Doom Tables

EXT. PLAIN OF HOTH - DAY

A small figure gallops across the windswept ice slope. The bundled rider is mounted on a large gray snow lizard, a Tauntaun. Curving plumes of snow rise from beneath the speeding paws of the two-legged beast.
  The rider gallops up a slope and reins his lizard to a stop. Pulling off his protective goggles, Luke Skywalker notices something in the sky. He takes a pair of electrobinoculars from his utility belt and through them sees smoke rising from where the probe robot has crashed.
  The wind whips at Luke's fur-lined cap and he activates a comlink transmitter. His Tauntaun shifts and moans nervously beneath him.

LUKE (into comlink) "Echo Three to Echo Seven. Han, old buddy, do you read me?"
After a little static a familiar voice is heard.
HAN (over comlink) "Loud and clear, kid. What's up?"
LUKE (into comlink) "Well, I finished my circle. I don't pick up any life readings."
HAN (over comlink) "There isn't enough life on this ice cube to fill a space cruiser. The sensors are placed, I'm going back."
LUKE (into comlink) "Right. I'll see you shortly. There's a meteorite that hit the ground near here. I want to check it out. It won't take long."

Luke clicks off his transmitter and reins back on his nervous lizard. He pats the beast on the head to calm it.

The weather on this planet is frigid and cloudy at best, most often it's freezing with blinding snow. Staying out longer than one needs is ill-advised, for good reason. But Luke disregarded the ever-present danger and set off alone in the wilderness. Now he must roll on the Doom Table.
  The result: Something big and hungry lurks in the snow drifts, its gaze finds Luke right as a stormstorm hits his location. If he survives the attack, it will be difficult for his allies to find him...

LUKE "Hey, steady girl. What's the matter? You smell something?"

Luke takes a small device from his belt and starts to adjust it when suddenly a large shadow falls over him from behind. He hears a monstrous howl and turns to see an eleven-foot-tall shape towering over him. It is a Wampa Ice Creature, lunging at him ferociously.

LUKE "Aaargh!"

Luke grabs for his pistol, but is hit flat in the face by a huge white claw. He falls unconscious into the snow and in a moment the terrified screams of the Tauntaun are cut short by the horrible snap of a neck being broken.
  The Wampa Ice Creature grabs Luke by one ankle and drags him away across the frozen plain.

LATER - INT. HOTH - REBEL BASE - MAIN ICE TUNNEL

DECK OFFICER "Sir, Commander Skywalker hasn't come in the south entrance. He might've forgotten to check in."
HAN "Not likely. Are the speeders ready?"
DECK OFFICER "Uh, not yet. We're having some trouble adapting them to the cold."

Worse Still, the weather is causing the otherwise efficient and safe snowspeeders to malfunction...

HAN "Then we'll have to go out on Tauntauns."
DECK OFFICER "Sir! The temperature's dropping too rapidly."
HAN "That's right. And my friend's out in it!"
— From Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back Script

And now the other hero, Han, must too roll on the Doom Table...

The first time I used a Doom Table was for a Dark Sun adventure in which the party tagged along with a group of well-traveled archaeologists, settlers, and adventurers going far away into a low mountain range in search of an ancient city and, for two members of the group, find a new place far away from the threats in the sandy seas to make their new home.

In this adventure, the party acted as followers or hirelings to the more experienced adventurers, and over time they "climbed the ranks" and gained followers of their own on the way to the hidden lair of a twisted dune reaper matriarch that covered an entire city (the target destination for the group). One key component of the trek was that the morale of the group and of individuals would be tested almost every day. If someone became shaken in combat, their morale was tested; if someone was starving or injured, their morale was tested; if there was a heated disagreement or some other hardship, anyone not doing well mentally up to that point would have their morale tested. On failing the test, people would abandon the quest and leave the party, heading back across the path in the mountains to one of the campsites or going even further back to their abandoned village or another distant city, their ultimate fate being decided by the Doom Table.
  PCs would also have their morale tested and could take short-term effects like losing faith in the mission, loyalty to the leader of the party, or becoming Exhausted. If the player decided that enough was enough and they left alone or with another shaken character, they would also meet the Doom Table and could become further Exhausted, start to hallucinate from the heat, act more erratically than normal, become dangerously forgetful or lost, and there was a good chance they would encounter bad weather or a deadly beast in the wilderness.

