Thursday 26 March 2015

From my next project

My sophomore self-published effort is provisionally titled There is Therefore a Strange Land. Here's something from it:

Dice
Portal Type
Portal Opening
Special
1
Ordinary-looking door
Simply on opening the door
The portal leads to a limbo-like vestibule where a guardian checks equipment and confiscates roughly half the items (1-3 on a d6 for each item)
2
Out-of-place door (made of metal, leather, etc.)
At a certain time each day
The portal temporarily causes those passing through to forget how to speak (10-60 minutes)
3
Wardrobe
On “the magic words” being spoken
The portal temporarily blinds those passing through (10-30 minutes)
4
Chest
With a special key
The portal is twinned with another portal somewhere in the city; every time it opens, so does its twin – with a 1 in 6 possibility something from the bestiary, picked at random, slips through into the real world.
5
Sideboard cupboard
With a certain mixture of ingredients smeared on the forehead of those trying to enter
The portal closes for 1d6 days an hour after it is entered. It cannot be opened during that period.
6
Trapdoor
Knocking a certain code
The portal causes those entering to randomly switch hp totals, sexes, facial features, or similar. If only one person enters, swap two random stats.

And here's a piece of inspirational art:


4 comments:

  1. Awesome drawing! You drew? Very useful random portal table!

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    Replies
    1. No, it's by William Blake. I did the table though. ;)

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  2. I could hang something like that on the wall... Tables are great - randomized narrative. People, who railroad D&D game suffer from lack of imagination. A sandbox campaign setting is a story in a different form. You tell the story through geography, through encounter tables, through treasure and monsters, most significantly, through encounter tables, considering that these can encompass combat, role playing and skill encounters, terrain, weather, incidents, and other events, limited by the DM's imagination. You can describe vastly different goblin and other tribes in terms of the loot that can be randomly found on prisoners and or bodies belonging to that or other band of enemies. Unfortunately, methinks that most of the D&D writing is done by commercialized artistic hacks, the whole concept of the so-called "Flavor Text" speaks of disdain for story telling and for narrative depth.

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