Spicy Random Myriapod Action

"Where else...do centipedes eat dinosaurs?"
-- World of Kong

Consider the centipede. Often overlooked in favour of the sleek and deadly 'glamour' arthropods (spiders, scorpions, preying mantises, ichneumon wasps), and bankrupted by the expense of keeping their progeny shod, the humble centipede labours unremarked and unsung. Asking neither thanks or reward, these silent heroes of the 1st level wandering monster table daily face danger and a swift, unmourned death in the performance of their duties. Centipedes unnumbered lay down their lives to keep the underworld free of both rotting trash and interloping surface-dwellers.

"Me sir? Just a humble 1/2 HD beastie. Only mildly poisonous sir. Happy to do my bit."


Despite natural arachnid reaction ("Too many legs by half!") I happen to really like centipedes as monsters. I find there's just something horribly fascinating about the flickering antennae and the sinuous, elegant gait of these creepy little creatures. Centipedes are (literally) the stuff of nightmares for me, so I'd like to maybe exorcise the horror a little by sharing it.

So, inspired in part by E.G.Palmer's random dragon generator , the delicious lolrandom of the Random Esoteric Creature Generator , and by the delightful Boschian lunacy of the Hordes of Hades generation tables from the One True DMG, here is my random skittering myriapod horror generator (written for Labyrinth Lord, but we're all friends here).

~Move~ (d6)
1. 6
2. 9
3. 12
4. 15
5. 18
6. 18+roll again

~Move~
Climb speed Y/N (50%)
5% aquatic 'neopede': half land speed, no climb speed, swim speed = move

~AC~
Base 9 -1/HD. Max AC3.

~HD~ (d8)
HD = d8-1. Treat a roll of 1 as "1/2 HD", and a roll of 8 as "6HD, and roll again"

~Size~
Around 1ft in length per 1/2HD

~Dmg~
Typically 1-2 per HD. So a bog standard 4HD centipede will bite for 1-8 damage.

~Special Attack~ (2in6 chance)
1. Oversized Jaws (+50% damage)
2. Crushing Jaws (-2 to armour AC)
3. Poison bite (additional damage, sicken, anaesthetic, soporific, hallucination, confusion, paralysis, death, weird other), save reduces or negates
4. Constrict (4HD min.) - as constrictor snake
5. Charge (4HD min.) - bite damage x2
6. Swallow whole (6HD min.) - as grey/purple worm
7. Breath Weapon (spit acid, pyrotic spray, electrical discharge, dart spray) - range 5' per HD, save negates
8. Hiss/drone (fear causing, soporific, hypnotic/attractant) - 5' radius/HD, save negates

~Special Defence~ (1in6 chance)
1. Resistance (1/2 damage) (physical damage, or specific energy type)
2. Immunity (0 damage) (physical damage, or specific energy type)
3. Camouflage (Hide in Shadows/Natural Terrain 3in6)
4. Energy discharge (damage/round to those in melee)
5. Noxious discharge (ink, goo, grease, etc.)
6. Heavy carapace (+2AC, 1/2 move speed, no climb or swim speed)
7. Regeneration (restores hp, or can reform if cut into segements)
8. Weird $#!% (displacement, gaseous form, repulsive, etc.)

~Peculiarity~ (DM's option)

• Parasitic Feeder (leech-like)
• Bioluminescent
• Beneficial symbiont
  
• Compulsive stealer of shoes
• Lays eggs in living prey
• Uses bait or lures to attract prey
• Tameable/Trainable/Can be domesticated as pet
• Harvestable organ (as fire beetle or folkloric toad)
• Harvestable derivative (as giant bee or chutney-making earwig)
• Patterns on carapace spell out messages
• Forms vast, all-consuming migratory swarms during the: new moon/equinox/11th of the 11th/return of the comet

~Save~
F of 1/2HD

~Morale~
5+1d4

~Hoard Class~
Incidental only. Centipedes aren't materialistic.

