Sheep and Sorcery Adventure Generator

 I tried to examine the style and content of my usual adventures and decided to make a generator for others to make adventures the way I have made them. I think rolling on this will give you an idea of the kind of games I run, but I am fascinated to see if you get any strange results and how you make sense of them. I'd love to see if you have any in the comments.

So this table lets you fill in the blanks of the following sentence. You can roll once and read across or roll three times.

You are [Doing?] in order to [In order to] in a / at a / from a [Where?]

Here are some tables of monsters, obstacles, themes, and NPCs that I have used in the past:

1d20 Monsters:

  1. Most Definitely Not Lemons: "Did that one just blink at me?"
  2. Porcelain Baby-Masked Automatons: Chittering brass legs, bursting to the brim of magic black ooze, a terrible too-low sound like babies crying.
  3. The Ancient One: What happens to a human being who perpetually ages but cannot die? Some might think nothing but a shriveled husk would remain, but a terrible metamorphosis happens instead. The body spills over itself, hideously growing as the inner savagery becomes external. Robbed of death, we become monsters.
  4. Many Boobed Frog Demon Lady: Belshazarria of the Muddy Pits Beneath Hell invites you to come with her to her home where you will feel love for yourself until you are nothing but mush.
  5. Childish Grass Giant: Hunched over, slumbering, it looks just like the hills around. At night, it follows after things that it thinks might make good toys. Be careful. He plays rough.
  6. Not a Beholder I Swear: A gigantic black brain covered in eyes with one single enormous eye. It wants your secrets, your stories of true fear, your nightmares. It feeds off such things.
  7. The Orphans of St.Ophelia's: The Void From Beyond bubbles up into our world as a black font of corruption and mutation. These were mere babes once, but their bodies have bloated, paled, and become monstrous. They wait in dark alleys, their pitiful cries luring in the well-meaning before they strike.
  8. A Black Ooze Conglomeration of Corpses: Held together by explosive black goop that seems to bear terrible, necromantic sentience, these corpses have been bound together into a hideous monster, spreading the vile stuff everywhere.
  9. The Gill Mother: Hulking pallid and slimy, this is a woman cursed or blessed by Mother Kos to this monstrous shape. One of her arms is many tentacles. She has a lantern, like an anglerfish. Her tongue shoots from her mouth and has a lamprey-like mouth of its own. This is her kiss. She will hypnotize creatures, infect them, turning them into her Fish Husbands, then their terrible mating produces the pale Grubfish that the city above largely consists upon.
  10. The Neverborn: Though they take many forms, they are usually tall black shapes like inhuman shadows with fingers like knives. They are creatures from the End of Time, creatures that never really existed but escaped from the realms of Unreality into the Real as the walls of time begin to crumble. They can sometimes make their way back through time through possessing mortals.
  11. The Giant Snake that Totally Isn't Actually Satan: Lies, damned lies, and statistics. This serpent once convinced a lady to eat some fruit? Idk
  12. Green Flame Jackolanterns: I just think they're neat.
  13. Sisters of Mercy: Strangely abstract white stone automatons looking something like nuns with silvery reflective discs for faces at the Sanitorium of the Remediators that some catastrophe has struck. "Due to a lack of physicians, remediation treatment is unavailable. Please accept mercy." They offer up white pills and will respond with force unless you take them. Death is present either way.
  14. Weird Horrible Goblin Creatures: I once had a bunch of stony goblins who were led by a massively fat one I called Beeg Chungus. I know. He was so gross that the PCs were genuinely disgusted by him.
  15. Torment Golem: A man trapped in an automaton looking like an iron maiden. He was trapped in an undying state by the Deathless Prince in days long passed and set as a guard over his treasures. he still believes that his wife and children still live and that he must serve the Prince or they will be killed though they died of old age long ago.
