Random tables for RPGs

I am quite interested in running a pure sandbox campaign at the moment - especially after buying Carcosa.

Obviously I will need a lot of random tables. So I will collect them in this post.

This website has a few as a starting point:

Random Fantasy Tables called "Tables for Fables"

More Random Random Tables

Random name generator

If you want to point to any helpful resources, please, leave a comment!

I will add them to the list.

All those "clever plans" - a rant

One big point of disagreement between Old School and New School is the question whether it makes more sense to play the rules or to play the world as imagined in the GM's/DM's head, that is the game engine - a game engine run by common sense and "realistic" behaviour. I am quite New School (not only in regards to this), and here is my train of thought:

I think that most people that are happy with the DM decision engine, are not just able very well to assess the DM as human being with psychological hang ups. Maybe you have just amazing GMs, but I hated for example my group that spent hours planing each session, when I had figured out very fast, that our first plan would always fail, because the GM wanted to fill the session and was full over adversarial energy in the beginning. For me this planning was completely pointless. Towards the end of the session, in 90% of cases, whatever stupid plan we would come up, would have success, because the GM wanted to push things forward.

Not to talk about the DM back in my teens that ridiculed plans by younger players - after all the DM can come up with countermeasures to even the best plan easily - and let them fail most of the time, while he would stare in awe at the plans of our grown up gaming buddies, and let them succeed. He was never aware of that, but after a few sessions it became very obvious to me and I was able to prove my (secret) thesis time after time from that moment on.

Or the DM that loved grimdark plans, because they were "realistic", but would rarely accept plans that involved compromise or bright colors.

With the DM as decision engine, I most of the time end up playing/gaming the DM's psychological structure after a few sessions and not the world simulation. You could argue that these hang ups and the world are the same - the DM after all provides the genre conventions of his game -, but for me it just kills any suspension of disbelieve in the long run.

You can read the whole discussion here on RPG.net.

My RPG Calendar 2012

January
19th The Dark Eye 1: Drei Schwüre (Hel; Jor, Jen, Ail, Pat)

February
2nd The Dark Eye 2: Drei Schwüre (Hel; Jor, Jen, Ail, Pat, And)
15th The Dark Eye 3: Drei Schwüre (Hel; Jor, Jen, Ail, Pat, And)

March
1st Ratten!: Pontifex und Dreher (Jen; Jor, Ste)
8th The Dark Eye 4: Blutige See (And; Hel, Jor, Jen, Pat)

My RPG Calendar 2011
My RPG Calendar 2010
My RPG Calendar 2009
My RPG Calendar 2008

Gamma World Vehicle Rules

Wizards of the Coast finally released the rules for vehicles for the new edition of Gamma World. They are available as free pdf. I was waiting for this a long time!

Finally porkers can ride motor bikes in battle. :)

Follow this link to find the Gamma World vehicle rules. 8 pages of fun! :)

There are stats for motorcycles, cars, pick up trucks, RVs, dump trucks and helicopters included. You will also find vehicle augmentations like sidecars and hover kits as well as turrets and mounted weapons. Not to forget stunts, as well as stunt catastrophes.

Everyone should print these 8 pages and put it in their Gamma World box!

And if you still need paper miniatures for the vehicles how about this? Flat paper miniature vehicles. Those are not for free though, you can also check my articles on free paper minis for other options...

Gamma World: The Church of the Minute

Flamer, telekinetic pyrokinetic, Smush, Giant Yeti, and Obsat, telekinetic engineered human, are chased all independently by cannibal biker tribes and run off in the Glowing Desert of the North. There they nearly die of thurst, but are safed by a yellow blob farmer named Bryant.

He takes them to his farm and gets them back to health. He has three mutant brother farmhands and her sister, a maid called Annabella, there. After they wake up, he asks them what they can do to pay back their debts. Flamer hands over 2 of his 3 horses, while the other 2 want to help fixing stuff at the farm.

Bryant is not really convinced about that latter two offers and tells them, they should better look for the priest of the Church of the Minute down south beyond the Rovin mountain range. Normally the priest would always come and bless the fields with the sacred cogs. But he did not appear this year.

The groups agrees that they are willing to do that and Annabella is especially in love with Smush. Bryant tells Obsat, that actually she should marry him, because he is a true inbred human, while they have a party at night and stuff is going on behind the barn between Annabella and Smush. He his actually created a bracelet out of a tent hering for her. The farmhands are not to happy about the romance, but the next morning, the three strangers travel South anyways to find the priest.

On the way through the Rovin mountain range, they encounter a tower, as Bryant has told them. The blob gave them a present for Old Zed, the keeper of the tower. In front of the tower they are suprised by a Porker. Smush asks the pig creature, if he is Zed, and the creature pretends inconvincingly that he is.

When the porker wants to open the gate to play the role, a badder, a mutant badger, appears from behind a rock, aims at the characters and tells the porker not to open.

A second porker wakes up behind another rock and a fight engulfs, in which the porkers are roasted to death by Flamer, Smush falls into a radioactive crater and nearly drowns there and Obsat throws radioactive goo at the badder. In the end the badger gives up and admits that they are from the Bazooka gang and haven raided the tower.

