the d60 on your wrist

If you need a random generator but can't roll dice or can't (or don't want to) access electronics, you already carry a d60 with you - or at least I do, with the seconds clock on my trusty $10 digital watch. This is especially great if you're solo roleplaying on a walk or at work, or perhaps if you're playing with others while walking or in the car or in just about any impromptu situation.

The easiest use for this is as a d6, a d10, or as a d6xd10 oracle, with 0 treated as the highest pip value. (As long as you aren't "rolling" too frequently, you can also make Ironsworn-style rolls with a glance, where the last minute of the seconds and minutes are the challenge dice and the tens digit of the seconds timer is the action die.) Knowing a few lists with an obvious/familiar order and 5, 6, 9, or 10 values (if one lower, let 0 = go with most appropriate) means you can be pretty flexible about this. Here are a few:

the universal d6 oracle that's been independently invented a zillion times, e.g.

1. no, and
2. no
3. no, but
4. yes, but
5. yes
6. yes, and

dnd stats (d6) or WoD stats + willpower (d10)

mtg colors

big five personality traits: d10, alternate high and low, OCEAN order

enneagram types: d10, 0 wildcard

dnd alignments: likewise

If you're familiar with the tarot, such that you just know off the dome what a seven or swords is or whatever (I don't), you can make :00-:19 the major arcana, drop the minor arcana nobility, and make the :2_s, :3_s, :4_s, :5_s the number cards of your suit of choice.

The Pathfinder Harrow Deck is basically already this, since the suites are just dnd stats and the "ranks" dnd alignment! (As before, turn the list of 9 into 10 via 0 digit as wildcard.) I'm tempted to familiarize myself with it because then I get an instant image or more complex tarot-y association that requires a little less brute force recall than actual Tarot, even if the original version is richer.

Oath boardgame suites (hearth, order, discord, nature, arcane, nomad) though I don't have a great intuitive sense of how to order them other than by memorizing in brute force

List your own!

a one-pager for NPCs

There are many one-page thingies to print off for generating NPCs; this one (pdf) is mine. Most of the content pilfered and lightly edited from there. 

The d66 charts are grouped by theme, so you can roll 1d6 if you're looking for something that fits a broad stereotype, or traits that have that kind of consanance with each other, and the traditional d66 if you don't. The "probable progressions" represent some possibilities for how a problem might develop in the absence of PC intervention. "Manners and motions" is taken from Laban efforts. The Durer is nominally a gender table, but the real purpose is just an image to make it clear which page this is as I flip through my GM's notebook.

Editable version here, if you wish to tailor to your own uses.

theme-agnostic d23 room generator

 I created this for my own use and might as well share it. It won't do any meaningful creative work for you - the results are in fact aggressively boring - but there are already plenty of random tables for that. What this does do is give you a recommended ratio of room stockings in line with the default B/X tables alongside pointing somewhere in your own work to start.

generated via Stable Diffusion with prompt "temple of evil, cross section architectural diagram by Albrecht Durer, Hieronymous Bosch, Gustave Dore"

 

leapfrog tables

Since my last post on eliminative progress tables, I've been playing around with some worldbuilding subgames and it feels a bit less chaotic than I would like. This is an attempt to iterate on the same idea but with a bit less predictability.

A leapfrog table involves more entries than the die used to roll it (for instance, 30 entries on a d6 table) where order matters. Use it as so,

1. When an entry is rolled, strike it off.
2. If landing on a stricken entry, roll again, advancing from the stricken entry (multiple times if necessary)

To add "declining marginal returns," you can regard upper levels of the die you're rolling as null results, e.g. roll 1d8, on 1-6 advance that many entries, on 7-8 nothing happens - such that if the first six entries are already filled up you only have a 57% chance of actually adding something, or whatever.

Tech tree adapted from the most recent edition of a popular 4X (1d10, null result on 9-10)

1. pottery
2. animal husbandry
3. mining
4. sailing
5. astrology
6. irrigation
7. writing
8. archery
9. masonry
10. bronzeworking
11. wheel
12. celestial navigation
13. currency
14. horseback riding
15. ironworking
16. shipbuilding
17. mathematics
18. construction
19. engineering
20. military tactics
21. buttress
22. apprenticeship
23. stirrups
24. machinery
25. alchemy
26. military engineering
27. castles
28. steel
    
29. banking
    
30. cartography
31. mass production
32. printing
33. square rigging
34. astronomy
35. metal casting
36. seige tactics
37. gunpowder
38. industrialization
39. scientific theory
40. ballistics
41. military science
42. steam power
43. sanitation
44. economics
45. rifling
46. flight
47. replaceable parts
48. bessemmer steel
    
49. refining
50. electricity
51. radio
52. chemistry
53. combustion
54. advanced flight
55. rocketry
56. advanced ballistics
57. combined arms
58. plastics
59. computers
60. nuclear fission
61. synthetic materials
62. telecommunications
63. satellites
64. guidance systems
65. lasers
66. composites
67. stealth technology
68. robotics
69. nuclear fusion
70. nanotechnology

goop -> ultrahuman evolution table (1d8)