  16. The Keeper: The Sewer Gardens of the Elven Seamstress ate guarded by this construct if wax and golden wire. Her head is a golden woven basket like the hat of a medieval beekeeper. Her waxy flesh is full of golden hives and is swarmed by automaton bees. She bears many different beautiful gardening tools in her four delicate arms. She is utterly protective of her mistress and totally untrusting of intruders. She can make her victims bloom as their flesh unspools into vines and flowers. 
  17. Officer Rush Kincaid: Considered making this guy an NPC, but he really is a monster. One of the paladin cops of the highway patrol. He has a handlebar mustache. He has a seemingly unlimited amount of sunglasses. He looks like a Rescue Hero. He is completely insane, a total fanatic for the law, and with way too much divine power for someone with a single brain cell. His dialogue is entirely made of Duke Nukem dialogue memes. The players call him Officer Scary.
  18. Agatha Silkspinner: Fae lady of spiders. She took over an island after a bad deal made by a wizard. She is lady of all spiders, and she can turn into a giant white spider shining like diamonds and she is followed by many giant spiders and other fae that she has entangled in her webs of contract or enchantment.
  19. Avatar of the Smiling God: The Smiling God is the god of the sun, meat, and eternal happiness with many shining perfect teeth. Its perpetually smiling devotees can sometimes explode, their meat taking on the hideous long, many-armed form of their god. 
  20. The Dancing Audioforms of Lost Yarghast: The silent song of the Piper in the dimensionally displaced city of Yarghast has transformed its denizens. Their flesh has bloomed into vibrantly colorful, ear-like forms. They dance to the song that none but them can hear. You will hear it too if you stay long enough.
1d20 Obstacles:
  1. Having PCs face watery doubles of themselves emerging from a fountain.
  2. Something way too powerful to fight chases the PCs or guards a treasure.
  3. A big chasm with a treasure on the other side. The treasure could be fool's gold. There could be a giant spider lying in wait in the chasm.
  4. Relive the adventures of Sir Gawain in order to gain his armor, shield, sword, and green sash.
  5. Defend the value of humanity to a court of genocidal elves.
  6. Steal a dangerous artifact from a greedy conman.
  7. The Hall of Baleful Light
  8. Feast of the Forgetful Dead
  9. The Ghoul's Church
  10. The Fae Feasting Hall
  11. Something speaks in riddles. It has valuable information but the PCs must figure out its strange mode of speech.
  12. Break into a lich's mansion to smash her phylactery. 
  13. Pass through a whole city of masked and wholly clothed people. They appear appalled by flesh.
  14. There is an invisible southern passageway, or the player may simply not be listening to your description.
  15. The room is quantumly afflicted. Every time the PCs look away, it changes. There are only so many different versions however and one contains something valuable. Another contains something dangerous.
  16. There are audio journal entries scattered throughout the facility that show what happened here.
  17. Help a bunch of skeletons recognize that they are dead without enraging them.
  18. A witch turns all the PCs into children and they must escape her house before she eats them.
  19. A monster has attacked a town but the PCs must understand what it is if they want to have any chance of fighting it.
  20. A magic item tempts the PC into using its power for evil.
1d20 Themes:
  1. There is always horror lying in wait, darkness in every place thought to be safe.
  2. Surprising moments of grace and beauty in places of darkness and ugliness.
  3. Without death, people become insane or monstrous and people become monstrous to avoid death.
  4. Ambition and wild visionary dreaming, leading to destruction.
  5. The inadequacy of both Law and Chaos and the need for balance and unity.
  6. The innocent are preyed upon by the powerful.
  7. Weird time and dimensional travel.
  8. The ever-presence of the absurd.
  9. Adventure is everywhere.
  10. Allowing player characters to become hideous abominations in defiance of God's will.
  11. Abandoning "D&D" aesthetics and using folklore or just weird stuff instead.
  12. People are changed by the weird often losing their humanity or being enslaved by it.
  13. The temptation of evil or simply to run away from reality.
  14. Allowing players to get away with absolute nonsense. 
  15. Greedy people using powers they do not understand and cannot control.
  16. The return of the king.
  17. Blurring the line between consciousness and reality.
  18. Thoughts controlling people rather than people controlling thoughts.
