Still A Slacker? Another Fast City Idea...

So here's an idea for generating a playable urban area in an hour or so. I have written it in white because it has some spoilers for our upcoming game in it and I don't want my players reading it. So players, go elsewhere. It may spoil the fun of getting to figure some stuff out...

Everybody else just use your mouse to highlight the text to read it, or hit the green "print friendly" button at the bottom--that'll give you a black-on-white version.

This method is best for weird/fantastic/evil/stylized cities with some sort of adventurey thing about them. City of Madness, City of Sorrow, City of Angels, et cetera. Cities that are kinda like dungeons. It could work well for the kind of stuff that's in D3: Vault of the Drow* and I1: Dwellers Forbidden City or China Mieville's The Scar...

Anyway, what you do is get yourself a pack of tarot cards, shuffle them, and randomly lay them out next to each other, edge-to-edge in roughly the shape of your city--then take a picture of it. Or you can do it all virtually by just googling up a whole deck of cards and cutting and pasting them around until you've got a semi-continuous shape.

So now you have picture of a bunch of cards on the ground. Each card represents a building or city block or neighborhood--which exactly is not that important for this method. The cards are a map.

Now interpret your "map" as follows:

-Coins/pentacles represent merchants and commercial establishments/neighborhoods
-Cups represent taverns and inns
-Swords represent (in a fortified city) military installations or guard towers, or (in a less bellicose city) ordinary areas where the key encounter will be with guards/soldiers/fighters. etc.
-Wands represent whatever kind of people or establishments are especially characteristic of the city. Like the one my PCs are in now is full of scholars and philosophers so that's wands.

The number on each card represents the status/level/priceyness of the establishment or encounter area and can (optionally) also be taken as, literally, the number of buildings in the cluster. So 9 of coins would be a fancy shop or 9 fancy shops or a cluster of 9 buildings with a fancy shop in it or an area of 9 buildings where there's an encounter with a high-level merchant, etc. Decide how you want to do these things when you start based on your idea of how big the city is.

Pages represent petty bureaucrats with dominion over the thing represented by their suit--commerce, food and drink, military/police/militia, and The City Specialty.

Knights represent knights or other high level fighters in the service of a faction that controls or is very important in that business in the city.

Kings and Queens represent the most important male and female people in each profession and/or the male and female heads of factions that dominate that business in the city.

Now that's the minor arcana. Here are the easiest of the Major Arcana to interpret:

-The Fool is the court jester or just an important entertainer, or maybe even just a big theater
-The Magician is, duh, the local crazy wizard
-The High Priestess is either the highest ranking female cleric in town or the church she is affiliated with
-The Hierophant is the highest ranking male cleric in town or the church he's affiliated with
-The Empress is the most politically powerful female
-The Emperor is the most politically powerful male
-Justice is where the court of law is
-The Wheel of Fortune is where the crazy gypsy lady or other local oracle is.
-The Hanged Man is where they execute or, alternately, torture people
-Death is where you have your graveyard and/or epidermally-challenged adversaries
-The Devil is where the most fearsome local demon or other villain is

The advantage of this system over the usual random city generator and even other tarot-card based location generators is all you have to do is remember what the suits stand for and you've got a whole city or city-like socio-architectural entity in less than a minute with 4 factions, a social hierarchy and a functioning infrastucture. If you use this method to generate a city you will not even need to look at this blog post to figure out what's what. because, of course, the pictures on tarot cards are already based on a fantastic-medieval social structure.

Once you've laid out your cards, take a look at what the city looks like--is the Queen of Cups next to the King of Wands? What's going on there? Is the 10 of cups surrounded by cheap merchants? What's up with that? Figure some things out about this place.

If you stopped there and just did the Minor Arcana and those 11 Major Arcana that you can probably interpret without referencing this blog post, then you'd have made a city with almost no work, which is neat. So if you want to do this shit fast with almost no thought, you don't even need the remaining 11 cards and might want to just leave them out of the deck entirely.

However, if you have some time to think, here are the others, and some associated ideas:

The Lovers:
Someone here will fall in love with a PC, or be desirable to them, or maybe it's a whorehouse...

Chariot:
An engine of war? A coliseum? Also, the card has a couple sphinxes on it, so there you go...

The Hermit
A monastery or someone unobtrusive who is secretly someone else.

Strength
A big monster. Perhaps chained up in someone's basement.

Temperance
Some force which moderates the overall tone of the city. Maybe a dissenting voice? Like in the Vault of the Drow this might be the headquarters of the Hey Guys Let's Not Destroy All The Surface-Worlders League.

Tower
Local mysterious architectural feature. Perhaps a literal tower. Maybe an entrance to a megadungeon...


Star
Unobtrusive but vastly important place/NPC/mcguffin.

Moon
Lunatics? Or one of these guys.

Sun
Friendly or helpful NPC.

