For the Love of Random Madness

I have taken a break from Shards of Thibral, just a bit of tie to get some space and some air, so I can look at the game from a fresh direction next week.

The rest of this post is a decent into gamer madness.. enjoy.

Part of this break has to do with on singular and innocent post from a friend of min.

He posted “I love charts.” while we were discussing old school games in general after one of our 2nd edition games.

Whit his post in my mind I dug around on my portable hard drive and found PDF copy of

“The Tomb of Adventure Design” http://froggodgames.org/tome-adventure-designby Matthew J Finch.

I totally want to buy a copy of the dead tree version, and I likely will as soon as I can.

I digress, the book is collection of random charts for everything. You want random towns and cities, in there, you want random swamps sure. Random adventure plots? Sure! You want a random spell sure, you name it it's likely in there. It really is a fun useful well done book, I highly suggest it.

Whats not in there? Random characters and a system that works with them. That's where I went over the edge.

Sounds stupid right? It just might be. Regardless over the weekend I spent an inordinate amount of time typing up and reworking a game revolving around an inordinate amount of randomness.

Random stats rolled in order old school grognard style, check.

Random character age,check.

Random careers that the character had before they were adventurers, sure.

Random weapons why the hell not.

Random Personal connections, OK sure.

Random classes with random class abilities, I guess so.

The distinct possibility of your character having a tentacle growing off his back because one of his past careers was “magical test subject,” yeah that could happen.

So tie that to some dubious dice mechanics and some rather over the top critical fumble tables (one of the critical fumbles starts with ("DAMN your eye popped out") and you can see the reason why my blog has been quiet for the past two days.

Add to this silliness that I have been trying to glue a role playing shell over this somewhat insane frame. A process that makes me even crazier because I can't just make a bunch of charts and crap and not try to have them lead to stories. You can probably imagine I have been running this stupid thing though my head for the past few days.

For you fine folks who read read this Blog, I'm going to share one of the first test characters rolled up for this as yet unnamed mash up. 

(The Working title has been "Amazing adventurers incredible exploits!" or (AAIE!))

Again everything is random but the name
Renford Bern
Middle aged human (three careers)
Careers:
Used to be a Boyer (gets bow skill)
Used to be a Thieves guild Mule (Underworld connection) (light weapon skill)
Used to be a Carpenter (gets another light weapons skill and +5 focus pool)
Stats
Brawn 2
Athletics: 2
Resolve: 4
Academics: 2
Knowledge: 4
Focus: 3
Leadership: 3
Attractiveness: 4
Mysticism: 6 
Resolve pool: 20
Focus Pool: 15 + 5 = 20
Myst pool: 30 
Underworld connection: Festering Bozz who owns a mysterious book
light weapons
Dagger. 1D4 dmg
punch blade Perk 2x attacks 1d4 dmg
Ranged weapon
Sling 1d4 dmg

Armor half plate 11+ 2(brawn) = Armor score 13

Class Preist
Diety: Kreigscott "The wolf of Smoke" (random Deity for the win)

Level 1 Ability : Holy weapon
Difficulty 20 -focus = 17
Normal success x2 damage vs undead
cost 1d6 focus pool plus one per additional round of duration.

Perk1 distract,

Perk2 2x attack,

perk3 stun,

critical x2 duration
Fumble the holy weapon explodes hurting anyone near for 1d10.

If I ever get it done enough to really play I will let you folks know how it goes.

Well thank you fore reading about my obsessive lack of control when it comes to games.

Do any of you have any much loved random chat for a game?

Let me know

I hope you enjoyed.