Everyday Obstacles

The things that hold you up on an adventure aren't always the standard adventuring fare like monsters, traps, and harsh conditions. Sometimes it's mundane, patience-grinding little things that can still cause snags.

No matter how powerful and renowned the party is, have them:

- Wait in line
- Deal with red tape and petty bureaucrats
- Run into rude people
- End up in a place where no one's heard of them

Any scenario where the normal methods of sword, sneaking, and social cachet are less effective than usual.

Sight Hounds

Sight hounds are artificial creatures created through a combination of obscure but well-documented alchemic processes. Their exact appearance varies between manufacturers and depends on the mix of sample tissues used in growing them, but most sight hounds look like mid-sized dogs with pointy ears, fluffy coats, curled tails, and large blocky heads. The common feature they all have is the villi array.

The top of a sight hound's head and neck from the top of their muzzle to their withers is covered in a dense pelt of sensory tentacles and villi that let them see and track energy fields and abstract concepts. They have rudimentary eyes at the ends of the stalks to avoid running into obstacles, but most of their vision isn't aimed at the physical world.

Making sight hounds is cheap, but training them is difficult and expensive. It takes a skilled trainer to teach a hound to recognize what a lie looks like, the exact shades of different types of magic, or the nuances of the electromagnetic spectrum. The best of them graft on a rudimentary villi array of their own, replacing an eye and section of skull with the new sensory organ to better understand what their charges see.

Emotion is the one thing all sight hounds instinctively understand. When you're happy, they know. When you're scared, they know. And when you say they're good, they know you mean it.

1d30 Reasons you shouldn't enter the city

1 Outstanding warrants

2 There's a bounty on you
3 There's a ridiculously gigantic bounty on you
4 You were exiled on pain of death
5 You faked your death
6 You pissed off the mob
7 You pissed off the guilds
8 You pissed off the city guard
9 You pissed off the church
10 6, 7, 8, and 9 all at once, outstanding
11 The longstanding grudge between your family and the ruling House
12 The Mayor hasn't forgotten you destroyed their statue and still thinks you instigated the riots
13 An old personal enemy holds considerable power there
14 Your ex still lives there
15 You broke your betrothal and there's a shotgun wedding waiting
16 Your parents live there and you're not ready for that right now
17 Your mentor lives there and you're not ready to face them yet
18 Your family is there, don't want to make them a target
19 Your dog is there, don't want to come back just to leave them again
20 Your fan club's HQ is there and it's incredibly uncomfortable
21 Don't want to get conscripted
22 You're banned for life after the last time
23 You definitely can't afford the bribes
24 You'll be expected to attend Society functions and make endless formal visits so as to not give Offense
25 The Steward will insist you take up your duties of state
26 You'll spark another succession war
27 You'd make a valuable hostage
28 Extra-planar travel makes you nauseous
29 It's not safe to be that close to your phylactery
30 The wards would incinerate you

What's this ominous pile of stacked bones? (d30)

1 A warning

2 A welcome
3 Evidence
4 A warding
5 A boundary marker
6 A trail marker
7 A midden
8 Aftermath of a hunt
9 Aftermath of a ritual
10 An art project
11 A scarecrow
12 A deactivated golem
13 An armored necromancer (just vibing)
14 A napping skeleton (let them sleep, they look like they need it)
15 A pile of sleeping skeletons (adorable)
16 An open-air ossuary
17 A memorial
18 A trophy
19 A sacrifice
20 A saintly relic
21 A roadside chapel
22 A replacement for the menhir that once stood there
23 A nest
24 A hive
25 A home
26 A throne
27 An oracle
28 An inactive portal
29 Aftermath of a spell
30 Aftermath of a miscast spell

Alectile Dysfunction

Sometimes you try to roll a die and it just falls onto the table with a disappointing flop. Sometimes you get too eager and it goes shooting off the table and gets lost on the floor. Don't worry, it happens to a lot of people. But if it's happening often enough that it causes problems in your gaming there are a few things you can try to make your rolls more reliable.

Note: "Problems" means wasting time looking for lost dice on the floor or having to ask "should I reroll that?" It doesn't mean cheating and has nothing to do with the actual numbers you roll. This is about the physics of rolling dice and getting you back to playing the game. It's also about you. If someone else at your table is flinging dice around to the point that it impacts everyone's enjoyment of the game, talk to them about it.

