Tuesday 14 January 2014

Random Ghost Generator

For Yoon-Suin, I came up with a little set of random tables for generating the ghosts which haunt the jungles of Láhág. Here they are:




A ghost created with this method:

Basic type: 5, Emotion: 6, Shape: 7, Appearance: 6, Method of Haunting: 4, Abilities: 18, 1, 11.

Mother Baxawalu. Mother Baxawalu haunts a vast Banyan tree growing at the bottom of a dark, ever-misty ravine. She appears as a naked old woman, carrying her own severed head in both hands. She tries to ensnare anybody unfortunate enough to stray into her ravine through the use of her sleep and hold person spells; once she has them in her power she ties them to branches in the Banyan tree and attempts to adopt and raise them as her own children, treating them like her family and trying to convince them of her undying love. Unless they escape, they typically starve to death or die of sheer terror and despair.  
Mother Baxawalu, it is said, was the mother of a zamindar of the town of Alipurduar, who was taken to the forest and beheaded by her own sons after they mistakenly assumed she had been unfaithful to their father. Stories of her haunting terrify local children, and the very sound of her cooing voice is enough to cause fear to any who have heard her tale. 

13 comments:

  1. Nice. Imagine being seduced by a beautiful dead ant that can read your mind.

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    1. It will know exactly how to seduce you.

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    2. Some of these results sound like classical ghost stories from the mid-civilised period of a culture, when they start tidying things up and making them make sense.

      And some sound like the original batshit crazy oral-culture peasent stories.

      Elder storyteller - "How did Siwu know the tree was angry?"
      Child chorus - "Because it has NO EYES!"

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    3. Oh yeah, I meant to put that if the thing is normally eyeless, an "eyeless" or "headless" result means the opposite.

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  2. A grossly distended fungus radiating feelings of pure love... we've all felt like that B

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  3. I love this until the abilities. I will replace them with waaay more creepy and esoteric ones.

    Otherwise, AWESOME!

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  4. Several of the entries on 4.1.1. seem like they should have abilities/mechanics associated with them.

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    1. I thought I'd leave that open for individual tailoring by the DM. Hence Baxawalu causes fear, because she's a terrorising ghost.

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  5. Very nicely done. I may steal this and re-configure for a straight up Oriental Adv 1st edition campaign I'm doing. Thanks for posting it.

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  6. I like this in the same way that I like the random village generator that you did a while back; with just a few setting tweaks someone can take it and use it in their own little world. And I think that the tweaks don't even have to be made at the level of setting out a table and making substitutions: you can just do it after you have rolled on the tables and got the meat of things.

    Anyway, I used your ghost generator and got the following:http://rpg-maths.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/a-ghost-hanna-on-hill.html

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  7. I noticed you are writing out all of your characters, their abilities, characteristics, etc. Doesn't that get annoying? I mean, I think we all can agree that character sheets suck!

    I wanted to share on this post the ultimate character sheet generator I found. You can see the tutorial here, where I found out about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ivzYOIyap8

    I downloaded it on iTunes here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sheetyourself/id607040305

    but you can also find it for Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.sparknet.sheetyourself&hl=en

    It was the best thing I ever did to keep everything organized in my games. :)

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