So that's stegocentipedes, rhemoraz, reggae-singing cocktopedes (NSFW), and honking great 'roid-raging megalocentipedes big enough to take down a rhino for dinner restored to their rightful place in the canon. My work here is done. Now hopefully the recurring centipede element of my dreamscapes has been exorcised. ;)

(centipede image shudderingly extracted from theanimalagency.com)

Bestiary of the Vaults: Assorted Horrors

Sundry hostile cryptids of the Vaults. Presented without comment (or Hoard Class entries for that matter...) for your edification and enjoyment.

Whistling Selenites

No. Enc.: 3-12 (3-30)	Alignment: C
Movement: 90'	Armour Class: 4
Hit Dice: 3
Attacks: 1	Damage: 1-8 or by weapon+1
Save: F3	Morale: 9
Hoard Class:

These enigmatic Dwarf-sized, pink-skinned humanoid rodents are masters of eldritch science from beyond the stars. Many Selenites survive by peacefully trading their arcane unguents and cryptic devices to other inhabitants of the underworld, but some prosper as merciless raiders who ply the skies in golden-hulled, sharp-keeled vessels powered by arcane music.

All Whistling Selenites encountered will be clad in highly ornamented brazen plate armour. Half of their number will carry elaborate tridents and weighted nets, the other half will carry circular shields (+1 to AC) and wield wand-like staves. These last fire a beam which causes one of the following effects:

1-2 acts as a hold monster spell if ray hits (save negates),
3-4 acts as wand of lightning bolts with 7-12 charges
5-6 rusts metal armour, 2 classes/hit

{If you kind these weapon effects simply too dreary and banal to be tolerated I would suggest substitutions from the mad science source of your choice. The random Space Alien Technology Tables (Carcosa, pp56-61) and the Dismal Depths Traps Tables are personal favourites.}

There will usually be 1 leader (5HD) per 10 Whistling Selenites. Leaders can cast spells (and save) as Elves of levels 5-8, and invariably ride Iron Chickens.

Iron Chickens

No. Enc.: 2-20	Alignment: N
Movement: 180'	Armour Class: 5
Hit Dice: 5
Attacks: 1 kick	Damage: 2-12
Save: F3	Morale: 7
Hoard Class:

Savage living mechanisms used as mounts and beasts of burden by the Whistling Seleneites. They seem to be six foot-high metallic birds, although their wings are oddly articulated and incapable of lifting their weight under normal gravity. Moronically stupid and wilful, Iron Chickens devour carrion and metal with equal avidity.

Totemalkin

No. Enc.: 1-3	Alignment: N
Movement: 60'	Armour Class: 6
Hit Dice: 5
Attacks: 1 paw or breath	Damage: 1-6, special
Save: F5	Morale: 8
Hoard Class:

Large and lazy tiger-like creatures of lurid colouration, totemalkin rely for food and protection upon their innate ability to induce sleep in those around them. The breath weapon of a totemalkin is usable thrice daily, affects a 30' x30' cloud, and functions as a sleep spell (save vs breath weapon negates). Normal and magical creatures of feline ancestry (big cats, phase tigers/Couerls, manticores, etc.) are immune to the breath.

Totemalkins are normally attended by 1-6 mountain lions, who scavenge the leavings of these messy beasts. Creatures immune to sleep effects (undead, salamanders, etc.) sometimes use Totemalkin as static guards.

Giant Rogusoks

No. Enc.: 3-11	Alignment: N
Movement: 60'	Armour Class: 6
Hit Dice: 3
Attacks: 1	Damage: 1-4+swallow whole
Save: F2	Morale: 9
Hoard Class:

These ten foot long, candy-striped fuzzy worms are notable in that no two encountered are ever alike. For all their apparently mindless nature these time-lost scavengers crawl silently around the underworld in seemingly endless search patterns, seeking who-knows-what. Only ever encountered in odd numbers, the omnivorous rogusoks prefer to lair in warm and musty environs from which they ambush unsuspecting prey en masse. They are able to swallow a man-sized melee opponent whole on a natural 20. Anyone swallowed takes 1d8 damage per round until cut free of the reticulated terror. Rogusok pelts are much sought after by hosiers, who will pay up to 50gp for an undamaged skin.

