Where All The Tables Dwell

Don't mind me. I'm just messing around in the vein of the last post, putting up pop-up links to give you random results based on these tables. When the post is complete I'll add the ONE BIG TABLE with everything so far, and bookmark on the right, and maybe use this post as a placeholder for yet more pop-up random stuff of mine. How to use:

1. Click link.
2. Observe the pop-up.
3. If the verb doesn't make sense, the two things are just doing whatever makes most sense for them to do.

The "became" verb needed a little finessing.

24/36 Genre Encounter Tables (click for random table)

1. SAVAGE: Prehistoric Times
2. SWAMP: Wet Teeming Life
3. INSECT: Arthropod Overlords
4. DARK: Lightless Abyss
5. EVIL: Agents of Mortal Sin
6. MANSION: Eccentric Family Values
7. MYTHIC: Olympian Heroes
8. PRISON: The Panoptic Carceri
9. TOMB: With the Dead in Dead Tongues
10. FILTH: The Wisdom of Repugnance
11. HORROR: Monster Chiller Theater
12. ABOMINATION: Hail the New Flesh
13. BEAST: Hoof and Horn
14. PLANT: The Green Realm
15. FAERIE: Fey Arcadia
16. FUNGUS: Mushroom Kingdom
17. SURREAL: A Week of Gifts
18. HOLY: Divine Light
19. GIANT: Someone Your Own Size
20. MEDIEVAL: Days of Olde
21. NEAR ORIENTALISM: Arabesque Tales
22. FAR ORIENTALISM: Mysterious East
23. CARNIVAL: Circus of Misrule
24. GOTCHA: Adversarial Referee
25. EARTH: The Enduring Element
26: AIR: The Transporting Element
27: FIRE: The Destroying Element
28: WATER: The Transforming Element

ALL THE TABLES so far, jamming together...

Other tables

509,124 Problems and Counting (derived from Bag of Problems)

Bag of Tricks II

General Dungeon Room Contents

Random Treasure

Monster Encounter:
Characters are: 1st level | 2nd-3rd level | 4th-5th level
Category I
General * Desolate * Stronghold
Category II
General
Category III
General
Category IV
General
Category V
General 

Carnival World

A little late for Mardi Gras, here's my split encounter table based on circus, carnival, and commedia dell'arte. The circus of evil is almost a cliche, but cliches are how these tables like 'em.

PS: Oh yeah, now with Paolo and Logan random table power! Click on the link (explanation here) to get a pop-up window with  a random result of 3 separate d20 rolls on the table (note: grammar not guaranteed). This could be very useful if I get all 22 previous tables into this format ...

The Satanic Rules of the Con

As you may know, the Satanists have their Eleven Rules of the Earth. These were written in 1967 by Anton LaVey, excusing them from the charge that they just wanted to make the Commandments "go to 11"  (Spinal Tap, 1984).

Being that Satanism is mostly run by Nietzschean atheists, I can fully believe that the Rules were dreamed up just to give the ACLU something to post up in Boss Hogg's courtroom. Indeed, they present a loophole-riddled life morality that only a Cormac McCarthy villain trying to write a parole statement would mistake for the real thing.

But ... at the same time they're a nearly ideal set of rules for behavior at gaming conventions, substituting "game" for "home" and "munchkinism" for "magic". They come with an anti-harassment policy (#5), an anti-theft policy (#6), and a solution to the strolling bard problem (#11).

What, I ask you, does this say about gaming cons?

Adventure Review: Wheel of Evil

Wheel of Evil might have been the first Old School Retrieval module I bought, in pdf form. It's for Labyrinth Lord, character levels 3-5, by Jeff Sparks and Joel Sparks, from the heady year 2010 -- when anything seemed possible. My core group of players finished it off in three languid sessions spaced over a year; I used it for a kind of "B list" activity when the full group couldn't play in the main campaign, with a separate bunch of 3rd level characters and a few guest players getting involved. Having finished it off recently, it's time for my belated, you might even call it nostalgic review. (And not a spoiler-free one, either, so beware.)

Photo: Vera Kratochvil

OSR modules can sometimes get into a "10 foot corridor, here a pit, there a secret door" rut, leaving adventurers to imagine themselves navigating between two walls of Xerox-proof blue. I really like when an adventure plays with a couple of vivid physical elements to break this pattern. The first adventure I came up with to run in my Old School GM career hinged on millstones being used to grind flour, but also bone meal fertilizer, with grisly possibilities ... Wheel of Evil draws another disturbing connection, between the cheese industry and the mold that is part of it, to very good effect.

It starts in a cheese ripening cave being plagued by kobolds, which is where the adventurers come in. Paid off with shares in the upcoming cheese market, they may eventually find that the kobolds have a gripe - they think that mold from the cheese caves is responsible for their own food supplies going bad. It turns out both humans and kobolds are under threat by an intelligent psychic mold who controls mold zombies, all the usual friends of Juiblex, and some far stranger things.

