Shopping in Nidus

This is still a work in progress. I've tweaked the numbers a little added local guides and now that I have my campaign's first rogue, figured I'd give him a bonus too.


I'm still thinking about making regions-- The Grand Bazaar, The Docks-- or landmarks-- The Bronze Statue of the Laughing God, The Plaza of Forgotten Gods-- that might affect the likelihood of finding certain things. But I'm hesitant to pin Nidus down too much. I want it to be bigger than life, and mapping seems to work against that.

Unprecedented

I had a player just email me tonight about gaming tomorrow! This is after we played Thursday and Friday of this past week. He's already got two other players lined up and sounds excited to go back into the Maw. Ha ha. I guess he enjoyed it.

This is the advantage of having a megadungeon; I already have plenty prepared for them to explore-- no worrying about overland travel and whatnot. It also helps that my swords & sorcery city Nidus is abstracted, so I can give them a sense of a huge teeming den of humanity without having to map anything.

Slave Angel

I found this pretty evocative. I think I like the figure on the left for a golem or construct that I might use separate from the slave angel.

I think this is from here.

Simple Card Mechanic

This is probably inanely obvious, but I'm bored. Here is a way to use playing cards to present players with probabilities that have diminishing chances. Get your deck. Take out the jokers. Shuffle. Have your players draw:


Any Number ~70%

Any Heart ~ 25%

A Royal Heart ~6%

The problem is, a deck of cards is more time consuming to shuffle than 7 dominoes. But it's functional. I just stuck with hearts for consistency, but if spades fit your Priest of Dark Fate's petitions better, they would work equally well.

The last probability drops off much faster than the dominoes. You could address this by making the last draw a Red Royal (heart or diamond) which would give you ~ 15%. But I liked the simplicity of going form hearts to hearts.

Simple Domino Mechanic

I've blogged a few times about dominoes before. To cut to the chase, here is the simple mechanic I used successfully in play the other day.

Pull out the dominoes seen above. Turn over. Shake up.

Ask the player to draw:

• No doubles ~70%
• Either Double ~ 30 %
• Double Blank ~15%

If you want to give it some campaign flavor you can. I called the three challenges: God's Teeth, God's Jaws, God's Eyes.

I like that it is simple, but seems more dramatic than dice (everything is a die roll but he was petitioning his god!). And it seemed pretty easy for him to understand the likelihood of success, in a way it might not if I said "Roll a 1-3 on this d4, next time you'll need to roll a 1-2 on a d6."

You can mess with the domino pool you're drawing from, but keep in mind it takes space to shake those things around ( I think 7 is the limit) and that I picked the blanks because they are simpler, and visually easier to read.