Listen to this episode here.
This week I've got Nova, aka Idle Cartulary, of the excellent Playful Void blog among other places linked below. Nova's one of my favorite writers in the, as she puts it, DIY elf game scene, and I knew that was a world I wanted to cover more this season.
Nova brought on the rumor table from Zedeck Siew's Lorn Song of the Bachelor, an excellent elf game adventure. We got to talk about what makes a good random table at large, our taste in how adventures are written, and how point of view is the thing that often turns serviceable fiction into real primo shit.
Further Reading:
Nova’s kickstarter for The Curse of Mizzling Grove
Dice Exploder on pick lists
The Isle, in print and on itch
Socials
Nova’s blog, Playful Void
Nova’s podcast, Dungeon Regular
Nova’s games on itch
Sam on Bluesky and itch.
The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com
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Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!
Transcript
Sam: Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and ask the group chat if anyone has the goss about it. My name is Sam Dunnewold and my co host this week is Nova, also known as Idle Cartulary.
Nova and I met chatting on discord, and I quickly became a big fan of her blog, Playful Void, and podcast, Dungeon Regular. On the podcast, she covers old school modules in ten minutes or less, and on the blog, she mostly writes reviews of RPGs, especially modules for DIY elf games.
I love that she calls them DIY elf games. What a perfect phrase for the kind of fantasy RPG coming out of the old school D& D tradition. It's such a silly term, but self aware about it, and I think that's such a healthy way to approach the genre. I feel like Nova's writing really takes these games seriously, while never forgetting that they're, you know, elf games.
And as I've started playing more DIY elf games myself, I've wanted to cover them in more detail on this show. In some ways that's hard, because they're often so rules light, and the adventure module you're playing is often more important than the rule system itself. But on the other hand, maybe that makes the rules more important than ever, or maybe it makes the rules in the modules the most interesting thing to cover.
Anyway, that's what I asked Nova to bring on, something from the elf game world. And she came back with the random rumors table from Zedeck Siew's Lorn Song of the Bachelor, an excellent adventure that we will be spoiling significant chunks of in this episode. We get into what makes a good random table at large. Our taste in how adventures are written and how point of view is the thing that often turns serviceable fiction into the real primo shit.
Speaking of spoilers, we also get into endgame spoilers for The Isle, another adventure module by Luke Gearing.
And one last plug, Nova is about to launch a Kickstarter for The Curse of Mizzling Grove, a new adventure module of her own. If you like listening to her today, there's a link in the show notes. Check it out.
And finally, a quick correction. In last week's episode on Psi*Run I failed to mention the original designers of Psi*Run: Michael Lingner and Christopher Moore. The Bakers did Otherkind Dice and Meguey published the game, but wanted to make sure we got Michael and Christopher's names in there.
Okay, that all said, here is Nova with Lorn Song of the Bachelor's Rumor Table.
Nova hey, thanks for being here.
Nova: Thank you for having me here.
Sam: So what are we talking about today?
Nova: Today I brought Lorn Song of the Bachelor, and I want to talk about the rumor table that forms the inciting event for this 48 page riverine adventure and dungeon crawl.
Sam: Yeah, yeah, so as you say unlike normal, we're talking about a module today, or like an adventure, I think module's the right way to describe it more than like a specific game.
God, I, now I want to take an hour and talk about whether modules are games unto themselves, but no, we'll leave that for another time we're talking about a module
Nova: I think it's very safe to say that modules, and module is my preferred term as well, because I think it's a broader term, that modules are definitely games and most module designers consider themselves game designers. To the extent that there is overlap between the two of them, that's probably a, a whole episode to
Sam: Yeah. But modules do come with their own mechanics, right, and so that's, that's what we're talking about today is a mechanic for this module.
so you want to tell us a little bit about the premise of Lorn Song the Bachelor?
Nova: Sure. So, Lorn Song of the Bachelor is a module inspired by the crocodile stories of Southeast Asia. There are two factions, the Gleaming Fins, which are the local people, and a colonizing company that are interacting in this location. Both of them want the crocodile gone, and the place of the player characters in this situation is to investigate the crocodile. And depending on which side you choose to take find out how to make it go away.
Sam: should mention right off the bat we are going to get into spoilers for this, it's sort of impossible to talk about the context of a rumor table without spoiling very large parts of the module, so if you want to read it for yourself or you want to play the thing, just know that you're going to know some stuff about it, and that's probably fine, I don't know, spoilers are fine.
But yeah, so let's, start off by just reading through the table.
