The Prison Megadungeon: Under the Influences

Writing the (ongoing) World’s Largest Rewrite series has been fun, but I ultimately think it is better as a source of monster ideas than something that should actually be finished. But where to put those monsters? A prison megadungeon without the cumbersome "world's largest" trappings. Let's make a megadungeon.

Caverns of Thracia is the megadungeon I have run the most. Arden Vul is the megadungeon I have spent the most time thinking about recently, thanks to the 3d6 Down the Line podcast. Megadungeon guidance in the greater world of blogs is too vast and diffuse to cite fully, but I will credit a few inspirations.

Arnold K’s Lair of the Lamb. It is not a megadungeon, but it is quite strong in treating the prison not first and foremost as a place that adventurers will delve into, but as a place ordinary people will try to escape from. The very idea of doing a prison megadungeon like the WLD and not making it a prison escape scenario is a little strange, after all. I don’t think I even mentioned that in my first World’s Largest Rewrite post. We'll get into this more in future posts, but the concept of this megadungeon is that the PCs begin as prisoners.

The Two Week Megadungeon. I will not be following the steps here precisely, but like LotL, the TWM process emphasizes lean efficiency over exhaustive completeness. That will be important for, you know, actually making discernable progress. 

Designing the Dungeon with Numbers. This post is specifically about the numbers one through five and how they imply different things when used in design. We’ll want to keep this in mind as a counterbalance against the sprawl of the megadungeon. That sprawl is, of course, part of the appeal; no adventuring party is going to explore all of Arden Vul, and no two parties are going to have the same experience there. But that sheer amount of content is overwhelming if we don’t carefully curate how choices are presented.

For example, we don’t want too many areas accessible to the players at first. If the PCs have more than five choices, it is probably more than they can really conceptualize meaningfully. More than five options becomes a list that has to be studied. And a list can easily become a chore.

But a choice between three to five options – with perhaps three to five decision points within each of those initial options – is much more digestible. The PCs will eventually have many more choice points, but these will be presented fractally, as the PCs engage with the dungeon; not all at once, and not too much, too soon.

Landmark, Hidden, Secret. This is one of those great blog posts that can inform all kinds of adjudication and design. We need to make sure that LHS design is baked into the megadungeon. You know how modern-style players are always talking about how the "exploration" pillar feels underrepresented, relative to the "combat" and "social/roleplay" pillars? LHS design, in conversation with strict time records, random encounters/events, and other procedures, helps deliver that exploration aspect of fantasy dungeon games.

The Lost Art of Getting Lost. It is fine to say the dungeon will be lethal, but players are smart and good at playing conservatively. They will probe carefully and back away from the unknown. Doors that slam shut and force the PCs to find a new way back to where they started really test those skills. The same is true of dungeon features like pits, portcullises, and sliding walls. The humble iron spike becomes a lifesaver when it can guarantee a path backward. But, of course, the noise from hammering in a spike triggers a wandering monster check. And when time passes, that faction you offended before starts removing your spikes… oh crap… 

Because our PCs are prisoners, we can also address some of the obstacles noted in the post. We can control the “economy” in a way that is not possible for “open-world” adventuring, so we don’t have to worry as much about torch supply trivializing light. Our PCs will begin with plenty of candles, and no other source of light. Imagine a simple torch as an exciting “treasure."

Metroidvanias and Megadungeons and Information Architecture in the Castle Automatic. Two posts from the excellent Rise Up Comus blog. The first post creates a taxonomic framework for understanding megadungeons, and why some fantasy adventure game features and character abilities do or do not work within that context. The second is on information design. We don’t strictly need to worry about information design, as we are designing this as an experiment, and maybe to run someday, not to publish (haha… unless?) But good information design is its own reward. Every DM can get by with their own chickenscratch notes and kludged together prep process, but it’s worth interrogating how we could do better and make things clearer, even if that just transmits a clearer picture to players.

The Monster Overhaul. I have cited this so many times during the WLD series. A good monster manual is much more than stat blocks; it is a worldbuilding and session-planning tool. And the Overhaul is not a good manual, it is a great manual.

