Friday, August 19, 2011

You want a randomly generated divine idol for you game? The Headless Horse Archer delivers!

Note: even though all posts so far revolved around the World of Zu setting, this blog is in no way meant to be a single-world blog or a single campaign documentation. Here, for instance, is something I wrote for a completely different game I intend to run sometime in the future, one that revolves around stone age tribes, divine idols and Polynesian/Mesoamerican aesthetics. And flying sharks. What we have here below is a set of tables for randomly generating a divine totem. It's not quite complete - it would be nice to also have a random table for exactly what magical effects they can bestow on petitioners -, but this is as far as it's been written up as of now.

Note: The only way of doing tables in Blogger I know of is to code them manually in HTML and hope the formatting comes out as usable. Sorry for the mess. The intention is that a single column can refer to several previous lines. For instance, if you roll "2" for appearance, then you next roll 1d6 to see if it's a humanoid, animal/monster or plant shape. Then you roll another d6 to see if it's rough or finely worked, which goes for whichever shape you rolled.


Appearance

1monolithic/geometric
2figurative1-2 humanoid1-4 crude1-4 full (partial for humanoid)
3-4 animal/monster5-6 lifelike5-6 partial (full for humanoid)
5-6 plant
3unworked stone
4fungal/tentacled
5spiked/bladed/tangled
6negative space (pit, cleft, etc.)
7group of small, separate pieces(roll again for type of pieces)1-4 organised layout
5-6 random layout
8compound, 2-5 elements1-3 uniform style
4-6 mixed style

Effect

1-3: 1 effect
4-6: 2-7 effects

1fire1-3 fully covered1-2 normal firenormal burn
4-6 partially covered3-4 colourful flame4-6 magical effect
5-6 special (sparks, sticky flames, etc.)
2water/ice1-2 normal1-3 normal effect
3-4 colourful4-6 magical effect
5-6 other (flows upwards, shifting ice, evaporation, etc.)
3air (whirlwind, cloud pillar, mist shapes etc.) 1-3 normal effect
5-6 magical effect
4light (halo, glimmer, inverted shadow, etc.)1-3 normal effect
5-6 magical effect
5sound1-3 positive/neutral1-3 no special effect
3-4 sinister4-6 magical effect
6movement1-2 hover/float
3-4 rotate
5-6 pulsate/throb
7heat1-3 warm/hot1-3 only to touch1-3 no magical effect
4-6 cold4-6 radiating4-6 magical effect on touch
8emotion1-3 positive(calmness, safety, happiness etc.)
4-6 negative(fear, anger, confusion etc.)


Communication

1-2speech1-2 whisper
3-4 normal speech
5-6 thundering roar
3telepathy1-2 weak, simple1-3 "heard" by one person
3-4 medium strength4-6 "heard" by everyone nearby
5-6 overwhelming, complex
4through a speaker1-3 human1-2 marked individual
4-6 animal/monster3-4 anyone
5-6 sacrifice
5visions
6dreams
7light/shadowplay
8thought implanted into subject1-2 weak temptation
3-4 moderate inducement
5-6 overriding obsession

3 comments:

  1. Cool! I'm going to roll some up for my dungeon.

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  2. Cool! This will come very useful to roll up idols with horrible curses and magical effects for my upcoming campaign. This is a very useful blog, thank you!

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  3. I've been thoroughly enjoying your blog Premier, thanks for sharing.

    For tables I find it easier to just do one up in Word, covert Word to PDF and then take a snapshot of the table. Upload the pic of the table to the blog - no mucking around with html that way.

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