Poxies

No. Enc.: 2-12	Alignment: C
Movement: 90', fly 180'	Armour Class: 3
Hit Dice: 1
Attacks: 1	Damage:1+cause disease
Save: E1	Morale: 7
Hoard Class:

You know the old theory that all disease is caused by tiny invisible demons? Poxies are what happens when the invisible demons of disease run amok, as in uncontrolled outbreaks of plague. These malicious little brutes are naturally invisible (as the listing for their neutral Pixie cousins) and enjoy spreading pestilence and misery wherever they wander. Anything they cannot devour or steal will be soiled beyond use. The toxic bite of a poxie causes disease (as the spell, neutralise poison has no effect against poxie bites). Poxies are repelled by soap, which harms them as holy water does undead.

(image fondled and filched from HammerWiki)

Scrawling on the Walls makes it Home

While I'm wait for my copy of Mike Curtis' Dungeon Alphabet to arrive (may the blackest of curses rain down upon the work-shy post fondlers of the Royal Mail who withhold from me the precioussss!), I thought I'd horf up a few of my own humble ideas for dungeon dressing.

Now, taking to heart the idea of making a dungeon 'lived in' (as advocated by many of the lumineries of our little niche-in-a-niche hobby), what makes something more lived in than abuse? Notably graffiti:

So, roll d6, d10 and d12 (no d8 though, I hate that guy):

~ Language ~
1 Common
2 Demi-Human (pick race)
3 Humanoid (pick race)
4 Other (pick race)
5 Ancientese
6 Unknown

~ Medium ~
1 Chalk or Charcoal
2 Ink
3 Paint
4 Blood/other bodily matter
5 Magic (dancing lights, glowing runes, spectral voices, illusions, etc)
6 Paper Scroll/cut up newsprint (ransom note style)/glued poster
7 Tologwork/folk art
8 Chiselled/Incised (rough, elaborate)
9 Screwed-down plaque (brass or painted wood)
10 Inlay into the existing stonework

~ Content ~
1 Threats ("SILENCE! I keel you!")
2 Obscenities (pictoral or written)
3 Boasts ("I am 11 inches. That's big for a pixie.")
4 Message Board/Ongoing Dialogue or Argument
5 Faction, Tribe or Cult 'Tag'
6 Directions (arrows, scrawled map, patterns of bent lines indicating turns)
7 Warning (50% nonsensical, or seemingly so. i.e.: "keep off the ceiling")
8 Instructions (50% deliberately misleading)
9 Clue (roll 1d10 for reading on the Gnomic Inscrutability Scale)
10 Riddle or Enigma
11 Nonsense Rhyme
12 OOPS/Anachronism (contemporary or futuristic warning sign, cutlery godling cave paintings, cinema playbill, spraycan artwork, metacommentary, etc.)

Mix your outputs from these tables with your existing dungeon content in whatever way seems most outlandish, nonsensical and "Wuh?" The bizarre, slightly threatening whimsy of Gearworld, rather than the chinstrokey "urban artform" clever-cleverness of WebUrbanist, is my personal touchstone.

The Reaction Table: My New Best Friend

(Cor! Is it dusty in here or what?)

The BD&D reaction table, oh how I love thee! Useful for recruiting hirelings, or for parleying with monsters; all (demi-)human life is contained within this simple little labour-saving 2d6 table.

2	Friendly, helpful
3-5	Indifferent, uninterested
6-8	Neutral, uncertain
9-11	Unfriendly, may attack
12	Hostile, attacks

The Judge's Guild Ready Reference Sheets already suggest using the table as the basis for negotiations (p37) and, given that in B/X D&D a "monster" is any creature not controlled by a player, you can use the reaction table to generate the current attitude of almost any encountered person or group.

