This summer, I was fortunate enough to take part in the School for Poetic Computation’s Worlds in Conversation class, led by Everest Pipkin, Weaver Walker, and Caro Asercion. It was a real boost to my motivation and excitement when it comes to game design, and I’m hoping to be posting more here. Specifically, doing small, weekly homework assignments has me wanting to make smaller things that I feel ok about posting. I’m going to post some of my homework assignments here so that they live somewhere that isn’t just my Google drive.
This assignment was to make some kind of mechanic/mechanical something that gestured at a larger world. I made this encounter table by opening books on my partner’s shelf to random pages and getting inspired by the first words I saw.
2d6 encounter table
2. A wizard
3. 1d100 Intuition rats – they know where filth will be
4. A patrol of 1d4 warhorses, traveling to or from (50%) the Beast Spine
5. 1d20 settlers, outnumbered
6. 1d8 children climbing trees, evading notice of 1d4 parental figures
7. A farmer leading 1d6 animals (Roll for each: 1: a dog, 2: a sheep, 3: a chicken, 4: a dog) to see The Queen
8. A traveling marionette show, 1d4 performers, 1d12 puppets
9. 1d2 athletes, searching for worthy opponents to best in (1: wrestling, 2: tug of war, 3: drive ball, 4: relay racing)
10. 1d6 forest lions, searching for a spot to sunbathe
11. An architect and their retinue (2d4 cathars) seeking or retrieving (50%) materials for a d100% completed chapel.
12. A dragon
Designer notes lol: My goal with this was to pack as much variance into each entry as possible. The hope was that this would give a lot of opportunities for the world to develop with each roll. Also, I can’t remember which RPG blog I read the advice “Always make the top result on a table a dragon and the bottom a wizard. Leave a comment if you know so I can credit properly.