Make RPG history and look insane while doing it. Blades of Gixa is one of the successful projects  that emerged from the Dungeon23 movement. Indexing location and history in the way this video demonstrates is an awfully interesting idea, and is something we can mess around with for bridging the ancient-lore-to-current-events gap, and avoiding the dreaded “this room used to be…” problem that plagues many dungeon products.

Various Cryptic Keyway posts and projects. Of course I can also take from things I’ve already done, whether iterating on a good idea or salvaging a half-finished thing for parts. Even before the WLD series, previous posts have suggested a similar concept to this one. This experiment will keep some of those ideas. And if it fails, it will be the fuel for something else in the future.

I’m not interested in turning the WLD posts into a dungeon itself. I ultimately think the “world’s largest” conceit is a mistake that undermines good dungeon design. But working through those posts has been useful for generating ideas, and I like (with credit and thanks to OSE and the Overhaul, of course).

I can also scrape content off of my aborted Dungeon23 project, as well as several other dungeons started and left unfinished over the years. Those could even still turn into their own things someday, but a currently active project (like this megadungeon) always gets to steal ideas from projects that are dormant.

We’ll add to this list of influences as we go.

Campaign Pitch: Dungeons Fall From the Sky, So We Delve Them

A historical account of events on Lillette A, a .85 PHI planet at 5.133 AU around Kelson 3 (stellar ref code 7833900). 

Timeline (local solar years prior to present)

• ~600,000Y: A Hivonium separatist seed-ship visits the Kelson 3 system, using illegal stochastic course-charting techniques to evade estimated pursuits. The seed-ship identifies Lillette A as the local biome most likely to support life, and distributes its payload, in direct violation of galactic propagation law.
• 110,127Y: The third in a series of sequential-path Persioxes probes passes within 16 lightyears of Kelson 3 and pings the system, calculating a 44% likelihood of an unauthorized biome. The results are relayed up the command chain for further action.
• 7088Y: Several Persioxes probes, traveling on altered courses in response to the first signal, provide triangulated scans estimating a 93% chance of an unauthorized biome. Kelson is listed for investigation, confirmation, analysis, and potential sterilization.
• 914Y: Crake, an Approxiare-class vessel, arrives at the system and establishes system perimeter control. 
• 897Y: Direct analysis across all seven Herber-Tavo categories confirms Lillette’s status as an illegal biome, with estimates suggesting over four million macroscopic species. The unusually fast evolutionary process is typical of Hivonium technology.
• 896Y: Given the speed of biome development, the crew of the Crake has no time to refer Lillette’s status back up the command chain for consensus. The crew, empowered to act on their own prerogative, vote 145.2-117.7 to sterilize the Kelson system of all life (fractions in the sum reflect the votes of clones that had not yet reached their majority, typical of ship votes from that period). The vote is unusually close, but a simple majority still prevails. System fabs are deployed and begin exponential production expansion.
• 781Y: The orbital shell is completed. The crew begins the three-stage process of recording extensive evidence of the biome, collecting samples of all unique life, and sterilizing the planet (informally, “flag, bag, and slag”).
• 531Y: The project timeline undergoes the first of dozens of extensions. Multiple proposals to either stop or delay sterilization are proposed. Revotes on the fundamental question are vetoed by Gecko, the ship AI, but disagreement among the crew inevitably slows work and spreads dissensus.
• 153Y: A severe GCR burst from outside the Kelson system hits the Crake, the orbital shell, and most of the system fabs; only a few inner-system fabs incidentally protected by Kelson’s magnetosphere are spared. Gecko institutes a red-3 alert (informally, a “Deep Ugly”) and takes priority on all systems it can still ping in the orbital belt. A deep-cover Hivonium virus, programmed to surface only in very high states of system distress, bootstraps itself into several of the most vulnerable fabs, then jumps to the orbital shell. Gecko, while attempting to quarantine the virus, descends into a runaway persona-splinter cascade. Soon over 2000 variations of Gecko are struggling for control of the orbital shell. Other Gecko splinters take control of individual fabs and quarantine them.
• 43Y: The crew aboard the Crake attempt to leave the system, but a combination of  internal dissensus, malfunctioning Geckos, and viral meddling cripples the ship in the outer reaches of the system.
• 28Y: Surviving crew aboard the orbital shell begin to abandon sections compromised by these events, desperately fleeing to Lillette’s surface.
• 0Y: A 263,000 m² chunk of the orbital shell in terminal orbital decay enters the atmosphere and streaks across the sky. Automated systems and the fragmented consciousness of the local Gecko splinter divert most remaining energy to easing the fragment’s descent, ensuring it is relatively intact as it gouges a deep ravine in a mostly unpopulated coastal region on the second-largest continent. Local feudal sapient populations immediately dispatch forces to investigate.

