The why of noble families

A set of tables for figuring out the local rulers and what their deal is.

These nobles are (1d6):

1. the last scions of a fading dynasty.
2. a small and tight-knit crew.
3. an extended clan of half-siblings, cousins and adoptees.
4. multiple branches at odds over the family money and land.
5. an obscure distant cousin and blood relatives who inherited from the main line.
6. a recently-elevated fighter & family, trying to act respectable.

Their family head is (1d6):

1. a stolid warrior, experienced in war and administration.
2. a second son who inherited when his brother died. Possibly mad.
3. a disciplinarian grandmother who rules her descendants with an iron fist.
4. a scheming uncle, always looking for ways to increase his family's fortunes, and therefore, his.
5. a weak-willed figurehead with a cunning spouse whispering evil plans to them.
6. a brash and impatient hunter who prefers entertainment over business.
   

Their realm is mostly (1d6):

1. farmland.
2. riverland.
3. forest. 
4. rocky.
5. marshy.
   
6. mixed (roll twice).

It sometimes suffers from (1d6):

1. drought.
2. flooding.
3. heatwaves.
4. freezing winters.
5. crop blight.
6. plague.
   

Their income is from (1d6):

1. collecting rent.
2. investment and moneylending.
3. mining on family land.
4. timber and sawyering.
5. charging tolls on a trade route.
6. sources they don't talk about.

A notable family accomplishment is (1d6):

1. victory in a historic battle.
2. victory in an honour duel.
3. ridding the district of a dangerous monster.
4. cultivating a new wine grape.
5. pacifying a warlike people.
6. draining a swamp to create arable land.

A family misfortune is (1d6):

1. madness in the bloodline.
2. no suitable heirs.
   
3. a rivalry with another noble family.
   
4. a debt to a supernatural creature.
5. declining finances.
6. a generational curse.

An advantage they have is (1d6):

1. an alliance by marriage to a more powerful family.
2. a sturdy and well-provisioned keep.
3. a busy trade route through their land.
4. a local religion which venerates their ancestors.
5. a powerful knight sworn to them.
6. a wise and loyal advisor.
   

Their current biggest problem is (1d6):

1. unrest among the peasants.
2. evil cults gaining a foothold in their territory.
3. monsters killing people at night.
4. banditry.
5. a dismal prophecy.
6. omens and portents.
   

In their lands, adventurers are (1d6):

1. expelled.
2. barely tolerated.
3. watched, but allowed to work.
   
4. ignored for the most part.
5. encouraged.
6. celebrated.

Click here to randomly generate:

(Thanks to Spwack of the Slight Adjustments blog for the generator code.)

The Shaldon prison

A prison which polymorphs its prisoners into forms more suitable for selling into slavery.

The fishermen of Shaldon always enjoy a plentiful catch thanks to the town's good relationship with nearby merman settlements. The aquatic creatures guide their fishing boats to shoals where they can spread their nets. In return, the town maintains the prison and uses it to jail criminals and other unwanted visitors.

The cells are short of amenities - there's no point putting bedding down when it'll just wash away. The cliff-side prison is built so that the lowest level, where the cells are, is below the high tide line. 

The cells have spells built into their very bricks. First Sleep, to keep prisoners from panicking as the waves start to splash into their enclosures. Then Polymorph, to change them into mermen. When the tide reaches its peak, The Shaldon mermen swim in to collect their new slaves. A life of cultivating kelp awaits them.

Prisoners who make their saves and resist the Sleep spell aren't as lucky. If they're not asleep, Polymorph doesn't trigger. They're likely to drown when the air pockets at ceiling height turn stale.

There are three cells the guards don't use. They may never have been used. Instead of polymorphing the occupants into mermen, they change them into sharks. Each door is closed from the outside with a handle that must be twisted upward to open them. Each handle has a wooden float secured to it by a cord, so the doors unlock by themselves when under water. The guards don't talk about these cells.

The soul-cleansing pool

A device that drains the evil out of a person and stores it unsafely.

The abbey at Mospid town owns a curious device, a shallow pool connected by underground pipes to a man-sized glass globe. Anyone who enters the pool while it's active has all their evil thoughts and impulses sucked down the drain and into the globe forever. Once in the water, the suction applied to their contained evil keeps them from stepping out until the transformation is finished and the evil is gone. 

People who have been through the process are placid, cooperative, and completely unable to make decisions for themselves. Perfect for cloistered monks. They work the abbey's fields and dairy herds, producing the famous Mospid cheese the abbey earns so much of its income from. The abbey also accepts a small fee from the local magistrate for every malcontent they turn into a productive member of society. As the abbot himself would say, the order is doubly blessed. (And any rumours about converts working themselves to death while their careless minders sleep or gamble are vile lies and perilously close to blasphemy.)

