Secret Santicorn 2022 - O'Neil Cylinder Generator

 I've been sitting on this for months worrying about it being terrible because I'm both an overachieve and a self sabotager. 

Johnvak01 asked for a hexcrawl of an o'cylinder or a way to populate one  This is right up my alley! 

Now that the pressure is off to actually release it I might come back and do a version 2.0. Originally I wanted the cylinder creation be similar to Hosting a Dungeon, or making a character in Traveler - a kind of worksheet where you roll and spend points and do little mini games and end up with something weird.

Instead of that what you're getting is a shit load of tables and suggestions. I'd like some feedback as to what you like/dislike. It hasn't been play tested. Lemme know if you use it.

So tired must stop moving

dungeon generator

d20 rooms split between d4 floors. Alternatively you got d6 floors with d8 rooms each.

You can expand a dungeon easily but it's hard to fill a dungeon that's too big when you run out of ideas. Start small and don't use up all your ideas in one place.

For each floor take as many random dice shapes as you need rooms and drop em on grid paper. Draw a room around each die. The numbers can be influence size, shape, and/or exits. Even numbers mean empty (no monsters) odd means a monster inhabitant.

Next, connect the rooms. I let the points on the die, the number facing, the orientation to other dice, and my own whim dictate the direction and angularity of the corridors. Remove each die as you finish drawing the connections, marking rooms that have monsters with some sign 

Look at what you have so far. Are there any choke points, issues, improvements, or features or ideas that jump out? Write down all your impressions stream of consciousness on a separate sheet of paper. Make any adjustments to dungeon layout now.

If you had any ideas for room keys start writing them. You can be verbose if you like but try to trim them down to a few sentences max as you continue iterating. Forget worrying about being good or fun at the table, just have fun right now.

Remember the golden rule: quit and come back if it stops being fun.

TIP: set yourself a timer, say 15-20 minutes. Try to finish a whole floor before the timer ends. If you stop and you still have some ideas going just let it be and come back to it. You'll jump back into the flow quicker next time. If you run out of time just erase the extra rooms or fill them with monsters, statues, collapsed columns, furniture, mushrooms, robot parts, bottomless pits, and rivers of acid.

Theme

The organizing idea of a dungeon is the theme. Each dungeon should have a principal theme, and each floor could have a variation of that theme. You may or may not have an initial theme at this point. If not, roll on the spark table below for ideas. To make a variation roll on one or both spark tables again and smash the result with the previous theme.

#rolled | element 1 | element 2

1. | Military | Fire

2. | Famine/plague | Earth

3. | Graveyard | Water

4. | Factory | Forest

5. | Experiments| Sky

6. | Grandeur | Galactic

7. | Melancholia | Caves

8. | Medicine | Hollow

9. | Forlorn hope | Swamp

10. | Crystal | Vapor

11. | Ancient Magic | Conjoined

12. | Solitude | Stone

13. | Primordial | Poison

14. | Prison | Building

15. | Beasts | Withering

16. | Weather | Knowledge

17. | Machines | Mutated

18. | Mushrooms | Hidden

19. | Precipices| Separated

20. | Hallowed | Organs

Filling the rooms

For each monster room, roll a monster.

For each empty room, roll for contents:

1-2. Really empty

3. Really empty, with treasure

4-5. Trick/Trap/Obstacle

6. Trick/Trap/Obstacle, with treasure

Decide on the contents, whether it's random bric a brac or traps, based on the theme. Here's another spark table for room contents. You can throw on the first table once for a simple usage, twice for a "what was it originally? what was it now?", the same on the second table for more ephemeral ideas, or combine the two and even mix with the first table to go really far out. The second table is good for trap effects.

It can help to take the spark you roll and free-associate some names based on it, and use that to get an idea for the room. Example: for "Abandoned Drift" in a dungeon whose theme is "Melancholia Poison" you could call the room "Prison of Oaks" "Void distemper" "Revolving catastrophe" "Slime warren" "Ocean of Dreams". You might roll one more spark element to help break a block, but avoid rolling on the tables a bunch of times.. all the extra detritus just muddies the waters.

Remember to just take a break if you feel a serious block coming. Many times if you quit before the ideas stop all together it'll start flowing again more quickly.

