The potential spoilers come think and fast in the last three chapters of the Gamemasters’ Guide. And so, we come to the last instalment of my “Where I Read…”
There is hardly anything I can say about the artefacts chapter without spoiling anything. Eighteen artefacts are described, potential sites of discovery suggested in each description. But the authors stress that’s its entirely up to you, where your players actually find these things. Unlike the demons in the bestiary, there is nothing randomly generated I can get excited about (Though there is a d66 table if you want to randomly decide which of the 18 artefacts your players discover). If you want to know more you’ll have to get out there, exploring the Forbidden Lands. Or volunteer to be GM.
The Encounters chapter starts with a table, cross-referencing d66 with terrain type, to provide a number between zero and 43. Zero means nothing happens, each of the other 43 encounters are subsequently described, with stats where required, or pointing you to stats elsewhere in the book. These encounters are not just wandering monsters. They could become adventure hooks. Some are repeatable, but others, once played through, couldn’t really happen to the same party twice. That’s not a problem though, if you had nots about what happened last time, and one of the NPC survived, you could continue the story, or take inspiration from the encounter but change the details, or simply re-roll. There are some intriguing references to SIMPLE, VALUABLE and PRECIOUS finds, suggesting, a random treasure table.
And indeed, in the final chapter, Adventure Sites, we discover a number of such tables, beginning on page 186. There are d66 tables for Simple, Valuable and Precious Carried Finds, and Finds in a Lair. Each lists the item, it’s value in coin, and its encumbrance. The items range from coin (the most common result – a few coppers in simple carried finds, to gold silver and copper in precious finds in the lair) to, on a roll of 66 on the precious lair table, an artefact, which explains the random artefact table in the chapter. When the encumbrance column shows a number rather that usual light, normal or heavy, that’s the number of people required to carry it. There’s a supplementary table of oddities, which modifies the items you rolled in other tables: it might be bent, burned or have bite marks in it, for example, each of which halves the value. Or it might turn out to be twice as valuable to a dwarf.
All these tables though are preceded by extensive tables for creating a random adventure site. The chapter starts off with a very important note, which applies to both the pre-written sites, and the ones you may generate.
An adventure site is not a scenario in the traditional sense. It has locations, NPCs and events – but it does not provide a pre-determined narrative for the adventurers to follow. Instead, they can interact with an adventure site in many different ways
In fact there may well be more than one narrative opportunity at each site. It’s up the players, and the GM to make the site into a narrative of their very own. Over them, the player character actions might well change sites so that when they return, other narrative opportunities are on offer.
You start off creating a new site by defining it as a village, dungeon or castle. In play this may well be prompted by what’s on the map, but if you want, for example if there are ruins marked on the map, you can roll randomly. a village is then defined by its size (population) and age, before moving on to how it’s ruled. You can roll twice on a d66 to create a bickering Rust Brother or Brutal council, for example.
Other d66 roles give the village:
- a problem, including widespread drunkenness or Bandits;
- a claim to fame, delicious bread or strange disappearances; and
- an oddity like inbreeding or a Old Burial Site
Then depending on the size of the village you roll for between zero and eleven “institutions” such as inns, stables, militia etc. There are an inn generator too, with randomly rolled names like The Rumping Druid or The Singing Jar. A few more rolls provide each inn with an oddity, speciality and special guest. So you might see a singing sister serve blood soup to a secretive spellbinder (shouldn’t that be “Sorcerer”? Ed.).
Your Dungeon on the other hand can be anything between d6 and over 1,100 years old. With between d6 and 6d6+50 rooms. It could have had one of seven original uses, one of ten builders, elves to a demon (with ten motivations, vengeance to passion) or developed naturally. You can discover one of ten fates for those original builders too. It might nave have between one and three different inhabitants (or groups) from a choice of 24, and one of 36 oddities. There are seventeen different types of entrance (shades of #D&Dgate).
There is even a dungeon room generator, that allows you to create a dungeon on the fly, with treasure and traps, as the players are exploring it! (Or in advance if you prefer)
Similarly, Castles can be defined with random rolls to determine:
- Type and size;
- Age;
- Original purpose;
- Founder (and the founder’s Reputation)n
- Condition;
- History;
- Inhabitants (including an “Is it really empty?” table or a “Who has moved in?” table);
- It’s Oddity of course (gotta have an oddity); and,
- It’s name.
But wait! We’re not done with the random generation. There are stat blocks here for typical NPC, and else where of course for other kin and followers of religious orders. But here too is the table for discovering a their occupation, defining characteristic (from eye patch to unkempt eyebrows, which on reflection doesn’t seem far enough for a “from … to” example) and a personal quirk.
Reading though the adventure sites themselves, you can imagine them being created by rolling on these tables (well maybe not for Inn names), and they demonstrate what a powerful tool set this is. Part of me really wants to run a totally emergent story, relying on dice and the imagination of the players to create the narrative. With just a little note taking after each session, a savvy GM would quickly work out when to forgo a dice roll in favour of reintroducing a NPC or developing situation from a previous adventure.
So this is the last of my posts in this “Where I read…” and I have to say, I am very excited for this game. We played an adventure already (and recorded it, so you will soon have the opportunity to hear us groking the rules), and o think we all love it. It was meant to be a one-off, to fill a gap in our schedule, but my players already want another session and are growing into their randomly generated characters.
All hail the return of the dice!
fictionsuit.org 