Interesting find of ancient crocodiles in the Sahara, both huge AND able to gallop. PICTURES.
Alligators and crocodiles and sprint rapidly for short distances, but to have one that can chase you down and swim after you.
Now to stat these up! Simplest, take standard crocodile and giant crocodile stats and bump the land speed….
It’s been a long day. Snow and cold last week, followed by warmer temperatures and a lot of rain and a thunderstorm last night. I only new there was a thunderstorm because I had to get up in the middle of the night, I can sleep through most anything once I get to sleep. That was at 3:30 and the power was out.
I got back to sleep.and was sleeping soundly and dreaming, on the edge of lucid dreaming when I swore someone was pounding on my front door, so I stumble downstairs to see who it was. No one. The dogs in their kennels were all excited and wagging their tails into the sides of the kennels making a load of racket. Did my dreaming translate that into pounding on the door? That was at 5:30 and I couldn’t fall back asleep. At 6:30 the power came back on and the streetlight across the street filled my room with light. (I need blackout curtains.)
At 7:00 my alarm went off, so I grudgingly got up and got ready for work and stopped to get massive amounts of caffeine to help me get through the day. At about 9:30 I dozed at my desk for a bit. Thankfully, it was a relatively slow day at work.
We finally got a CostCo in Kalamazoo, within a couple miles of my work, and just off the way home. My son presented me with a membership card, as he got two with his membership. Since he lives with me, we are in the same household. I made the mistake of shopping while I was hungry, but got things that are healthy…or mostly so. I saw what I consider a good deal on a mini desktop with Win7 Pro. My last desktop got zapped and all I could salvage were the peripherals and the hard drive. My laptop has a failed screen and keeps freezing up and having issues with Google+ Hangouts with the weekly AD&D game I’m in. I do some work for a non-profit, so I need a working PC to keep up. I was on the look out for a good buy.
Did I bury the lede well enough? LOL
My tired brain came up with a name based on some of the OSR and original modules, and I thought I’d write about that tonight.
The Caves of Cavernous Caverns. Awesome, right?
Or, The Caves of Chaotic Caverns.
The Crumbling Caves of Chaotic Caverns.
The Terrifying Terror of The Terrible Trolls.
What this is calling for is a random adventure/module name generator. I recall having read about something like that a couple years ago, there is probably more than one, but I don’t feel like googling for them right now.
Alliteration add punch to it, like : Red River of Raging Ravenous Revenants. Although a horde of raging revenants would be silly without the proper story and narrative elements, psychobabble and circumlocutious obfuscation….
It’s not a complete set of tables to generate a module/adventure/campaign name, since I didn’t put a die and a roll with each table, just something to get started. This is more a placeholder for me to refine my idea and come up with some sort of finished product or PDF to share at some point in the nebulous future. Ah what fun a tired brain can generate! Here is the current PDF.
d3 ARTICLE
1-3 – A/An
4-6 – The
LOCATION
Cave(s)/Cavern(s)
Tomb/Crypt/Vault/Grave
Hill(s)/Knob/Mount/Mountain(s)
Plains/Tundra
River/Lake/Sea/Ocean
Idol/Altar/Shrine/Temple
Pit/Dungeon
Fort/Castle/Fortress
Aerie
Coast
NOUN/ITEM
Secret
Night
Gold
Hoard
Horde
Clan/Tribe
Idol
Deep
Dark
Unholy
ADJECTIVE/DESCRIPTOR
Shiny
Adjective form of the Location
Frightful
Awful
Awe/Awe-full
Dread/Dreadful
Mischievous
Ravenous
Raging
ALIGNMENT (Use Lawful, Good, and Neutral if you want.)
Chaotic
Evil
CLASS (Mix in some of the AD&D Level Titles or find a Thesaurus)
Wizard/Mage/Archmage/Necromancer
Priest/High Priest/Acolyte
Monk
Thief/Rogue
Assassin
Warrior
Ranger
Paladin
COLOR
Black
White
Red
Blue
Green
Yellow
Ochre
Mauve
Taupe
Plaid
WEAPON(s)
Sword
Dagger
Staff
Hammer
Axe
Spear
Bec-de-corbin (not so much….)
Arrow
Club
MONSTER(s)
Kobold
Goblin
Orc
Hobgoblin
Drow
Pirates
Lizard/Lizardmen
Frog
Ogre
Troll
Dragon
Gelatinous jelly of slimy oozing spores (Now I need to stat that out….)
etc.