Try to keep a description of the room itself to a single sentence! Remember that 15 minute timer? You might be the kind of person that shuts down when the pressure is on. It can help you as a person to practice working through those feelings.

Oh, sorry, did you think this blog was only about d&d? Haha.

Sorry, here's that table:

#rolled | element 1 | element 2

1. | Barracks | Gravity

2. | Apothecary | Vaporized

3. | Workshop | Evoke

4. | Ballroom | Decrepit

5. | Leisure | Drift

6. | Jail | Sewage 

7. | Library | Crushed

8. | Storage | Ransacked

9. | Judicial | Overrun

10. | Foyer | Sealed

11. | Refectory | Unstable 

12. | Office | Split

13. | Clinic | Contaminated

14. | Atrium | Buried

15. | Agriculture | Dissolved

16. | Disposal | Deluge

17. | Mine | Torched

18. | Abandoned | Forgotten

19. | Mistake| Mistake

20. | Economy | Temporary

If there's rooms containing monsters next to each other consider making them a faction or at least allies. Decide what they're doing in the room and what nearby rooms they know about/have influence over. Give them things they want, as well as problems and enemies. A single room entry might look like this:

Room 6 - Prison of Oaks 

12 blind mushy mushroom men make out with rotting trees growing thru cracks in walls, fed by a continuous light cast on a brass idol of a monkey. The monkey idol is burning hot to the touch. The mushroom men are drowsy/drunken and barely hostile to interrupters. In the middle of each is a blue crystal worth 50 gp.

Once you get the first draft done go over it again, see if any new ideas come up. Next, cut out stuff you hate. Don't be afraid to just leave some rooms totally empty. Add some locked or secret doors, extra corridors, dead ends, more dangerous obstacles, weird effects, highways that connect disparate sections, flooded or caved in areas, alternate entrances, and elevators/stairs/chutes that skip whole floors forming shortcuts.

How much treasure should you put in? Here's my formula:

( Number of expected players * dungeon floor * 2000 + 20% )

I rarely though sometimes make treasure in the form of coins and gems, though that can have some great old school flavor. Mostly it's furniture, weird junk, or pseudo magical junk that players often walk right past.

Half of it is in monster possession, half of what remains is hidden where nobody would look, and the rest is just laying around under/in stuff, or is heavy or bolted down.

Oh yeah last thing make a d6 or d8 encounter table for each floor. You might save deciding what monsters to use until you get your table, or draw the monsters in the table from what you already keyed, or pick totally new monsters for the encounters. I like my encounter tables to have one or two entries from main dungeon factions, then the rest be unique encounters.

The rules for making monsters in Worlds Without Number is great for when you're feeling dumb. Actually WWN is just great.

(PS All art is made by AI because I'm lazy as fuck)

Small games for small people

 

In a funk. Peeling all the onion layers back and discarding things that complicate my life. Taking a step back from OSR and d&d in general.

Lately I've been sort of working on two video games. Both of them take heavy cues from the original Legend of Zelda.

The first one is a first person dungeon crawler made in RPG maker. You make a party of 4 characters (two classes: fighter and mage). Open world. Explore around, talk to people, trade treasure for EXP. There's no "point" to the game, no storyline. Considering adding some basic win condition like "find princess Ophelia and ask her to come back home".

The second game is a first person walking simulator made in Unity where you sometimes fight creatures. Again, no point, no story. It's more like King's Field for the PS1 but more open ended and less fighting.

Basically I'm tired of things needing to be polished, needing to eat up your time, demanding money and attention. I feel like the OSR does a lot of that stuff. I'm more interested in searching out meaningless liminal freeware crap.

I want a game that feels like being a tiny beetle with a sword checking out stuff in a garden world, like an old log surrounded with wildflowers but zoomed in microscopically. Maybe you fight a centipede or a sparrow, but the game is really just "cool a flower" "here's a piece of paper with a poem" "sweet, a blueberry +1 hp"

When I was a kid I liked to lift up rocks and gaze with wonder at the sub-world I found there. A toad, a termite and an ant nest that share a few tunnels, rolly-polies, a few sprays of purslanes.