One simple roll and you can instantly determining exactly how dyspeptic and put upon the local raise dead on legs feels today ("He said to throw the rotting stiff in the river for all he cared."), or whether the local merchant decides you're a thief ("...and then he chased me down the street raising a hue-and-cry. And I only wanted my cloak patched!"). Haggling for a better deal on that nearly new platemail? Roll on the reaction table. Want to know if your proffered "gift in anticipation of services rendered" is sufficient to allay the cupidity of the grasping court eunuch? Reaction table. Want to know how the duke reacts to your pushing for higher bounty? Reaction table.

In a hexcrawl context you can use the table to determine the current attitude of the latest hicksville (or poor, put-upon merchant caravan), towards our favourite gang of wandering killer hobos. Maybe you roll a 2, and the next village the PCs turn up at mistake them for fabled heroes and throw them a parade ("Why no, I'm merely travelling incognito."). Or you might roll a 12, and decide that the merchant's guards have mistaken their practised, woodcrafty approach for an ambush by marauding Orcs ("You cretinous yokels! Orcs are green! Do I look green to you?" "Orcs can be cunning..."). Or you could roll a 7 and have the locals be not just indifferent to the PCs, but wilfully oblivious to their presence ("It's some local tradition. We have to give them time to decide for themselves whether we're ghosts, or hallucination, or what...").

You can even use the reaction table to determine the prevailing mood of a locality otherwise indifferent to the presence of the PCs. Maybe (2) there's a general air of goodwill and jubilee because of a religious festival or annual sporting event ("Rejoice! You have joined us in time for the Gnomish Mating Frenzy!"), or perhaps (9-11) it's all just one loud sneeze away from kicking off into a full scale gang war.

Why bother? Well, mainly for the sake of verisimilitude. The chaos of random rolls help to give the impression of a larger, richer, more complex, and more carefully thought-out world than the DM has time or energy to put together. It's part of what James M calls The Oracular Power of Dice (yes, he pronounces the caps): take the die rolls, make of them what you will, and rationalise it all afterwards. Any contradictions and inconsistencies, well, that's all part of life's rich tapestry.

Oh, and for a bit of extra hilarity, there's also a separate d6 table for stronghold encounters (LL, p56) which has varying probabilities for 'chase', 'ignore' and 'hospitable' reactions on the part of the inhabitants. Combining this table with a 2d6 reaction roll can be great fun if characters rock up to castles entirely uninvited (pro-tip: "Ahem. Heralds milord."). The plot hooks write themselves:

• Ignore + a hostile reaction: the drawbridge stays up. The peculiarly-accented residents hurl abuse and catapult cows.
• Hospitable + neutral: the lord is obliged by his position to show largesse and is watching through gritted teeth as the gluttonous peasantry eat him out of house and home /again/. Don't expect any favours.
• Hospitable + unfriendly: the classic 'poison feast' gambit.
• Ignore + friendly: "Sorry, plague about, doncherkno. Have to keep the gates closed: doctor's orders. There's a pest tent down the way though..."
• Chase + friendly: "No harm in a bit of Hare and Hounds, eh what? You be hare..."

So, yeah. A handy little innovation.

Auctions, or "What you want for it?" "What you got?"

I've been watching “Deadwood” and reading up on the South African diamond rush recently. People in boomtowns were often cash rich, but they blew through this windfall wealth at an accelerated rate, living the high life and paying wildly inflated prices for the simplest of necessities. The applicability of these violent boomtown settings to traditional D&D is so obvious as to need no further context.

I'm not suggesting adding a sliding scale price system to LL (although a simple one would show why all those poor, put upon merchants on the RETs actually bother carting stuff hither and yon...), or even - Gygax forbid! - exhaustive price-adjusted trade tables (pace Alexius of Tao of D&D), I'm mainly interested in this for the purposes of varying the value of objects looted from the dungeon.

It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine that one-of-a-kind dungeon goods are given a flat value of "blah many gp". Sure, it KISSes things, but it hardly reflects the chaotic "easy come, easy go" life of an adventurer. So, stealing a little from GW’s “Mordheim” (a game I love for being grimy, mercenary, and oh-so-D&D) I propose Random Value objets d'art.

