#randomtings | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

zedecksiew · 2 years

Text

Stalagmite-folk + Process Notes: Overloading the Random Table

Some orientation:

Stalagmite-folk are living, ambulatory speleothems. (They don’t have legs, but glide over mineral surfaces like ice on a floor.) They are organised into families: sibling sets, issue of a local stone-spirit father and the divine Mother Water.

Blind Elephant is a stone father whose marriage has come to a Bad End. So his children, the Blind Elephant family, are exiles.

BLIND ELEPHANT, REFUGEE FAMILY

Maybe they’ve met flesh-people before. Or heard stories about daylanders. The novelty that you are distracts them from their troubles.

They know you to be:

Sightless, underground. They keep trying to sneak up and startle you.

Wild and murderous. He treats you like he would a dangerous animal.

Exotic specimens. “Your hair is so pretty! Can I touch it? Wow, stringy!”

Fascinatingly disgusting. “So you cry from your crotch? Can we see?”

Inferior in every way. She will speak over you, and never let you finish.

Poor, malnourished. They keep trying to feed you stalagmite-folk foods.

They have:

A peridot afro so big it messes with their balance. They indulge in too much olivine candy.

Shoulders sprouting jagged carbuncle spikes. The new pyrope supplements are working.

Corrosive breath. They have lava-folk friends, and love the taste of their acid-rich cuisine.

Painful joints. Every move, they grind like a rusty hinge. They drink too many bug slurries.

Rusty skin, streaks at a touch. They bulked up on iron ore, but have stopped working out.

A glowing body, searing hot. Torch resin is a narcotic to stalagmite-folk. They’re an addict.

They travelled with few belongings. Including:

A pet – a rock-porcupine. Will sniff out and try to steal metal objects, to chew on as snacks.

A club of ensorcelled citrine. Any spot it impacts transforms and shatters into yellow jewels.

A set of vials, filled with condiment powders. Any would lacerate your lungs, if breathed in.

A set of finely carved wooden serving platters. Easily scratched. Utterly impervious to heat.

A sword of witch salt. The first flesh creature it touches immediately mummifies. It shatters.

An unfinished younger sister they’d been sculpting. Without parents she will never be born.

Back in their own halls they made their living:

At a crystal farm. They can show you a clear path through the fields. Their family is known for fist-sized amethyst grapes and extra-sharp salt lilies.

As a glassmith. Their workshops were hells of fire and unbreathable fume. They made toy figurines so fine these come alive at their command.

Angling moonfish. The best fishing spots are always in the loneliest caverns; they could lead you down shortcuts or detours known to nobody else.

Practising the gut art. Using their stomachs as chemistry labs, they’d guzzle ingredients, and regurgitate potions. They kept stores of rare materials.

In a crude-oil mine. A nasty business. That liquid demon-stuff harbours all manner of perilous horrors. They are scarred, and trained in fighting arts.

At the creche. Not everybody in a family is interested in caring for younger siblings. Their creche-hall is full of nooks, to play hide-and-seek in.

Few will admit to you the terror they are all feeling. They blindly followed their stone father in his retreat. Without a home, with a wrecked family – who are they, really?

+++ +++ +++

PROCESS NOTES: OVERBURDENING THE RANDOM TABLE

As we crawl to a complete draft for REACH OF THE ROACH GOD, the problem I’ve had to solve for most often is space.

Word count => Ballooning page count ==> Added dimensions and weight ===> Shipping costs we may not be able to afford.

I blew much of my word budget on ROTRG first three sections. Not a bad thing, considering these are the full adventure modules. But it does mean things are getting tight, space-wise.

The random NPC generator up-post appears in our stalagmite-folk gazetteer. It is the only set of random tables that chapter gets. It has to:

Generate individual NPCs (who are these stalagmite-folk refugees?)

Detail a specific community (what is the Blind Elephant family like?)

Model non-specific communities and culture (what are stalagmite-folk like, in general?)

World-building via random table, I guessss?

A powerful RPG design technology. Brian Yaksha discusses it a lot; his Rakehell is an object lesson for how the principle works.