If there's one fly in his ointment, it's the glass globe. During the first year the pool was used, the evil it contained was just a thin haze. Now it's a roiling dark cloud crackling with electrical discharges. Sometimes the globe rocks on its stone base. The abbot has it strapped in place with ropes and nets while the pool's not in use. While it is, and there are visitors watching, he has men standing around it ready to steady it as needed. They don't like touching it. It feels like doing something shameful.

Clearly the amount of evil being stored now is a problem. The abbot has been experimenting with draining evil into pilgrims. These pilgrims come to the abbey for hospice care while they die, conveniently wiping out the burden of second-hand evil. The process is difficult. Like trying to take a cupful of water from a high pressure hose. Excess evil has been leaking out into the surroundings. It causes nightmares, sickens livestock and sours milk. The abbot suspended the experiments when hostile half-human creatures started to appear in nearby forests.

The obvious solution is to close the pool down and pay someone to lose the globe out past the edges of civilisation. The abbot vetoed that idea. Mospid Abbey depends on on the money and workforce the pool generates. Instead, he's been paying wizards and sages to secretly travel to Mospid and examine the globe. None of them have had any useful suggestions yet, so he has them processed through the pool to keep the secret.

The problem is coming to a crisis point. It's the perfect time for a party of adventurers to make things better worse different.

Magic item: Mini-iceberg maker

A pair of magic skates that freeze water to ice under your feet and are completely impossible to use safely.

When Robert Griffensmere, the youngest scion of the Griffensmere family, fell in love with the youngest daughter of the rival Dunbridge family the heads of both houses were furious. Both teens were confined to their respective households and forbidden to communicate.

The houses were separated by a wide bay which routinely froze over during winter. Robert was a strong skater and looked forward to gliding to his lover over a path of ice. But he didn't want to wait until winter. He had the household conjurer make him a pair of ice skates that would freeze the water under him as he moved.

When he tried them, he discovered that it's much easier to balance on a solid sea of ice than on two square feet of it, rocked by waves and his shifting weight. He tipped into the water and found to his horror that his skates were now frozen to an ice boulder. He was floating, but head-down. Unable to free himself quickly enough, he drowned.

The first people to investigate the floating patches of ice in the bay on a warm spring morning were a privateer crew on their way to harass shipping lanes. The captain immediately recognised the potential of what he found. He had the body lifted aboard and coated in tar to preserve it.

Now the ship drags Robert and his magical skates behind them to create a wall of mini-bergs to damage or delay small target ships.

Mini-iceberg maker

Usage: All characters
Charge: Permanent
Appearance: Two skates attached to a tar-coated corpse. When dropped in water it floats upside-down and forms ice on the skates.

Magic item: Spoons of revealing

A magic item that can tell you where you food came from.

This item consists of three wooden spoons, each with a hole bored through the handle halfway along its length. They come with a tapering ivory rod. If the spoons are slipped onto the rod, they sit at different heights and turn easily.

If you've eaten a meal or ration using all three of the spoons, they swing to point at:

• The field or pasture the main ingredient came from
• The oven where it was cooked
• The water source used in preparing it.

If the meal was prepared without one of those things (eg. dried meat or pickled vegetables), the spoons rotate but can't settle on a direction.

Duke Buckley took a lot of pleasure in being a food snob. He squeezed his peasants for taxes to pay for the best of everything. Spices from far-away lands, meat from animals bred for tenderness, vintage wines. He had a wizard craft the spoons so he could boast that he knew every step of every meal's preparation.

He should have paid the wizard for a Detect Poison spell. Or been willing to share his meals with a poison taster. He might have lived to enjoy more of them. His last meal of braised game hen with saffron contained enough hemlock to kill a bull. Squeezed peasants sometimes squeeze back.

The assassin took the spoons as loot and sold them back to the wizard who made them. The wizard suspected that a delivery of eel fillets came from further away than the seller claimed, and was the cause of his stomach gripes.

Usage: All characters
Charges: 1d10
Appearance: Three ordinary wooden spoons and an ivory rod. A heavy mahogany base slotted to hold them.

Orchestral bestiary

The orchestra went mad while struggling through the Sequenzas. They turned feral and fled into the formal gardens. They live there now, eating whatever they can hunt or forage. You can hear them late at night, playing strange and discordant requiems.

It's only surprising it didn't happen sooner.

Flautist

A skinny woman in a tattered gown, dirt streaked under her wild eyes like war paint. She taught herself to fire darts from her flute. They're smeared with toxins she collects by milking plants in the poison garden.

AC 6 [13], HD 1* (4 HP), ATT 1 x dart (1d4 + poison), THAC0 19 [0], MV 120' (40'), SV 12 13 14 15 16 (F1), ML 10, AL Chaotic, XP 13, NA 1 (1d3), TT R

Specials: Poison. Death in 1d6 rounds, death save negates.