As I explained in the About and here and elsewhere, the name of this blog comes from my brother, Robert, the DM mocking my character in his game, who hired all the mercenaries he could to deal with the large hordes of orcs in his territory and all of the troops dying, making it very difficult to hire more troops. It’s a bit like “going over the top” in WWI.
It is not lost on me the irony of the term when it comes to social media, as one wants to encourage and attract followers.
But if you think about it, whether you follow my blog or not, you will die, so don’t be like all the others who die without following my blog, join the few who die valiantly (?) in the pursuit of role playing fun!
Follow me! ….. and die!
Or as best as I can imitate the way my brother says it:
.
NOTE: I went down the Wikipedia rabbit hole on this one – Wikipedia or a regular Encyclopedia is good for that when I find something I want to learn more about. Short version, there would be about 100 Roman gold Solidi in a US pound. In the early Roman empire the standard silver coin, the Denarius was a day’s wage for an unskilled laborer. A system where silver is the standard coin of trade would require one to determine how much that would buy and what the fractions of a silver piece, i.e. copper pieces, would buy.
This was mentioned in the past week and has come up on various RPG blogs over the years. Gold as the main coin is the default in AD&D. The weight of the coins is ten to the pound, which would be huge coins.
I was reading up on ancient Roman coins last week on Wikipedia, and the Romans used 72 coins to the pound of gold, for the Solidus. Another gold coin, the Aureus, was valued at 25 silver denarii, and its mass in relation to the Roman pound went from 1/45 under Nero (7.3 g) to 1/50 under Caracalla. The Solidus was a new coin under Diocletian and started at 1/60 of a Roman pound and equal to 1,000 denarii, under Constantine it had the 1/72 pound and was worth 275,000 of the massively debased denarii. In later years the Solidus equaled 4.6 MILLION denarii. The aureus was about the same size as a denarius, but weighed more due to the higher density of gold. They had copper and bronze coins that were common, but were debased just as severely as the denarius. This example shows that the price sheet in AD&D or other FRPGs is a snapshot in time, and as the economy is flooded with loot, prices should go up, if you want to model reality that closely.
The fantasy vs. reality, is that in the real world it is estimated that all the gold ever mined would make a cube of almost 21 meters on a side. The pile of loot Smaug has and other depictions of dragons has could not all be gold, based on the real world. Silver is another matter, I found this graphic that illustrates the amount of various sizes and weights of gold and silver and compares the size of all the gold every mined vs. all the silver ever mined. The ratio of gold mined to silver mined is 1:10.48 in modern times. Prior to current methods the ratio was about 1:8.52, and historically 1 ounce of gold has had the power to purchase 15 ounces of silver. Now, as of March, 2014, an ounce of gold is valued at over 64 ounces of silver.
However, in the ancient world, the silver coin was the standard. It was a day’s wages for an unskilled laborer. What I found interesting, is the for Roman soldiers, their annual pay in the Republic was 112.5 denarii per year, and was raised to 225 denarii a year by Julius Caesar; and they had to pay for their own food and arms. Centurians’ pay varied under Augustus from 3,750 denarii and the highest ranking, 15,000 denarii a year.
Depending on which era’s size and value of coin you wish to use in your game, or make your own standard; you can greatly vary the number of coins and the amount of wealth a single person can carry. In AD&D 1,000 coins weighs 100 pounds. A roll of quarters contains 40 quarters and weight 8 ounces, or 80 quarters to the pound. That would make 1,000 quarters weigh 12.5 pounds. Based on a modern pound, with 16 ounces, being 453.592 grams, or 28.3495 grams to the ounce, and a Roman pound being 328.9 grams with 12 ounces, each 27.4083 grams. This makes the Roman pound 72.5% of the modern pound, meaning that 1,000 quarter would weigh 17.24 Roman pounds. Similarly, a gold solidus would be 1/100 (1/100.798) of a US pound. With 100 gold solidi in a US pound, 1,000 of them would only be 10 pounds. Thus it would take 10,000 coins of this size to equal 100 pounds. This makes the ability to carry a large number of coins and large amount of wealth somewhat easier. Gems and jewels would still be a more compact means of carrying a large amount of wealth great distances.