Swathes of Luka Rejec’s Ultraviolet Grasslands are conveyed via random table. Emmy Allen’s toolbox setting books, Gardens Of Ynn and Stygian Library. The most robust RPG settings tend to do this? It simply makes the most sense.

My favourite recent example is Scrap Princess’s inspired-by-Shadowrun-and-2020s-Muskian-disaster-capitalism NooFutra:

A book of tables and tables and tables of bonkers ideas that mutate play and its world in wonderful ways. (Is it NooFutra or NooFutura? Anyway: it really is wonderful.)

One thing that I like to do with the random generators in A Thousand Thousand Islands, because it fits the setting’s themes of porousness, anti-taxonomy, “one thing is always in relation to another thing”-ness –

Which I am now forced to do with ROTRG, out of necessity, simply because

I Just Don’t Have SPACE A R G H !

Is this: all the random generators in the book are consciously written as multiple tables, spliced together. Tables that, in a different, better-delineated RPG work, would exist as separate things / lists / rolls – designed for separate purposes and to output separate results.

Presented here are the rough thoughts I had in mind, as I was making these d6 tables:

1: Sightless, underground. They keep trying to sneak up and startle you. 2: Wild and murderous. He treats you like he would a dangerous animal. 3: Exotic specimens. “Your hair is so pretty! Can I touch it? Wow, stringy!” 4: Fascinatingly disgusting. “So you cry from your crotch? Can we see?” 5: Inferior in every way. She will speak over you, and never let you finish. 6: Poor, malnourished. They keep trying to feed you stalagmite-folk foods.

This a reaction table + personality generator. (But then it’s a poor reaction table that isn’t also a personality generator.)

Also it’s a micro-aggressions table, meant to communicate how the stalagmite-folk are inclined to treat flesh-based persons. They aren’t Racists. They simply belong to a Superior Civilisation, you know? In a way it is their Burden.

1: A peridot afro so big it messes with their balance. They indulge in too much olivine candy. 2: Shoulders sprouting jagged carbuncle spikes. The new pyrope supplements are working. 3: Corrosive breath. They have lava-folk friends, and love the taste of their acid-rich cuisine. 4: Painful joints. Every move, they grind like a rusty hinge. They drink too many bug slurries. 5: Rusty skin, streaks at a touch. They bulked up on iron ore, but have stopped working out. 6: A glowing body, searing hot. Torch resin is a narcotic to stalagmite-folk. They’re an addict.

Physical attributes generator. (Meeting a minimum standard of gameability, because those are the “cosmetic” details players remember. So not “big afro guy”, but “guy with afro so big it makes him a liability while we’re spelunking”. Stuff like that.)

Plus a list of foodstuffs – detailing the stalagmite-folk’s general relationship to food, and alluding to their relationship with other groups (torch resin would be supplied by the pale-folk).

This here’s an example of word-count constraints determining creature design. The stalagmite-folk have this “you are what you eat” thing going on, mainly because I realised I could merge two random tables together if they did.

1: A pet – a rock-porcupine. Will sniff out and try to steal metal objects, to chew on as snacks. 2: A club of ensorcelled citrine. Any spot it impacts transforms and shatters into yellow jewels. 3: A set of vials, filled with condiment powders. Any would lacerate your lungs, if breathed in. 4: A set of finely carved wooden serving platters. Easily scratched. Utterly impervious to heat. 5: A sword of witch salt. The first flesh creature it touches immediately mummifies. It shatters. 6: An unfinished younger sister they’d been sculpting. Without parents she will never be born.

Simple treasure / magic items table.

But treasure tables aren’t simple anywhere, are they? Info on what the NPC has; what they can do, in play; material culture; what’s valuable versus what’s not in this culture; all that good shit.

1: At a crystal farm. They can show you a clear path through the fields. Their family is known for fist-sized amethyst grapes and extra-sharp salt lilies. 2: As a glassmith. Their workshops were hells of fire and unbreathable fume. They made toy figurines so fine these come alive at their command. 3: Angling moonfish. The best fishing spots are always in the loneliest caverns; they could lead you down shortcuts or detours known to nobody else. 4: Practising the gut art. Using their stomachs as chemistry labs, they’d guzzle ingredients, and regurgitate potions. They kept stores of rare materials. 5: In a crude-oil mine. A nasty business. That liquid demon-stuff harbours all manner of perilous horrors. They are scarred, and trained in fighting arts. 6: At the creche. Not everybody in a family is interested in caring for younger siblings. Their creche-hall is full of nooks, to play hide-and-seek in.