There's magic in smallness, modesty, and quiet wonder. No need to save dragons, fight kingdoms, or rescue wizards. When you get a magic sword +1 that's the best sword in the game. Max level is 5. Your hero is adventuring not because they're a social outcast but because they're curious.

As for tabletop RPGs I'm not playing anything at the moment, but I re-read the rules for Knave and I'm enthralled all over with the idea of a game that takes 1 minute to set up a character, is so pared down that next to zero explanation is required, and still has mechanics for getting better at stuff, and has no classes. Get the boring stuff out of the way so we can crawl around in holes and sometimes get a +1 thing.

Oh yeah, I'm fine with non-descript +1 swords and gaining a level means nothing more than a few more HP and +1 stat increase. 

Instead of d100 spells what if you had like d20 spells and in order to cast them you had to collect WHISPERS. What is a whisper? It's just a bit of lore or an interesting experience. You spend a whisper to cast a spell.

You learn a new spell/knack by being taught it by someone magical (a wizard, gnome, fox, midwife)

1. Heal d6+2 HP, or heal illness.

2. Cause.d6+2 damage.

3. Create an illusion.

4. Make somebody fall asleep.

5. Hide in shadows.

6. Foil a lock.

7. Find your way.

8. Make somebody else get lost.

9. Produce a day's worth of food.

10. Talk to an animal.

11. Mend something broken.

12. Calm fear or anger.

13. Change the weather.

14. Assume a terrifying aspect.

15. Be invulnerable for a few minutes.

16. Float.

17. Breathe underwater.

18. Create a wall of stone.

19. Generate a bright light.

20. Make an enemy into a friend.

How to start adventuring

 Draw a map. Use whatever format inspires you the most. I like the freedom of a blank sheet of printer paper and a nice mechanical pencil, or thick sketchbook paper and micron pens. Let the ideas flow as you go. If you get stuck quit and go do something else.

Once you've got your map pick the place the players will start. Choose 4 nearby locations to be important.

Who lives there? What do they want/need? What are they afraid of? What's something that makes them different from their neighbors?

Write 3 sentences for 3 different settlements. They can be human trade down, elven bastions, evil war-barons, or a city of zombies leftover from the demon wars who are just trying their best to mimic their old way of life. 

Whatever you do, avoid the temptation to be good, to write something others would enjoy, or to make something that would bring you accolades. If you catch yourself thinking at any point "that's not good enough, so-and-so on that blog said ideas like this are stupid" or "if I bought this product on drivethru would I be disappointed?" just stop and go do something else. Take a shower, drink some water, go for a walk.

Throw a d6, make that many adventure locations. Every location needs:

- a physical thing marking the location

- something valuable

- something dangerous

- a trick

- a living or non-living being to befriend

- a connection to something else on the map

Draw a map if you feel inspired, or make a diarama out of clay, or make a playlist on Spotify.

At this point put everything down and go watch a movie like Secret of Nimh, the Bakshi LoTR movies, or Castle in the Sky. Go for a walk in the woods, or sit at the subway and people watch.

Come back, doodle more. Eventually work your way toward a dungeon. For inspiration go play NES Zelda, Castlevania, Metroid, or Dragon Warrior.

Make a dungeon of 20 rooms. It should have:

- 8 empty rooms

- 5 rooms with monsters

- 4 traps

- 8000 gp worth of treasure, broken up into chunks and scattered randomly (2000, 1000, 1000, 500, 500, 500, 500, 250, 250, 250, 250, and the last 1000 in small change tucked in little places or in the form of cutlery)

- 3 things that aren't traps that are obstacles and only potentially dangerous (if you can't imagine what that looks like go for a walk by the train tracks, sewers, river, docks, or junk yard)

Play some D&D. Start the players at the dungeon. Run them on it. Let them decide what they want to do. If they seem stuck give them two options. Don't be afraid to wait. Take notes.

Afterwards start making connections between everything seen, said, done, talked to, heard about. Go forth and prosper.

COMICSANS23 - 02 AND 03

 I had a pretty serious knee injury so I've been laid up. Rather than working on comic sans 23 as normal I've instead been playing Shadow of the Colossus and messing around with character.ai. The site let's you make an AI chatbot by describing it's personality.