Just for reference, all of these table entries are in quotations, like they are dialogue coming from someone that you're talking to, receiving the rumor from.
I think this table's short enough that it might be fun to just read the whole thing. You wanna do that for us?
Nova: Sure I can read through it.
Rumors of the Bachelor: To speak of fell creatures is to attract their attention. Especially now with attacks happening so often, the gleaming fins must be persuaded to talk.
Number one, a hunting party killed him once. A few weeks later, he was back.
Two: ask Aunty Sighty for one of her incense burners. Keeps him away.
Three: watch out for kingfishers, blue ones especially. He uses them as spies.
Four: he buries his victims. Pebbles piled on the bank? Those are graves.
Five: he can wear human shape. He can be anyone. He could be you.
6: kill a boar, leave it by the water, say his name, he won't touch you then.
7. He's a hill spirit. When the chief fought him, there were earthquakes.
8. Treasure hunters don't come back from the ruin, because he lives there.
9: he can't be killed, not by mortals. Means he's a god, obvious to me.
And 10: there's more than one white croc, they've a nest somewhere.
Sam: Cool. So, I don't know, I love this rumor table, but before we get into the details of this one, I thought maybe it would make sense to go back and talk about what is the history of this kind of mechanic?
Nova: So the history of the rumor tables go all the way back to some of the earliest modules. Not the earliest modules from my understanding but certainly, rumor tables are appearing in the late seventies and early eighties as a basic component of modules and a basic way of engaging the players into the bulk of the planned adventure.
Sam: Yeah, and this kind of random table, like rumor tables we're gonna get into in a second, but this kind of random table with just like a few juicy, flavorful options, I feel like you see all over modules. You see it even in character creation in a lot of games. Like, I could do a whole episode on the patches table from Mothership which is just a hundred patches that might be sewn onto your spacesuit or onto your uniform. You can create an entire character off of just rolling up some weird little patch and that, little nugget of flavor that is going to propel the game forward just a little bit is something that I think random tables are so good at and useful for.
Nova: Yes, and it's really interesting because if you go back to reading early, early modules from the hobby, as time goes on, you can see it progressing from random tables that don't provide a lot of juice or flavor and slowly the preference growing into random tables that provide more juice and flavor. So going from 1D4goblins to a goblin named Scrakt, who... wears a skull on his head and
Sam: Has a fishing pole. Yeah.
Nova: whatever has a fishing pole. Exactly. kind of moving in that more flavorful direction. And, and I really feel like I chose this because Zedeck in particular, the author of this module, Zedeck Siew, has a gift for putting description into his tables in a very evocative manner. and doing that in very few words, which few words makes a random table far more accessible to use, in my opinion.
Sam: Yeah. A sentiment I have that, I feel like you share that description, is the thing that I want out of a random table, and really out of a module at large, is someone to think up a bunch of cool little ideas that I would not have been able to come up with on my own.
And 1d4 goblins I can just do that at home and I can have fun with that but I can do it at home. Like if I'm investing my time into reading a module, the thing that I want is someone to give me a bunch of ideas that are gonna be more surprising than 1d4 goblins, are gonna get me somewhere that me and my table would have not gotten on our own.
Nova: Yes, precisely, so like I think one of the things I really look for in a random table is specificity. Because it, like you said, you want it to be something you couldn't come up with, and also you want it something that's going to tie this random thing solidly into the world and to the people that are in your game.
So, having tables of things that are kind of general aren't really helpful in my opinion, because of that. It can't be something you would have come up with on your own. and similarly random tables like one type of random table I don't really like, or rather set of random tables, is the random NPC generator,
Sam: Hmm.
Nova: because, and there's an example of this in Lorn Song of the Bachelor, actually, of one of these tables that I'm not so much of a fan of where, you could generate a uh, name of a NPC, their personality, what they look like, maybe what their goals are. They spend a few pages, I think it's a two page set of tables in Lorn Song of the Bachelor.
And, to me, I would rather that just be a list, or a random table, of six or eight more concrete, specific characters than providing me with the opportunity to make a potentially unlimited number of characters.
Sam: Yeah, it's like the difference between being given six fully assembled action figures and like a box of action figure limbs. Like, I, I don't, like, I don't know, I could just take the six that you gave me, like, I could figure out what to do with those, I don't necessarily need to assemble them myself.
Nova: Yes, I like that analogy. Or like the difference between getting a box of Lego with no instructions and getting the Lego with the instructions. I'm paying for the instructions in the case of a module.