Dungeon is actually SPACESHIP and magic is sometimes TECHNOLOGY has a long and rich history in D&D, from Metamorphosis Alpha and Barrier Peaks all the way up to modern examples that I will not name, just so that I don't inadvertently spoil them here.

This scenario is obviously in the same vein. The principal changes are as follows:

• Instead of a long-ago secret, the arrival of space technology is a currently unfolding situation.
• Instead of something buried, hidden, and forgotten, the sci-fi aspects are obvious, unmistakable, and world-changing. 
• The arrival of sci-fi tech has direct geopolitical impacts on the world; factions and fronts care about these things.
• Humans are the aliens; the “elves,” “dwarves,” and so forth are mutations or random evolutions from human stock, but they are to their knowledge the "normal" residents of their world.

Up in space, we have a Deepness in the Sky / Children of Time / Children of Ruin situation. Down on the planet, the vibe is more like Troika or Anomalous Subsurface Environment.

Humans are aliens, but the natives of Lillette probably don’t find them naturally suspicious, once they are separated from their technology. The fantasy species on the planet may be intentionally designed, or the product of randomness, or some of both. An “elf” living on a particular part of Lillette will be accustomed to meeting sapient bipeds (“humanoids” or whatnot) who vary in relatively small ways. A “dwarf,” a “goblin,” and other such creatures are much more similar to an elf than they are different. A “human” would just seem like another variation on a common template. The now-stranded humans, on the other hand, are absolutely freaking out about all of this. But for the denizens of this fantasy world, this is a Tuesday. The humans are a bit like vault dwellers in Fallout; better tech, but lacking in survival skills.

The action of the game is driven by competition for the falling bits of tech. These are dungeons populated with weird tech, escaped experiments, hostile security systems, insane Gecko shards, the desperate surviving human crew members, and virus-corrupted robots. The local flora and fauna would also be weird and dangerous, and interact in unpredictable ways with the falling tech (add Scavenger’s Reign as an influence here too). 

There are a lot of threads for adventurers to pull on, in addition to delving dungeons and negotiating the factions:

1. Functioning Gecko shards that still want to raze the planet of all life.
2. Former crew now trapped on the planet who are aware of that plan and don’t want it to happen (at least, not until after they can escape).
3. Surviving crew still ensconced in functional sections of the orbital shell or the further-out system fabs, who are rotating through stasis, waiting for an opportunity to escape the system.
4. Maddended Gecko shards that have made contact with the planet and that natives perceive as “new gods” who have come to shake up the existing pantheon.
5. For advanced play, traveling to space is a possibility. It could be possible to explore the sections of the orbital shell still in orbit; the damaged Crake; and even the few fabs that remained functional.

The World's Largest Rewrite: Trepan Lizards, Grues, and Carving Up the Stone Theme

Last time: Grey Horse, Devil Swine, and Normal Humans

#109: Skeleton. We’ve already met our mummies, zombies, wraiths, and wights, so we have a pretty good number of undead knocking around the prison. Skeletons, like zombies, make sense as minions of more powerful undead. We placed the zombies with the mummies, but let's save the skeletons as servants of an as-yet unseen monster. I’m going to place them near the salt water aquatic monsters, to provide some variety there. The bones of failed escapees, animated by some dark magic, drifting up from the depths amidst the seaweed, to clutch at ankles, join us, join us... 

