Random Blogwagon: Cartomantic Encounters for 4 Overlapping Factions
This is a response to Prismatic Wasteland's "Random Blogwagon."
As astute readers of my About Me page will know, I'm currently running a campaign of B4: the Lost City. Though I haven't made any play reports (mea culpa), I can report that we've largely left the contents of the module to play in my version of the eponymous City beneath the keyed dungeon of the module, Lost Cynidicea. While the original module provides guidance on features of the city, and subsequent versions have drawn a map of it, I decided to draw and key my own, to some success.
The original module features three Old infighting Cynidicean Cults — the lawful Brotherhood, the neutral Warrior-Maidens, and the chaotic Magi — each worshipping one of the old gods against the chaotic-but-the-blatantly-evil-kind cult worshipping Zargon, a freaky cyclopean people-eater with tentacles. The underground City where the remnants of this civilization live is, it would seem, dominated by a central temple of Zargon, while the three older cults maintain strongholds elsewhere in the city. (This felt odd, to me, and I've tweaked the execution: the three old cults now operate like a fractured resistance movement, with individual secret bases.)
In making an encounter table for this area, I had lots of cool ideas for how these factions might interact. Perhaps if the Warrior-Maidens encountered a Zargonian prisoner transport, they'd try to spring the hapless captives free before they could be taken to the monster. Perhaps the lawful Brotherhood of fighting-men would fall into open conflict if they ran into a squad of Magi, whom I imagined as anarchists opposing Zargon by lobbing vials of Cynidicean Fire.
A traditional encounter table didn't really work well for this, and subsequent tweaks to it that involved rolling for encounters more than once felt unpleasantly like I was rolling arbitrarily until something happened1.
Recently, though, my friend Havoc, who is always experimenting with new mechanical things, mentioned before a game of Hearts Aglow that he'd be "rolling" random encounters with playing cards. I thought this was a neat idea, though not clearly different to me from rolling a normal 52-entry encounter table, and focused on saving the hearts of the innocent from that dashing but cruel rogue, the Silver Gentleman. (Actually, this might've been the Field of Winds adventure. I'll edit this later, I've got a deadline!) The thought of using playing cards for stuff has tickled me for some time, but random encounters seemed like an odd fit.
Anyway, that was until I rolled the Prismatic Wasteland random blogroll table, took a shower, and happened to think about both things at the same time with just under 24 hours to spare to think about combining these things.
Anyway, here's the idea
There are four factions in play. There are four suits of cards. Pretty handy, right?
- Clubs — The Brotherhood of Gorm
- Spades — The Magi of Usamigaras
- Hearts — The Warrior-Maidens of Madarua
- Diamonds — The Cult of Zargon
My first thought (this is all just theory, right now) is that I'll include one or two entries on the normal encounter table that indicate a bi-faction encounter. When this occurs, I'll draw two cards from the deck, and use the numbers as an oracle for what the encounter looks like, the first card representing who is there and the second who is arriving. I took some test draws to kick the tires and got...
- Joker and 8 of spades — ...haven't decided about jokers yet. Maybe that'll be a monster the Magi are encountering? Moving on...
- Queen of diamonds and 4 of spades — I have another half-developed idea the face cards will represent individual notable figures of each faction, and I happen to know who the Queen of Zargon is — Helena, a villainous Medusa. Bad luck for the Magi initiates in this one, I think.
- Ten of clubs and five of hearts. I've established for myself earlier in the game that the Brotherhood and Warrior-Maidens occasionally contact each other on diplomatic missions, and earlier in tirekicking when I thought of the order of cards mattering, that results like these could account for this. This result, then, represents a group of Warrior-Maiden representatives meeting at a Brotherhood location.
As you can see, it's a bit rough around the edges, but I did roll June 8 on the big table, and it's 23:58 here. If I use this in play and have any more thoughts, I'll write em down.
In the spirit of the random blogwagon's discussions of randomness, a tangent: I'm stoutly opposed to mechanics that involve rolling more than, say, three times in a row to determine if a single given thing happens or not. (n.b.: situations that include actual complications are different from a binary yes-or-no.) I've yet to find a thing with a level of granularity that justifies this, and it tends to stray into something novice referees pulling for a given result do: Make that thing happen if this roll, that roll, or some other roll happens. If you want it to happen so damn bad, roll once on 6-in-6 and quit wasting time! /rant↩