Professions table. Generates an NPC’s skill set.

It also tells you what their work-space was like. Considering that our stalagmite-folk gazetteer strongly suggests a “go explore the Blind Elephant’s home caves and figure out what’s going on” adventure – this tells where a particular NPC could be useful, should they tag along.

And those spatial descriptions also mean that this conveniently serves as a generator for Blind Elephant geography. You could roll on the table a coupla times, look at the spread of your results, and determine whether the Blind Elephant are a family of fisherpersons or miners or artisans.

Also meaning that, possibly, maybe, in theory, you could roll up any stalagmite-folk settlement, since the professions list is meant to communicate typical economic activities that the culture engages in.

In my mind I see this stuff as an extension of Brendan / Necropraxis’s overloaded encounter die. That’s a keystone bit of design, in service of RPG procedure and its streamlining.

Could you do the same with RPG setting / adventure design?

What if your weather table was your location generator? What would that look like?

You’d lose granularity. (You’re removing a roll; setting certain weather-to-place relationships in stone). But what would you gain in terms of building the character of the world? (Hail always falls around the region’s stone megaliths, wonder why?)

Does any of this work? Is any of this useful for anybody but myself? Don’t know.

Definitely these splicings push towards more specificity – so designers who are trying to make more toolbox-y things would find this dumb / counterproductive.

Is it useful to me?

I know I’m susceptible to overburdening a text. Not information-dense, just dense? Prose that does too much implying, and has left too much unsaid. Descriptions with too few explicit guardrails for players’ / GMs’ imaginations, they just never bother getting onboard.

It has been useful, so far. I’m reasonably happy with our draft of the stalagmite-folk gazetteer. I think I experienced something not entirely unlike fun, while writing said draft. (Writing sucks ass; I never have fun writing.)

And I didn’t bust my word-count limit, this time. So there’s that.

(Art by Mun Kao. The stalagmite-folk are part of REACH OF THE ROACH GOD, our first book; preorders are open.)

#writing #fantasies #rpgs #reachoftheroachgod #athousandthousandislands #art #stalagmite-folk #randomtables #processnotes #rockcupines

20 notes · View notes

jakascoo · 2 years

Text

Tim: Are you reading fan fiction? Conner, reading an article about extremely rare diseases: Wh- No. Tim: Oh, is it on AO3? Conner: This is CNN.

#incorrect quotes #tim drake #red robin #conner kent #superboy #timkon #incorrect tim drake quote #incorrect conner kent quote #incorrect timkon quote #randomt hursday #timkon quote #this is canonn

9 notes · View notes

jeffs-gamebox · 1 year

Text

D12 Dice-o-Nautica US Edition.

Random bizarreness.

Roll a d12 to determine which strange place you visit today. Open Sewage and Manhole Cover Museum in Cape Giradeau, MO. Middle of nowhere Ohio. Random grid coordinates of a former town in Utah. World’s Largest Ball of Twine (One of them) somewhere in Missouri. The First Sex Shop ever erected in San Francisco, USA. Grid coordinates of an abandoned shack in New Mexico. Underneath an old…

View On WordPress

#1d12tables #d12table #d12tables #randomtables #rpgwriter #ttrpg #ttrpgdesign #ttrpgwriter

1 note · View note

shane-and-pepper · 1 year

Text

Pouf ! J'ai pas mal de difficulté à travailler en ce moment, du coup retour aux activités doudou : les tables aléatoires. J'en ai fais une pour ajouter ou modifier la magie dans vos parties de #jdr elle est disponible sur le lien au dessus

#jdr #rpg #randomtable #tablealeatoire #magie #magic #side effects

0 notes

geffenrecords · 2 years

Text

trying so hard not to talk abt skam again its so painful but anyway i fucking hate mika and the little italian gay one

#im watching randomt episodes from. all of them. and man. the second lucas got that call from mika i got flashbacks #zyz

0 notes

randomtable · 11 months

Text

Random Calendar Builder: Starting With Weeks

This is part three of a series on calendars! See this master post for more calendar content: https://www.tumblr.com/randomtable/713543620842700800/random-calendar-series-masterpost?source=share

A different approach to building a calendar with randomization: starting with the smaller units and building up.