My RPG Calendar 2011

January
13th Gamma World 1: The Church of the Minute (Jor; Jea, Hel, Mic)

February
8th Gamma World 2: The Chosen Ones (Jor; Jea, Hel, Dan)
24th Gamma World 3: Horse Eating Beetle River (Jor; Jea, Hel, Dan)

March
1st Gamma World 4: The Mall in the Forest (Jor; Jea, Hel, Dan, Mic)
8th Gamma World 5: Princess Peach and the Piper (Jor; Jea, Hel, Dan, Mic)

---

December
29th DungeonSlayers: Der Zauberer von Lom-Tranar (Flanf; Jor, Ann, Chris, Chris)

My RPG Calendar 2012
My RPG Calendar 2010
My RPG Calendar 2009
My RPG Calendar 2008

Gamma World Random Character Generators

I had lots of fun with the new D&D Gamma World last night, just creating random mutant characters. Today I found a Gamma World online character generator.

Give it a try. Those characters rock!

For even more options (20 additional origins from Famine in Far-Go and 8 from Legion of Gold) check out the official Gamma World Random Character generator on the Wizards of the Coast website. They call it an Interactive Character Sheet.

And finally a third one: it does not seem to include Famine in Far-Go, but has the Origin Powers listed. That was missing from the other two character generators: Gamma World Random Characters with Power Cards.

I printed loads of random Interactive Character Sheet characters and keep them in my Gamma World box. If a player needs a new character, he or she just pulls out one of them and decides if he wants to keep it. (I also photocopied all the origins, so that players don't have to look up their powers in the rule books during the game.)

Update, May 2011: I found out about another JavaScript character generator for Gamma World 7th edition, or D&D 4E Gamma World, as you can call it as well.

Random adventure generators

Random created adventures seem to solve many of the problems people have with GMing. They are created superfast and instead of preparing stuff that maybe never come up for hours you can fill in the details really needed during the session.

With the only versions you don't even need to roll on a lot of tables.

I found this nifty adventure generators recently. Give them a try!

Random dark future adventures.

Random fantasy adventures.

Bonus: a random Viking generator.

Luftenwelter - A look back

I used to have the following text in my signature on tanelorn.net

Luftenwelter - Savage Worlds Luftpiraten-Fantasy ohne Gebrochene Himmel, aber mit fakedeutschem Namen...

Last Tuesday we finally finished the campaign with its 40th session. While we were playing weekly the first year, the second year we had lost some steam.

Still it was the longest campaign that I participated from the beginning to the end and actually my character Brulus, an alchemist hunchback, was the only one who made it through all 40 sessions.

I have to add though that most sessions were "only" 3 to 4 hours long, while the 50 Fathoms campaign had often 7 hour sessions.

We only used battlemaps and miniatures in the beginning and very end. One player said she could not imagine the scenes in her head, when she was seeing stuff on the table. I luckily don't have that problem so much, but I guess a little bit of it is still there - subconsciously.

What was a little bit annoying was that the GM did not real know the rules and showed no intention in learning them. Therefore he obviously was not able to balance encounters properly or look out for interesting special abilities for the foes. In my opionion D&D4 would have helped him with that.

Nevertheless I had much fun with us being able to mess with the setting. There were many opportunities for character play, the GM was very flexible and I never had the feeling of any railroading going on. Some of the sessions I enjoyed most actually developed seemingly out of the blue. For example a stay in a dwarven city. That actally was very sandboxy and where we only had the one line mission statement to get a certain hammer. It proved that no plot is necessary as long as the GM is fast enough to make stuff up in realtime. :) This kind of sessions seem to give even more space for character based developement of the story.

What was kind of a pity was that many of the strong or important NPCs did not reappear until the 10 minutes epilogue. So it felt there were still some lose ends.

Doctor Who Online Character Generator (and Messageboard)

I just found this amazing Flash online character generator for the Doctor Who RPG AITAS.
I got the link from the as amazing Doctor Who RPG Messageboard.

I also found a handy player handout pdf online.

Time travel galore!

Doctor Who Character: Alternative Time Lord, First Draft

So we created the Time Lord of the coming Doctor Who campaign.

Everything noted down here could change, but we could a good first concept. That pretty much started with the Gadget Card: Sonic Lipstick. That way we started discussing a Robert Smith (Cure singer) like Time Lord.

Here are the stats:

Awareness: 3
Coordination: 3
Ingenuity: 6 (incl. +2 from being a Time Lord)
Presence: 4
Resolve: 4
Strength: 2
[=20 Character Points overall]

Good Traits:
Time Lord (2) includes: Feel the Turn of the Universe, Vortex
Boffin (2)
Photographic Memory (2)
Screamer (1)

Bad Traits:
Code of Conduct (1)
Distinctive (1)
Eccentric (1) (manic-depressive)
[=4 Character Points overall]

Skills:
Fighting: 1
Convince: 3
Subterfudge: 4
Technology: 4
Science: 3
Athletics: 2

[=17 Skill Points; 1 STILL MISSING!]

Gadget: Sonic Lipstick

He was stuck for 20 years in the 1980ies in a time loop.

Personal Goal: Explore and find other Time Lords

We wanted him to have the TARDIS, so we decided to have him swap time machine with the Doctor, as the Doctor needed to have one with working Chameleon Circuits for some time.

(We discussed, but forgot to add Owes Favour and Tecnically Adept as Traits)