The goal of rolling is to get a randomized number by having the die tumble several times before it comes to rest. There are a few variables involved in that:

• The shape of the die. A die's center of gravity changes with its shape. More ball-shaped sizes (d12, 20, 30) take less force to roll than pointier dice with pronounced edges (d4, 6, 8).
• The surface it's rolled on. There needs to be enough friction between the die and the rolling surface that the die's edges catch and it tumbles instead of just sliding along.
• The space it's rolled in. There needs to be enough of an open area that the die can roll and tumble a few times before it hits an obstacle.
• The force used to roll.
• The angle of the throw. A die thrown at a low angle to the table will travel farther than one thrown from a high angle.

If you have the right mix, the physics work in your favor and you get a nice, satisfying roll. If any of the variables are too far off, you run into problems. Start troubleshooting your dice rolling by thinking about your:

1 Force used

This is the simplest one. Are you throwing the dice hard enough? Too hard? Think about the times you've had an issue with the dice and try to see if there's a pattern. (Do pointier shapes flop more often? Try rolling those harder. Do rounder shapes go flying? Ease up on those.) Go get your dice and roll a bit, refresh your memory. It might be as simple as building a new muscle memory of how to throw each die shape. You might also just need to chill and stop chucking the d20 across the room.

2 Throw angle

You probably don't think about it, but what angle are you throwing your dice at? It does make a difference. The angle a die hits the table at determines the path it'll roll. A low-angle throw will travel farther along the table than a high-angle one and high-angle throws are more likely to bounce. Paying attention to the angle you throw at lets you predict how it'll behave.

Rolls off the table are more likely when you have a low angle and a lot of force. Flops are more common when you have a high angle and not much force. Slides happen when you have a low angle throw with force on a smooth surface, because there's not enough friction to make the die actually roll.

Try changing the angle of your throw. It's another facet of building new muscle memory and may help.

3 The space

Is your table cluttered? Be honest. If it's crowded on the table, organize it enough that you've got an open space to roll in. You don't have to clear it off completely, just make an open area that everyone can reach to roll in and make sure it stays clear. Aim for a 1' x 2' clear space and see if having that obstacle-free zone helps.

4 Rolling surface

If the table you play on is smooth, try putting something over it. Test roll on a tablecloth, piece of construction paper, sheet of craft felt, maybe even a carpet sample square. Anything with a rougher surface texture than your usual rolling surface. See if it makes a difference in how much the die tumbles and if it stops before falling off the edge of the table.


Try those changes individually and in combinations. If you still don't see an improvement in your rolls you might want to try some gaming equipment:

Dice trays

These provide a guaranteed clear space to roll in with walls to keep your dice from flying around. The walls also create a backstop for the dice to bounce off of and randomize more. I'd suggest getting a tray with a rougher inner surface like velour, felt, or suede leather so your rolls won't slide.

Dice cups

These are great for playing when there's not much room. Use the cup to shake the dice, then turn it over and reveal them like in Liar's Dice. It reduces the area needed to roll to a spot the size of the cup's mouth and randomizing by shaking inside the cup eliminates problems with the force and angle of throws. I'd suggest getting one made of leather or that has thick padding on the inside to cut down on noise while shaking since plastic can be loud.

A shot glass

Hear me out, it works. Get a shot glass. You want one wide enough that a d20 can sit in the bottom and not touch the sides. To roll this way just drop your die in the glass, it'll bounce around the inside and randomize just as well as it would with a good roll on the table. It also works with a lowball/old fashioned glass. The key is to have a glass surface for the plastic die to ricochet off. The drawback with this method is you can't roll multiple dice at once. The upside is it's ultra-compact and only takes up a shot glass worth of table space.

Dice towers

There are lots of styles, but the core principle is you drop a die in at the top and it randomizes by bouncing through a series of baffles inside the tower before rolling out at the bottom. It does all the work of rolling for you and conserves table space by using a vertical axis to reduce your rolling area to the footprint of the tower.


They're all good choices and there are plenty of styles available if you want to try them. Like anything else: Expensive doesn't mean better, look for good craftsmanship and quality materials, and consider how you'll store the thing once you've got it. (I try to look for equipment that disassembles or folds flat for easy transport and storage.)

Hopefully some of these suggestions will be useful and help you cut down on chaotic rolls so you can spend your game time playing, not hunting for lost dice. Give them a shot and see how it goes. Good luck!

Alternate Dice Interactions

I like playing around with dice. Figuring out probabilities and how they'll change in different circumstances is fun. It's one of the reasons I used to write systems, they let me implement my weird dice ideas and see how they worked. I'm more focused on writing content these days, so I figured I'd share the interactions I haven't gotten around to using yet. They might as well see the light of day now and instead of waiting for some nebulous future game.