1d12 Week Structures

1. A 6 day week, with no set “weekend” - different days off are taken by different people. 2. A 5 day week, with a single weekend day of rest. 3. A 10 day week, with two concurrent weekend days of rest 4. A 4 day week, with no set “weekend” - different days off are taken by different people. 5. A 6 day week, with days of rest on the third and sixth days. 6. An 8 day week, with two concurrent weekend days of rest 7. A 7 day week, with two concurrent weekend days of rest 8. A 9 day week, with days of rest on the third, sixth, and ninth days. 9. A 10 day week, with three concurrent weekend days of rest. 10. An 8 day week, with three concurrent weekend days of rest. 11. A 6 day week, with two concurrent weekend days of rest. 12. A 7 day week, with two concurrent weekend days of rest and a day of rest on the third day.

1d4 Naming Conventions for Days of the Week:

1. Days of the week are referred to by numerical names (ie “firstday” or an equivalent in one of your worlds languages). One day has an exception; what’s special about it? 2. Days of the week are named for gods or other religious figures. What kinds of prayers or rituals are devoted to them on their days? 3. Days of the week are named by duties, chores, or cultural practices that are expected to be done on that day. Are these widely followed, or viewed as something “no one does anymore”? 4. Days of the week are named for planets and/or other celestial bodies (or, for lunar calendars, they might be related to phases of the moon instead). What religious, cultural, scientific or magical associations do these planets have?

For the Rest of the Calendar (1d4)

1. A lunar calendar. Each month is divided into four weeks, based on the full moon, new moon, and waxing and waning half moons. There are 5d4 months in the year. 2. A solar calendar. There are 9d10 weeks in a year, and 5d4 months.* 3. A lunar calendar, based on multiple moons. The moon with the shortest lunar cycle is used for the weeks, while a moon with a longer lunar cycle is used for the months. There are 9d10 weeks in a year, and 5d4 months in a year.* 4. A lunisolar calendar. Each month is divided into four weeks, based on the full moon, new moon, and waxing and waning half moons. There are 5d4 months in the year, but every 2d4+1 years there is an extra month in the year, which helps keep the months aligned to the seasons.

*The number of months may not divide evenly into the year with these results. To resolve this, multiply the number of weeks by the number of days in one week. This is how many days are in the year. Divide the number of days in the year by the number of months in the year, to get the number of days in the month. If this number is whole, great! If not, take just the decimal of the result and multiply it by the number of months in the year to find the number of extra days. You can distribute these days to either make some months longer than others, or insert extra days between months that are observed as holidays.

This post is already pretty long, so if you want to build your calendar further, check out my posts on randomly generated solar and lunar calendars.

#random table #random tables #ttrpg #ttrpg community #ttrpg homebrew #homebrew #dnd #d&d #dungeons and dragons #dnd homebrew #dnd table #random worldbuilding #worldbuilding #ttrpg worldbuilding #genre neutral #Calendar Building #random calendars

77 notes · View notes

possuminnit · 7 months

Text

ohhhg my god i randomt got such bad cramps i think im about to see god

#keeling over and crying #possuminnit.thoughts

3 notes · View notes

local-streetcat · 4 months

Text

Me when

#randomtings #parappa the rapper #um jammer lammy

12 notes · View notes

yesdramas · 1 year

Photo

random timestamp challenge: IMMORTAL SAMSARA 沉香如屑 — 2022, dir. Guo Hu, Ren Hai Tao (7/59)

#immortal samsara #沉香如屑 #cdramaedit #cdramasource #chinesemedia #userdramas #asiandramanet #chineseartistsinc #dramasource #immortalsamsaraedit #gifs #randomts #israndom #syaring #usergooseras #tuserjade #natahjikio #roserayne