Judgment
Someone out for revenge on the PCs because of their actions in a previous adventure. Or, if The Hanged Man is a secret place of torture, Judgment could be the public execution grounds.

The World
Something here explains what's going on locally. Maybe there's a big map or just some talkative people, but this is where you put your not-in-this-city adventure hooks.







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*Found out last night Satine used to be able to speak Drow. She learned it off the internet back in the day. No shit. Loser. Just kidding Satine you know I love you. Hey, why are you reading this?

Friday Night's DM Kit

Mandy is being interviewed for Maxim and we're waiting for Kimberly and Connie and Satine to show up (game time was 5, so , naturally, we're starting at 7). This'll be a very improvised game, with a lot of tables.

Physical objects:

1. Cherry Coke (2)
2. Dr Pepper (2)
3. Santitas corn chips

(2 cut-n-pasted-together printout pages:)

4. -One piece of 8.5 x 11 paper containing both of the Vornheim roll-on tables with the keys pasted into the one on the left as well as charts for the damage for common weapons, 12 random curses, 12 random traps and the "fishing" column from Kellri's Guide to Encounters pdf, 12 random insanities table from Vornheim, and the shortest tables from the wavecrawl kit.

5. -Another piece of paper containing the random building chart from the inside back cover of Vornheim, the Vornheim "search the body" table, and slackratchet's copy of the Realms of Chaos d1000 mutation table.

6. A drawing I made of what it looks like approaching the Isle of Oth from the East.

On the laptop:

7.Youtube queue full of Pogues and random sea chantys.
8. itunes cued up to "Sea Chanty" by Blood Circus
9. SRD spells page
10. Kellri's AD&D statblock pdf
11. A version of the Vornheim City Kit edited down to just the tables
12. The Wavecrawl Kit
13. Megadungeon treasure table

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Post-play report:

I used 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9 (the Maxim guy rolled up a druid), 12 and 13 (for treasure found in the belly of a whale).

It all performed admirably.

Note on the Wavecrawl Kit:

We got through 5 days at sea tonight: Dead calm, mirror water, whale, storm and a ship (which the girls avoided) plus 1 encounter on either end of the trip.

The girls ate: part of a shark caught last session, a couple ducks caught by the druid's owl, a doppleganger of the owl that emerged from the mirror water and a chunk of whaleflesh Satine managed to rip out with a pick-axe. (Good thing the Maxim guy showed up.) Satine had a good idea about using a shocking grasp potion to do some electric fishing but it didn't work out.

Note on the Vornheim back inside cover roll-on multiple hit chart:

If you write your players' names next to their ACs on the chart (in another color if possible) it makes the DM's side of combat really fast.

Making Picking Locks Fun, Disarming traps + Die Drop Fumbles

3 new rules...

Standing on the shoulders of research done by Telecanter, I rigged up these...

BURP Lockpicking Rules

Quoth the man:

Your thief knows four ways to manipulate locks...And that's it. She knows the wrong actions might Jam the lock permanently preventing it from being picked or opened with a key.

So, DM, when you come upon a lock, roll d4 to determine the method that will finally be effective:

1-bump
2-undulate
3-rake
4-probe

Or BURP as a mnemonic.

An ordinary lock--most locks--only have ONE right move.

Roll or decide how hard the lock is--1 thru 4: This is how many guesses the PC gets. The harder the lock, the fewer wrong guesses you can make before it jams: i.e. a 1-Guess Lock jams on the first wrong guess.

A 4-Guess Lock is the easiest.

HOWEVER

Assume "bump" and "probe" are radical solutions--like performing a "controlled drop" on your ipod to fix it.

Guessing wrong by 1 (i.e. guess "probe" and it's actually "rake") means you get to keep guessing (up until the jam limit for the lock). Guessing wrong by 2 or more (i.e. probing when you should be undulating) means the lock jams.

(Clever thieves will be able to realize after a while what their options are after one pass according to what happens to the lock. i.e. after a "rake" that does not jam the lock, the thief will know the next thing to do is undulate or probe.)

Every time a thief levels up, s/he gets one "get out of a jam free" card.

"Get out of jam free" cards can be used once, ever, so even high-level thieves will only have a handful at most at any given time.

These "cards" take 20 minus (thief level) rounds to use.

Having lock pick tools adds a number of "cards" equal to the gp cost of the tools divided by 25.

You can bolt on a system which takes into account traditional lock pick percentages by including that as a chance to unjam and remove the unjam-free system.

Trapped locks:

New traps: For any given civilization/dungeon/building that has recently and arbitrarily-placed traps, simply assign a number 1-4. That number represents trapped locks in that place. So like in one dungeon all "bump" locks could be trapped, in the next, all "rake" locks are trapped, etc. These traps respond to any attempt to pick the lock.

Old traps: This rule is for ruins and decaying places--these ancient traps are hard to spring. Two wrong guesses result in a trap going off.