Sam: Yeah. Although I will say the, the Lorn Song NPC tables in particular, I really do love as like a high quality example of the thing that is going on here.
Nova: Yes, I agree with you. Zedeck's writing really makes it shine. And like, you can just off the cuff roll up a very characterful creation out of those tables. but, would still rather see a bespoke character by Zedeck than any of those characters that I could roll up randomly.
Sam: As much as I can sort of imagine an entire character whole cloth from the adjective throat cancer rasp, I would be better off with like, Nora the grandmother, throat cancer rasp,
Nova: exactly.
Sam: so that's kind of some thoughts about random tables at large, but you, do you have other sort of like framing thoughts about random tables before we get into this one in particular?
Nova: Yes, so the existence of the contents of the random table, is that it's making implications about the world and about how we're interacting with the world.
So, for example, for a rumor table we're assuming that the answers listed in this rumor table are going to be answers to common questions that we're going to ask. It's guiding people into how to interact with the world in a way that's quite subtle. And I'll probably come back to this at some point. That's one of my favorite things about random tables is that they're very subtle tools. You read a random table and it's not immediately evident how useful or how elegant it is.
There's kind of a contrast here to me between, like, random tables and, like, PBTA moves, where I read a PBTA move and normally, I get to the end of a good one, and I'm just like, oof, that's really juicy, and I get excited about using it. Whereas a random table, quite often, the genius of it can be very deeply hidden. And I will probably get into how hidden some of those secrets are when we talk about this rumour table in particular.
Sam: yeah, I really love, we talked about this on the episode I did on picklists with Ash Kreider about how, like, the options you don't pick still inform your story.
And that feels really true of random tables too, right? Like if you're rolling up one of these rumors per player or something, which I think would be a fairly common use case, you still are gonna have six more or whatever after that where you're like, Oh, these are other things that could come up, that the Gleaming Fins believe, and that's gonna color how I'm playing them as a GM, and all of that kind of stuff.
Nova: Yes, and like, again, we're jumping forward to this specific table, but for this, this is about the Gleaming Finns particularly. It's about their culture, what they believe. So as probably the primary faction you're going to be interacting with, it provides a huge amount of information about them, and their superstitions, and how they interact with the world, even if you're not going to provide all of those rumors to the players.
Sam: Yeah, I mean, let's just keep going and get into this specific table at this point. I love, um, in a rumor table just scene setting of it. I mean, I understand that's like the purpose of a rumor table is to entice people and like hook people, to be a good rumor, to like bring people in and get excited about playing the thing and also have little clues to like keep an eye out for as they're going and all of that, but it's just so fun to do that. Like, it's fun to do that as a reader. Forget playing it, like, I got excited to read the rest of this module by reading this table.
Nova: Yeah, exactly. So like, this is like the third page, I think, in the module. I think there have only been 250 words in the text before this rumor table occurs. And it's probably 250 words long. And at this point, it's almost all you know about what's going to happen in this module. And it is totally the hook that drags you forward into the rest of the module. effectively serves as like the flavor text on the back of a book or on the back of a movie. on the movie poster or something like that, to draw you in.
Sam: Yeah! And I the other thing that I immediately love about framing a table like this as rumors is you just inherently know, these things all matter, but like half of them are lies, right? You can't trust any of this. Like it sets a vibe, but it doesn't, it doesn't claim that any of this is definitely going to happen. Like it leaves open so much possibility.
Nova: I think that's really interesting, actually, and it's something that this rumor table does in a very interesting way, because false rumors are really common since the beginning of rumor tables, and often I don't like them because they can drag the action of play away from where things will be most interesting or most compelling.
But in this case, the untrue rumours are still believed to be true by the primary people you'll be interacting with. And so for the most part, when they're untrue, they're telling you something about the people you're talking to. But also, most of these untrue rumours are kind of half truths here.
So... for example, the Piles of Pebbles are not actually where the crocodile buries his victims, but they do have meaning in the adventure that you will find out later on.
