The ever-incredible ktrey over at d4Caltrops had a recent 1d100 table of potential blogpost topics: in my infinite wisdom I am going to shotgun the gamut and answer every single one of them. Split up into four posts of 25 each for my own sanity.
1. Are phones/devices permitted at your table? How do you handle distractions?
I don’t have a rule against it. If people are really getting distracted, I'll throw them one of the softball “how does your character do X?” prompts to get them back in.
2. Are spellcasters rare? Common? How do "normal" people feel about them?
Spells like "snap your fingers and light a match", "fix a clean break in a broken object" and "find the lost object that you swear you just set down" are an everyday part of life. Cunning men / women, witches, spirit mediums and other low-power practitioners are found basically everywhere, and are highly valued in their communities.
Mid-power practitioners (roughly where a magic-specialist PC would be) are not uncommon, and attitudes are more ambivalent. A letter of introduction from an initiatory society won’t smooth over everything, but it will help a traveling mage.
High-power practitioners (traditional wizards with the hat and tower & so on) are rare and considered extremely dangerous (for many well-attested reasons).
3. Are there secret societies or factions hiding in your world? Tell me about one!
I am habitually incapable of resisting cheeky references to SCP deep lore that no one else will get, regardless of what game I am running, though the actual group of interest I use is context-dependent. The most likely ones will be the occult historical factions (Daevites, Ortothans, Nalkans, and Mekhanists) appearing as mystery religions, since they lend themselves extremely well to evoking vast secrets lost to time.
4. Are there any interesting holidays/festivals in your world?
One off the dome: an isolated village whose midsummer festival entails a giant red and white orb descends from the sky and gives each inhabitant an amorphous, blobby tie-die sculpture sort of thing with no apparent purpose or design. Then the orb leaves, the sculptures are installed next to the family shrine, and next year they are returned to the orb in exchange for new sculptures.
No one knows why this happens.
5. Are there any recurring jokes or humorous call-backs that occur in your games?
At some point, there will be a skull with the name DENNIS carved into its forehead.
6. Are there constellations in your setting? Can you describe four of them?
It's never come up, but if I had to do it on the fly I would rename existing constellations and probably mix different traditions together while doing it. Proper names would be swapped out but the titles would probably stay the same or be similar i.e. Taurus would be the Bison or the Bonnacon, the Dippers would be the Raccoon Brothers, Orion would be the Amazon, etc.
7. Are you working on your own system? What makes it stand out from others?
My great open secret is that I generally don’t put high value on rulesets as a whole, and tend to treat them as modular assortments of mechanics (sorted by broad genus) that can be tweaked and recombined as needed.
Which is to say I have tried making my own system, but found no reason to see those projects through when I can just use what other people have made.
8. Can one buy magic items in your setting? Where would one go about doing this?
There are two kinds of magical item, far as I'm concerned: those that inherently have magical properties (phoenix feathers, bonnacon turds, basilisk eyes, etc) and those that have been imbued with magical properties intentionally by a practitioner. Both can be bought, though the former is much easier to acquire than the latter since you can just go on down to the shop and pick up some mandrake root; to get a bespoke enchantment you need to find someone willing and able to do the enchantment, and then they'll need time and resources to make it happen.
9. Describe 4 things that qualify for deity disfavor and cause clerics to lose powers
In increasing order of severity (exact likelihood and specifics depend on the deity):
- Violation of ritual praxis by accident or ignorance
- If you don't know or flub up the proper rites but are doing your honest best, most popular gods will let it slide.
- Minor violations of ethical praxis
- Overlooking minor sins is basically required in order to maintain a human priesthood, though all gods will get fed up with it eventually if left unaddressed for too long.
- Ritual impurity
- This will often be an instant disfavor, though will usually only last until the follower has ritually purified themselves; the more charitable gods will make exceptions for emergency situations (ex. violating dietary prohibitions under duress in order to save someone's life)
- Knowing violation of ritual praxis / desecration of sacred space
- Getting sloppy with rites can be tolerated to a (usually very small extent), but deliberate transgression is going to have pretty immediate consequences.
- Extreme violations of praxis or sacred space
- This is the part of the gradient where violators are going to get their asses cursed or smote.
- Uncategorized Fucking Around
- Circumstances where the only natural outcome is Finding Out.
10. Describe a few pieces of expensive jewelry one might find in a dragon's hoard.
- Jade and silver torc of two entwined serpents from the 18th Dynasty of Thuria
- Gold and lapis lazuli headdress of an exorcist-priestess of Nan-Sul-Gara
- Amber nose stud with preserved insect of unknown provenance unknown
- Marble touch-sculpture of the blind and bat-like Venusians; is actually biting political satire
- Amulet containing the left navigular bone of Saint Jomo the Mortitian.
