There are so few words relevant to my purpose that start with ‘Q’, I wasn’t sure what I was going to talk about when I got here, but thankfully those random tables came along at a good time for me!
Some years ago, I wrote Gaining Favor of Patrons. This post described how to define missions a patron might send their followers on so they can gain the patron’s favor.
This is very much like a Quest in the deity template and the divine aspect template.
The centerpiece of that post is the Mission-Target table (copied below). Roll a d8 for the action to be taken, and d6 for (the nature of) the target.
It’s pretty abstract, and this makes it easy to use. As long as you can find ‘targets’ and explain how the action can be done with it, you’re good.
The original post expands on and explains the terms used in the table, so I’m not going to copy those here.
| Roll | Mission | Target |
| 1 | Acquire | Event |
| 2 | Create | Information |
| 3 | Destroy | Location |
| 4 | Explore | Organization |
| 5 | Infiltrate | Person |
| 6 | Protect | Thing |
| 7 | Steal | |
| 8 | Transport |
Instead, I’m going to explore a little what each target might look like for the (draws domain card) Knowledge domain. The actions (missions) are mostly explained the same way by target type.
Knowledge Targets
Let’s see, what kind of targets do we have that could be associated with the Knowledge domain?
- Event: graduation or commencement, announcement (such as of a discovery or major agreement or initiative),
- Information: … must I?
- Location: Places of knowledge (libraries, schools, museums) or discovery (observatory, laboratory) are obvious choices.
- Organization: Sage’s guild, school/college/university (the faculty or board, more than the actual site and buildings).
- Person: Sage, investigator, teacher, student, Tyrion Lannister.
- Thing: a particularly ‘container of knowledge (book, scroll, USB key) is obvious, alternatives include objects someone wants to study (not just ‘read’, but examine or experiment with).
… okay, I am not building these tables today. But I can easily imagine having tables for ‘events related to each domain’ and ‘information of interest to each domain’ and ‘locations of interest to each domain’ and… so on.
But I will add it to my backlog, because I can see value in them.
… and now I wonder if I want to look into extending my table engine so I can have results add tags. