7 Facts About Your Next RPG Setting

Crucible of Worlds, Ron Spencer

 

Made with Spwack's Generator Generator. Inspired by Scrap Princess' Dark Souls-y Worldbuilding Post.

So uh... where do all these fantasy creatures/concepts come from?

Never Have I Ever as Character Introduction

by alcd

 

Two random peasants are sitting at a big round table in the local tavern. Already a little tipsy, they invite the PCs (interesting strangers as they are) to sit and join them for a friendly drinking game.

It’s an ancient game; they call it “Never Have I Ever.”

Give the peasants names. They're curious about the folks from out of town and generally rambunctious. Roll a d40 whenever its a peasant’s turn to ask. Skip whatever’s uncomfortable. The peasants go first:

1. Never have I ever ridden a horse
2. Never have I ever lost a fight
3. Never have I ever seen a dragon fly
4. Never have I ever stolen from a sacred place
5. Never have I ever been arrested
6. Never have I ever been married
7. Never have I ever run away from home
8. Never have I ever climbed out of a window
9. Never have I ever eaten a magical creature
10. Never have I ever cursed in a sacred place
11. Never have I ever met the duke
12. Never have I ever met a royal
13. Never have I ever respected a royal
14. Never have I ever fought a knight
15. Never have I ever gone to war
16. Never have I ever had my fortune told
17. Never have I ever stolen from a friend
18. Never have I ever met a wizard
19. Never have I ever blamed alcohol for something I said
20. Never have I ever ate an entire roast by myself
21. Never have I ever saved a life
22. Never have I ever been stabbed
23. Never have I ever got a tattoo
24. Never have I ever met a fairy
25. Never have I ever started a fire where I shouldn’t’ve
26. Never have I ever lied to a friend
27. Never have I ever met a mermaid
28. Never have I ever lied about my age
29. Never have I ever made up a story about someone who wasn’t real
30. Never have I ever met a ghost
31. Never have I ever role-played
32. Never have I ever tried blue lotus (or the local drug equivalent)
33. Never have I ever worn someone else’s undergarments
34. Never have I ever paid for sex
35. Never have I ever fallen asleep during sex
36. Never have I ever had sex with a wizard
37. Never have I ever had sex with a nun/monk
38. Never have I ever had sex with more than one person in 24 hours
39. Never have I ever had sex with more than one person at once
40. Never have I ever had sex with a member of a different species

Pros:

• Ideal for new role-players: everyone gets practice acting as their characters in a safe, non-challenging environment.
• Roleplaying decisions are fast and easy: has your character done this or haven’t they?
• The game is designed to reveal embarrassing moments rather than heroic ones.
  
• It's an opportunity to share personal character flaws.
  
• It’s an opportunity to flesh out everyone’s characters.
• It’s an opportunity to endear the party to the town and its locals.
• It’s an opportunity to role-play getting drunk in character.
• It’s an opportunity to get drunk in real life.

Cons:

• It's a silly anachronism.
  
• Doesn’t immediately lead to adventure.
• Might be a giant waste of time.

Liches Libram did a much more in depth analysis of this type of roleplaying encounter. IMO for a group of new players, fresh off an intro dungeon and looking to mingle with the locals, simple is best. Two truths and a lie also probably works.

(After writing this post, I found a Reddit story of exactly this: here)

Easy Money

by Sam Bosma

 

I refuse to count pennies anymore.

Lexi did advancement better than everyone else back in 2019, so I'm ditching XP for GP for my hack. Now I'm confronting the fact that I never want to count individual XP, GP or any sort of P again. So here's how I'm handling money in the new version:

The whole party shares a wealth level which represents their combined purchasing power and standard of living. There are five wealth levels: In Debt, Broke, Well-Off, Wealthy, and Extremely Wealthy. Each wealth level corresponds to a tier of purchases that can be made at that wealth level.

 

Wealth Level                 Approx. val/purchase     Example purchases

In Debt                           (<1gp)                            Rations, candles, lockpicks, rope, simple tools


Broke                             (<10gp)                          A raft, a month’s rent, a hireling, weapons & armor

Well-Off                         (<100gp)                       A horse, a house, henchmen, plate armor, spellbooks/ scrolls

Wealthy                          (<1000gp)                     A sailboat, a mansion, a construction team, magic items

Extremely Wealthy        (Go nuts)                       A ship, a castle, an army, really big magic items 

 

You increase your wealth by selling treasure. There are three categories of treasure, corresponding to the wealth levels they can move you to when sold. Selling normal Treasure makes you Well-Off, selling Big Treasure makes you Wealthy, and selling Epic Treasure makes you Extremely Wealthy. You must sell Epic Treasure to an NPC who could reasonably afford it, like a duke or a crazy rich wizard.