#132: Whale. Yeah, OK, let’s do this. OSE includes a killer whale (AKA orca), narwhal, and sperm whale. Rolling randomly gives us the sperm whale. A brief aside: It is interesting to see how OSE stats suggest a different concept of the world than a modern D&D system. A sperm whale has 36 HD and 162 (!) HP. A red dragon, the strongest of the chromatic dragons, has 10 HD and 45 HP in OSE. 

Compare that to 5E.2014, where an adult red dragon has 256 HP. The 5E MM doesn’t stat whales, but the roc is similar in HD to the whale in OSE, and that is about even with the dragon in 5E. It feels like modern designers felt it was important that the dragon was not only the most dangerous monster, but also (among) the biggest monsters. No such compunction in OSE.

The sperm whale is so big that it is hard to place it in the dungeon; it is very much intended as a wilderness monster. So let’s embrace that idea and put it outside the dungeon, but strongly associated with it. The sperm whale’s signature abilities are to ram ships and to swallow creatures whole. The prison builders enchanted this creature to crush ships approaching the island prison, and swallow any survivors in the water. Their intent was to prevent both prisoner escapes and rescue attempts from the outside. The whale itself can serve as a mini-dungeon, with survivors living inside the whale; that’s a classic trope. 

#41: Gargoyle. The flow of water is already a consistent theme within this dungeon, so let's include gargoyles that honor the origin of the term. Historically gargoyles were not just statues (or “grotesques”) but specifically rainspouts on the buildings they adorned. Our gargoyles are bound by the dungeon builders to channel water through the dungeon, for hydration, drainage, and sanitation purposes. They may be cruel and twisted monsters otherwise, but their commitment to the routing of water takes priority over monstrous behavior. Two gargoyles can form a 1’ diameter “pipe” through solid stone between their locations. PCs who parley with them could use their help to bypass various hazards and obstacles. Beware their betrayal, however, as they could easily send you trouble instead.

#115: Stegosaurus. The OSE entry for the stego is minimal, but the Monster Overhaul, as usual, proves its value with supplemental random tables. Rolling on a few of those we get “fleeing a predator” as a response to the prompt “why are they charging?” and “we steal and devour their eggs” to answer “what do we use them for?” We’ll place these guys near the sabre-tooth tiger, since they also fit the lost world theme. But we also want to build up the idea that the dungeon’s divisions are breaking down, and that creatures from different regions are interacting with each other. So we’ll say these stegosauruses are frightened by the chimera, and that the noble and his retinue are stealing and eating their eggs.

#23: Cockatrice. It is interesting that cockatrices and basilisks, at 5 and 6 HD respectively, are quite a bit bulkier monsters in old-school D&D, while modern D&D presents them as relatively junior monsters, compared to the medusa and gorgon in the Family Stone. The cockatrice is described by OSE as “small,” but is about as tough as an ogre. The monster overhaul notes they are “rarely viscous, though their feeble minds and tendency to panic can lead to disasters” (this also serves as a good description of my cat). As discussed when we placed our medusa, petrification is an incredibly useful ability for the fantasy prison warden. Petrification can be a way of safely transporting a prisoner; putting them in “solitary”; managing a shortage of supplies by temporarily (unless…?) reducing the percentage of the prison population that needs to, you know, eat; and even creating statues that can fit together to build walls. You know, like in Unico in the Island of Magic.

Uh, you know, Unico in the Island of Magic? OK, maybe not everyone has seen Unico in the Island of Magic. You can watch it on Youtube! The petrified-people-used-for-building stuff starts around the 30 minute mark. I watched this when I was very, very small, and for years afterward, I had a very deep and paralyzing fear of being turned into a statue and used as building material. Fortunately, this never happened to me in real life, and I eventually got over that fear. But this probably does explain why I have written about gorgons so much on this blog. These blog posts don’t typically include processing childhood fears, but there ya go.

What were we talking about? Oh yeah, the cockatrices are here for the same reason the gorgon (medusa) is – petrification is really useful to the prison builders. For the same reason I don’t want to cluster all the undead together, I’m not going to put the cocatrices next to the other petrification creatures. I’ll drop them near the center of the map, next to the doppelgangers, who were the second-ever monster we placed during this exercise. If the cockatrices petrified the doppelgangers, they might have formed a feral colony near that area. The zombies are unaffected or indifferent to their presence, and the bull sharks are protected from the stony birds by water. 