In this adventure, I never felt I needed to fill in. There is a lot of imaginative detail: a living mold valve that transports people and things through a long crack in the earth; a mold creature that hurls half-size black puddings at the party; some potential kobold allies who have distilled a mold-killing solvent from their own urine. Again, it's the physical concepts, the sheer yuck-factor of mold-things and kobold-whizz that makes the adventure stand out. There are also some useful handouts including copies of the cheese shares and a couple of maps that the characters might get handed in the course of play.

Here are some of the minuses:

• The encounters are pretty linear, except for one chance to shortcut into the final area through the aforementioned mold valve. The "kobolds are good guys, cheese boss is the villain" twist is also straight out of a Scooby Doo Twilight Zone episode written by Fredric Brown. But hey, this is D&D (sorry, Labyrinth Lord), not David Foster Wallace here. My party had a good time all the same. The plot action is written in a fairly open way that avoids railroading, so they felt they had choices along the way, not in terms of which path they followed but how they dealt with the kobolds and the various cheese workers.
• The party's payment in shares of the cheese production means they have a vested interest in keeping the cheeses safe, and there are even rules for how much the shares depreciate if various things happen to the cheeses in the caves. But I didn't see the action of the module putting the cheeses in danger in a way that would fully exploit that. I would have liked something like an early kobold invasion that the party is there to catch, so you have fighting in the caves and the tension of cheese being ruined through fire spells, fumbled blows and so on.
• That climactic cave encounter is a killer, as the master mold is defended by mold zombies, invisible violet fungi, and the aforementioned black pudding hurler. I scaled that hurler down to chucking a mini-pudding every other round, and it still would have gone badly for the party of 5 level 3 characters plus henchmen plus kobold pals, had it not been for some spells specific to my system and one very creative guest player in the second session. After making friends with a kobold war party and finding out about their urine solvent, he had the idea to use some conjuration spells to create a 5' cube of non precious raw material (kobold urine concentrate ice) and to multiply that cube six times. The cubes were toxic to all molds, slimes and kindred things, and the party ended up pushing them as a bulwark right into the final cavern. I think that 3rd and 4th level characters in this adventure will have a tough time here unless they are very strategic or the DM (sorry, Labyrinth Lord) pulls some punches.

Cast the Eldritch Filler Out Of Your Writing

Reviewing a description I wrote this morning, I had an insight that applies just as much to my own work as to others'. It is very common in adventure writing to see a sentence like this:

"There is a strange / eerie / eldritch / curious / peculiar / etc. green porcelain urn in the middle of the room."

Leaning on synonyms of "weird" is an understandable residue of the pulp era, although Lovecraft's beloved "queer" is definitively out of play nowadays, at least in that context. But all of these words are crutches for lazy writing. I even suspect that Lovecraft's reliance on them is a strong reason why critics often judge him as a distinctive rather than good prose stylist. Consider this rewrite, which tells more and forces less on the reader:

IMPROVEMENT: "A green porcelain urn is in the middle of the room. It is lopsided, but in a spiralling way that has a certain logic to it, if not symmetry."

Much better. The description creates a vivid image, which the reader instinctively compares with the image of a normal urn. We come by the sense of weirdness through honest imagery rather than a storebought adjective.

These lazy words drive loopholes through a couple of well-known rules in writing. It's widely known by now that a writer should "show, not  tell." This is the principle behind the more specific caveat against "mental invasion" text to describe emotional or aesthetic effects in the second person (for example, "A feeling of peace comes over you as you see the unicorn cropping grass in the tranquil glade.")

But "weirdness" words belong to a class of adjectives that essentially lie. They present a subjective reaction of a human being as an objective trait of the world. There are a lot of these words in the emotion lexicon: "disgusting," "creepy," "maddening," "adorable." I think the less a writer uses them, the better. The prose becomes more alive, more muscular, more detached.

Let's see how a sample paragraph from Lovecraft would read with these terms removed or altered. From "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (which uses 25 "queers" alone, and who knows how many other synonyms...), here's a paragraph which could also stand in for a wordy description of a treasure object, with the disposable weirdness-adjectives in red...

It took no excessive sensitiveness to beauty to make me literally gasp at the strange, unearthly splendour of the alien, opulent phantasy that rested there on a purple velvet cushion. Even now I can hardly describe what I saw, though it was clearly enough a sort of tiara, as the description had said. It was tall in front, and with a very large and curiously irregular periphery, as if designed for a head of almost freakishly elliptical outline. The material seemed to be predominantly gold, though a weird lighter lustrousness hinted at some strange alloy with an equally beautiful and scarcely identifiable metal. Its condition was almost perfect, and one could have spent hours in studying the striking and puzzlingly untraditional designs - some simply geometrical, and some plainly marine - chased or moulded in high relief on its surface with a craftsmanship of incredible skill and grace.

In the first-person narration, of course, these terms are more excusable, because they can pass as the honest reaction of the narrator. But it's also striking how little they matter, except in conveying the impression of a highly excitable and creep-prone person through their nearly incantatory use -- and even then I'd say that the "literal gasp" and the "hardly describe" at the beginning are just enough to do that job, while the descriptions of the "elliptical outline" and the "scarcely identifiable metal" continue the sense of weirdness, but through description rather than authorial fiat.