When I talked about the d30 Sandbox Companion last night with my gaming group, one of the tables that elicited a "hot damn!" of excitement was the Cult Generator on page 21.
It has five columns, the first two help supply the name of the cult, and the last three cover worship, immediate goal and strange practices.
Let's try to randomly roll out two cults (remember, this is more to seed your imagination than anything else - it's barebones and needs to be fleshed out for gameplay):
Cult One
Rolls of 21 and 22 for columns 1 and 2 gives us "The Partnership of the Smoke".
A roll of 17 indicates the worship / following of a male elfin magic-user. Hmmm, make that elf a drow and the "smoke" could refer to the hair. Or maybe he specializes in wall of fog and cloudkill like spells.
A roll of 16 for "immediate goals" results in a cult that seeks the destruction of libraries and books. Maybe this is a cover for the cult leader - maybe he is looking for certain magical books and is seeking to destroy the others as a distraction.
Finally, the last roll is a 13 - these kooks never cut their hair.
Cult Two
Rolls of 4 and 11 for columns 1 and 2 gives us "The Church of the Elect".
A Roll of 1 indicates they worship a beholder. There's no way this could be anything but a death cult ;)
Another roll of 1 gives their immediate goal as anarchy. See, told you this shit was bad...
Finally, a roll of 21 indicates that they sleep from hooks. This is the type of cult the PCs best run from or destroy outright, because they are crazy enough to be truly dangerous and they have a beholder pulling their strings.
Damn, this shit is fun and supplies some damn good hooks for my current sandbox. Further details would be needed to run with this if it were to be more than background noise in the campaign, but as my players do read the blog, I'll leave them as is for now ;)
Just think, over 24 million cultish variations from one table...
Miskatonic Monday #311: Lights in the Trees
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Much like the Jonstown Compendium for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha
and The Companions of Arthur for material set in Greg Stafford’s
masterpiece of...
19 minutes ago
I read this post. OK, I admit the Drow Elf Hair cult didn't float my boat. But the Beholder Death cult with the believers sleeping while hanging from hooks? that was sufficient bait. So I bit and bought and boy howdy, I am glad I did. A great buy for the money (currently $4.95). Don't think about it. Buy it or I'll send the Hook Sleepers after you. You can keep the Hair cult though.
ReplyDeleteusually I use random charts like this as something to pick through, but for the two posts I went with "run as rolled". Admittedly, this can be hit or miss BUT it does force one to put some imagination into making things work - brainstorming on acid ;)
DeleteThat second one is killer. Could easily see them develop into a memorable group for a entire campaign, built from just the short output from the d30 generator.
ReplyDeleteThe first one might take a bit more work, but also offers reasonable seeds since destruction of books and libraries is an subversion of the usual things associated with magic-users (and some versions of elves). Smoke works into the theme nicely, maybe the cult burns libraries. Quite the vivid image of determined book burners lead by an elven mage.
Maybe they destroy the books so the enclosed knowledge won't fall into the "wrong" hands. That is anyone but the elven mage
DeleteCool. I'm loving Roll XX, sounds like a similar deal.
ReplyDeleteToo bad it uses d30s. I used all mine as sling ammo.
ReplyDeleteIs it as good as Ready Ref Sheets? Would be good to use both of them, or are they self sufficent?
ReplyDeleteI have enjoyed your posts on the d30 Sandbox Companion and picked up my own yesterday evening. Have not read much of it yet, too busy trying to wrap my head around Dungeon World.
ReplyDelete