#4: Basilisk. What a serendipitous result. We have our oops-all-rocks enemies showing up back to back. In Soviet Russia, rocks pet you. 

Combined with our gargoyle in this entry, and our gorgon (medusa) lore, I think we have some interesting ideas of how petrification played a major role in the formation and maintenance of the dungeon. I like the idea that the prison-builders started with cockatrices (relatively easy to control, insofar as they have to make physical contact to petrify). Later, as the prison grew both larger and more difficult to control, they added basilisks, in a desperation move (capable of petrifying at range, but a real double-edged sword for other sighted creatures).

Rolling randomly, I’m gonna put the basilisk on the left side of the map, and it lands right next to the… rock baboons… which feels like the dice trying to tell me something. We’ll keep our scream-oriented baboons but also make them literal rock baboons. Why not? 

#15: Bugbear. Another minimally described goblinoid in OSE. Hairy, ungainly, attacks with surprise (this also serves as a good description of my cat). Going to the Monster Overhaul directs us to the… ogre entry, surprisingly, but I respect it. The Overhaul is not afraid to create Weird Problem Creatures, and the bugbear is definitely one of them. Its abilities are as follows: “Harmed by innocence. Attacks against the [bugbear] take a penalty equal to the attacker’s HD or level. Bonuses to damage become penalties. Toy swords cut as steel ones.”

That’s kinda mental, right? Certainly more interesting than “stronk goblin with +2 to surprise, move along.” You can imagine why a creature that fundamentally subverts violence would end up in our prison. However, by imprisoning this freak amongst mostly guilty inmates, the jailers have inadvertently made him powerful. None of the twisted reprobates in the prison would be able to harm this guy. I’m not trapped in here with you, you’re trapped in here with me. This is a cool puzzle monster. Clearly our bugbear is a dungeon boss, like the dragon and the devil swine, controlling other monsters/NPCs, because they cannot harm him. We’ll drop him near the bottom of our diagram; he’s probably bossing around some combination of hobgoblins and humans. Maybe the poor cyclops too.

#69: Lizard Man. The most evocative bit from OSE is obviously “Man-eaters: Kidnap humans and demihumans, whose flesh they regard as a delicacy” (thankfully, this does not serve as a good description of my cat). 

To my surprise, there is no entry for lizardmen in The Monster Overhaul. Not even an index entry pointing to another monster. I guess lizardfolk fall somewhere between kobolds and troglodytes in the Overhaul taxonomy. We’ll use troglodytes. With four separate random tables, they have enough going on in their entry that there will be material left for the actual troglodytes when we eventually roll them up.

Rolling a few times, we get “Genetic offshoot blessed with strange powers but cursed with mind-rot” and “Trepanning drill. Improves divine access” as a treasure. These two hooks together really sell these guys. The basic OSE beastiary does not have a direct mind flayer equivalent, so for this dungeon, our lizardfolk fill that roll.

#105: Shadow. “Intelligent, incorporeal (but not undead) monsters that look like shadows. Able to slightly change their shape.” I like the non-undead shadow concept. The Overhaul’s index suggests “Grue” as an interpretation, which isn’t on our OSE list, so we’ll use that to embellish these fellows. The grue is a highly mobile, durable, deadly creature in darkness, with light as its only weakness. It is easy to imagine our prison wardens trapping a grue/shadow here with redundant “walls” of light. As the prison keepers' authority slips away, the lights begin to go out, and the grue probes its containment, restless to be free. We’ll probably create a “high security” block for creatures like this, that require special methods to imprison. 

#45: Gnoll. Gnolls have a little bit more going on than some of the other humanoids, but not much; the OSE description is just a winking reference to their post-Dunsany presentation as a portmanteau of gnome and troll. The Overhaul has no gnoll entry, but refers to the hyena entry, which has a nice “legendary abilities” table. “Hyenas only eat the corpses of unholy people. The souls of those they consume stay inside the hyena.” This gives them a pretty clear reason to show up in our dungeon. The gnolls have broken into the prison in search of "unholy" souls to devour. We’ll assume they’ve entered the prison from the top and are trying to get toward the lower middle, where the humans are.

