Town Crier

Here's a d20 town crier table to help the city feel more like a living entity. I'll roll on it near the beginning of a session to get an event (separate from the encounter tables I use periodically throughout the session). The list was started using this as a seed: [link].

Source: British Museum
  1. Event coming up (market day, holiday, festival, feast)
  2. Crown introducing new tax (luxury, staple, property, toll, market)
  3. Notorious criminal escapes / bounty offered (thief, murderer, assassin, arsonist, demon worshiper, sorcerer, monster)
  4. Someone did something to win renown (won prize fight, bred otherworldly roses, solved ancient riddle, saved child from burning building, etc)
  5. Superstition / tradition supposedly necessary for day (no crossing water, dress in red, fasting, etc)
  6. Public execution (thief, petty noble, murderer, arsonist, heretic, usurper, looters)
  7. Troubles in neighboring boroughs (riots, fires, famine, plague, sorcerous, monsters, warring groups)
  8. Weird event (disappearances, fiery comet, sighting of strange creature, etc, etc)
  9. New laws or abolished laws (curfew, sumptuary, Grey District, arms, other)
  10. Big crime or crime wave (burglaries, pickpocketing, murders, counterfeiting, arson)
  11. Denouncement of traitor (noble, sorcerer, librarian, political figure, knight)
  12. Aristocratic news (new noble, someone appointed to order, territory changes hands, marriage, death, birth)
  13. Discovery (portal, dungeon, library, creatures, mine, distant land)
  14. Impending disaster (flooding, cyclone, sorcerous, invasion, plague, famine)
  15. Party related news (last notable thing they did, or the fallout from a recent adventure)
  16. Death / funeral (lord, merchant, religious leader, gang leader, social leader, famous animal)
  17. Sizable signing fee offered for recruits for specific campaign (sewer militia, local lord's retinue, gang, mercenaries, library)
  18. New mercantile endeavor (seer/magical, new portal discovered, fine arms/armour, luxuries, exotic goods)
  19. Upcoming entertainment event (pit fight, concert, play, drumming competition, mazzascudo)
  20. Increased / changed group activity (gang, cult, lord, political group, animals)

Mazzascudo: [wiki] [wiki2] [images and context from tumblr]
Grey District: The ruined/haunted half of the city across the river, illegal to visit/loot, giant megadungeon for the PCs

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Strigastadt VIII

Image
Tonight's game was with a smaller crew than we're used to, yet it was quite eventful! It turned out to be a super long play report, so maybe grab a cup of tea before you dive in. :) Characters: Belina the (mutant) printer [Jackson] Barbarus the aspiring chicken farmer [Also Jackson] Roxanne the wrecker [JT] Cecilly the acrobat [Alex] The session started with some upkeep / long-term plans. Cecilly is rounding up acrobats, jugglers, and other performers in a scheme to establish a sort of street performers' union backed by the protection of the Stone Cats. She found a few acquaintances willing to join if the Stone Cats established their reputation a little more solidly (Roxanne: "So we're a clown gang now?"). Work was also done to take control of the Belltower, former hangout of the Blind Vipers and crossroads of two inter-building bridges, where Cecilly hopes to establish a sort of soft toll checkpoint. The resident old bell-keeper resignedly sighed and ...
Read more

Dog Breeds

My players requested an animal trainer profession. One thing led to another, and I wound up making a table for dog breeds available in the marketplace. I'm planning on using James Young's mechanics for animal training ( link ) with a couple tweaks, since they seem super cool and please my programmer heart. Fair warning, I haven't playtested this yet so my approach could be way off base, but I wanted to post before I wandered off and forgot. Also, I am no expert on dogs, so my apologies if any of the below info is off. Dog base instincts: Obey 1 Chase 2 Protect/bark 2 Survive 3 Play 2 Personality : +1 random instinct Dog breed : roll 3d6 for more typical adventurer pups, or d20 for any. Whatever entry you roll, the adjacent two are also available for purchase here. x is the quality rating. Gets +x to the instinct listed for that breed (including non-standard instincts). For reference, in my system 5-6 is the starting grit and move for humans. Max trained move is 9...
Read more

Hexclock / Hexcrawl Movement

Image
While playtesting the ruleset I'm working on I ran into some hiccups with overland movement rates. Frequent changes between terrain types caused my simplistic "3 hexes for plains, 2 for forests, etc" rules to not flow as nicely as I'd wish. The multipliers I was using could also combine a bit too extremely, and flat bonuses felt wrong at lower rates where mountains would proportionally benefit far more than plains, for example. Here's the system I came up with as a result - it has worked nicely in my tests thus far. It requires a bit of math though. Nothing hard, but fair warning in case math is especially difficult for you. This is for 3-mile hexes. Cost is how much it costs to enter the hex, from a per-watch budget of 60. Hexes per watch given for ease of reference. A watch is four hours, and they can travel without penalty for two watches a day. 3 watches = Tired, 4 = Exhausted, 5+ = make Grit/Con checks at increasing penalty. For each degree of ease, move one ...
Read more