Dice interactions are rules that directly interact with the math of a die roll to alter the outcome in some way. Some common ones most folks are familiar with are:

- Being able to reroll
- Replacing a roll result with a pre-rolled value
- Bonuses and maluses
- Advantage and disadvantage

Anything that modifies the dice rolled or the roll's result counts.

Here are some interactions I'd like to see used widely one day:

Step Up/Down

Alter what size die gets used in a roll. Make an ally's d4 roll a d6, or an enemy's roll use a d12 instead of a d20. (This one's already used regularly, but not enough that I'd call it common. I want to see it used even more often.)

Twin

Add a second die of the same size to a roll, turning the linear probability into a triangular distribution. There are already spells and abilities that let you add a specific die size to your rolls to give a variable bonus, but this is more about creating the curve probability than just providing a boost to the roll's result. It lets the player choose to avoid the risk of rolling very low or high and increase the probability of mid-range values. A play it safe strategy.

Pool

Add multiple dice of the same size and turn a single-die roll into a pool. Exactly how many dice are in the pool could be determined based on level, abilities, spell effects, whatever. It's not important. What's more interesting is how to resolve a roll like this. A number of successes-based threshold doesn't make sense for a roll that likely originally had a target number to beat for resolution. The two options that make the most sense to me are:

1) The result is the total of the dice. So a pooled skill check would (likely) have you rolling Xd20 and a pooled damage roll would be Xd[damage die]. It could easily end up being overwhelmingly powerful. It would also have the same mid-range stabilizing effect as Twin since it introduces a bell curve. The more dice you add, the more centralized the curve.

2) The result is one value chosen out of the separate rolled values. So if you roll a pool of 3d20 and get 2, 14, 9, only one of those is your result. There are a few ways you could decide which of the values is chosen. The most obvious is to pick highest or lowest, but that would just make this Advantage/Disadvantage with more dice. That's boring. The better option is that the player chooses which of the values they want to use.

Bulk

Replace the lowest value on a die with the highest so the highest value's probability is doubled. (Ex: On a d4 you'd replace the 1 with a 4 so your possible outcomes are 2, 3, 4, 4.)

Sap

Replace the highest value on a die with the lowest so the lowest value's probability is doubled. (Ex: On a d4 you'd replace the 4 with a 1 so your possible outcomes are 1, 1, 2, 3.)

* The probabilities for Bulk/Sap are different from Advantage/Disadvantage. The -vantage rolls are independent, meaning you still have a 1/X chance of each possible outcome in each roll. For Bulk/Sap the highest/lowest value has a 2/X chance of occurring. The significance of the 2/X probability also changes with the die size and has a much more dramatic effect on smaller dice.

Cycle

Rolls don't have a set die they use. Instead you cycle through the dice in a standard set, either stepping up or down with each new roll. So if you start a session rolling a d20, your next roll will use a d12, then a d10, a d8, d6, then after you roll a d4 you cycle back to a d20.

You can alter the direction of the cycle at any point with abilities/spells/etc to do things like making an enemy go 8-6-4 then reverse direction to 6-8-10 order instead of looping around to 20, or timing it beneficially for an ally.

Spiral

For enemies only. Each time they succeed add a die to their rolls so they have an ever-growing dice pool. The more they succeed, the more likely they are to succeed in the future in a self-sustaining spiral and get more dangerous as time goes on.

1d12 Guardian Beasts

1 Little girl in a pristine, frilly white dress. Happy to see you. Hands dripping red.

2 The combined spirits of eight thousand and one crows. Yoked together into a single body and mission but able to split apart into a cloud of beaks and claws.

3 You. Not a doppelganger, not a clone or shadow-self. It's actually you.

4 Ancient warrior's ghost, bound to his duty forever. Very friendly and understanding if you take a minute to stop and talk.

5 Your parents. They love you and are so proud of you, but they won't play favorites.

6 Five-legged horse made of fingernails with dog's teeth and dozens of tiny glowing eyes.

7 Many-tendrilled beast of shadows. A zone of hungry darkness, fuzzy at the margins until it strikes with razor edges.

8 Giant moss-furred hound made of black soil with bog iron bones, teeth, and claws. Melds into and erupts from the earth at will.

9 Lurid fungal bloom encrusting several rooms. Easy to pass. Releases spores that make interlopers want nothing more than to stay and protect the place.