A quarter has a diameter of 24.26 mm and is 5.67 g. Based on Roman coins of about the same era, both the Aureus 7 g and Solidus 4.5 g gold coins were about 20 mm. The Denarius was about 19mm and was about 3g, about the size of a penny – 19.05 mm and 2.5 g. The sestertius was about 35 mm and 20.3 g. A half dollar is 30.61 mm and 11.34 grams. The Eisenhower “silver” dollar is 38.5 mm and 22.7 g with a copper core and a copper/nickel cladding. A Morgan silver dollar is 38.1 mm and 26.73 g, so 0.4 mm smaller but just over 4 grams more massive, thus the heft if you pick up a “silver” dollar and a silver dollar.
BTW – The Troy pound is 373.241 grams with 12 ounces, Troy weight is used for precious metals. This is why a pound of feathers weighs more than a pound of gold if each is measured with their usual method and not on the same standard.
I have played in games with the default AD&D coinage system, and games with a silver standard of ten silver to one gold and ten copper to one silver and platinum and electrum are rare or non-existent, having only been used by the ancients.
My current game uses this silver standard with ten silver to a gold and ten copper to a silver. However, I have been re-thinking that. Yes, it is easy and decimalization makes the math easy. However, I am thinking about a new silver standard with 1 gold = 100 silver and 1 copper = 100 silver. That makes the copper nearly worthless, so maybe more like 50 silver in a gold and 20 copper in a silver.
Something to think about.
With 1 silver = to a day’s wage for an unskilled laborer, the value of a copper would need to be a reasonable breakdown of that. How many loaves of bread can that buy? Can a single silver buy enough to feed a family? How big of a family? A family of four, six, bigger?
The drawback to fiddling with the money system, is that you have to revise the price sheet to accurately reflect the new prices. Without a quick way, like a spreadsheet to fiddle with the relative value of each coin to the other, it becomes tedium.
[EDIT 11/16/2014 – Removed last line to remove incorrect information and a very confusing sentence.]
There are many types of currency in FRPGs and other genres of RPGs.
We are all familiar with gold and silver in coins, bars, and items, gems and jewelry, magic, trade/barter, force -such as a quest or geas, other types of items found in treasure hordes, like the awesome ewer! One powerful form of currency is the favor. I briefly mentioned this in yesterday’s post on Magic Shops.
Often a character or party will be in need of something, like a potion or scroll, to help them overcome an obstacle to one of their goals. For example, a scroll with several sleep spells to quickly and quietly make their way to a well guarded tower. Or a potion of control of the creatures guarding the tower.
When seeking such things from a local wizard, or cleric, the matter of payment comes up. Gold and jewels are nice, but what if there are other needs of the temple or wizard? Thus the favor. A form or barter, its value agreed upon by both parties.
What kind of favor is required? Small, medium, large, enormous?
The favor is often more valuable than gold and can be as valuable as magic. One agrees to a favor with a wizard in hopes of it not being too severe, or difficult to fulfill. There are small favors, like information: Where is the lair of the marauding orcs? Mid-sized favors, like: Rescue the villagers from the band of ogres and slay the ogres. And large favors, like: go slay this creature, or retrieve this item from far away.
One avoids honoring a favor at the risk of the wrath of a wizard and his associates, or the patron diety of the temple. Not honoring a favor will make it difficult to gain another favor from anyone else in the general area. Among wizards and temples, perhaps no wizard or temple of that diety will ever help that party or character again. Perhaps other temples and merchants and other NPCs with useful skills will not enter into a favor agreement.
Backing out on fulfilling a favor would be perfect fodder for a quest or geas to compel fulfillment.
One might argue that a chaotically aligned person would avoid agreeing to a favor as payment. That may be for the personality of the character in question, but if one views a favor as one of the forms of currency, a greedy character would seek to acquire favors owed them, in addition to coin, gems, magic, and other goods and services. While it might not be in the nature of a given character to enter into a favor agreement, how is that different than any other character agreeing to a sum of gold delivered by a certain date as payment?
Favors are currency in our world, but tend to be limited in scope to family and close friends. How many of us have done a requested favor for our parents or spouse? They will come out and ask for a favor. In this context, it is usually a one-sided transaction, but a home cooked meal from Mom is often worth it, and one’s spouse might have a more personal reward in mind. When one asks for a favor, how often is the reply, “OK, but you’ll owe me?”
In farming communities, one farmer will make an arrangement for another to plow or harvest a field that is closer to the neighbor, in exchange for the same in return. Of if one farmer is called away for a family emergency, such things occur.
Why not extrapolate that into the game world of whatever genre? How common is the movie or TV plot that someone owes the mob a lot of money, but they’ll forgive it for a special favor?
