RPGaDay 2025 15: Deceive

Lies and truth are interesting things in an OSR experience. I’ve been used to modern games, where there’s an “insight” skill or something similar that the players will roll to check objective reality. Outside of specific spells, such as Detect Lie or items such as a Candle of Truth, OSR games tend not to have that possibility. To me, a skill such as insight suggests a mechanical means to test objective reality with absolute certainty. Roll below the DC? You’re probably being fed lies. Roll above? You have 100% certainty of the outcome. Of course, you could roll in secret as a referee but at that point, what’s the use of the skill? The PC is left with the same amount of uncertainty as before.

RPGaDay 2025 14: Mystery

The following table is to help kickstart a mystery. The tens on a d30 will produce who has committed the crime, ranging from distant to close relation. The ones will then detail what crime it is. Hopefully, this will spawn some good ideas for interesting events.

RPGaDay 2025 13: Darkness

Darkness seems to be a pivotal thing for an OSR experience. Darkness is foreboding and dangerous. The OSE SRD notes that “[a]ll non-human monsters and many demihuman races have a special kind of vision that allows them to see in the dark. This is called infravision.” Imagine being in a space where you can’t see anything, but everything in the dark can see you—terrifying. OSRIC on p.124 of the core rules dedicates six paragraphs to light, vision, lightsources, and the resources to keep them alit. The last paragraph specifically points out the risks of intelligent creatures realizing an approaching light means people are coming. After all of this, a paragraph is spent on infravision, noting that almost all subterranean creatures have it.

RPGaDay 2025 12: Path

Today’s prompt, “Path”, lead me to think about a feature I don’t really describe much. I’ll describe the journey somewhere or events that happen. I’ll describe moments of rest, or unique features of a landscape being traversed. I don’t, however, tend to describe the state of the road that the PCs travel.

RPGaDay 2025 11: Flavor

Immediately, this prompt made me think of describing potions. I want to have an easy way to generate more unique looks and experiences for potions. So, this table can generate a variation of experiences of a potion.

RPGaDay 2025 10: Origin

I really enjoyed reading Carcass Crawler 5, which has a chapter on creating Level 0 characters. As part of that, on p.14 there are background tables listing a profession, items carried, and a fitting weapon. I’d like to add on to those tables with one of my own.

RPGaDay 2025 09: Inspire

I was a little stuck on today’s prompt, “Inspire”. So, I used the little roll tables for additional inspiration. I got a 5, for “Why”; a 1, for “Envious”; and a 3 for “Genre”. Of those, “Genre” is the one that sparks something. So, today’s random table is going to be “genres” in a loose sense for inspiration. Typically, I’d say a genre is “fantasy” or “science fiction” or the like. What I’ll abuse it for today is seeds for adventurous locales.

RPGaDay 2025 08: Explore

Another day of my self-imposed random table per day challenge for RPGaDay2025! “Explore” is a bit of an easy prompt for this: any encounter table involves results of exploration. So, I tried to do another D-Devil table to have it generate curious results.

RPGaDay 2025 07: Journey

Today’s entry for what has become RandomTableADay for me is on the topic “Journey”.

A few years back, I read the Welsh Piper’s post on Hex-based Campaign Design (Part 1). In it, The Welsh Piper speaks of efficient hex map design, referencing an old, lost-to-the-internet post by Greywulf, on a Microlite d20 site. This lost article is called “The Lazy Gamer’s Guide to World Building”, and I could find an old copy on Scribd. Greywulf argued to generate seven three-mile hexes, putting an adventure in each, and just expanding the next ring of hexes around wherever PCs move to. The Welsh Piper, in turn, expands on that idea by making 25-mile hexes with 5-mile subhexes, and the Part 1 post is all about generating that terrain. The idea being that one 25-mile atlas hex should be more than enough adventure to start with.