Sam: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I, listen, I read this six weeks ago, and loved it, and only half remember what happens in it, and so I'm looking at the rubric table like, wait, which ones of these are true? And I remember that there is some importance to the kingfishers. But I don't, I remember someone's using them as spies, but I'm pretty sure it's not The Bachelor, but I'm not positive, and like that's, that's the ideal vibe, as you say, I, I um,
an example of the kind of like less good maybe rumor table that you were talking about. I won't name the module in question, but I was running a dungeon a couple of months ago, and the players started by getting the rumor that time moves differently inside the dungeon, which was just a lie. And then we spent, like, half the session with people trying to figure out how to make some kind of device for timekeeping. And I find that, like, kind of interesting, like, a fun problem to solve with, like, whatever resources they had at hand, and also a complete fucking waste of time. Like, what are we doing? Like, it would be so much more interesting to, like, dive in and engage with, what the module is actually giving us. And as much as that fear hanging over things might be interesting, like, also, who cares? That's not what the module's about. Like, what, go write that module and come back to me with weird rumors about it.
Nova: Exactly. Or incorporate something that that contributes to in some way.
So like, I was reading something this morning and what your example reminded me of it, because what you could do is say, Oh, well, actually, this is not a time warping dungeon, but there is a time warping puzzle in the dungeon.
Sam: Yeah.
Nova: And so suddenly this rumor, which is false, you get to the room with the clock in it, and you're like, wait, this has something to do with changing time, and you can respond to it like that. Whereas having it just be false, distracts us from the core component of play that we're enjoying having.
Sam: Yeah, yeah, exactly. All
Nova: um, I think the other thing here is, a lot of these rumors, are not just hooks to draw you forward, they're also foreshadowing. So they cause tension in future moments that you will not have encountered when you get the rumour. So, the pebbles I mentioned earlier, as soon as you encounter those pebbles, you'll be fearing that the Bachelor is near.
If you feel earthquakes, you're going to be fearing that the Bachelor is near based on the... Rumor that he is a heal spirit.
So, a lot of these provide a sense of foreboding and a sense of tension to future scenes that if they were absent, those future scenes that otherwise would be somewhat static situations further into the module.
Sam: There are also a couple on here where it's just like Uh, here's a thing you might want to go check out, like, are you bored? Go talk to Auntie Sati right? Just go down there, like, I guess if you need to gear up, you can get one of her incense burners, and like, as I recall, those don't work, but she'd be happy to, like, con you into buying one.
But now you're like, at this entirely different NPC who like, knows a lot about what's going on, that it's probably useful for you to have a relationship with, and would just kind of push you out into the adventure a little bit deeper with the rumor.
Nova: And also it kind of leads into that fun complexity of the characters, like you were saying earlier, that the Gleaming Finns are not a straightforward good group of people. And Aunty Sati is really emblematic of that. So it's meaningful that she is the one that they hook you into in these rumours because you go there, she's a really useful ally, she has a lot of information that you can provide, she's also a source for these rumours if you want to provide more rumours, but she'll sell you incense that doesn't work to protect you against the Bachelor, and the Bachelor is a deadly foe. So that encounter can lead you into a confrontation with the Bachelor that you didn't intend, and that confrontation with the Bachelor that you didn't intend opens you up to a lot of other things in the adventure.
For example, if you injure the Bachelor, an opening to the dungeon appears where the bachelor was injured. So baiting the player characters into a confrontation with the Bachelor adds additional ways to access further situations and locations that they wouldn't have
Sam: yeah. yeah. Totally.
Nova: So I think one of the other things that's really interesting about this table, and that contrasts with some other rumor tables is that the Gleaming Fins have never been to the Old Ruin. That's one of the rumors talks about how nobody has ever come back. And that's the focus and climax of the adventure in a similar way to the Bachelor himself.
But it's absolutely unknown to the Gleaming Fins, so there's nothing about this climactic dungeon in the rumours themselves. You know nothing about what is inside the dungeon. The Kingfisher God is alluded to, and just the location of the ruins is alluded to, I believe.
But the rumour table is about the Gleaming Fins. It's their rumour table, and so there's no further information outside of what they would know. There is at least one complete faction, the catfish people, who will be a complete surprise when they're encountered, and have their own village and that nobody knows exists because the rumor table is very specific to a specific group of people.
And I really think that is an important way of thinking about these rumor tables, because often in rumor tables you find out that there's something in the rumor table about level five of the dungeon, which is only opens one day every year at midsummer's noon.
And how do people know
Sam: Yeah.
Nova: level five of the dungeon at midsummer's noon? How is this a rumor that is on this rumor table? So thinking about who is speaking the rumors adds a lot of verisimilitude and interactivity to what you're doing, and it builds the world more strongly.
Sam: Well, and the other thing that that does is it focuses the rumor table on what's gonna be immediately in front of the players at the beginning of the adventure, so you get a lot more juice there. Like, by the time you're going into this dungeon, we don't need a rumor table, like, they're, we're pumped and ready to go.
