Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Sounds in the Distance - Whatre Those Hepcats Up To?

Riffing off my pal Anne H.'s great post about signs of an upcoming encounter

Anne is one of my favorite players, bar none, and she's a terrific thinker in terms of DM side stuff. In our exchange on MeWe (yuck, btw, still not a fan of the UI or ease of finding conversations)...

excuse me - in our exchange I pointed out that Moldvay has the DM determine the distance until the encounter happens with a 2d6 times 10', the direction as she or he might wish. That's what all those empty rooms are for in the Moldvay stocking process: to have free spots to put random encounters.

I also have a "Gang Names" generator that's pretty amusing

 I guess one part of the artistry of being a DM is knowing and conveying what those weirdos are up to. Luckily, I've done a miniscule part of that for you. I play with Tablesmith a great deal and I like to do this sort of thinking a couple of times and then not again... So I made a "What Those Folk Up To?" thing in Tablesmith that helps me stock nefarious weirdos and their strange and inscrutable motives. HOW you convey those things they are doing is up to you, I suggest with sounds and smells since (hopefully) the party won't see those creatures if they are more than 30' or so (so out of lantern light).

Here's a list. You could use a d100 and keep rolling until you got something. All this stuff might lead to combat, I guess, or probably (in my game, at least) more likely to get into a roleplay thing. I stick with gibberlings because of the swords, hair, and chicken feet lets me use my Greaser voice from The Outsiders or maybe Grease or some Jersey variant.

#
# NMS_HumanoidMotives
#

  1. searching for food
  2. eating food
  3. searching for mates
  4. mating
  5. gambling
  6. squabbling about betting
  7. in a war party
  8. in the midst of battle
  9. trading
  10. squabbling about trading gone wrong
  11. scavenging
  12. hiding food stores
  13. digging a hole
  14. painting glyphs
  15. painting historical scenes
  16. painting mythical scenes
  17. dancing around a fire
  18. engaged in a religious ritual
  19. burying their dead
  20. entombing their dead
  21. building a funeral pyre
  22. cremating their dead
  23. disposing of evidence
  24. caring for their young
  25. instructing their young
  26. building a shelter
  27. building a fire
  28. healing their wounded
  29. telling tales
  30. telling jokes
  31. on the lam
  32. recovering from a battle
  33. building a shrine
  34. building a temple
  35. capturing livestock
  36. hunting game
  37. in a courting ritual
  38. gathering supplies for a shelter
  39. preparing to hibernate
  40. escaping from persecution
  41. escaping from imprisonment
  42. capturing prisoners
  43. looking guilty
  44. looking unsettled
  45. looking anxious
  46. looking terrified
  47. fleeing a powerful enemy
  48. dismembering a large carcass
  49. cooking soup
  50. bickering
  51. wrestling
  52. carousing
  53. drinking liquor
  54. drinking hallucinogens
  55. consuming drugs
  56. passed out
  57. recovering from illness
  58. suffering from illness
  59. dying of some plague
  60. laughing uproariously
  61. tittering
  62. hiding
  63. hiding badly
    64. to 75 (roll twice - included for your ease and merriment)
    76-100 Getting ready to mess you up, interloper (this isn't in the original Tablesmith thing)



1 comment:

  1. You know what just struck me. Torchlight goes out to 30', so the DM has to roll a 2 or 3 on 2d6 to have the monster start out within visible range. So there's a like 90% chance that the wandering monster is outside of sight range.

    90% of the time, when there's a wandering monster, it's too far away for anyone in the party to see it? This is one of those rules, like putting every property someone lands on but doesn't buy up for a bid in Monopoly, that makes you question whether anyone has ever really played the game the way it's written, and makes you wonder how different it would feel to do so.

    ReplyDelete

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