63 notes · View notes

dominicswoodworks · 1 year

Photo

It has been a while, but I finished another entry to the AI Artifact Series! This one took me longer than expected mainly because the idea I had for random tables did not work out properly. But I think I made it work, and the cureness of the little hopefully makes up for anything else. #AIArtifact #raspy #cuteCritter #glowingLeftover #magicItem #randomTables #Roleplaying #RPG #TTRPG #WalkingPapercut #BeInspiredWithDominic Join me on Discord - Link in bio! — view on Instagram https://ift.tt/tG7Ag6x

#Instagram #IFTTT

2 notes · View notes

jeffs-gamebox · 2 days

Text

d12 Random Huge Overland Encounters

12 random encounters that will shake the land. The GM may wish ti fill in some of the blanks.

These Huge monsters are intended for a High Fantasy game. Because I am currently working on my BRP Design Challenge entry, but I love Shadowdark RPG, Old School Essentials, and Dungeon Crawl Classics, we’re going to make these system agnostic. These encounters could also be adapted to a science fiction setting with a little effort. [Content Warning: Sharks, Spiders, Snakes] Roll 1d12 and…

View On WordPress

#d12table #d12tables #randommonstertables #randomtable #randomtables #rpgblog #rpgblogger #rpgwriter #ttrpg #TTRPGblog #TTRPGblogger #ttrpgdesign #ttrpgwriter

0 notes

elysium-atleus · 1 year

Text

started a Wattpad writing account. here's my first piece:

#writing to you from elysium #wattpad #wattpad writer

0 notes

chottobenkyou · 2 years

Text

youtube

Randomt faktum. Jag hittade denna låt från beskrivningen på en konstverk på deviantart för länge sedan. Jag har ingen idé vad det var men xD;

#Youtube

0 notes

randomtable · 1 year

Text

Random Calendar Builder: Solar Calendars

This is part one of a series on calendars I am planning! See this master post for more calendar content as I post it: https://www.tumblr.com/randomtable/713543620842700800/random-calendar-series-masterpost?source=share

Year length:

(how many days does it take for the planet to revolve around the sun?) The year is 7d100 days long.

Now, divide this year length by 4 to find the length of your planet’s seasons. *If the result is a fraction or decimal: 1/4 or .25 means one season will be one day longer than the others. 1/2 or .5 means two seasons will be one day longer than the others. 3/4 or .75 means three seasons will be one day longer than the fourth. The length of seasons is also the number of days between the solstices and equinoxes.

1d8 Days to Start The Year On: 1. The day after the Winter Solstice, when nights are just beginning to grow longer. The New Year is celebrated as a time of hope, of starting an upward journey after hitting a low point. New Years celebrations might include light-based decorations, songs about light and hope, and making plans for self improvement. 2. A day between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox, which is the anniversary of the dawn of the ruling dynasty who implemented this calendar. (Feel free to select the exact day randomly). The New Year is celebrated as a patriotic event. New Years celebrations might include flying emblems or flags, nationalist and propaganda songs, and speeches or addresses from leaders and politicians. 3. The day of the Spring Equinox, when cold is giving way to warmth, and it is time for planting and for baby animals to be born. The New Year is celebrated as a time of rebirth and new beginnings, and it may be personified as an infant or baby animal. New Years celebrations might include imagery of flowers, eggs, and babies, time spent planting crops or gardens, and songs about joy and rebirth. 4. A day between the Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice, which is the birthday of a deity or other important religious figure. (Feel free to select the exact day randomly) The new year is celebrated as a religious feast day. New Years celebrations might include prayers and songs to the holy figure, feasts in their name, and religious services. 5. The day after the Summer Solstice, when the days are long and hot. The New Year is celebrated as a time of rest, taking a break from hard work and hot sun. New Years celebrations might include observing a day without work, gifts like hats and parasols that protect from the sun, and activities like swimming to cool off or sharing chilled food and drinks. 6. A day between the Summer Solstice and Autumn Equinox, which is the anniversary of the death of a deity or other important religious figure.The New Year is observed as a somber day of religious reflection, where the year that passed may also be treated as a living thing which has died. New Years customs might include fasting or making other sacrifices, lengthy prayers, and wearing veils or other mourning clothes. 7. The day of the Autumn Equinox, when the harvest is in full swing. The New Year is celebrated as a time of bounty and of preparation for the long nights of winter ahead. New Years celebrations might include feasting, songs wishing farewell to the times of plenty and to the sun, and expressing gratitude to the earth, to a deity of fertility, or to farmers for a bountiful harvest. 8. A day between the Autumn Equinox and the Winter Solstice, which is thought to be the anniversary of the creation of the world itself. (Feel free to select the exact day randomly). The New Year is observed as a serious but joyful religious holiday. New Years traditions might include offerings to the god or gods of creation, prayer and song about their power and might, and excursions into the wilderness to behold their creation in its natural state.