Here’s our updated diagram. Getting a little more crowded, isn’t it? Remember, this is not the dungeon map; just a very simple diagram that can eventually inform regions, which can in turn serve as the basis for an actual map.

Oops-All-Backgrounds D&D

I have written before about the underrated design of the backgrounds in D&D 5E.2014. Backgrounds in 5E include a brief description and some “suggested characteristics,” but mechanically they boil down to the following pieces: 

• Two skill proficiencies
• Usually one or two tool proficiencies (although a few backgrounds don’t get any)
• Usually one language (although again, a few backgrounds don’t receive one)
• A brief starting equipment package
• A “feature” that doesn’t have an explicit mechanical application, but exists entirely as something to be leveraged by the player and adjudicated by the DM. Usually the feature grounds the character within the game’s social milieu.

This is a solid chassis for a starting character, even without ancestry and class. The problem with backgrounds in the context of 5E is that they are quickly swallowed up by class progression. Those background details may come up in the first few sessions, but nobody bothers to use the Rustic Hospitality feature by level 5, let alone level 20. 

But… what if they weren’t competing with the classes? What if instead, the classes were designed like backgrounds? What if... the fighter class just looked like this?

1. Skill proficiencies: Choose two, just as you normally would, from the 5E fighter skill list
2. Armor proficiency: Choose one from among light armor, medium armor, or heavy armor
3. Weapon proficiencies: All simple weapons and any three martial weapons
4. Equipment: Same options as the in the 5E fighter list
5. Feature: Choose either Action Surge or Fighting Style

And what if the dwarf ancestry just did this? 

• Weapon proficiencies: Battleaxe, handaxe, throwing hammer, and warhammer
• Tool proficiencies: Artisan’s tools of your choice (smith’s tools, brewer’s supplies, or mason’s tools)
• Languages: Dwarven
• Feature: Choose either Darkvision or Dwarven Resilience

Any one of these is an MVP (minimum viable PC). Where you go from there depends on what kind of game you want. If you want to hew closer to normal 5E, layer on additional features and mechanics as class advancements, but keep it much leaner than typical 5E. Use GLOG-style progression as a model, with maybe four levels, capping characters at a low/middle power level, just like you might when using a 5E chassis to run a megadungeon.

If you want to keep it simpler, instead model the game on a system that features little or no advancement, like Troika, or one of the Into the Odd-based games. Or assume that advancement comes mostly from exogenic acquisitions, as in an equipment-focused game like Knave.

The Roadside Shrine Test

The PCs are traveling overland. Various NPCs (all controlled, of course, by the DM) tell them that it is important to donate to the shrine at the crossroads, to ensure a safe journey. The NPCs say that ignoring the shrine is sure to bring misfortune. The donation amount is a significant expenditure for the PCs.

There is a surprising amount of potential complexity beneath the surface in examples like this. In-game choices intersect with player choices via metagaming (and metagaming is good player behavior, not bad). What might the DM be doing here? The players may consider the following possibilities. 

Worldbuilding. The shrine is an opportunity for the DM to illustrate local beliefs and add some texture and life for the world. The PCs can engage with the shrine or not; it won’t have any direct bearing on future events in the game. 

Foreshadowing. The shrine decision itself has no actual stakes, but it is a theme the DM intends to iterate upon. The DM will later present a similar choice with higher stakes. The escalation of the theme may continue until the party engages with it or otherwise resolves the tension.

Consequences (direct). The shrine is literally controlled by some minor god, spirit, or genius loci, in just the way the locals expect, which will cause some explicit consequences for the PCs.

Consequences (framing). The DM does not do anything differently, but instead frames any setbacks in the subsequent journey as a consequence of skipping the shrine. In this instance there actually was no real choice, and the shrine “decision” was just a set to facilitate later spikes by the DM.

