What has changed since the last time we were here? d30 Table!

I have a bunch of tables and generators, but it's all in Portuguese on my Brazilian blog Pontos de Experiência. I am mainly working on my Adventurers of the Lost World setting book, but I will eventually translate some of my stuff in English to post here, which is exactly what this post is about today.

When running my games I always want to give the feeling of a world in constant motion and change. The characters can start in a settlement, go on an adventure and when they come back, something must have happened. The world continues without them, and they have to notice it somehow. This will give them the impression that the campaign world is real, even when they are not around!

To aid me in this task, I came up with this simple d30 table. It gives you a general idea you can interpret and create more elaborate events in pretty much any kind of settlement. So, whenever you feel like enough time has passed and some sort of change should happen to a place in your campaign world, roll on the table below and adjust the result to the settlement in question!

Complications for DCC RPG Characters

Image from Judge's Guild City State
of the Invencible Overlord

It's not uncommon for characters in sword and sorcery stories to have complicated lives, with enemies interfering with their adventures, crime bosses trying to catch them for some debt they owe, cults attacking them for some unforeseen reason they saw in a prophecy. This all the while they are trying to achieve their goals to find a lost treasure, to stop a dark ritual to awaken a sleeping old god and all sort of other quests.

One way to simulate that in our games could be with a simple mechanic like a random encounter linked to each character. Every player could have a complication for his character and once per session the GM could roll a chance for those complications to arise during the game. This would insert more tension in the game and would make the adventures more chaotic, with unexpected events in their way. Since this could potentially screw up all their plans, when the complications show up, the gods could send a favor to the PC in the form of a Luck point to even the odds. That way, a player would have a reason to accept a complication.

Why are my Zero Levels going on an Adventure?

Have you ever got yourself questioning why the heck do your level zero characters are going on this crazy adventure with monsters, planar travel, awakening old gods and cursed places? Most of the time, we do not spend more than a few minutes (or seconds) thinking about it and just jump with both feet on the awesome journey in front of us.

Howerver, it might be interesting to consider their reasons, and it might help deciding how they act and what class they follow if they survive the funnel. The following table was created with that in mind but can also be used to determine the motivations of other NPCs encountered by the party while they are adventuring. With a little effort, this could be used as a general motivation table for NPCs in almost any situation. Why is the Thieve's Guild Leader doing this? Roll on the table and interpret the result accordingly!