Morale

The morale system I came up with was simple: each character in the party that had a level or was designated as a follower/hireling is given a Morale stat between -10 and 10. (I presented Morale as a track at one point and made it into a sort of clock at another, but it always functioned the same way.) It represented their power of will, faith, loyalty, and, to some extent, their mental state, and it began at 1d6 - 2 (average of 3) for most characters. Over time, completing skill tests and accomplishing goals, or failing, would increase and decrease the party's overall Morale.
  During combat, if a character collapsed or died, the group would make a Morale test: roll 1d20 + Morale, with the DC being given for each stage in the adventure; early on the DC was 11 or 12, rising by 2 or 3 each stage of the journey. On a failure, that character's Morale would drop by half of that stage's level (I thought of it as a sort of fluctuating, expected level or monster encounter rating for the area), on a success it would rise by 1. Also on a failure, that character would take penalties until they rested (think Exhausted); if they failed by a large amount (more than 5 or 10) or critically failed, their Morale would decrease. If an NPC's Morale ever dropped below zero or further decreased, they would roll on the Scatter Table. Lastly, if something would cause an NPC to leave the party or if they ventured into the wilderness alone, they would roll on the Doom Table if an effect didn't already force them to roll on it.

The first two tables I made for this system are the following:

1-2 (10%)	Roll on the Doom Table	2 points Exhaustion (up to lvl 4), -3 Morale
3-6 (20%)	Runs away as fast as possible, leaving anything not already being worn or carried; they are no longer part of the campaign	1 point Exhaustion (up to lvl 3), -3 Morale
7-10 (20%)	Runs away to camp site or nearest safe area, packs whatever necessities they can carry and leaves the next afternoon; there is a minuscule chance they will return to the campaign within a week	1 point Exhaustion (up to lvl 3), -3 Morale
11-14 (20%)	Runs away to camp site or nearest safe area, packs whatever necessities they can carry and leaves in two days unless convinced to stay; there is a fair chance they will return to the campaign within a week	1 point Exhaustion (up to lvl 2), -3 Morale until they take a long rest
15-18 (20%)	Runs away from the immediate threat in the local area	1 point Exhaustion (up to lvl 2), -2 Morale until they take a long rest
19-20 (10%)	Visibly shaken, stands their ground	+2 Morale

Scatter Table

1-2 (10%)	Discovers one of the Matriarch's lairs; dies a slow, horrible death, a piece of their equipment will be partially sunk into the dirt outside the entrance which will be noticed by anyone who knew them in life, their body and bones will be eaten by the Matriarch or a random wandering monster within a day
3-4 (10%)	Runs into an acid pit and dies a slow, painful death, a few pieces of their equipment will be scattered around the pit or eaten by a random wandering monster, otherwise nothing of them remains
5-6 (10%)	Runs away nonstop for three days before collapsing and dying of thirst somewhere in the mountains
7-8 (10%)	Runs away for a few days before being shredded to pieces by a random wandering monster, all of their non-food equipment will be wildly scattered in the area
9-12 (20%)	Runs away for several days and reaches the spot they decided it was a good idea to disembark on the campaign, then becomes sleep deprived and wanders in a random direction for a day (1d12 going clockwise, 12 due north, 6 due south) then another random direction for another day
13-16 (20%)	Runs away for several days and reaches the deserted town; 50% chance to encounter a random non-hostile wanderer, 50% chance to encounter a demon
17-20 (20%)	Runs away for several days and reaches the edge of the mountains, making camp; 25% chance to head back to the campaign and make it there alive after encountering multiple wandering monsters, 25% chance to continue their lone journey and be killed by random wandering monsters at dusk

The Doom Table

They're very... simple. I'm not they're simple in a good way, though. And the Doom Table is certainly very final with how it's written, but it was intended to be used as a little dusting of spice and only for NPCs or PCs who were on death's door or who had failed several important skill checks in a row. Since then, I've made other tables, as you do, and they aren't nearly as final. Instead of "you probably die a horrible death," they're more like the situation with Luke and Han on Hoth. If a player does something that would put them in a very, very dangerous situation, roll on a Doom Table that introduces an ailment (internal bleeding, hallucinations), a monster, the malfunctioning of an important item (armor, snowspeeder, wand), or bad weather that suddenly gets much worse.