I play this in my campaign and have experienced it in other campaigns that the specifics of the favor is not discussed until it is time to fulfill it. Some favors took years of game time to be resolved.
Tenkar has a post asking about Magic Shops. My reply grew as I thought of things to add, so I had to write a post, as I needed one for today anyway.
Game balance and maintaining a challenge for players is the key here.
Magic shops are only places where one can acquire inks (from a magical or fantastic creature, like a giant squid’s ink, or the blood of a troll), quills (from a magic creature), paper/vellum/papyrus for scrolls, and some standard items/ingredients for spells. Any special/unique/plot hook worthy ingredients are not to be found.
There would be a market for wizards and others for body parts of various creatures for potions of control, strength, etc. How common is it for busy wizards to trade scrolls, potions, knowledge, etc. for a “favor“, choice of found magic items, body parts, and a lot of gold or gems/jewelry?
Any place with a lot of magic items/ingredients is either a wizard’s tower, occupied, or long “abandoned”, a temple or shrine, or a tomb or dungeon.
All the really good stuff, the players have to find, or find someone who has something they want/need and is willing to trade; or live long enough to have the party wizard make it.
In AD&D 7th level is awesome because scrolls can be made, with the proper materials. Also, potions can be made by wizards and illusionists with the help of an Alchemist. This makes potions, other than healing, hard to come by.
Even holy water in AD&D has rules for how much can be made and the minimum 5th level cleric needed for all the requisite spells. Holy water can be hard to come by if the cleric at the local village shrine is not high enough level or does not possess the appropriate font.
While magic was once common in the ancient world, and many of its marvels still exist and function. Knowledge of all its features and functions are lost to time, or rare manuscripts, or word of mouth teaching from one wizard to the next.
Thus adventurers have to go where they hope there are unexplored ancient ruins, in hopes of finding the things they need to reach a level where they can make their own items or easily make deals to get the good stuff from NPCs.
I have played in games where one could buy anything they wanted, and it overpowered the game and the DM ended up scrapping the campaign and launching a new one that was low magic.
I find it much more interesting to have to figure out how to survive in a low magic campaign where wizards are reluctant to share fireball and lightning bolt with up and coming wizards. What kind of favor is needed to get access to these items?
While magic wands,rods, and staves are fairly common in my brother’s game, finding one that is permanent is rare. If one makes a wand of fireballs, if the wand is not re-charged with at least one fireball within 24 hours, it ceases to be a magic wand. I have a character with a wand of ice that can only do wall of ice, because of this. It still has its uses, but is not the awesome instrument of icy death it once was. This forces much more judicious use of these items. One can blast the enemy into submission, but at what cost?
In my brother’s game, another player finally reached archmage, 18th level, via an ioun stone, and made a very complex staff, that my brother declared is an artifact, due to permanency and very good rolls by the player for the success of most of the spells. It took a lot of time in game, a lot of gold, and a lot of other ingredients and preparations. The accomplishments of this player are much more impressive than a magic rich environment where powerful things are easily required. Back in the early days, I knew players that had archmages, high priests, lords, etc. after a few sessions. Monty Haul syndrome isn’t prevalent among experienced DMs, but can suck a lot of fun out of it.
Even an alchemist making certain kinds of potions should be regulated so that players can’t just buy their way into everything. Even if there were such things, how long until the alchemist is out of ingredients to make more healing potions, or they become scarce and the price goes up?
Or as Gygax advises in the DMG, a huge influx of coin from the dungeons eventually inflates the cost of goods and services?
I am sure one can have a high magic campaign where there is balance, but for me, that would take a lot of thought and effort to plan and keep up with it all and assure a balance.
I do like a Dragon Magazine article that discussed a high level fighter going out to fight a dragon and limping back victorious, but his magic weapon and shield failed their saves, and are no more. I don’t recall which one it was as that was probably 30+ years ago that I read it, but the imagery stuck. That would bring balance with either a high or low magic campaign. One big, bad, nasty dragon gone, two or more permanent magic items destroyed in the fight, along with healing potions, henchmen and hirelings.
If magic is easily acquired, it should be easily lost. Even magic items that are acquired with great difficulty can be easily lost.
