Responses to random selections from the d100 questions list by D4 Caltrops, whose OSE Encounter Activities I greatly enjoyed.
Adventurers have a hard time with frivolity. They discover quickly that power and control are not ways to get what they want, they're what they want. Adventurers' Guilds like Potion Addict and Iron Cup are always close at hand to buy treasure in exchange for things that will make them stronger, so they can go out and do it all over again.
Nevertheless, some delvers escape the cycle.
- Announcements. Take your money to the nearest Rat King outlet and have news of your dungeon victory broadcast over the entire network of deformed psychic mutants at enormous expense.
- Monster Zoo. Every dungoneer has a favorite monster and often they want to interact with them in a context that doesn't require them to fight. This leads to tragedy when dangerous exotic animals inevitably escape and destroy the local ecology.
- Bounties. Every dungeoneer has a monster they want exterminated. This one is on the edge of frivolity since bounty offerers consider it a public service/correcting a market failure (too many monsters not enough people killing them).
- Prestation. Frontier colonies try their damndest to regulate and tax the outflow of goods to other markets. Adventurers respond by either smuggling their wealth out illegally, or blowing most of it on lavish parties and extravagant gifts to the locals before leaving.
- Titles. The monarchist rump states of the Baronies have cash poor aristocrats willing to sell their least used cognomens. Just don't expect anyone in Brickmountain to call you Don.
Tell me about a thing you've included "just for you" without regard to the Players
From The Dream Merchants to Is It Killing When I Look To The Other Side to Straight To The Top to The Signal Smugglers, a huge amount of my Delta Green output was just references to media properties I liked at the time.
How would a Player go about Brewing their own Potion or making a Scroll?
There's a schedule for it in Revision 15 of Begone, FOE, which is the heartbreaker I run. The gold spent might be on reagents (monster organs, plants, chemicals) or it may itself be consumed in the reaction that creates the potion. This is why the magical revolution is powered by dungeon treasure.
Which Die from the typical (or atypical!) Polyhedrals is your Favorite and Why?
The D6. Tell me why you need more than this.
Share a Puzzle or Riddle that has produced a memorable experience for you
The puzzle from BESTOW is my favorite in any RPG ever.
How much Time do you spend Preparing between Games? What's that look like?
I don't spend a lot of time preparing between games. I spend a lot of time before I start but once I've got all the pieces together it runs itself. The most time consuming thing is creating new NPCs, or generating game statistics for existing NPCs who didn't have mechanics. In a game like Unknown Armies a couple NPCs can take more work than the rest of an adventure combined.
Besides that I look at what happened and what the players want to do next, and I look for world elements which have gone underused or forgotten which might be relevant. I look for events which were set in motion in previous games and haven't come to pass yet.
How are Skeletons Made? Ghouls? Why haven't Wraiths/Vampires taken over?
Skeletons are made by defleshing other undead. Sometimes this is deliberate excarnation like the Holy Mountain burial practice, sometimes it's natural decay and scavenging like on Hogman's Plain. Sometimes a human becomes a Ghoul when they pray to the God of the Depths for survival at any cost, or inadvertently when they commit an act of cannibalism. Elves can't become Ghouls because cannibalism is normal for them.
Wraiths/Vampires once ruled entire continents but were beaten back by the efforts of the Starhelm, a chaotic social movement of Night Slashers style undead hunters. In recent times the oversupply of Clerics has diminished the ability of night creatures to operate openly, just like advances in Clerical water creation broke the power of the Djinn Potentates to dominate the desert.
What other Hobbies do you possess that seep into Games, subtly or otherwise?
I used to play a lot of video games and still occasionally play some. For many years I used a lot of music from LISA the Painful (and fangames like Pointless and Timeless). Lately I've used a lot from Judero and Northern Journey. You can check the music tag to see what else is in there.
I started painting miniatures recently. I wrote a couple dungeons for OSE and an entire world for His Majesty The Worm to play with the toys I painted.
No comments:
Post a Comment