Consequences (retroactively diegetic). The shrine has no effect, but later, someone may cast Zone of Truth or a similar truth-seeking spell on the PCs, and ask them what choice they made. Their answer has social consequences.

Consequences (factions and fronts). Factions or fronts in society care about the shrine. They may even be forces the PCs haven’t yet seen. Refusing to donate to the shrine may escalate a clock or decrement a reputation ranking. 

This is by no means an exhaustive list! Players could be considering literally dozens of overlapping agendas and incentives when assessing this choice, although they are surely not consciously enumerating most of these points. None of these are strictly right or wrong (although some can certainly lead to an r/rpghorrorstories post with the wrong execution). 

The Book Club RPG

A novel TTRPG.

Everyone brings a book to the game. It must be a physical copy that you own and are willing to mark up.

You will need a random number generator set to the number of pages in your book. You may be able to do this with dice, but an online random number generator is easiest, as you can set a range that directly corresponds to the number of pages. Follow the book’s pagination and ignore introductions, appendices, or anything else outside the normal page number range. 

Character creation

Name

“Roll” a random page. Start from the top of the page and grab the first name you find. You can use your own judgment if something “counts” as a name, but generally, err in the direction of choosing the first word that seems reasonably name-like. This is your character’s name.

Mark the word so that you remember that you already used it. A highlighter may help, if you want to keep the book readable. But blacking it out with a sharpie has a powerful energy to it.

Try to stick with this character name, even if you don’t like it, or it isn’t the sort of name you would normally choose for a character (especially if it isn’t the sort of name you typically choose). If you really want to change it, you can reroll, but you must mark one “dogear” on your character sheet. More on that later.

Appearance

Roll three random pages. For each result, choose the first adjective that appears on that page. When you have three adjectives, that’s the description of your character. 

You may get an adjective that doesn’t really make sense for describing a person. Try to use it anyway, even if you think of it as more of a figurative description than a literal one. Mark each word in the same fashion as you did the name.

If you genuinely can’t find any way to make the adjective work, or just dislike the adjective so much that you don’t want it associated with your character, reroll and mark a dogear on your character sheet.

Skills

Roll three random pages. For each result, choose the first verb that appears on that page. These three verbs are your character’s skills.

Some of these will be easy to interpret as player skills, like running or fighting. Others will require some interpretation. What does it mean to have a skill at “representing,” “isolating,” or “facilitating.” Or a verb that is not normally associated with a person, say, “flooding”? You will have to employ some lateral thinking. 

As before, mark the words you use. Basically you’re going to mark a word every time you roll for a word. If you forget every once and a while, that’s fine, but try to do it when you can.

If you really can’t make a verb work, that’s OK, but you know the drill; take a dogear.

Equipment

Roll for three more pages. For each one, take the first concrete noun that refers to a physical object that a person could carry in one hand. It doesn’t have to be something that a person would ordinarily carry. Use common sense.

Ethos

This one is optional, but may be useful to your game if your character still feels fuzzy. You don’t need this for a one-shot, but it may come in handy for a longer game. 

Roll for three more pages and choose the first three abstract nouns you see. Your character has strong feelings about these ideas, but they don’t have to be affirmative. For example, if you get a word like “slavery,” the character could simply be an anti-slavery advocate. Same rule as above with dogears. 

Content

If you ever roll a word that violates the table’s agreed-upon content and vibe for the game, you can reroll such results without taking a dogear. For example, if you use lines and veils, a word that is strongly associated with a subject covered by a line or veil can be rerolled for “free.”  

Action Resolution 

Whenever you do something uncertain, roll a random number and flip to that page. The first letter of the first complete word determines the nature of the outcome.

• A-B: Yes, and 
• C-F: Yes
• G-L: Yes, but 
• M-P: No, and
• Q-S: No
• T-Z: No, but

If you have a relevant skill or piece of equipment, you can look at the first two words with different letters and choose an outcome from between them (for example, if the first series of words on a page was “all actionable attributes have been accounted for,” you would choose “A” and “H”). Mark any words that you “use” in this way. 