Tuba player

A tremendously fat man, his shirt buttons strain to contain him. He stalks, barefoot, like a predatory building and uses his tuba to fire actual cannonballs. Where did he get them?

AC 5 [14], HD 6 (27 HP), ATT 1 x cannonball (1d10, full round reload), THAC0 14 [5], MV 120' (40'), SV 10 11 12 13 14 (F6), ML 10, AL Chaotic, XP 275, NA 1 (1d2), TT T

Cymbalist

This one was probably a bit loopy even before that fateful day. His tuxedo is stained with blood. He's filed the edges of his cymbals and teeth to razor-sharpness. He giggles and whispers to himself while he uses them both.

AC 6 [13], HD 3 (14 HP), ATT 2 x cymbals (1d6) or 1 x bite (1d6), THAC0 17 [2], MV 120' (40'), SV 12 13 14 15 16 (F3), ML 12, AL Chaotic, XP 35, NA 1 (1), TT S

Triangle player

No-one's afraid of the triangle player. His only job is to go ting! No-one respects him. Even the other musicians push him around. Maybe that's why he ditched his triangle and picked up an axe. 

AC 5 [14], HD 2 (9 HP), ATT 1 x axe (1d6), THAC0 18 [1], MV 120' (40'), SV 12 13 14 15 16 (F2), ML 10, AL Chaotic, XP 20, NA 1 (0), TT P

Cellist

If a wandering martial arts sage saw this guy fight, they'd immediately adopt the cello as their clan's signature weapon. He can swing it like a mace, stab with the end spike or fire arrows from the strings. I think he's been secretly planning to murder the brass section for a long time.

AC 7 [12], HD 4 (18 HP), ATT 1 x swing (1d6) or stab (1d4) or arrow (1d6), THAC0 15 [4], MV 120' (40'), SV 10 11 12 13 14 (F4), ML 10, AL Chaotic, XP 75, NA 1 (1d3), TT R

Violinist 

The orchestra's diva. Everything is done with a little flourish. Even swinging that violin bow at you like a sabre.

AC 5 [15], HD 5 (23 HP), ATT 1 x bow (1d6), THAC0 15 [4], MV 120' (40'), SV 10 11 12 13 14 (F5), ML 10, AL Chaotic, XP 175, NA 1 (2d3), TT T

Conductor

Wild-haired, twitch-eyed, muttering in German. He hates his musicians as much as he hates you.

AC 3 [16], HD 7 (32 HP), ATT 1 x baton (1d6), THAC0 13 [6], MV 120' (40'), SV 8 9 10 11 12 (F7), ML 10, AL Chaotic, XP 450, NA 1 (0), TT T

The why of Witches

A set of tables for rolling up a witch's situation and motives. She could be ally or antagonist. 

This witch is (1d6):

1. A girl barely in her teens
2. A young woman
3. A middle-aged woman
4. A crone
5. An ageless creature cloaked in illusion
6. Just a voice from a shadowed corner
   

Who specialises in (1d6):

1. Potions
2. Protective charms
3. Reading the future in a glass
4. Curses
5. Spells to soften the heart and lull the will
6. Controlling animals
   

And lives in (1d6):

1. A hut
2. A tidy cottage
3. A ruined castle
4. A tree
5. A swamp hovel
6. A cave
   

She turned to witchcraft because (1d6):

1. Every woman in her line passes the knowledge to a daughter
2. She wanted to harm an enemy
3. Her community needed a wise woman
4. It gave her the power to control her fate
5. She had the gift from birth
6. A family member needed supernatural healing
   

Her customers are (1d6):

1. Followers of a suppressed religion
2. Local town-folk
3. Criminals
4. Adventurers
5. A high-born family
6. Unseen things of the forest and field
   

And they want: (1d6):

1. Visions of the future
2. Protection for a hidden enterprise
3. Revenge on a third party
4. Advice on personal problems
5. Health tonics and herbal remedies
6. Spells to ease their way to a goal
   

Her biggest problem is (1d6):

1. A demon suitor
2. A paranoid official
3. A zealous priest
4. A rival magic-user
   
5. A corrupted spell
6. An evil fate
   

Her biggest advantage is (1d6):

1. A protective amulet
2. A hidden sanctuary
3. A rich customer's secrets
4. A way of travelling that can't be followed
5. The good will of the land itself
6. A chest of gold
   

Her ally is (1d6):

1. A forest spirit
2. A fierce familiar
3. A grateful community
4. A minor demon
5. A skilled criminal
6. A fellow witch
   

Her interest in adventurers is (1d6):

1. Obtaining magical components
2. Delivering magical items
3. Protection
4. Acquiring 'servants' who won't be missed
5. Cleaning up a magical accident
6. Because sometimes a stab wound is the best curse there is

Click here to randomly generate:

(Thanks to Spwack of the Slight Adjustments blog for the generator code.)