  19. How will our history define us?
  20. The union of the spirit and the flesh.
1d20 NPCs:
  1. Bebezyx: The multiarmed, pale, goblin-like creature, that seems to lengthen its body and grow new arms at will.  This creature is a childish scavenger and will trade for specific qualities that it chooses mostly at random. Bebezyx will also sing like a creepy child in a horror movie but he's really perfectly harmless.
  2. Lillith the Succubus: Bound by a cruel wizard, even to remain after his death, this enslaved succubus has no love for her master. Take hold of his walking, chicken-legged house and she will work for you instead. The last group in this position never wanted anything sexual from her and instead just used her as a kind of secretary that eventually became like the party mom. Her romance with a Murder Machine was one of my favorite subplots.
  3. Hell Ranger Jesus: So Jesus Christ once made an appearance to a PC that was a Christian priest was plumbing through the depths of the Muddy Tunnels of Hell. The Lord was guiding souls lost here to salvation and provided the priest with a silver flaming sword inscribed with Truth and Love to guide him through this dark place.
  4. Franduin the Yellow: Perpetually high wizard. Shouts Gandalf quotes at inappropriate times. One time he let the party talk to a Lord of Hell by having it possess a small terrier. 
  5. Big J: The priest PC from the Hell Ranger Jesus entry was carrying this character through Hell. Big J was a wannabe Christ and the leader of a dangerous group of drug addict bandits snorting Elf Cocaine that allowed them to teleport. He was using child slaves to harvest the blue flowers, but the party was intent upon redeeming him for his funny hippie accent so they learned that his real name was James McCulloch and he himself was a victim of much abuse. After his redemption, he turned towards using his remarkable intellect to help the party.
  6. The Immaculate One: An elf sage who has almost reached enlightenment. He is so close that he has turned to stone like the Grecian Urn, his perfection defying change. He only turns to flesh under the full moon to answer any questions asked of him. The party once spent a very long time talking to him about why he wanted to leave life behind and instead join with the Beauty that is beyond this physical world.
  7. Billy Hemlock, High Duke of the Autumn Court, King of Wonderlost: Mushroomy fae lord living in a palace of ruin at the heart of a land of people all caught up in absurd quests through making deals with fae who merely laugh at the torment they cause. Sometimes outsiders come in their dreams to Wonderlost to dance there with him at his masquerade ball.
  8. Figarus Cornswallow: Local conman who presents fake wonders in his Mystery Shack-esque establishment. He tends to get a hold of real magic items only to endanger others and himself with them.
  9. Torro's Sheep: Torro was a PC who rolled particularly low on his intelligence, but DCC made him a farmer with a sheep. We joked at first that his sheep was probably smarter than him, then the sheep became demonic, then it was definitely going to cause the apocalypse. This is actually where the name of the blog comes from. The Sheep tends to glare at PCs with eyes full of hellfire and fart such wretched fumes that creatures keel over upon smelling them. 
  10. The Mortician: Small hunched over creature with sickly greenish skin. He has three arms and a belt full of tools. He obsessively maintains the immaculately preserved corpses in crystal coffins in his lair. Overhead, a strange light, looking like the distorted light underwater undulates as large shadows pass through it. This is a passage to the realm beyond death and the Mortician can use this power to protect those under his care, awaiting the prophesied day they shall be resurrected.
  11. Gwardur the Once and Future King: Basically just Arthur. We had a player who dunked his head in a pond and found himself living a whole childhood over again in the Edenic land of Avalon where Gwardur told him tales of heroism, his old life was only a dream, and the secret of what Gwardur had done and what he might be hiding from hung overhead always as a mysterious stranger shows up to tempt the one PC to enter into the red-doored ruins where Gwardur has forbidden him to go.
  12. Molobek the Mad Wizard: Pornography addict connoisseur and absolutely bonkers wizard. He is only a head, his eye sockets containing candle flames, and his tongue is forked. Something that would seem at first to be his body follows his commands, however, Molobek calls it Grumbo, and despite its apparent headlessness it seems to be inhuman and too large to fit the head of the wizard.