The math doesn’t work out perfectly with these letter divisions, but it doesn’t need to; if anything, I kinda like flat “no” as the smallest category and “no, but” as the largest one.

Dogears

You may acquire a few dogears during character creation or play. This is a metacurrency that a player can spend to compel the player with a dogear to roll in a situation that otherwise wouldn't require a roll; or to make that player reroll a result that they just rolled.

When you call in someone's dogear, the affected player erases it from their sheet and you add it to your sheet. If a player cashes one of your dogears during a session, you can’t cash one on them until the next session. So only a few dogears should change hands each session, and they should always be circulating among the players.

Focus and Genre

While you can do this game with very different books, if you want to concentrate the tone a bit more, have everyone select books from the same genre. For an even more focused experience, have everyone use the exact same book. Novels are an obvious choice, but remember that anything full of text made up of full sentences can work pretty well. There's no reason this game wouldn't work for a group all using copies of an air conditioning unit's operation manual.

Dynamic Domains: Four Options for Proactive Pantheons

The worst thing about TTRPG deities is the certainty of it all. The mystery and myth of a terrible, powerful, ultimately unknowable divine consciousness, boiled down to entries on a table in the cleric class description.

I understand why. As a mechanical element of a fantasy TTRPG, deities are essentially an extension of character creation. A deity needs to be immediately grokable, and it helps if it makes some kinda sense within the presumed universal vanilla fantasy milieu. 

But I think there is room to make our deities more interesting without losing players. That's why I've written about how to improve pantheons quite a few times before. 

So consider the following twists for fantasy deities. Assume in each case that we're talking about deities who possess three spheres, or domains, or whatever you like to call them. Death, weather, the hunt, commerce, the stars, the sea, that sort of thing. Then alter it juuust a bit from what you would see in your bog-standard fantasy setting.

Two Truths and a Lie

Each deity is well-known for three domains. What is not well-known is that two of them are real and the third is a lie. 

The deity claims power over that third domain – or at least their followers do – but the deity doesn’t have cosmological influence over it. Maybe they once did, and hope to again. Maybe they can kinda fake it. Maybe their followers’ belief is patching the hole, or their followers are unknowingly drawing power from elsewhere. But it is ultimately a lie, and discovering that, or hiding it, or leveraging it, could play a major role in a campaign.

The Public and the Secret

Each deity has three domains. Two are commonly known, and what the deity is famous for. The third is secret, and is only known to a select few.

Those who know could be clerics and paladins, particularly past a certain level. Or it could be scholars and spies who have come across this information on their own. Or perhaps even the warlocks who draw power from that deity secretly.

Again, a secret can be a powerful motivation for adventure and for deity action as a front or antagonist. And it just raises intriguing questions. A god who is the deity of life and the sun… but also (secretly) the god of the underworld… is a bit more interesting, yes?

Rising and Falling

Each deity has three domains. In one domain the deity is rising, in another they are stable, and in a third they are falling.

This lends itself to change over time, particularly in a campaign on a longer time frame. Imagine that the game begins, and a dozen deities are each rising, stable, or falling in three respective domains out of a total count of 24. They overlap on many of these domains. 

Whenever a god achieves a goal associated with a domain, they can improve “falling” to “stable,” or “stable” to “rising.” If they are already at rising, they can force one other god to decrement their status in an overlapping domain from “rising” to “stable,” or from “stable” to “falling.”

Regional Competition

Most modern fantasy pantheons are by implication global (pan-prime-material?) This is serviceable, but also takes away one of the most interesting sources of conflict and competition that we see amongst real-world religions, as belief systems intermingle with geopolitical and national/social forces. 

Assign domains to regions of the game world. Some of these could have a symbolic relation (the sea to coastal regions, for example), but it is not required for each one. Gods have power in domains based on how much of the population within the domain-attuned area follow them. In this view, gods have quite a strong incentive to evangelize, and much of the conflict in the game world could reflect this struggle for power. Imagine that a rival army conquering your lands means not just a new ruler, but also that an entirely new god will take possession of the domain of the afterlife, and consequently the fate of everyone’s ancestors. Those are compelling stakes that can drive in-game action.