Like, if the purpose of this is to kick people off and, to jumpstart the flow of story, the thing that we need is as much juice as possible that we can use right out of the gate, not something on level 5 of the dungeon. Like I'm invested when I'm five levels deep.
Nova: Exactly, exactly. so I just, I just love that, that density of juice you get out of these like 10 sentences in this rumor table. I think it's just an example of how, like, I often compare writing modules to writing those one tweet stories. You know, there's... There used to be that, that account that used to write a story in one tweet,
Sam: Yeah.
Nova: and I'm like, this rumor table is ten one tweet stories, with all of the narrative potential that those one tweet stories used to
Sam: Auntie Sati is selling baby shoes that have never been worn. Yeah.
Nova: Yeah, exactly.
Sam: Yeah, I, so, having read some of your work, I feel like you take that really far to an extreme in a way that is, really cool and really fun, but I also wonder... Like, Hiss is written in this way that is, like, unreadable to me, but I think would be practical and very useful in play, and I'm curious to hear you talk about balancing module writing for use at the table versus ease of readability.
Nova: Yeah. So I think that, so, so I guess to speak like from the evolution of my work is that kind of, I started down this line having a chat with some OSR creators and talking about how you could just fit a monster stat block in like one line. It's like, well, you could just write a monster as a haiku was the joke that made.
And so I went and I decided to publish a book of monster haiku. I've written three volumes of this at this point. So that kind of started getting me interested in how to, reduce the words used for the most kind of punch and reading further into English language haiku and sihu, which are like a Korean poetry that have a similar Um, these kind of short form poems that use implication a lot in how they communicate their message.
And so I set myself this impossible task of writing a very large module. It's yet to be released, it's called Bridewell, and it's a hundred page or so module that's written in this style. Completely unreadable.
But, kind of the purpose there, for me, is that you don't read it. I don't want it to be readable. What Zedeck's done here is immensely readable. It's really enjoyable just to sit with and read through. Whereas I want to see if I can figure out a way, and this is, Hiss is an experiment in this as well, figure out a way that you can just open the beginning and start playing. And the descriptions are brief enough and succinct enough and evocative enough that you don't need to look to the previous page or the next page to really know what to do next.
And so Hiss leans really into some of the commonalities of the form, like rumor tables, random encounter tables, so I don't have to explain what they're for, and then, aside from that, it's just... what building do you show up to first? This is the map. Where do you go? Who do you encounter?
And so, so that's kind of where I came to that kind of density of form that I've kind of slanted up with my writing. And I found that amongst the readers and players of my work, it very much falls into two parties. Some people have a very negative reaction to it either because they really need to feel comfortable reading through the whole thing before they play it, or because they're readers. They don't play their modules, they read their modules. like, either of those are very valid in my opinion.
But there's another group who are just like, this is the best thing I've ever read. because this is dense, and everything I want is on the page, and I don't have to turn pages very often. And I can play it without any prep or minimal prep, and these people get really excited about the stuff that I do.
So I, yeah, different strokes, I guess.
Sam: to bring it back to the Lorn Song of the Bachelor, Zedeck I think does a good job of at least a little bit straddling the line. Like this is such a readable module. Like, I read this in one sitting in an evening just as my, like, evening reading. But I also feel like there's very little across pages in this, right?
There's very little where I would have to be like, I'm on this page, I have a flip to that page. It's like the whole rooms are on one page. It's not it's not messing around, gettin too spread out, I think.
Nova: Yeah, it's a very narratively written module, and I think also the use of the art here, the art here by Nadhir Nohr, and it also serves to spread out the text in a way that makes it much easier to digest, I think.
Sam: Yeah.
Nova: It's actually interesting the way you say that, because I don't know if you've heard of The Isle.
Sam: Yeah. Oh, I've read The Isle.
Nova: This is a module by Luke Gearing that, came out about a year, year and a half ago. It's a really controversial module, because it's very narrative. It doesn't provide a lot of explanation, it really feels designed to be read in the sense that it leaves mysteries for you that will be discovered deeper into the module, and it keeps kind of like dragging that along but never really explains itself.
And I really like The Isle. But I feel like Zedeck does a better job of this narrative structure in this than The Isle because it is a less dense, more spread out, illustrated piece of work.
I do wonder how much it is just that Lorn and Song of the Bachelor is a much more succinct, shorter work than The Isle. And so the overall impact of The Isle is very impressive.