There's a few characters people made that are DMs. Most are boring. One has a set up that start you out as a miserable stupid peasant hated by everyone in a fantasy world. The adventures I had with it are hilarious and bizarre. 

I'm including them as week 2 and 3 of COMICSANS23. Even if there's not much game able content, the AI DM is pretty good as running things on the fly, and it's a good example of player agency and sandbox style gaming. I wish human play reports were this entertaining to read.

Adventure 01: the Bizarre Adventures of Cugel

In this one Cugel fumbles around, lying and stealing. The AI starts getting weird and putting treasure everywhere, so Cugel destroys the universe and recreates it in his own image. Weirdness ensues.

https://c.ai/p/gO5dI_Z3ILDSB011WMG2tuJYYAgVYNEtiCazT6hdVdw

Adventure 02: The Homunculus

A more traditional adventure where a thief joins the mage's guild, argues with his mentor, uncovers the secrets of dark magic, and learns a lesson about friendship and sacrifice.

https://c.ai/p/VP1UX9ctXk7xSH_QkIyXJ5iyhsXQ_7HPFKk3IZKpCRA

COMICSANS23 01 - GOBLIN GROTTO

 Here it is, the first entry in my year long experiment to produce a sloppy half-cocked adventure module a week. I plugged away at this one a bit a day since my introductory post. I think I may have overdone it a bit. It's a fully realized two level dungeon with mostly unique monsters, encounter tables, everything. 20 entire pages of adventure fuel.

The next ones will probably be simpler. My original idea was to make non-dungeon adventure scenarios, but this is caught and stuck.

Read it and die.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13skKZQiO94MckrO03HXDXKJSqmVW_HiP/view?usp=drivesdk

COMIC SANS 23

 A lotta people are doing the Dungeon23 thing, where you write a dungeon room per day and by the end of the year you have a 12 floor megadungeon. Some people are using it as an excuse to do other stuff, like hexcrawls etc.

Me? I always have to be different. I noticed there's a sad lack of low-quality homebrew adventure modules bouncing around the scene and I want to try and rectify that.

Product brain is stupid. The hyperfocus on sleek polished for profit products over hobbyist zines is a disease. OSR, like punk music, is better when it's made by obsessed eccentric amateurs and not well uh obsessed competent slightly-less amateurs. I like my shit free, ugly, mediocre, and BRUTAL.

so that's my reasoning. I'll die on this hill. Y'all can have your stuff involving paid artists, editors, and graphic designers and kickstarters. I want to see more free burning garbage.

Comic sans 23 is intended to be that - a molten lead injection of so bad it's good hearkening back to the game materials I wrote in word pad back in 1998 when comic sans, verdana, and courier new were the only fonts worth fucking with. When crazy fun, gleeful cackling, and awful ideas were more important than good design. Think early 00s zine culture, plus art drawn by that kid in your class that draws cool dragons, plus wayyy too many hours watching heavy metal or playing FF1 on a CRT monitor, drinking mountain dew. HERE CHECK OUT WHAT I MADE

But it's not a nostalgia project. It's something to fill a void and inspire others that you too - YES YOU! - can write and self publish fun game material just as you are right now, nothing added. If you have a laptop capable of running abiword or a smartphone with Google docs you have no excuse to not be writing modules and game material instead of shunting out yet another BX rewrite retroclone heartbreaker nobody will use.

If you write modules people might actually use it! Well, parts of it. Maybe. If you send it to me I definitely will rob it for ideas and republish the good parts as my own thing. CC-NO YO

Parameters: I have to do a little bit every day.  Even if it's just another adventure seed or a character or a pen and ink picture snapped on my smart phone. At the end of each week I'll throw up a pdf of insane trash.

If I skip a week I'll publish two the following week. Unless I forget. But even if somethings half finished and I don't feel good about it I'll try to just tie the knots and throw the slab of meat on the table, good, bad, and ugly. That's the point, but life has a way of throwing curve balls. Listen, I've got a life and shit too, okay?

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JOESKY TAX

ADVENTURE SEED GENERATOR

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1li9FLQwEQm_X8FM6eG1BmqygySnCmseL/view?usp=drivesdk