Months:

The year is divided into 5d4 months, which may or may not be roughly based on the lunar cycle*. Divide the year length by the number of months to get the length of the months. It’s likely this number won’t be even. If it isn’t, multiply the fraction/decimal by the number of months to get the number of extra days.

1d4 Things to do with Extra Days 1. Make months unequal: distribute the days among certain months, so that some are a day longer than others. 2. Add these days as extra holidays between months: These days aren’t considered part of a particular month, rather falling between the months and being days of rest or celebration. Try to distribute them equally, if you can. 3. Add these days as a multi-day holiday at the end of the year: this extra time becomes an extended period to prepare for the new year, following the tradition rolled on the previous table. 4. Add these days as a multi-day holiday in the middle of the year: this extra time is a mid-year break, situated between two months near the midway point of the year. You can consult the previous table for what this festival might be for, based on what time of year it occurs, or make up something else.

Weeks:

Your calendar’s weeks are informed by how its months are divided. Here are some options for weeks, noting which types of months they work for.

Perfect Weeks: (Does not work for unequal months.) If there is a number between 5-10 that your month length can be evenly divided by, then this can be the length of your week. For calendars with extra days between months, those extra days are also considered to be between weeks.

Unequal Weeks: (Works for any type of months.) Your months are divided into a number of weeks. In order to make that number whole, some of your weeks are a day longer than others.

One Short Week: (Does not work for calendars with extra days added as a multi-day holiday.) Weeks are 1d4+4 days long. If this number does not divide evenly by how long your year is, the remaining days are treated as a multi-day holiday at the end of the year. (Note that this holiday is still considered part of the last month of the year.)

Earth-like Weeks: (Works for any type of months.) Weeks are 1d4+4 days long and do not change or reset at the end of the year or month. What day of the week the year or the month begins on varies from year to year and month to month. If you have holidays that are between months, the weeks should also skip these holidays.

*Bonus: Lunar Cycles in Solar Calendars (Under the Cut)

If your year does not divide perfectly into the number of months you rolled, then your lunar cycle will not stay aligned with your months. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll assume that your base month is the actual length of a lunar cycle. You can plot these lunar cycles out on your calendar just like we do on Earth, and you’ll see that they quickly become misaligned with the months.

(Warning, math ahead!) The “extra days” you calculated before are called the Epact, the difference in length between the solar and lunar years. You can subtract the Epact from the year length to determine the lunar year length, and use those numbers to determine extra information about the alignments of the solar and lunar calendars: * A purely lunar calendar (with no leap months added to re-align with the solar year) will cycle through the seasons, so over several years what seasons happen in which months will shift. To determine the length of this cycle, divide the solar year length by the Epact. This tells you how many years it takes before the seasons re-align in the lunar calendar. (On Earth, it takes 33 years.) If the result is a whole number, then the lunar and solar calendars will have the same New Years Day if they both began on the same day initially. (If it isn’t a whole number, how often they line up is a little bit more complicated: it’s equal to the least common multiple of the two different year lengths, divided by the length of the solar year.) * You can also determine how many years it takes before the cycles of the moon line up to the same days of the year again. This is equal to the least common multiple of the solar year length and the lunar cycle length (which is the base month length), divided by the solar year length.

#random table #random tables #ttrpg #ttrpg community #ttrpg homebrew #homebrew #fantasy #dnd #d&d #dungeons and dragons #dnd homebrew #dnd table #random worldbuilding #worldbuilding #ttrpg worldbuilding #genre neutral #random calendars #calendar building

55 notes · View notes