I remember that I was very impressed with one particular tale at the beginning of The Isle where you hear about I believe it was a dead monk floating in a cove in the first few pages, and then what happened to that dead monk is revealed five or ten pages later. And that really impressed me. I was like taken with the Isle at that point.
And that habit continues, but over the much longer length of The Isle and density of The Isle, it becomes less possible to hold everything you need to in your head.
Sam: Yeah, Yeah, I think The Isle is a really interesting point of comparison to bring up on this subject of rumor tables in particular, because notoriously The Isle has no rumor table. It doesn't even have so much as a reason why the players would be going to this place. It is almost like an anthropological description of a location that no one ever will or should ever go to.
And it is sort of left as an exercise to the reader to imagine why players would come to this place in the first place. Like, to use this at your table, you have to do some writing. And I think there's something aesthetically pleasing about that in the context of The Isle for me. But I also really want a rumor table, you know? Like, I want something that's gonna, like, come in and give me some support to bring the thing to the table.
Nova: So I think one thing that's interesting about The Isle in comparison to this as well is that Lorn Song is very much about the people who live here. The company that is competing with them, and the characters that are in this dungeon.
The Isle isn't really interested in the culture of the monks on the island. It really relies on our kind of collective unknowledge and understanding of what monk life is to kind of imply what the culture is, to imply what is there, to imply what their response to the depths of the dungeon are.
It does do some interesting things in replacement of a rumor table, I think. For example, there is a location that is a cemetery. And it gives details on each of the characters who are buried in this cemetery, and that plays a similar role to this rumor table in the context of that module. So like, I wonder if the intent there, although it's not stated, and that's very much the conceit of The Isle, that a lot of Luke Gearing the author's intent is not stated.
I wonder if the intent is that you would wander across the barren isle, see this cemetery as the only landmark apart from the church, and maybe encounter these tombstones as your, as your rumor table.
It's a, definitely a unique approach though.
Sam: The other interesting point of comparison, as you're saying, like, the Lorn Song of the Bachelor is so much about the people and the culture of this place, whereas The Isle is in a lot of ways thematically about isolation and desolation, right? And the idea that there is intentionally no rumors about this place because this place is so barren, is so isolated, also kind of underlines that theme.
And that's an interesting choice in and of itself.
Nova: It is, and I think that that is related. Again, The Isle is very subtle and very up for interpretation, but correct me if I'm wrong, but the final boss in air quotes, of The Isle is a druid kind of like this kind of iconic representation of nature and forest and, it's pictured as this like mossy creation, which is in utter contrast to everything seen before in the module.
And I wonder if some of the intention there is actually that that contrast is intentional, that the isle is barren and that the people are lonely because the druid is about, the density and effluence and abundance and, and connection because there's not really any indication that that druid is malevolent except to civilization.
Sam: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Okay, so, earlier you were talking about how rumor tables are really subtle, right?
And I, I was wondering if you could elaborate on that.
Nova: Yeah, sure, sure. So I guess in terms of subtlety, I think that the thing with a rumor table is that you look at it and it's a list of, in this case, 10 things. And a list of 10 things is, it is not on its face a very complex set of information.
And I think this was in a Discord, I was chatting with someone and they were like, picklists and random tables are the same thing. And I disagree, because there is some subtlety to the connections in a rumor table compared to a picklist. For example, in a rumor table, at least for true rumors, it is assumed that everything in them is true. Whereas in a picklist, you are choosing what is true for the game or the world of the character. Also, in a rumor table, most of those facts connect to other places in the narrative, in the world, or in the characters.
So, in each of these Lorn Song rumors, there are one or two connections to other places, or people, or things in the adventure that are not apparent on a first read. In fact, you have to read the entire 48 pages and then go back and look at the rumour table and you're like, Oh, that connects to this, and that connects to that, and those things are not apparent on a first read.
And also, there is the probability involved in the rumor table, or in random tables more generally, because there's a significant difference in what will show up on a 1d12 roll versus 2d6 table, for example, in terms of likelihood of things occurring.
And there were also like recently I was writing a table for Mothership. And I think this might've been for my module Hell on Rev X, where I chose to do a half D10 table over a D5 table. I was trying to stick to 10 sided dice because that's the Mothership convention. But it turns out the D10 table with rounding has a much more pleasing results in terms of probability than just saying roll a D5. There's a subtle difference there that definitely will not be apparent to anyone but meant that I could weigh things subtly in favor of certain aspects of the table that made the adventure more likely to be enjoyable.
