Here are some ideas for Magical Qualities that can be incorporated into some of the various Tools and Implements that might find their way into a Character’s Equipment. While Wonders are usually confined to Weapons & Armor for dealing with challenges associated with Combat, sometimes having the Right Tool at hand for a specific task is more interesting, especially if the tool in question has these sorts of unconventional features and benefits.
When Stocking Dungeons, we sometimes turn to using Dice to Randomly Generate the Room Contents. In B/X and its successors, we’re presented with this lovely little table to help us with this process:
With a few quick throws of some six-sided dice, we’re able to get a rough idea of those Room Contents!
I’ve committed this table to memory at this point (I use it in my Wilderness Stocking Procedures as well, just slightly re-skinned) but one thing always irked me slighty: The “wasted opportunity” hiding in that “Chance of Treasure” Roll. It would be much more preferable if instead of a binary yes/no, that roll could give us a little something more.
After thinking about this for a bit, I came up with the following Table. This utilizes both of the dice rolled (in that lovely d36 method) to get a little more granular while preserving the same results as the table above. With the additional combinations it exposes, my hope is for it to serve as a bit of a “Helper” or “Oracle” and provide some additional inspiration/ideas for the results. I often find myself looking toward certain additional Random Tables I’ve created for this in various ways, so I’ve linked some of them here to make them accessible with a quick click. During the Process, I even spotted a few new opportunities for some additional d100 Tables and added those to my growing Dev List. đŸ¤£
Random Stocking can provide a wonderful “Starting Point” sometimes and it remains the backbone behind my “20 Minute Dungeons” and the Dolmenwood Dozen Project I put together recently. It’s always interesting to me how that initial idea produced can sometimes spawn interesting connections or situations once the results are assembled together and presented in context.
So, without further ado, here’s the Expanded Dungeon Stocking Table. I’d love to hear if you find it useful when digging those Dungeons and would be excited to see what it shakes out for you! There may even be a similar tool/resource for Wilderness Stocking in the pipeline as well!
Here’s a bit of a blast from the past. I decided to give a little refresh to my old Quick Equipment & Encumbrance Sheet because it’s still turning out to be useful for various games I’m running.
As before, the chief purpose is to cut down on the time-consuming “Shopping Trip” portion of Character Generation, but still preserve some player choice in how they outfit their characters that goes a bit beyond the more comprehensive “kits.” There are some tricky choices baked in, but I if you wanted to speed things up even more, you can always just have the players roll 6d12 (but I’ve found this tends to lead to a lot of table time spent “swapping” sometimes). With a few quick checkmarks/highlighters the adventurers are ready to go, with all of their Equipment on a single handy sheet.
I tend to prefer using Voronoi Tesselations/Diagrams for my Urban Adventures/City Crawls instead of the traditional Grids or Hex Maps. They just feel more organic to me, and can really capture how sometimes it takes longer to move from one dense/crowded/difficulty planned area to another. Distances are seldom in a straight line in Cities, and it's easy to get turned around or lost in an unfamiliar Urban Center without a Guide. I dislike relying as much on measuring out precise distances these days, instead preferring to think of navigating Cities more in terms of resource consumption and procedural checks.
Unlike in a Standard Dungeon, Food/Water/Light should be relatively easy or at hand (provided the characters are not utterly destitute) so the resources we’re dealing with are generally TIME and MONEY. TIME to meet deadlines assocaited with hooks/rumors/adventure, and MONEY paid to Guides or for Information to reduce TIME. As the old adage goes: They are often one in the same. Also throwing another wrench in the works are Produral Checks: Bad Weather, Encounters, and other unusual Events that can breathe life into an area (a neighborhood wide Celebration clogging the streets, Hue and Cry from a Crime udnerway, etc.)
Here’s a quick way to generate a Voronoi City Map for a Crawl that produces something like this:
First, locate a map you like or create one. The example above uses this twitter account: https://twitter.com/metropologeny
(you can generally right click on an image here, and “Open in a New Tab” to obtain a URL to use in the next step).
Next, go here: http://cfbrasz.github.io/Voronoi.html
Paste the URL from the twitter account in the “Display Image with URL” box. Then, if you prefer, you can use your mouse to place points and divide the map into districts/neighborhoods/sections/quarters, or if your lazy, you can uncheck the “Update diagram on mouse move” check box, and then place a number in the Add box and click Generate until you see something that looks interesting or usable.
I like going with “20” sites, for ease of randomization with our handy, ubiquitous icosahedron, but for sparser/denser maps other site amounts might work a little better.
And there you have it: Fairly quick Voronoi City Crawl Map!
You can number the sites (those dots make them a little easier to identify), whip together some Exciting/Evocative Smells, some interesting NPCs with Professions that can help you intuit the primary shops or industry of an area, or perhaps a City Dweller Event as a “hook” or ongoing item of interest, and tailor a few Encounter/Event Tables to the different regions to give it some real flavor and flair. You could even stock them like Dungeon Rooms (Encounter, Hazard, Treasure, etc.) with some judicious reskinning.
I am very tempted to start working on a few more Tables that can help with Urban Crawls. One can never have enough random inspiration to cut down on tedious preparation!