For my game, weather was rolled similarly (if not exactly the same) to the tables in a previous post, but I love the idea that if Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewie were characters in a D&D game, the bad weather in that scene above was part of the Doom Table created for adventures on the planet Hoth and Luke rolled the wrong number. Or, maybe instead of the table in that adventure being focused on what happens to characters who are in the wrong place at the wrong time, it's focused on broad events like "Wampa attack," "mount dies," and so on and the weather was always going to get worse. Or another way it might have happened is that Han and Luke made too many missteps and spent too much time in the wilderness, progressing the clock, and finally reached midnight with Luke's decision, triggering the table.

I've loved Doom Tables ever since I came up with the first one above, and I've always liked the idea of Morale to make events and combat in adventures a bit more tense. For me, Dark Sun, West March, and Ravenloft/Shadowfell campaigns are great places to work them in. They aren't for every kind of game, but when they do fit, they can be disastrous in the best ways.

Dark Legacy Part 2

In Part 1, I talked about books I was reading for Halloween weekend and some inspirations for adventures in the Shadowfell, specifically Dark Legacy of Evard. With the monsters in the first "session" adapted to 5e rules and a few extras added, I realized I missed an opportunity to go over my plans for the first non-linear section of the adventure.

In Dark Legacy of Evard — and the rest of 4e's Encounter series — the adventure is designed to be played in quick, 2-3 (or less) sessions and focuses primarily on a single encounter each session. This adventure, however, is not linear, which presents a lot of room to play with when you aren't running it the way it was designed. In Session 1, the characters find themselves in an inn (of course), and at night, one of the other patrons sneaks away to the graveyard and triggers some sort of magic that shifts the inn, the graveyard, and the entire town into the Shadowfell. The party wakes up and runs downstairs where they find monsters running around. In Session 2 the party runs into the first fork: they can either track down the missing patron — a suspicious scholar investigating Evard, a very powerful wizard and expert of shadow magic — or to help the guards and militia in town by cutting a path to the armory. If they chase the scholar, they will run through the woods and into the graveyard while the town marshal and guards are left to get equipment on their own. If the players take this route, what will happen to the guards?

I see this as a great opportunity for a secondary antagonist to show up. But not as a Big Bad Dude, as a typical townsfolk: A man in his thirties with a short beard and mustache in plain clothes, comes from around the corner. They carry a sword and are sweating from fighting, and call for someone else between breaths, "Over here! The guards are over here."  Garren and Lilia, siblings, wearing simple clothes and a handful of scars and worried looks just like everyone else tonight, join the group entering the armory and help distribute the equipment among the other militia that made it. The marshal, named Grimbold, and a few guards talk to them about the creatures they've all met so far while they don their armor, and they show gratitude to the pair.
  Garren had hoped to catch one of the townspeople alone — they're starving — but the opportunity to make more allies is well enough. And later, when Garren and Lilia go with a guard to patrol the streets, they'll have time for a quick snack...

Garren is a well-learned illusionist and enchanter and a vampire who wanders between this world and the Shadowfell, and who just happened to be caught in the middle of the events surrounding Duponde. Lilia? Here she is an elaborate illusion of Garren's sister, long dead by now, created from stitching together souls of the dead wandering the Shadowfell and his own memories of Lilia. Garren needs to feed, just like any vampire. Unlike just any vampire, Garren doesn't like killing his meals, he deeply enjoys watching them suffer and fall over the course of months, when he can.
  When he feeds on a guard in town — which he will easily get away with if the party of would-be heroes isn't around — the guard will collapse, as if attacked by one of the shadows, and get a fever. Soon they wake up, thankful to Garren for "saving me back there, I don't know what happened..." but find they can't sleep. If they do sleep, they have chaotic dreams and wake up parched and aching all over. Awake, the night seems to take days to pass. They have trouble staying hydrated and feel hungry and paranoid all the time, but of course Garren or Lilia shows up to help them fall asleep with a few kind, enchanting words to at least help them get some rest and, more importantly to Garren, make it easier to feed. After a week or two, or a couple of nights in the Shadowfell, Garren's curse will have developed enough that it becomes difficult or impossible for anyone in town to remove. And very soon after that, the poor soul will need to feed.

Eventually, one threat or another will make itself apparent. The poor guard could easily be thought to have succumbed to the Shadowfell's dark desires and turned into a monster. If other accursed people are found in town, "it was that guard... How many have they bitten, you reckon?" "Who do you think it is?" "Marshal... It's you? It's you, isn't old man?!" Or, maybe one of the party members is accused. After all, they were "missing" that one night, and the other night. And this whole thing started when they got here, didn't it? "I suspect them over that kook scholar, myself."

After that tiny idea, the stories writes itself, really.

Continued in Part 3