Okay, had a rough few days, not as much sleep as I should, so here's a post where I just work out a new RPG plot from some randomisers.
Full disclosure: I love randomisers, like random tables, online generators, special dice, card decks etc. I think they are great for GMs, they provide ideas that probably just wouldn't occur normally.
A few years back, some friends of mine at the company Artemis Games kickstarted several decks of cards that do just this. At the moment, the cards aren't available sadly, they're out of print, but I got them at the time and they've proven to be pretty damn useful. I'll probably go into more detail on them at some point as I use them but the ones I'm using today are:
- Character cards - a deck of cards with a complete character profile on each one.
- Location cards - they produced cards for urban and rural locations. I'm using the urban one on it's own this time. Each card has details of a single location within a city on it.
- Plot cards - Each card has a short summary and key details of a plot to use in a game.
The details on the cards are themed to the playing card suits, hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades, and these mean different things for different decks. In Character cards for example, the detail in Hearts is what the character wants, Spades is their occupation, Diamonds is their physical appearance, strengths, and weaknesses, and Clubs is their social connections. In the Location cards, Hearts is any inhabitants (or lack thereof), Diamonds is valuables or treasure in the area, Spades is any structures there, and Clubs is any defences like traps or guards. Overall, it's easy to tell from a card which one is which so it's not necessary to memorise them, but it's handy to have the details laid out in categories because then instead of drawing an entire person or location, you can also randomly draw just one detail, for example 'What does this bartender really want' or 'How well defended is this keep in the wilderness'. It's also possible to draw several cards to create new combinations which keeps them pretty versatile.
To create the plot today, I'm drawing: 2 epic plots to form the overall narratives, 3 character cards to show the major NPCs the players will meet/butt heads with, and 4 locations to say where the story will take place. Lets begin.
For the plots, I've drawn 'Fight the Power' and 'The Bull of Phyros'.
Fight the Power is character focused, it's about a woman called Helena who is tired of her boring life and her uncaring family, and wants to rob a pharmacists of it's money and herbs to get rich quick. The twist is that her father knows about the plan and hires the adventurers to stop her. Okay, interesting start.
The Bull of Phyros is a very different story. The eponymous Bull is a titanic creature that leaves a trail of destruction in it's wake as it storms across the world. It doesn't eat people but is strong enough to crush anyone in it's way. Interestingly, it eats valuable materials. The twist is that it's creator Phyros made it accidentally and is now following it, trying to find a way to stop it.
We're going to find a way to combine these two plots into one, and I've already got the start of an idea here. Helena is after excitement, danger, and valuables, and here is a giant construct beast that is definitely dangerous and possibly full of valuables. But lets see what gets drawn from the Character deck:
Squire Henry de Luna - a charming young man who wants to save the world but currently is still in training.
Lucius Viparrio - a former archmage who experimented with powers he couldn't control and suffered injuries that left him unable to perform magic anymore.
Karla Gennel - a spendthrift bartender who is a source of local information with dreams of owning her own place one day and has money stashed in the woods hoping to make that happen.
Interesting, more ideas to work with. I am now thinking that Helena is definitely not working alone in her schemes for getting rich, Karla has to be involved. Squire Henry probably has nothing to do with that, he's in it for the glory not the money, but he's going to be interested in bringing down the Bull just the same. At the moment, Lucius is quite similar in his backstory to Phyros, so I may merge the two, but possibly the Location cards will give me a reason not to.
Universal Hospital - a hospital run by monks who heal the sick for donations (with a twist that they can bring back the dead for large enough donations).
Death Row - an area of town formerly known as Chimney Street, said to be cursed where a series of mysterious deaths occurred years ago.
The Sewer Network - exactly what it sounds like, the city sewers, but with the added problem that alchemists have been dumping materials down here, making the rats super smart and the alligators super large.
Aurum College - a prestigious college that charges a hefty fee but trains people in many different arts, including warfare.
Good news for Lucius, I've got a reason to keep him separate from Phyros, which I'll detail shortly. Bad news for Helena and Karla, their lives just got less pleasant. Right, here's how I'm working this all together:
The Setup
A number of years ago, Lucius Viparrio was conducting magical experiments in his workshop on Chimney Street. Unfortunately, as magical experiments tend to, it all went wrong for him, and for the nearby inhabitants. Magical energies tore through the buildings, shattering brickwork, and maiming and killing civilians. Lucius survived but badly injured, and was brought to the hospital to recover. He has a little wealth to keep himself there but not enough to afford the healing that will restore him.