10 Worms. Hundreds of thousands of worms, attracted by sound and working together to undermine the ground below intruders. Devour anything organic that falls through to them.

11 Sturgeon made of luminous plasma, swimming placidly through the air and unaware of its surroundings. Arcs of electricity leap from its spines to any conductive objects or creatures nearby.

12 Nimble eight-legged construct of prisms and lenses mounted on a titanium armature. Can direct rays of focused light to blind and incinerate by repositioning its body segments, using the pieces like burning glasses.

Experiment: The Voice of the City

This is an idea I've had for a while about how players could communicate with an abstract entity that's influencing large numbers of people, like the tutelary spirit of a city, or something less benevolent. It's not a situation where solid rules would be useful, instead it'd rely entirely on good descriptions of the phenomenon to convey what's happening and how potentially unsettling it is.

The kind of entity I'm envisioning could be sentient or not, relatable or utterly alien, but it has to be incorporeal. There's no physical manifestation of it. No avatar or possessed medium or interpreting oracle that comes to speak directly to the players. It also has to have a subtle influence over a lot of people, on the scale of a metropolis. Possibly even a small country.

If the players want to speak to it, they just need to talk within earshot of any of its people and it will hear.

If it wants to speak to the players, it subtly directs the normal conversations of people within its domain so certain words occur in a distinct pattern or are emphasized. If you listen to the general hubbub and background noise of the city its messages are clear in the overlapping, overheard snippets of dozens of unrelated everyday conversations going on around you.

(You could easily have an antagonist who's using some flavor of mass mind control do this to talk to and taunt the players, but I prefer it as the work of a semi-scrutable intelligence.)

I'll try it out next chance I get and report back.

1d8 Weird Woods Encounters

1 A trail you've never noticed before appears. It connects to a trail you're familiar with and it's old, made of cracked concrete partially covered with washed-out dirt and gravel instead of the mulched woodchips the other trails use. You don't know where it goes.

2 The 'trail closed' barriers are up. They usually only close that section of the park off in the winter. What's happening back there to make them barricade those trails in the middle of summer?

3 A wooden foot bridge across the river that's been swept from its moorings and pulled several feet downstream. It's stable, embedded in the stream bank now, but noticeably skewed.

4 A secluded section of trail looks down from a bluff over the river. On the far bank someone's built a conical lean-to around the base of a tree. There's a clear path down to the river bank and a fallen log you could use as a bridge if you wanted to look closer.

5 The trails you walked and the park maps don't match. The map says there's a single mile-long loop trail in the area you were and doesn't show any hint of the switchbacks, connectors, and forks you found. It took you almost an hour to get back to trails you recognized. Whatever's on the map, it's not where you were.

6 That deer was too calm. The others in the herd ran off when they heard you coming and all you saw were tails and glimpses through the trees. That one though, it just stood there watching you. Or watching behind you? What was it looking at?

7 An overgrown footpath off the official trail leads into a secluded clearing that's too perfect. Just enough shade, no bugs, and a circle of stones all exactly the right size and shape to sit comfortably on arranged around a pile of mushroom-covered logs. It's dead silent.

8 The park's property used to belong to a family. Along one of the trails is a small private graveyard with six stone markers. Each is engraved with the names, dates, and kind epitaphs for the family's departed dogs.

True Name Variations

The idea of names having power is ancient and mythic and practically universal across cultures. A magical name that describes the essence of a thing and gives the Namer control over it is a classic, and of course it seems like hubris when the Namee is more powerful than the Namer. I love it and thought I'd play around with some twists on the old mainstay:

0) If you know something's True Name you don't gain power over it. It gains awareness of you and starts taking an interest.
Whatever primal force you're trying to contact goes "Hey, who are you and how do you know my name?" Like if a frog suddenly called you by name you would probably pay attention and engage with it at least a little, even if you could just walk away.

1) A True Name is accumulated, not a single thing.
You're not born with a True Name and not everybody has one. You end up with one as you gain nicknames, epithets, aliases, and titles throughout your life. Once you hit a threshold of Names the collection of all of them becomes your True Name. Reciting all of someone's Names in sequence is what has power, and it does require all of the Names, including private pet names and what their parents called them when they were little.

2) True Names change frequently depending on where someone is and what they're doing at the moment.
Only one Name out of an entity's collection is the True Name, but which one it is changes with the aspect of their persona they're expressing. If you want to get the attention of The Charnel-Daubed Lady of War when she's at home with her family, you need to summon "Mom." 