A halfling fighter/thief with a girdle of storm giant strength, gauntlets of ogre power, a ring of regeneration, and a +2 sword is nearly invincible in melee. The back stab from such a character is a death blow to the majority of creatures on the receiving end. Who needs to pick locks on doors when you can just run through them? It takes some of the challenge and fun out of it, unless the DM can present challenges, like an invasion of a lot of giants, or massive hordes of orc, or trolls, etc. The DM must give a challenge equal to the power available to the players, or it can become the same old boring slog. A magic shop where one can buy any item in the book, makes that challenge harder to maintain over time in my experience.
I joined the Amazing Castles community on G+ a couple weeks ago. Every day I get multiple pictures of new castles. Many of them are castles I have heard of, but never seen a photograph of them. There are also several that have angles that I have never seen of them before.
I like castles and wish I could afford to go to Europe and see them all.
Someday, when I grow up, maybe I can own one….
I plan to view them on my tablet and use some tracing paper, to see if I can make my own castles from the bits and pieces. Perhaps figure out how to map them on graph paper too.
One of my many interests is genealogy. I find it interesting to see when and where my ancestors were in relation to history, another interest – I have a BA in History.
There are many free genealogy programs that make it easy to generate a family tree for printing. If you are interested in a family tree for the rulers of a kingdom, or how a tight-nit extended family in a village tie together, or a major NPCs family, or even for players to chart their characters and how they might be related.
One thing I just saw posted on FB was about a Biographical Outline. There is both a PDF for printing, and a Doc file for editing.
It may not be something you use as a GM for more than a few NPCs, but as a player, it might be helpful to chart the events and places your character was involved in.
Such tools can also be helpful if you want to write a novel with a lot of characters that are related, or a historical novel, or a nonfiction biography.
Dice Drop Generators differ from All The Dice Tables/Generators in that instead of being a collection of tables to consult, the placement of the dice as they land on a blank or pre-printed sheet determine the results.
Random Dungeons from Buckets O’ Dice is a method of generating random dungeons. Dump all the dice you own on a sheet of graph paper, those that miss the paper take away. Those that roll their max, keep in place and remove the rest. The value on each of the remaining dice indicates room size. d4 = room size 4, d6 = room zize 6, etc. Read the rest at the link for details.
A variant on Dungeons from Buckets O’Dice is Five-Die Dungeon Generation. Similar to the above, but 5d6 are used, ignoring those that miss the paper.
I haven’t turned up other Dice Drop Generators with a Google Search.
[Update] Google+ has a community called Die-Drop Table Heaven.
If you know of a Dice Drop Generator, please share.
All the dice tables/generators are tables that require using one of each type of dice, i.e. d4, d6, d8, d12, d20, etc, and then referring to the table/sub-table for that die. Most I have seen only do d4 through d20. The idea is to have a single roll of these dice generate one item, NPC, situation, etc. It is a neat idea. Just trying to come up with ideas for your own such generators can help you get the creative juices flowing as part of session or sandbox prep.
I like the idea for rapid session prep when you need some quick ideas. I think this is a neat idea for quick generation of NPCs, Maps, Treasure, Different kinds of objects, dungeons, magical effects, etc.
The Swords and Wizardry SRD has two tables in PDF format that use all the dice to generate multiple characteristics quickly. The GrimRandomNPCGenerator.pdf and Grim’s Random Tavern Patron Generator.pdf, which is actually at the Mythmere Games Website, AKA Swords And Wizardry. A third Grim’s table is a Treasure Map Generator.
Grim also has a lineage generator: Grim’s Roll All the Dice Lineage Generator. Grim posted his NPC generator over on Dragonsfoot Forums.
I did some Google searching and uncovered a few more tables that use all the dice.
I plan to collect a list of All The Dice Tables/Generators.
Telecanter’s Receding Rules has a post of OSR Table Types:
Telecanter’s Receding Rules: Roll all the Dice
TelecantersEncounterSpur EncounterSpur.pdf
TelecantersHirelingSpur TelecantersHirelingSpur.pdf
TelecantersMagicItemSpur TelecantersMagicItemSpur.pdf
Ronin has a generator for Random Pits & Occupants.
Applied Phantastically has an all the dice generator for Random Tables. And related articles on generating tables.
Similar to All The Dice Tables, are multiple dice tables, or multiple result from a single roll tables. A good example of tables are the d30 tables from New Big Dragon/Richard LeBlanc and his d30 DM Companion and d30 Sandbox Companion supplements.
What tables have I missed?
Related to this are Dice Drop Generators, which is a similar idea, but is not a formal table. I will be collecting those as well. Often dice drop generators are for quick random maps.
