eliminative progress tables

 A d6 table has six entries, right? Not here!

The following sort of table is meant to represent when you have a sequence of events or developments where some things are biased to happen later and indeed can't happen at the start, but where there's still considerable randomness about the exact order, and an expected "early" thing might never kick in. 

To use this table, simply eliminate any results that arise for future rolls, decrementing every future result. Here's a toy example: a goop evolving into something like a person over millions of years:

d4 goop evolution table

1. mouth and anus
2. locomotion
3. brain
4. eyes
5. opposable thumbs
6. rational soul

So l roll 1d4 on the table and get a 1 - my goop is now a heterotroph with ingress and egress for nutrients. The table now looks like this:

1. locomotion
2. brain
3. eyes
4. opposable thumbs
5. rational soul

I roll 1d4 again and get a 2 - my sessile coral thing now has a brain, but it can't see or move.

1. locomotion
2. eyes
3. opposable thumbs
4. rational soul

1d4 on this and I get 4 - they've evolved a rational soul! So now you have a coral that's a full person. Maybe it just contemplates, since it can't really do or observe anything? Maybe these are the brains in vats I've been hearing so much about? Maybe their strange dreams call out to people from the sea, singing of a strange kinship... 

(Note this table could have given us sequences that make even less sense, like getting a rational soul before getting a brain - I would rather roll with and explain such oddities than try to fit everything into a more elaborate sequence.)

Potential uses of this could include:

• evolution, as in the above, towards people crabs
• the villain's plans progressing
• class abilities, especially in your bespoke GLOGhack
• a civilization progressing up a "tech tree"
• rewards from a patron for progressively crazier tasks

and so on. I've been thinking about telescopic isotime (which I've just learned is used in Lizardman Diaries' Empyrean Dynasty long before it occurred to me) and am thinking of some millions-year-long minigames involving evolution towards humanish people and millenia-long tech tree development - I'll post rules for those soonish.