1. aging
2. sex
3. mouth/anus
4. mobility
5. eyes
6. pain
7. ability to breathe air
8. brain
9. sleep
10. survival instinct
11. live birth
12. hair
13. walking upright
14. grasping
15. vocalization
16. memory
17. empathy
18. display of emotions
19. reciprocity
20. dreams
21. sclera
22. breastfeeding
23. menstruation
24. opposable thumbs
25. immortal souls
26. morality
    
27. maths
28. metaphor
29. music
30. language
31. telekinesis
32. astral projection
33. telepathy
34. aura reading
35. psychic vampirism
36. personal survival through reincarnation
37. levitation
38. Speech of the Gods
39. body-hopping
40. conscious control over all physical and mental processes

goop -> anything evolution table (1d20, null result on 16-20)

This can become the ultrahuman evolution table

1. aging
2. sex
3. mouth/anus
4. mobility
5. eyes
6. pain
7. ability to breathe air
8. brain
9. sleep
10. survival instinct
11. exoskeleton
    
12. flight
13. bioluminescence
14. pheremones
15. venom
16. ability to survive in vacuum
17. burrowing
18. exotic energy source
19. can see ghosts
20. darkvision
    
21. live birth
22. hair
23. walking upright
24. grasping
25. vocalization
26. memory
27. empathy
28. display of emotions
29. reciprocity
30. dreams
31. web-spinning
32. fire-breathing
33. shapeshifting
34. parasitic larvae
35. petrification
36. magnetic sense
37. phase shifting
38. antimagic
39. explosive
40. hallucinogenic
    
41. sclera
42. breastfeeding
43. menstruation
44. opposable thumbs
45. immortal souls
46. morality
    
47. maths
48. metaphor
49. music
50. language
51. telekinesis
52. astral projection
53. telepathy
54. aura reading
55. psychic vampirism
56. personal survival through reincarnation
57. levitation
58. Speech of the Gods
59. body-hopping
60. conscious control over all physical and mental processes

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.

OSR-Style Roleplay - what it really means

Is the OSR based on a false origin myth? Should it die? Is it an ineradicable discourse? Has it died already again and again? There are many stories you can craft. 

But unlike you heretics, I don't believe in crafting stories - I believe in procedures. As always, once you roll the dice, you should stick with result forevermore. Once you click on the below button, that's what the OSR is.

random factional alignment generator

Why still more posts on alignment? Maybe because as such an inherently slippery concept, there's so many ways to resolve it. Here I want to lean into the idea of alignments as really just being army factions to play Chainmail in. Those of you who grew up as the same time as me will likely recognize exactly where my conception of where Generic Fantasy Army Faction Components comes from.

d10x10 [adverb] [allegiance] alignments

Posts on the alignment tag on this blog just keep growing, but so far they haven't added up to an kind of project. This post will not add up to anything coherent either. This is similar to my random alignment generator but a little more lightweight - I'd use the former to generate initial ideas for NPCs and this in conjunction with other sources, as perhaps a kind of reaction roll.

style

1. fanatically
2. fastidiously
   
3. hypocritically
4. naively
   
5. nominally 
6. self-loathingly
7. self-righteously
8. surprisingly 
9. trying to be
   
10. unwittingly
    

allegiance

1. traditional
2. progressive
3. benevolent
4. patriotic
5. selfish
   
6. malevolent
7. communitarian
8. individualistic
9. peace-loving
10. nature-loving
    

interleaved spark tables

Sometimes you want things that are related.

emoji spark table from Lenormand

Lenormand is 36-card oracle deck - that is to say, a d66 spark table. Just about every card is iconic enough that there's an emoji for it, and plain enough that you can guess reasonably enough at its meaning. In the few cases where there wasn't an emoji, I took one that approximated suggested meaning (swords crossed for whip) or which felt right even if the associations were different (dove for stork.)

random grimoire generator

Inspired loosely by taichara's Spell Shard Tables. You can dissect, copy, and improve this generator here.

overloading the ability score roll

The best part of 3d6 in order is that you get to spin a story out of the wacky results - okay, so this person has a high str and low con, so they're like, built like one of those resistance-focused athletes that have trouble with long-distance, and they have a high int and low wis, which means... or whatever. 

But sometimes everything is between 8 and 12 and you have to be subtle, and I myself am terrible at subtlety. That's where this chart comes in - you don't even have to roll any new dice!