  13. Father Justin: A priest who went into a house to deal with a haunting, only to find his mind utterly broken by the labyrinth of world-hopping nonsense he had fallen into. When the party finds him, he tends to spout mad nonsense as he seems to defy all danger thrown at him.
  14. Leon of the Bronze Pride: Apparently quite chill leader of a bandit group wearing bronze lion-masks. He will relaxedly talk about how he is torturing his enemies at this very moment. He wears two curved swords and a pair of magical spurred boots that allow him to walk on the ceiling.
  15. Ramun the Jester King: Smiling elf leader of a group of clown-themed bandits including goblins, orcs, elves, and all kinds of people who have given into an extreme nihilism. He has a magic ring that fires disintegrating beams.
  16. Tiberius Septimus: Supposed leader of the Whispershire Adventuring Guild, but he really fills the role more of an accountant, handling the business side of things while the adventurers run amok. He is a quiet little man, supposed to be a wizard by guildmembers, though no proof has been found of this fact. All he wants is to hear their stories and get a look at the artifacts they collect.
  17. Etriban the Irregular, Flesh Crafter: Etriban is odd amongst his peers. The Flesh Crafters of Carnal Way do not regularly meet with those of low station, dedicated to keeping the secrets of their vile craft away from prying eyes. Etriban, however, lives in a “shop” he has hastily made out of a nook under the Lover’s Crossing bridge on the Fog Walk. His many alterations are quite evident despite the tattered scarlet cloak and brass mask he wears. 
  18. Moonstone, Moth Elf Instructor in the Elven Arts: Moonstone likes to think of herself as a fun, go-with-the-flow person, living out of her wagon, preaching about the benefits of crystal healing, decrying modern medicine, and performing elaborate stretches to realign her cosmic energies. The truth is that she is one of the most up-tight, neurotic people you will ever meet, but she does know her stuff regarding Elf Magics.
  19. Water Blossom: Fragile bag of trauma and eladrin escapee from the clone farms. He fled to a world of mages through a mysterious door and learned the secrets of the Lobster God and the Thousand Whispered Words of Power. He commands the unholy powers of the Weird Chair and the Shark Missile.
  20. The Shop Keeper: This mysterious wizard has anything you might wish to buy in his chicken-legged house. He commands the demons 69 Angels Fall from Heaven and Steven. He has spent his time exchanging his magical services to desperate villages in exchange for one of their youthful daughters. These feed the roots of the Plums of Youth which he grows in his garden.
Other helpful links:

Some settings/locations that I have used or thought up: here.

Weird monster generator: here.


Comments

  1. This is neat. I love adventure generators and this is a tidy little one. It might be fun (edit: haha a lot of work actually) to come up with tables like you three roll table above for theme and NPCs and so on.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks Ben! It was a lot of work but it was fun to walk down memory lane and see all the different things that I have included in my games. It paints an interesting picture of my own mind... possibly a worrying one...

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  2. One of the posts to bookmark for sure. Thank you, this is very useful.

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  3. I think this is excellent. Also, while it has some overlap with ideas I've had behind things I've run, there'd be a lot of difference. I think if anyone finds they have the time and patience a introspective review of the things they've run is potentlially quite valuable. Certainly got me thinking a bit.

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    Replies
    1. ...I mean, there'd be a lot of difference in my version of this.

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    2. Thanks, Alistair! I did find it valuable to go back and see what I had done before and try to really take stock of the things I had made. I realize just how many things I have borrowed, which I think is fine to do with games, but it also made me want to try and be more original.

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