CapnZapp
Legend
Note: these posts are copied from Goodman Games whose forums are about to close. Please excuse if the direct copy leads to some wonky formatting.
Well, I'm finally done. I've made a carousing table that attempts to answer not the question "what happens during downtime?" but "who do you meet?"
I'm calling this party goer a "paramour" which explains the name of the table.
This table is intended to be a companion table to whatever carousing table you and your group prefers. The idea is simple: First you roll on your regular carousing table, then you may roll on this table to generate a "partner in crime" (or wine, as it were). This tells you not only what happens, but also who it happens with: have you met a new friend that will feature more in the campaign, or just a passing acquaintance?
As always, if a player gets a result that would kill off his or her enthusiasm, choose or roll another result, or carouse with no paramour at all! Nothing is worth ruining a player's fun. That said, this table is written in the OSR mindset where players actively like "things happening" to their characters - good things, silly things as well as upsetting things!
NOTE: I wrote this material for a Sword & Sorcery campaign using Dungeon Crawl Classics rules. You should find the material easy to use for most semi-light D&D clones: just about the only mechanism specific to DCC I'm actually using here is its introduction of the Luck attribute.
Well, I'm finally done. I've made a carousing table that attempts to answer not the question "what happens during downtime?" but "who do you meet?"
I'm calling this party goer a "paramour" which explains the name of the table.
This table is intended to be a companion table to whatever carousing table you and your group prefers. The idea is simple: First you roll on your regular carousing table, then you may roll on this table to generate a "partner in crime" (or wine, as it were). This tells you not only what happens, but also who it happens with: have you met a new friend that will feature more in the campaign, or just a passing acquaintance?
As always, if a player gets a result that would kill off his or her enthusiasm, choose or roll another result, or carouse with no paramour at all! Nothing is worth ruining a player's fun. That said, this table is written in the OSR mindset where players actively like "things happening" to their characters - good things, silly things as well as upsetting things!
Designer's Notes:
I should tell you up front that these tables are probably rated Mature Adult. My Sword & Sorcery games are about heroes and heroines that live life to the fullest! My inspirations include 80's S&S movies and S&S artwork from the greats, including Frazetta, Vallejo, Sanjulian... To that end, the Xoth campaign setting has been a blessing, even though few to no direct references are included in this material (none is "Xoth-dependent").
Personally, I've always thought that carousing tables that offer generic, non-specific outcomes like "You meet a companion for the night" defeats the purpose of using carousing tables in the first place. Why? Because I find it bloodless and uninspiring. What fires up my imagination is specifics! I want carousing tables that give me details about the person my hero meets! Is it a man or a woman? What do they look like? If your character is attracted to this person I want to know why! Is it some treacherous scoundrel or a dependable friend? And so on... (My mind reasons that I can always change these details, but only if I have some in the first place)
I might add that, no, while you might think this is a list of buxom serving wenches, that is not all. In fact, I have created three columns, so each player can always choose to randomize a male paramour, a female paramour, or a paramour that is of a neutral or unknowable gender, or simply a paramour whose gender can be chosen by the player (or left unspecified, if that floats your boat). In my world - as per my inspirations - gender is an important decider of stereotypes ("men are from Mars, women are from Venus"). Do feel free to ignore any or all of this! For instance, go right ahead and roll on the male table but make the paramour female anyway if you like a female paramour that acts in a stereotypically masculine fashion. And so on.