	STR			DEX
1	waifish	reclines most waking hours	no intuitive sense of Archimedes' principle	klutz	shaky hands	reacts slowly
2	short	asks others to open jars	lifts from back	no sense of rhythm	left-handed (and uses right to conform but has never really developed it)
3	lanky	dominant arm much stronger than the other	often has a sprained muscle	can't pat head and rub belly at same time	missing a finger	easily startled
4	stocky	firm handshake	rises from sitting without hands	can wiggle ears	double-jointed	fidgety
5	barrel-chested	carries around large set of gear	loves to tell people about kegels	can always land on feet	ambidextrous (or left-handed and has learned to compensate)
6	huge	strict lifting regimen	practices yoga	parkour player	reflexively plays cat's cradle	reacts instantly
	CON			INT
1	rare disease	wheezy	fragile bones	illiterate	innumerate	incurious
2	the clap	gets terrible sleep	squeamish	aliterate	forgetful	reflexively credulous
3	sweats profusely	hates exercise	used to comfortable surroundings	uses same phrases over and over	perfectly capable of math, but excuses laziness by being "not a math person"	reflexively dismissive
4	decent immune system from filthy surroundings	raised in mountains	iron liver	keeps journal	memorizes lists and categories	reflexively believes experts
5	never gets the cold	can hold breath prodigiously	gets into bar fights	obsessed with puns	enjoys pointing out fallacies	reflexively suspends judgment
6	gets sick rarely enough that they're unfamiliar with what it feels like	long-distance runner	relishes pain	composes poetry	obsessed with riddle contests	always curious to hear a new argument
	WIS			CHA
1	never dreams	missing an eye	drinking habit	just plain fugly	walks with a slouch	actively tries to alienate people
2	religious skeptic	absent-minded	no tolerance for boredom	halitosis	stutters	cranky
3	religious but not spiritual	colorblind	gets excited for projects and has no follow-through	awkward proportions	opens up on favorite subject	aloof in a studied way, like a pickup artist or sable-clad poet
4	spiritual but not religious	perfect pitch	reflexively refuses to give up	not universally good-looking, but definitely some people's "type"	opens up when drinking	unrelentingly positive
5	prays daily	fastitiously clean due to keen sense of smell	infinite patience	fashion conscious	brashly confident	kind smile
6	prophetic dreams	practiced meditator	ascetic	model-good looks	brashly confident... if the situation requires it	intuitive sense of what others want

Don't roll on everything at once; that way lies madness. But you can pick a few at your leisure that give you a better sense of who this person is to hit the ground running.

diegetic monster statblocks (with attached generator)

A good statblock is glanceable, allowing the GM to quickly get the information she needs. Here's a shot at what that might look like for FKR-style or systemless treatments - though it's kind of a rough draft and I expect others will be able to iterate and improve. Very stupid monster generator attached!

random Exalted region generator

 Where to in Creation? Only this button can tell.

Knaves of Creation

I dig Creation and almost everything about Exalted other than the endless lists of rules and superpowers. So why not run a mortals game in the setting using, say, Knave (purchase, srd)? Anyway, here's a random generator. I've kept Exalted's atributes as a nod to the original, and because Knave doesn't care too much about how you divide up attributes anyway.

MtG-based setting oracle (with sample result: the Dreamscarp)

(See also Seed of Worlds' read of the oracle - a spider-infested ancient scientific facility!)

Click on me twice; your setting is at the border between those two places

My world is at the edge of these two places. Very numinous! A fissure that bubbles up dragons and a big pole stretching into the heavens, so maybe a bit Freudian too.

Click on me thrice for the kinds of things that live there

Things aren't what they seem; living illusions or those who create them are at least as common as natural creatures. The Tree and the Canyon make things more real; storms bubble up from them - the famous dragons are only a particularly strong manifestation of this. Some mages come to make illusions that this place of power makes into reality, others to simply ride the wave of its raw power.

Maybe nothing natural (aside from the supernatural tree.)

Click on me twice for faction leaders

There's a spirit who doesn't like the mages coming in here. And he's going to fuck with your gear! And a clan of Minotaurs who come here for rasslin' against fearsome illusion-spirit-dragon-things of the area. They gotta go defeat something fierce to prove their worth. Strictly rasslin', though, no weapons, which is why the gear-hating spirit lets them come in regularly. Maybe they can help be your guide through the area, but you'll owe them a favor - they don't take cash.

Click on me once for a fearsome beast

Well, we all know what the tallest and oldest tree is, right? Only this gargantuan beast is big enough or respected enough to eat from its leaves. You can have a very linear brontosauruscrawl hiking up from its tail to its forehead - battle or battle of wits spirits along the way. Maybe it has magic poop?

Click on me once for legendary loot

A legendary blade - the reason the loot-hating spirit hates loot! If it kills something in the area, you can go summon it even outside the area. (Most things that become substantial here are simple ephemeral elsewhere, but this is a way aroound that.)

speleogenesis apparatus

In the style of my feudal crisis generator, this generates a (very stupid) dungeon history.

hyperstructuralist pantheon generator

The following started out as an attempt to automate Throne of Salt's Pantheon Generator, then drifted into something that is a bit more smooth and conceptually "neat" - the sortof thing Levi-Strauss would come up with if he wasn't limited by empirical examples - and by that point it acquired too much technical debt to be hacked back into its original purpose. Still, it's been a while since I posted, so like a panicked undergraduate scrounging to get from a C- to a C+, I will submit you some work that has been done in lieu of good work that hasn't.

Who's my warlock patron?