Dungeon Inspiration from ancient Greece and the Pacific Rim

This is from the wikipedia entry for Ophion:

Apollonius of Rhodes in his Argonautica (1.495f) summarizes a song of Orpheus:

He sang how the earth, the heaven and the sea, once mingled together in one form, after deadly strife were separated each from other; and how the stars and the moon and the paths of the sun ever keep their fixed place in the sky; and how the mountains rose, and how the resounding rivers with their nymphs came into being and all creeping things. And he sang how first of all Ophion and Eurynome, daughter of Oceanus, held the sway of snowy Olympus, and how through strength of arm one yielded his prerogative to Cronos and the other to Rhea, and how they fell into the waves of Oceanus; but the other two meanwhile ruled over the blessed Titan-gods, while Zeus, still a child and with the thoughts of a child, dwelt in the Dictaean cave; and the earthborn Cyclopes had not yet armed him with the bolt, with thunder and lightning; for these things give renown to Zeus.

two things that are awesome about this pasage:

1. "rivers with their nymphs came into being and all creeping things" makes me think of little elf chicks riding around on the Host.

2. A cave where a god was raised.  Put that in your dungeon!

And also a wizard's tower

Starting Equipment

Here's a way to quickly generate starting equipment (with some randomness and some player choice) for Fantasy Roleplaying.  This was inspired by The LotFP equipment generator at Hill Cantons, and I suppose DCC a bit, with those random free items at the end.  Characters made with this will tend to be kinda LoFi and broke, though occaionally you can get a high roller.  Either way this adds a bit of flavor to character generation and it's fast!

Download Here:

STARTING EQUIPMENT

Lamentations of the Flame Princess Language Variant

I really like LotFP's rules on languages.  I tend to run smaller groups when I play though, and I feel like the rules as written are meant for or work much better with larger groups.  In a larger group, you are sure to have a specialist and/or a wizard or two, and odds are somebody is going to roll a 1.  In a small group though, the by the book rules can cut down on your number of social encounters, so I've come up with the following variant.  The purpose of these rules (both this variant and the rules as written, as I see it) is to randomly give a different PC the spotlight when new creatures are encountered.  This variant just increases the chance if not guarantees that someone will be able to speak to an NPC or monster.

(because I like it when the players can talk to the mud people/giant spiders/pirates from the blood sea)

Languages:

 When making language rolls, every player rolls a D6.  With normal languages the low rolling PC understands the language with the number rolled being an indication of how well they speak and understand the language.  The lower the better.  Example: three PCs encounter a swamp troll who is trying to tell them that the cave to the north has a group of harpies living in it.  They roll 3, 3, and 5.  The two who rolled 3 can both understand the swamp troll, but not very well.  Maybe they get that he's warning them about the cave, but they don't understand the word for harpy.  Characters who have an INT modifier or specialists with ranks in Languages can roll an additional die for each pip or plus, and take the lowest.  Stranger languages, or languages of creatures from other planes may require two or more low rolls and a maximum roll of say, one or two.

Elf Beard

For a thoughtful discussion of elves with beards try this

Instead of a thoughtful discussion I'll give you a list of why Elves don't cut their beards off:

1. Doing so reduces their fighting ability to that of a magic user of the same level.
2. Doing so eliminates their ability to cast spells.
3. Little know fact: it's actually the beard that makes them resistant to ghoul attacks.
4. As above, but sleep and charm spells.
5. In addition to reaching 9th level, an Elf must have a beard in order to establish a stronghold .
6. Because they're trying to pass themselves off as dwarves.

Elf PCs roll a D6, and disregard the result if they're lady-elves.

Treasure Hoards and Magic Items

The first table allows a treasure hoard to be generated very fast.  Roll all the dice in a hoard at once and there you go.

The second set of tables for Magic Items is the same idea, but it requires a bit of interpretation on the part of the DM.  For example, what does an amulet that detects healing do?  Maybe it allows the wearer to know the HP of other characters and creatures in it's presence, or to know the location of the nearest shrine or healer, or to know the location of every shrine or healer on the continent.  how about a dagger that creates/summons undead?  That's easy, any creature killed by this dagger rises from the grave! 

What this set of tables does:
It takes the sort of familiar magic items and effects you might find in your favorite fantasy game and forces the DM to creatively remix them into unique items.

It might be better to roll on this beforehand rather than in game to give yourself time to determine the exact nature of the magic item.  Multiple magic items could be randomly generated and placed as needed.

Here is the pdf:
Treasure Hoards and Magic Items

Playing a covenant of wizards in old school D&D?

I have always been fascinated with the game Ars Magica.  (free download of 4th edition rules is available at this link) The closest I ever came to playing it was a game where we were wizards in a post-apocalyptic setting with various robot and mutant animal underlings.  For that game we created characters in at least 2 different systems (neither one was the system published in Ars Magica) and just used whichever set of rules that was apropriate for the character in question to resolve actions. 

But that's not why I wanted to post today. 

I've been thinking about running an Ars Magica style game with a D&D type system.  Other folks have written about this here and here. The thing is, is that while I love the idea that Wizards are the main characters and that clerics and fighters and merchants or whatever are just the hired help, I'm not really excited about the intricate Ars Magica game system.  So, what if you just took that concept and used, oh I don't know, B/X D&D rules as written.  (or at least started with that and made as few changes from there as necessary)

You could start with Magic-users of high level to aproximate the power of Ars Magica characters, but I think it'd be more fun to start with 1st level wizards and build a covenant from the ground up. 
PCs can hire a bunch of mercenaries and shield-bearers and head into the dungeon looking for bits of magic. 

Change I would make to RAW:

• M-Us don't automaticaly gain spells when they gain a level, they have to find all their spells.
• Domain building starts right away, no need to wait until "name level".  These are wizards we are talking about here.
• Spell research and magic item creation and other non-dungeon activities including domain building can happen at the end of each session, to explain what the M-Us do in between dungeon expeditions.  I would suggest that unlike in D&D where spell scrolls are fairly common treasure, most of the time spells that are discovered in the dungeon are incomplete fragments and further research and experimentation is necessary to turn them into a spell in the wizards spell book.  This alows the DM to give the players a hint at the kind of spell they can make, but the PCs can take those fragments in whatever direction they want. 
• I would consider making spell casting times longer, maybe one round per level of the spell.  (in Ars Magica longer casting times reinforces the need for shield grogs)  With maybe an option to burn a spell slot of one level higher to speed cast. (this wouldn't come into play until 5th level when a MU could burn their 3rd level spell slot to get off a 2nd level spell in one round, and it wouldn't be super usefull until 7th level when a MU could burn their 4th level spell slot to speed cast fireball)
• I would also consider the option to cast an unmemorized spell, or a spell fragment or even a spontaneous spell made up on the spot like in AM,  but that's a pretty big divergence from rules as written...
• Retainer rules wouldn't need to be changed at all.  I like LotFPs retainer rules, where the charisma limit to hirelings effects NPCs with character levels or monsters only with no limit to 0 level hirelings.  Actually LotFP would be an all around great rules set to do this with.

I think it'd be awesome.

Slimes Molds and Jellies!

Even if you are not in the camp that says all monsters should be unique, it can be a challenge to find or create monsters that savvy players can't just easily metagame their way through.  To help alleviate this challenge I created this chart that allows a DM to quickly create a remixed version of the slimes molds and jellies of classic fantasy adventure gaming.  This chart can be used on the fly or when preparing a dungeon.  Personally I think it works best when used to generate an ooze or two to give various rooms or regions in a dungeon a specific flavor.

Please download and let me know if you use it:

Slimes, Molds & Jellies!