- An electrum medallion; it menaces with spikes of obsidian; it is engraved with the image of an elephant and a dwarf in electrum: the elephant is striking down the dwarf; the elephant is on fire; the dwarf is screaming.
11. Describe a near death situation or TPK that you've been a part of at the table
The one time I played Mutant Year Zero (right before covid kicked off), the entire party died from radiation poisoning two hexes away from home because we didn’t have a scout. Mistakes were made.
12. Describe an occasion where a die roll or randomizer had everyone surprised!
It’s been long enough since I’ve played regularly that I don’t have any good examples on hand.
13. Describe one big "mover and shaker" or local lord/lady in your world.
I’ve yet to settle on a name for her, but there’s a drow / lilu / kin-yani diplomat-sorceress who’s one of those 4D plate-spinner types. She’s the overseer for a major (but relatively new) trade relationship between the surface and the subterrene, and has acquired an impressive number of enemies from both sides. A woman with a lot of use for deniable assets.
14. Do all dwarfs have beards or only certain ones? Why?
Not all of them, but they’re common for both sexes (as is body hair in general), and female dwarves without beards will often grow out their sideburns.
15. Do you do any "funny voices" or accents when portraying? If so, what are they?
Usually only for comedic characters, which usually boil down to “bloviating wizard”, “Eeyore”, and “goblin”.
16. Do you have any stories from games that your players can't stop talking about?
Since I don't really have consistent groups I don't have many player stories, but I have plenty of Gm stories; the con game of Dead Planet I ran a couple years ago remains a highlight, when the players managed to open up the Gaunt hive in the Red Tower barracks without any casualties by tossing in a homemade gas bomb and welding the door shut as the player in maggot armor held it in place. Weird to recount a story of players committing war crimes as entertainment, but the clever thinking on their feet was just so good.
17. Do you take breaks during a game? Are they on a schedule or ad hoc?
Ad hoc, usually around the mid-point and hour / hour and a half in.
18. Do you use "critical hits" or "fumbles" in your games? What have they added?
The real benefit for a crit of either variety is that they provide a great opportunity for you to ask a player “all right, how does that play out?” They’re a tool for engagement.
19. Do you use music at the table? If so, what are some examples? If not then why?
I’ve done it a couple times in the past (Waaaaaaaaaay back when I ran Deep Carbon Observatory, I used Elegiac for going upriver and Flutter Fly for the dueling wizard encounter), but I’ve found it low-benefit to high-hassle on the whole.
20. Does alignment ever change, what kind of things would lead to that?
Changing either your political or spiritual alliance, depending on how I am interpreting alignment at that given moment.
21. Draw or describe a treasure map your players might discover in play
A grid of street patterns scribbled on the back of a receipt: the only indication of actual locations are a circled X and a handful of very loose interpretations of fast food logos.
22. Have you ever fudged die rolls? Do you have strong feelings about the concept?
I’m most likely to fudge enemy health rather than rolls; if the players have the situation under control / it’s starting to get boring, I’ll just decide 1-3 more hits will do it in if it’s not going to surrender or run off.
23. How are skeletons made? Ghouls? Why haven't wraiths/vampires taken over?
Skeletons are made by binding a minor spirit to a bunch of bones. They can follow some basic commands, and work a bit better when the spirit is the shade of an appropriate species (i.e. the shades of dead humans are best for a human skeleton, though the skeleton and shade don’t have to be from the same person.
The original ghouls were a species of entelodont that got imprinted in a specific shoggoth gene line, and emerge in the modern day as the result of a prion disease that causes all sorts of epigenetic / retroviral fuckery when a body containing dormant imprinted cells is cannibalized.
Ghosts and undead exist in their own ecosystems with checks and balances via predator-prey relationships. Vampires are something of the equivalent of a tiger - solitary predators with very large territories. Either that or horrible tick monsters.
24. How big does a dungeon have to be to qualify for the "mega" appellation?
Big enough that the campaign setting doesn’t exist concretely outside of it: the dungeon is the setting.
25. How common are adventurers? How are they treated generally by normal folk?
Adventurers are migrant workers, so the locals’ opinions on them will vary a lot according to the present economic situation and assorted intersections of race and class. They go where the (monster hunting) work is, and so will usually make seasonal rounds (often as part of a circus) and use the winter for rest and recovery.
Talking about rpgs? On this blog? In this economy?
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