One of the things as a budding GM that
I dug about my fave classic Traveller supplement, 76 Patrons,
was that each patron encounter/mission/hook came with a d6 chart that
made each of them variable in nature. Even better most of the higher
rolled entries became progressively more of a twist—often more
dangerous or messed up.
So an eloped couple of aristocrats on a
roll of one are in fact just being paranoid, no one is following
them. On a roll of two agents of the woman will try and kidnap her,
and on a six agents of both families will try kill the opposite
members of the family and kidnap their own!
It's an elegant, creative-GM-friendly
way to bake in not just replayability and non-linear feeling choice
but also scenarios to keep players on their toes. I used to love how
it would like any great random table introduce a layer of
self-surprise for you as a GM. That oh wow moment and malicious
little chuckle.
So that gets me to the new
tentatively-titled book Ground Down in Revoca Town. One of the
reasons the Hill Cantons books always end up considerably longer than
I originally anticipated is that the broken brain DIY tinker in me
can't just write the damn books straight—inevitably I always want
to explore something whether its pointcrawls, chaos indexes, or how
to present urban adventures, etc.
Revoca has been no exception and one of
the things I've been currently obsessing about is presenting 76
Patrons-like variability when it comes to some of the mysteries of
Revoca Town, the mythical wilderness and Great Aviary (big dungeon)
nearby.
Example, one of the abiding mysteries
for more than a year was why the local ruling family (the Morvnas)
has had only female heirs for 17 generations. The party in the
original campaign became quite tight with the teenaged current Lady
of the castle, living under her staircase and tempted by the tripled
locked steel door leading down into the underworks.
That's how it worked in the campaign
but in the published manuscript I am working to weave in “but wait
it get's worse” scenarios (and a few better). So on a roll or DM
choice of say one it's just a simple run of incredibly improbable bad
luck, the males die in childbirth with an escalation up the “oh
it's getting worse” scale to a very dark and dangerous roll on the
six. Each “mystery path” in turn has some effect on the adventure
locales so a party going to the Tarn Tomb of Morvna (small dungeon in
the lake) will encounter a few markedly different rooms/themes.
It's a fun way to play with things and
I am enjoying its execution. I have a feeling that it will be used
more and more at my own table as I develop new material.
