Posts tagged #random-table
What does the gnome want buried?
This table is based on a quest I rolled on the 5e Artisanal Database, available to patreons of Sly Flourish. The quest went something like this:
Ten Encounters in the Endless Warrens
- A hot-dog stand, run by a kobold called Frank. The hot-dogs taste great!
- A sad lump of goo that is dreaming of becoming a proper gelatinous cube some day.
- Parakeets. Lots of them. With bloody beaks.
- A big fat Ogre with a baked goods fetish called Yo-Mama!
- Sunflower seeds in front of a locked door.
- Spider husks but no other signs of arachnids.
- The tiniest little wizard tower you can imagine!
- An old crone got lost looking for mushrooms.
- Jarl, a love-crazed swashbuckler in denial.
- Who let the dogs out? They look stinky and happy and friendly. Too bad they have tentacles for tails…
Random Goblin Shit
- Super stinky feet.
- Jittery, a bit like a meth head.
- Wooden teeth, painted red. Insecure about his dentures.
- A very fine Waistcoat with a watch on a chain. Where did he acquire such attire?
- A cake in a cake box.
- Weasels in a bag. They’re squirming. The goblin pretends not to notice.
- Wears glasses, they’re cracked and obviously the wrong prescription.
- Teeth filed to points.
- No shirt, covered in tatoos, all pumped up and roided out. The others are hyping him up.
- Rabid with froth at his mouth.
Civilizations Generator
In a similar theme as the Historic Event Generator, here’s a generator for entire civilizations - that can rise and fall based on the historic events.
Historic Event Generator
So your world is basically just heaven and earth and you want to be all “Let There Be Light!” and are running out of ideas. I have two words for you: Random tables. Obviously, you need to make your own, but ain’t nobody got time for that! So use mine. Now, I didn’t actually fill in each entry myself - I use a trusty little LLM to do that for me and then edited away until I liked the results. And I didn’t come up with the method myself: That’s something a Benedict monk taught me in history class as a teenager: The latin phrase quis, quid, ubi, quibus auxiliis, cur, quomodo, quando is 7 questions that can be asked about a historic event. Somehow it got stuck in my head. I’m probably totally wrong about it all, but as far as I remember, it translates roughly as:
SCA Heraldry Names
Just a quick reminder: SCA Heraldry has a ton of names by period and culture. You can distill random tables of names from there. Using ChatGPT to mash them up can sometimes also work.
Random Myth Generator
I stumbled upon the following link and need to remember it: Random Myth Generator by Chris Francis. That link will take you to a very simple page: It’s a giant button that says “Random Myth Article” and clicking on it will take you to a random Wikipedia article. Some examples you might get directed to:
Random Allemanic Names for NPCs
I’ve been working on a setting that would work well in Swiss German for a campaign. Fantasy names tend to be very English oriented and “home” base names just… don’t really fit a setting that goes well with Swiss German native speekers. I hope to explore that further another day, but for now, here’s a table of random NPC names to use in a setting that might be a place like medieval Switzerland:
NPC Development Questions (d20 Table)
Here’s a list of questions that could be used to help flesh out an NPC. I suggest rolling 3 times on the list and answering the random question.