Cut to the present. Helena and Karla are two orderlies working in the hospital. Their days are long and unpleasant, caring for the badly sick and the dying, and working for a charitable order isn't paying enough to get away and start a new life, though Karla is making an attempt. Helena wants to start a life of crime if only for the excitement. Karla has gotten close to several patients including Lucius and knows his story, for all the good it does her.
Enter the Bull of Phyros, a rampaging titan construct that is heading this way. It's not going to hit the city itself fortunately, the terrain is steering it away, but it will soon trample through the nearby Aurum College and destroy it in three days time. Rather than try and fight the bull which has never worked in the past, the city is trying to arrange the evacuation of the college and it's most valuable information and resources, and let the Bull smash the rest.
From this, Lucius comes up with a plan: Helena and Karla can sneak into the college via the old sewer system, steal a load of valuables that no one will miss, and escape, letting the Bull's path of destruction cover for the theft. He will have enough money to be healed fully and they will have enough money to start new lives elsewhere.
Of course, that's where the PCs come in, because a) the more people you have, the more valuables you can drag away and b) everyone knows that sewers are dangerous. So Helena and Karla will scour the taverns and docks for likely sorts, gather them up, and bring them to Lucius for the mission. The agreement will offer a share of whatever treasure they bring back, a fairly standard plot hook.
In fact, these sewers are going to be very dangerous, with various monsters and hazards to fight through, before they reach the College. This will be different depending on the party, mostly based on their experience. If the players are new to gaming or to whatever system I'm using then this provides a nice warm up and introduction to that: throw together a straight forward dungeon, populate in a few giant rats, two or three hazards to avoid with whatever passes for skill checks, and a bigger monster fight near the end. But it also works well for higher level experienced players, the monsters just get bigger and the hazards just get trickier, and there's potential for some side passages off to parts unknown for them to come back to later.
Then we have the college itself, the heart of the adventure, presenting a lot of different challenges, mostly social and skills based rather than combat (unless the characters screw up big time). As well as their objective of gathering treasure without being seen, they will have to deal with:
- Refugees from other places in the Bulls path. While it isn't trampling any major settlements, small farms, homesteads, or hamlets are being crushed and the people are fleeing for their lives, arriving at the first 'safe' place they can rest.
- The valiant defenders - Squire Henry and his mentor (draw a card for a name) Sir Breskan are in charge of rallying the military students of the college to try and defeat the Bull instead of running. Most would say this is suicide but Henry believes in their courage and zeal and various other words like those and says they can do it!
- Phyros himself - the players will bump into him in one of the areas they ransack, and he will realise they are not from the college, and so explain himself: he's here ahead of the college's destruction trying to dig up some research that will let him kill his creation permanently. The Bull has a weak spot, it's heart, and is large enough that people can get inside it and attack the heart directly. All he would need is something to stun the beast temporarily, preferably a large and well aimed explosion, and so he's here trying to find research on building a bigger bang.
So here is a grander and more noble quest than the characters originally set out on, take down this terrible monster for good. And if your players are into that, great. In my experience, it's never wise to count on the altruism of player characters though, so here are some additional details to use:
- The sewers were unstable and the approach of the Bull has forced them to collapse. This doesn't mean there is no way to get away but getting away with armfuls of loot will be nigh on impossible, leaving them with a meagre reward if they join the refugees.
- The Bull devours any valuable materials it finds in it's path, meaning it's insides are full of gold, silver, and jewels. At the very least, Helena and Karla will be swayed by the promise of greater reward and insist the PCs join them.
At points like this in the story, I will leave things up to the players. I don't need to figure out all the possibilities for how they might hit the Bull with a bomb. They might build a trebuchet, they might lure it to a spot they've mined, they might drop the bomb on it as it reaches the college walls. Whatever they decide on, as long as it sounds workable and they roll well, it'll do the job. Likewise, whether they take advantage of the defenders and Squire Henry to get the job done or ignore them, that's up to them Leading to the final stage of the adventure: inside the Bull itself.
This will be another dungeon, but stranger than the last. It's laid out strangely, it's noisy all the time and hazardous in new and interesting ways. Corridors that try to squash the PCs, steam vents for pressure or actual fires burning them, grinding gears and swinging blade like levers. And monsters too. I can see elementals from the machinery attacking them, golems that are part of the greater construct, even ghosts of it's victims that are haunting some of the treasure within. Finally, the heart itself will have defences, more likely some tougher standard constructs to fend off the PCs. And once it's dead, it's all over bar the looting and aftermath.
So there you have it, a short adventure built from randomised cards, currently a little rough around the edges but with potential. I'm not sure which game I would run it in but that's a topic for a different post.