So there are lots of subtleties to random tables and rumor tables that we can take advantage of that are not immediately apparent.
Sam: Yeah. On the difference between picklists and random tables too, as much as it's sort of very easy to convert between the two of them, right, like it's, really easy to just say, I don't want to roll on this table, I'm gonna just pick the one I think is cool, and similarly if you don't know which of the like six attributes to give your Apocalypse World character, you can just like roll a die and find out, right?
But I know people for whom picking off of a random table feels like cheating, and I know people for whom rolling randomly feels like giving away control over the story that they would like to hold on to. And I think both of those feelings are super valid, and I just find that to be an interesting distinction between the two forms.
Nova: Yes, and I think that they're really valid too. I don't see any problem, let's say with this rumor table, looking at the people you're playing with who are your friends, identifying what things would be appealing to them or inciting for them, and giving them those rumors rather than rolling randomly. That is a perfectly valid use of any of these tables.
I do think that randomness often adds something to a situation that is pleasing because we get to be surprised in what occurs next. So I think that in a lot of ways, the randomness is a way of intentionally giving away our agency in exchange for the experience of surprise. Because if we are telling a story collaboratively, then the only surprise that we gain is the surprise of other people's suggestions. And even those surprises are tempered by the negotiation that happens between players at the table.
Now, like, I don't have a problem with that type of negotiation, I enjoy collaborative storytelling games, but it's an incredibly different experience to the experience of being constantly surprised by what is occurring even when you're the person who is ostensibly in charge, the referee or the dungeon master or the game master. And that's what random tables add. They add that aspect of surprise.
And... there's a series of articles called the Blorb Principles by a blogger called Sandra. Yes, Blorb. And basically this is describing a style of playing a traditional kind of elf game where the dungeon is in complete existence, or the place you're going completely exists. You're not making it up as you go along. Before you enter a room, the contents and people in that room
And that style of play really feels that you gain something from having a concrete place, even if it's imaginary, to explore. And the interaction with random tables into that style of very concrete Blorb style play is really fruitful because you know that what is going to be there was always going to be there, your choices are very meaningful, but the outcomes of those choices can be all over the place because you never know how the people in that room are going to react. There's so much that you don't know because the rumours you get, the random encounters that you arrive at, the reactions of the people are all randomised.
So I feel that style of play, which I feel is one of the earliest styles of play, even though as a term Blorb is relatively recent, the style of play it's describing is as old as the hobby. And the interaction of random tables with that concrete style is a really important aspect of making that style work. Whereas it's less important in a very collaborative storyteller game, let's say Microscope.
Sam: Yeah,
Nova: We're not adding anything to Microscope by having more random stuff in it, right, because it's all about building things collaboratively. You just need a few sparks and then you can go off. And, like, Apocalypse World lies somewhere in the middle, right, and other Powered by the Apocalypse games where, where some randomness does help, but a lot of it is by negotiation with the people at the table.
Sam: Yeah, I think that injection of randomness goes back to underscore the thing I was saying about... what I want from a module in the first place when I'm reading a module of like I want an idea that is gonna come to the table that I would not have been able to think of on my own. And a good pick list brings you like a menu of options to choose from there, but there is something quick and exciting and like extra sort of energetic about like You randomly roll, this is the one that you got, this is true about the world now, how are you going to, like, insert it into the fiction and change things up and adapt to it, that I think is really powerful about random tables. It's really exciting about that. Like, that's the power of the random table for me.
Nova: Yeah, well, like, it's the same power as the power of rolling a dice in general, isn't it? There's something to the game feel of rolling a handful of dice that, as much as it is not ideal in every situation sometimes you just want to have dice in your game. Sometimes you just want to, make clacking sounds, you know?
clackity clack. Yeah, Like, I attribute a lot of the success of, 5th edition, for example, to the swinginess of the d20 roll because there's something really special about the fact that occasionally something astounding happens that you don't have a lot of control over what's happening, that you're constantly surprised every time the referee calls for a roll.
And whilst I'm not a huge fan of playing 5th edition, I do think that that feeling is really important to why so many people like that game. And that feeling is the same feeling that random tables in general draw from for their attractiveness.
Sam: Yeah, absolutely.
Are there any other... preferences that you have about random tables that you want to make sure to, to express here before uh, before we call it quits?
Nova: Yeah, I guess like, what I really look for in any random table, or set of random tables, when I read one, or when I'm writing one myself, I always ask the question, why is this a random table, and how could I structure that information in a way that makes it simpler? Because a lot of the content in whatever I'm putting there, I want to minimize the complexity associated with it.