3) There's only one True Name out of an entity's collection of Names, and it's the one they like best and think describes them the most accurately.
Their True Name will change over time. To summon them you need to know them well enough to correctly choose the current True Name from their entire collection of Names.

* Giving people and entities new Names can alter them, but also protect them by increasing the size of their collection of names. While they don't have any power to control, Names definitely have the ability to influence their bearers.

Things to do at sea

Back in 2019 I was running a campaign that involved a lot of traveling. It wasn't a full-blown hexcrawl, but tracking time and managing supplies while on the road was an important element of the game. Eventually the party ended up on the coast. And went to sea.

One of the common problems of trying to run a game on the ocean is that there's not much to do aboard a sailing ship. There'll be external events like encounters and occasionally places to go ashore, but on the ship itself? Not as much. It's just you on your little boat, isolated in the vast expanse of water.

You could handwave the days and weeks of sea travel by saying the party boards a ship in port A then land two weeks later in port B and never actually interact with the ocean at all, but if you want there to be some adventuring done at sea then dealing with the shipboard downtime can be tough. I wanted to try it, so I came up with this subsystem to handle the lulls between bouts of extreme aquatic danger and mystery:

Each player can pick 3 things to do each normal, uneventful day.

They can't pick an activity more than once in the same day.

Doing something once gains them a little insight and grants a small, one-time bonus to a related task later.

Doing the same thing 3 times or more counts as light training and gains them a permanent bonus or specialty to the related skill.


Things to do aboard ship

• Mend sails/ropes and repair the ship: Hone crafting skills, learn about ship construction.
• Practice tying knots: Bonuses to using ropes and rigging.
• Whittle or scrimshaw: Hone crafting skills, specialty in jewelry/sculpting/decorative details. Might end up with something you can sell.
• Fish: Get food, learn about ocean creatures and marine survival skills.
• Gamble: Build ties with the crew, no gambling for money at sea.
• Tell stories: Build ties with the crew. Hear rumor, gossip, and legends about the sea.
• Practice sparring: Get better at fighting on moving and uncertain footing.
• Climb around in the rigging: Hone climbing skills, acrobatic or athletic. Get a head for heights.
• Hang out with the Navigator: Learn to read maps, predict the weather, and interpret the stars.
• Help in the galley: Build ties with the crew, hone cooking skills.
• Befriend the ship's cat, teach it tricks: Adorable. Hone skill with animals.
• Wakeboard behind the ship (tied on so you won't be left if you fall): Because.

1d20 Cave Wonders

1 Bioluminescent [1 worms, 2 fungi, 3 jellyfish, 4 coral]

2 Giant crystal chamber
3 Massive geodes
4 Stalactite cathedral
5 Crystal pool
6 Bottomless spring (1 healing, 2 resurrecting, 3 cursed, 4 really cold)
7 Sourceless river
8 Towering waterfall (1 boiling, 2 curtain, 3 lava, 4 frozen solid)
9 Hot springs
10 Lava tube maze
11 Hallucinogenic gases that make you see god(s)
12 Vast dome miles across
13 Underground forest fed by shafts that let in sunlight
14 Vivid paintings
15 Exquisite bas reliefs
16 Hall full of statues
17 Ancient lost city (1 cyclopean masonry, 2 rock-cut, 3 ivory and bone, 4 crystal)
18 Ancient necropolis (1 ruined, 2 sealed, 3 sunken, 4 extremely haunted)
19 Dirt whale
20 Immortal naked mole rat colony

1d20 Cave Hazards

1 Random hole (1 vertical, 2 steep-sided, 3 giant cenote, 4 ankle-breaker)

2 Chasm (1 deceptively wide, 2 jumpable(?), 3 narrow, 4 bottomless)
3 Sheer cliffs
4 Undermined passage
5 Narrow squeeze
6 Dead end
7 Lost mineshaft
8 Flooded passage
9 Flash flood
10 Rockfall
11 Earthquake
12 Bad air (1 blackdamp (CO_2), 2 whitedamp (CO), 3 stinkdamp (H_2S), 4 afterdamp (CO +))
13 Firedamp
14 Radioactive ores and irradiated stone
15 Guano and ammonia fumes
16 Toxic mold and spores
17 Hot springs and vents
18 Ant hive (1 stinging, 2 biting, 3 stinging and biting, 4 harmless but gross)
19 Giant ant hive
20 Carnivorous naked mole rat colony

(This list is included in Red Solstice vol. 2, available now from Spear Witch!)