Instead of listing a golden chalice as being worth 500gp, said item might have a random value of 2d8x50gp, with the specific price only being determined when the chalice is actually sold on. (note: using a 2dX bell curve keeps the probable resale value near the centre of the range, but allows for occasional wacky variation to reflect the vagaries of the market)

In the Dungeon
Just pop the description, weight and random value on a card and toss it to the players. How can they be expected to know the random value? Well, the Dwarf or *cough* Scout character does a thumbnail appraisal on the spot, of course. Yon guesstimate will do until it comes time to sell the gaudy trinket on.

At the Auction House
The kind of ancient and exotic curios recovered from dungeons have a specialised and limited market. Although many people desire them, only a select few have the ready cash on hand to purchase adventurers' loot. And a small, specialist market is glutted fast. At auction (what, did you think these things were hocked to the local blacksmith or something?) you'll get full price for the initial lot offered, then -20% for each successive lot sold. When a multiplier of x0gp (-100%) is reached the local antiquities market is saturated and no further goods can be sold for a worthwhile price.

E.g.: each lot of goods on offer has 2d6x50gp resale value. Lot 1 sells for full price. Lot 2 for 2d6x40, lot 3 for 2d6x30, etc…

Note: the DM only rolls for the item’s ~actual~ value when the lot is finally auctioned. Up until then only a rough idea of the resale value (the possible range of values) is possible.

Going back to the dungeon and gathering more loot resets the local auction price. While the PCs are off exploring, killing and stealing local buyers are busy replenishing their purses by selling on their new acquisitions, extending lines of credit, writing excitable letters to their business partners, and squabbling with the new sharks entering the bidding pool. All sales are final (barring the old standby of stealing goods back from the buyer).

Bright Lights, Big City
Market value of objet d’art is more stable in larger settlements. More money is chasing the same goods (less bid depreciation), but some of this larger pool of potential buyers will have their eyes only on specific lots (offsetting potential bid inflation). My KISS rule of thumb is that these factors cancel one another out.

Towns & Cities, and their impermanent counterparts Caravans and Trade Fairs, lose resale value more slowly than do boomtown adventureburgs. They lose only -15% and -10% value for each successive lot. This gives adventurers a reason to travel to the big city (you can't offload that big score in Hicksville), and to treat merchant caravans as something other than wandering piggy banks.

Lot	Ad'burg	Town or Merchant Caravan	City or Trade Fair
1st	x100%	x100%	x100%
2nd	x80%	x85%	x90%
3rd	x60%	x70%	x80%
4th	x40%	x55%	x70%
5th	x20%	x40%	x60%
6th	x0%	x25%	x50%
7th	-	x10%	x40%
8th	-	x0%	x30%
etc...	-	-	etc...

(Optional Rules)

• Paying for an appraiser (price?) allows a re-roll of the lowest die when determining auction value. The re-roll stands in all cases.
• Pawnbrokers, fences, kopje wallopers and other shady bottom feeders will buy up excess objet d'art in a glutted market, but will offer only 1d6x5% of the rolled value (rolled per lot). It’s better than nothing, but not by much...

Value by Weight
Sometimes, particularly when the market is already glutted by an embarrassment of riches, it'll be worth breaking objet d'art down for their bullion value. As seen in that masterful study of historically accurate high medieval chivalry "Knight's Tale", you simply knock a chunk off the item and sell it on as gold, silver or whatever, losing the value added of the workmanship. The DM will probably be able to pull a price out of his butt for this, but don’t expect to get more than 10+1d10% of the objet d’arts full auction value as a bullion price.

The Wider World
Normal farming and fishing villages, or logging or mining camps, have no interest in dungeon-derived objet d'arts. Quite apart from the fact that the entire village is probably worth about the same as the goods on offer, what good will these fancy toys do a bunch of turnip farmers over a hard winter? If anything they're just going to attract the cupidity of bandits, monsters or other adventurers.

Adventureburgs are atypical of settlements of their size in that they are single industry boomtowns, that industry being the re-supply, entertainment and general mulcting of the walking goldmine that is a party of successful dungeon crawlers.

edit: little bit of editing and tidying