Whenever you make a significant purchase appropriate for your wealth level, make a CHA save. If you fail, the party’s wealth decreases by one stage. A significant purchase one stage above your wealth level always decrease your wealth. Purchases below your wealth level never decrease your wealth.

You can’t make purchases above your wealth level while you are In Debt. The next treasure you sell pays off your debt and leaves you Broke. (Alternatively, you can keep buying shit, at the risk of provoking your lenders.)

 

Anyway, that's that for now. Let me know if this smells right; I'm personally excited to playtest it. You might recognize a lot of it when I show it off; I've been doing a lot of "borrowing creatively" from other peoples' blogs. Portals and pegasi made some really good shit pretty recently and i plan to steal as much of it as possible.

Kekai Kotaki

my own creation for a campaign i'm running thru Roll20

DEMON COUTURE

 

by Marko Mitanovski

The party meets an 8-to-18-foot-tall agent of chaos in the dungeon. What are they wearing? (Roll 2d6 once/twice)

(Sidenote: Demons are gender- and sex-fluid by default.)

11 - Gilded corpses with fused arms, worn as ear/lip/noserings.
12 - Haunted bone wind chimes hanging from neck-skin piercing. Sound incurs Save vs. above-ground drowning.
13 - Literally frosted tips.
14 - Chimeric leather skirt (blend of human and animal skin) that bleeds mercury when damaged.
15 - Torso piercing you can crawl through. Carries around a faithful, nude manservant inside.
16 - Skulls everywhere. You can never go wrong with skulls.

21 - Costume caricature of a Lawful Good-aligned god. Looks homemade.
22 - Billowing gown made of twitching feathers. Bleeds black and cheeps intermittently.
23 - Vorpal heels.
24 - Dress shirt composed of 1001 spell scrolls. Entire outfit has 1 in 216 chance of exploding. (Triple boxcars)
25 - Tasteful sunglasses.
26 - Rings made of other creatures’ fingers. Has a beholder’s array of touch attacks.

31 - Octuple-helmet-brassiere covering their rows of breasts. Harvested souls briefly inhabit the helmets and scream.
32 - Devilishly anachronistic suit and tie.
33 - Sewn lips. Speaks through corpulent avian familiar (1d4): lord emu; giant parrot; dire hummingbird; goose.
34 - Sentient ooze neck-pillow/seat-cushion. Demon is acid-immune.
35 - Subdermal implants the size of railway spikes. The demon is in pain, but that’s the price of fashion.
36 - Mammoth-head belt buckle. Primarily used for opening bottles.

 

by theDURRRRIAN

41 - Choking perfume. Smells like old people and sleep paralysis. Save vs. hallucinations.
42 - Beard and mane flowing like a solar halo, radiating heat and light.
43 - Additional, seemingly sentient, extremely conventionally attractive human faces sculpted onto various body parts (2d4): center of chest, back of head, forehead, elbow.
44 - Sword through the neck. Demon doesn’t breathe or need their head to live.
45 - Is actually a tongue-shaped parasite wearing an entire other demon.
46 - Armless dress resembling an upside-down rose. If the dress is damaged, the demon’s arms are freed.

51 - Cranial bifurcation from the mouth up. Split is lined with teeth; adds a bite attack.
52 - Cloak of severed hands clasped in prayer (“moral camouflage”). Demon appears as Lawful Good for purposes of alignment-detecting magic.
53 - Bite shoes.
54 - Headdress depicting half of an epic blasphemy in bones. (It’s a couple’s costume. A demon on the floor below is wearing the other half.)
55 - Tryptophobia holes in the forearms containing (1d4): blacksteel spears; undead thralls; alcohol; BEES.
56 - Titanite horn-tips; protect the horns from wearing down against the ceiling.

61 - Medusa-head tongue piercing. Save vs. Petrifying Gaze whenever they open their mouth.
62 - Different crown on each of its spiraling horns.
63 - Angel-steel iron maiden around the head. (Only a Lawful Good creature can open the mechanism.)
64 - Delicate gossamer veil gliding across the floor. Creatures caught in the veil are stuck fast and consumed faster.
65 - Fractal wizard-trap robes. Spellcasters who see it Save vs. eating their own fingers.
66 - This shit. (See below.)

This shit