Like, a picklist is better than a random table if adding the randomness doesn't add to our capacity to focus in on and learn about the world that we're inhabiting in the game. Or a simple table like this table, which is just a one to ten table, is better than two pages of tables that contribute the same information.
Whereas if I'm trying to roll weather, then maybe one of the hexflower tables is actually the better choice. And maybe going more complex is going to enable me to communicate more information about the world in the same amount of space and the same amount of cognitive impact.
I have ADHD, so for me I actually think a lot about this stuff in terms of how much cognitive load it causes me, because whenever I have to pick up another ball, I have to drop a ball. And so, a hexflower is great for weather, because it means I don't have to remember as much about the weather. Whereas if I decided to put rumors on a hex flower, then I would just lose it. I would lose it. Like, why are you adding this complexity to something I'm trying to manage?
Sam: Well, I mean even going back to weather, it's like, yeah, listen, if weather is important in your game, a hex flower is a great way to do it. But also, do we give a shit about the weather in, this particular game that we're playing? Like, nah, it's like raining because it's dramatic right now.
Like, you got to think about what is the game that you are playing and why do we care? Like, making a random table about something makes something important. So don't do that unless you want the thing to be important.
Nova: Yes, so there's something really interesting in Lorn Song of the Bachelor, actually, is that part of the introduction to the Old Ruins, the main dungeon, is that there is a page devoted to describing the passages that you pass through. And I would have to go back and look but, I believe there are two tables, you roll two dice, one on each table, to gain a description of the passage you're travelling through.
And, this either says something really interesting about the space you're travelling through, or is unnecessary, and I'm not sure which one it is. It certainly seems to say to me that, to the author of this, the passageways between the rooms that you're having these main encounters for are really important. That they are important things to experience in and of themselves to some degree. The journey in this dungeon is as important as the destinations inside this dungeon. And I think that's really interesting that it says that.
Now, on the other hand, if I'm running this module and I have to generate a new passage every time someone passes through it, that's quite effortful for me. It involves me reading and matching things together and coming up with a description based on the words. They're beautiful words, but I still have to string them together and make them my own. And I also have to, it also loses something, because that, what that also means is that the passage between room A and room B doesn't tell me anything about those rooms.
Sam: Yes.
Nova: So, I don't know that it is a bad choice or a wrong choice, but it's a really interesting choice to have and it kind of like ties back to what we were saying about what random tables say about the world and how they draw attention to the things that are important in your game.
Sam: Yeah, yeah, the pulling of focus onto the passages between rooms also de emphasizes the importance of the rooms themselves. Like, the rooms that are destinations that have the sort of named NPCs that you want to be interacting with, those feel like the more important thing. They are given so much more space in the text, as opposed to a couple of random tables to describe the space, plus a random encounter table.
But, in actual play, because we've put those random tables in there, we're gonna be spending nearly as much time dealing with uh, I don't know, checks, notes a number of tooth golems like, in a weird slippery passageway as we are, like, talking to the interesting person who created the tooth golems, who exists somewhere in the dungeon.
Nova: And I think that's something interesting as well about Lorn Song in particular is that I actually suspect I suspect that words are spent on the passages than on any individual room in the old ruins. Because this is very sparsely laid out, there's a lot of white space, it's fairly heavily illustrated, and so I actually suspect that maybe perhaps with the exception of the final room, they are all quite brief, I think.
However, I think you're right about space. Each of those rooms is given a generous amount of space.
Sam: Well, I already asked this once, but any final words for us on random tables?
Nova: No, I don't think so. I think... I'm sure I will think of something after we log off that was very insightful, but I don't think I have anything else to add at this point.
Sam: People can come to the Discord to hear your very smart insights whenever they want to.
Alright, before you leave, if you haven't checked it out, I highly recommend pairing this episode with the episode I did with Ash Kreider on picklists Even if neither episode does a lot of explicit comparing and contrasting of picklists and random tables, I think there's a lot of implicit connections to be made.
Okay, thanks again to Nova for being here. Her blog is Playfulvoid. game. blog, her podcast is Dungeon Regular, her games are available on Itch, and The Curse of Mizzling Grove is about to launch on Kickstarter. Links to everything in the show notes, it's all great stuff.
As always, you can find me on socials at s dunnewold, or on the Dice Exploder Discord.
Our logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by PurelyGrey, and our ad music is Lilypads by my boy, Travis Tessmer.
And thanks to you for listening. See you next time!