BURP Disarming traps:

Tell the thief there's a trap and it'll go off after a number of wrong guesses equal to his/her level. The thief's options are as for a door, with the added modifiers of "hard" and "soft" (i.e. rake hard, rake soft, bump hard, bump soft, etc.) DM rolls a d8 to determine the proper action.

Die Drop Fumble:

If you drop a die off the table while rolling (DM too) it results in a "fumble token" to be used later to make a failure into a spectacular failure. If a player dropped the die, the DM may use it next time the PC fails to do something, if the DM dropped the die the players may choose to use it next time an NPC or monster fails to do something.
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Playtest in 3 hours.

Nothing is Fluff In A Fairy Tale

Remember the Wu Jen in Oriental Adventures?

It was the Asian wizard class.

Pretty much it was like the AD&D wizard except the arcane sorcerers of the exotic east have to adopt a taboo--or else they'd lose their powers. Some examples

* Cannot eat meat.
* Cannot have more treasure than the character can carry.
* Must make a daily offering (food, flowers, incense) to one or more spirit powers.
* Cannot bathe.
* Cannot cut hair.
* Cannot touch a dead body.
* Cannot drink alcoholic beverages.
* Cannot wear a specified color of cloth.
* Cannot light a fire.
* Cannot sit facing a specified compass direction.

I remember in my wayward youth, being a good little munchkin, I was trying to make a Wu Jen with a taboo that wouldn't get in my way. And I couldn't. Can't eat meat? What if we're starving in a jungle? The treasure thing? Forget about it. Daily offering? What if I'm paralyzed for a day?

In other words, although most of these taboos have nothing to do directly with the mechanics of killing things and taking their stuff, any one you could imagine might get in the way.

Because in an RPG, any characteristic of your PC could possibly become an issue. That's how RPGs work.

Or, to put it another way, although wargamers divide rules into "crunch" (numbers) and "fluff" (background info), there's no fluff in pen-and-paper RPGs. It all matters, or could.
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What I really like about Wu Jen taboos is they're one of the surprisingly rare examples of true "fairy-tale logic" in D&D. By that I don't mean it's just unscientific or magical, what I mean is the rule has the aesthetic qualities specific to fairy tales. I use this "logic" a lot.

The most prominent characteristic of fairy-tale logic for DMs interested in promoting it is that it deals in absolutes, not percentage chances or marginal cases. Halflings having better saves than humans isn't fairy tale logic--elves being immune to sleep spells isn't quite fairy tale logic but it's close, elves never sleeping unless they want to is fairy tale logic.

In fairy tales, effects follow causes with the inevitability of contracts between gods. There are no half measures. This makes the mechanical manifestation of fairy-tale logic nice and clean. Fairy tale monster powers should have no save--though they could have loopholes (vampires are the classic example: except at night, unless you invite them in, etc. etc.).

The long-term game advantage of this is that rather than sending PCs level-grinding around the setting looking for magic items with buffs, it forces them to create scenarios to exploit the logic.

(Interesting sidenote: fairy tale logic is the opposite of science but it is very close to how computers "think". Either/or, if this then not that, etc. It is easier to create a video game that works on fairy tale logic--"pac man can only eat a ghost after having a power peller"--than one that simulates reality.)

Like for example one of my least favorite things is the demon defense hierarchy: minor demons require a +1 or better magic weapon to hit, middle ones require +2 or better to hit, bigger ones +3 or better to hit, blah blah. That just ensures that the PCs have to have a mood-crushingly big market in magic items if they ever start fighting demons. Now if the demon can only be hit by a recently-despoiled virgin that has kissed a king during a war--well then there's like 9 adventure hooks right there.

They Not Only Look Good...

...they work!...



"Okay, you keep 50 hit points at first level, but the porno stars come with us"
--Joesky

My First Dungeon Kit Plus Mystery Glyphs

Mandy's run a few adventures she made up, but no dungeons. I made Mandy a little My First Dungeon Kit. So she can fill it in, change it around as she likes, run people through it, realize it's easy and then make her own. Not the world's most ambitious dungeon, but there's enough there for the PCs to have lots of options about what to do and have some fun before getting to the major encounters and/or treasure. Click to enlarge the starter dungeon.

The thing underneath is just something I'm drawing. You can use it as mysterious glyphs or as the plan of an ancient city, or both. Whatever.

You Know Who Rocks?

Stefan Poag, of Aldeboran rocks. A nifty game blog. He tells you about it in the way that it indeed is. Unlike me, he is actually has a very large number of his artistic eggs in this here DIY D&D basket and will discuss with you the trials and tribulations thereby accumulated. Go pay attention to him.

Also, in other rocking-related news, Matt over at Land of Nod rocks. I picked up his free download of Nod 6 and am reading the dungeon in it and I am thinking "Holy fuck I might actually run this as-is" you know how often I run stuff someone else wrote? Not often, peoples, by no means often.