbright then draws the canker abominations to itself and burns the wood, claiming the souls for itself.

NETRUNNER

Here’s a quick variant I threw together for using Netrunner cards to generate cyberpunk heists.

THE CLIENT (Identity): This is either the person looking to hire the PCs or the corporation the pseudonymous Mr. Johnson works for.

THE TARGET (Agenda/Asset/Upgrade): This is what they want.

THE JOB (Operation/Event): This desscribes the nature of the job. (You can draw this option multiple times to enrich the difficulty or the complications of the mission.)

THE PROBLEM (Asset/Hardware): This is a hurdle that is going to make finishing the job difficult. (You generally want to draw one problem for each job card you pull.)

THE TWIST (Operation/Resource): Finally, no heist is complete without an unexpected complication somewhere along the way.

 EXAMPLE SCENARIO

THE CLIENT (The Foundry): A lunar mining facility that produces the advanced materials required to build bioroids.

THE TARGET (Net Police): A division of the Lunar PD that recently executed a secret warrant on the Foundry’s databases. The Net Police now have a dossier containing information that the Foundry can’t afford to let out into the wild.

THE JOB (Traffic Accident): The lead investigator for the Lunar PD needs to be taken out of the equation, but it needs to look like an accident. Literally. The PCs need to sabotage her flier. Once she’s out of commission, the case will pass to her deputy.

THE PROBLEM (Deep Red): The deputy is clean, but the Foundry has access to the deputy’s passkeys. Unfortunately, the only way to use the passkeys is to gain access to the Lunar PD’s evidence databases. And those are hyper-secure. The only way to get reliable access from outside Lunar PD headquarters? Cutting edge Caissa ICE. You’ll have to heist a Deep Red unit with the latest Caissa releases.

THE TWIST (Rework): When they pull the file and burn the evidence database, the PCs discover that a copy of the secure file has already been made to a grand jury database. To finish the job, they’re gonna have to hit the courthouse!

In 2011 I posted the Ruined Temple of Illhan here at the Alexandrian: It’s an old school dungeon crawl based around the Neo-Norska Pantheon and the supporting mythology I created. The centerpiece of of this mythology was Illhan, the eldest son of Thor. Illhan led the Eight Sons of Thor and Three Daughters of Hel to fight the legions of Nidhogg, the Great Serpent of Shadow. He was notable for wielding a hammer in each hand and his primary holy symbol was a pair of crossed hammers.

A few days ago, I was linked to this amazing piece of art entitled “The Son of Thor”:

This isn’t a direct depiction of Illhan, the Son of Thor. (It’s some other son of Thor.) But if you were going to use the Ruined Temple of Illhan, this piece of art would be pretty cool to use.

In a thread on the RPGsite (see post #15), Barbatruc proposes an interesting method for tracking torches and lanterns. He later mentions being inspired by Intwischa’s method for tracking ammo. Talysman drops in a little later (post #26) to mention that he does something similar with wands. (Which, I’ll note, is very similar to Numenera‘s artifact depletion roll.)

For my own reference, I’m going to archive these methods here briefly:

LIGHT SOURCES: In OD&D, set aside a d6 for each lit torch and a d24 for each lit lantern. At the beginning of each turn roll all the dice set aside: Anything that comes up 1 goes out and gets marked off the character sheet. (This results in torches and lanterns having by-the-book durations on average, but introduces an element of uncertainty and variability. More importantly, it simplifies bookkeeping.)

INTWISCHA’S AMMO: The PC has an “ammo die” of a size determined by the amount of ammunition they’re carrying. They roll this die with each attack roll and if it comes up 1, their die type decreases by one size. If they purchase ammunition or find a stash of it during the adventure, they can increase the die size instead.

ALTERNATIVE AMMO: Have your PCs buy ammo in lots equal to the die size of the system you’re using. (d20 in 3.5, for example.) When you roll a 1 on your attack roll, mark off one lot of ammo. (Trail of Cthulhu uses a similar mechanic in pulp mode, but when you roll the 1 you’re actually clicking on an empty cylinder and automatically miss. I’m ditching the “critical failure” aspect of the mechanic and just using it to track ammo.)

WANDS: Roll percentile dice. On a roll of 1 or 2, the wand has run out of charges. (Note: This system doesn’t work if you want the PCs to have some method of determining exactly how many charges are left in a wand.)

What I’m seeing here is a cluster of techniques that I think can be trivially generalized to cover any form of consumable that are likely to be carried in large quantities for frequent use. I suspect it’s particularly useful if you can incorporate it into a general resolution mechanic (instead of rolling a separate die on every single check).

Ken Levine proffers (and comments upon) a Mike Nichols quote:

Every scene is either a fight, seduction, or negotiation.

Levine points out some caveats with the claim and Mark Evanier (who originally linked me to Levine’s piece) offers a few more, but I thought the simplicity of the fight / seduction / negotiation triad was an interesting conceptual tool when thinking about scene-framing. As I discussed in the Art of Pacing, there’s a lot of different ways you can think about the creative elements that you put into a scene and a lot of different structures you can use (or abuse)

DH Boggs at Hidden in Shadows has put together an absolutely fascinating bibliographic analysis of the earliest versions of the turn undead ability in D&D.

The short version: Virtually no explanation of the “turn undead” ability was provided in the original edition of D&D. Boggs makes a strong case that the ability was only being used by Arneson’s Blackmoor group in Minneapolis and not being used by Gygax’s Greyhawk group in Lake Geneva. Gygax, therefore, gave the ability short shrift in compiling the 1974 rulebooks; this short shrift, in turn, resulted in people interpreting the ability in a way that was much more powerful than Arneson intended (or the Blackmoor group was experiencing). And the legacy of that power-up is something that the game is still dealing with 5+ editions later.

This is a great example of the “Ur-Game” of D&D, as I described it in my Reactions to OD&D several years ago.

What’s also interesting to me is how closely Boggs’ reconstruction of Arneson’s original rules mirror the house rules for turning that I posted here on the Alexandrian back in 2007. (These rules are still being regularly used in my 3.5 Ptolus campaign. And they’re great: Streamlined resolution paired with a range of effects which is less overpowered and, simultaneously, more interesting in the results it produces.)

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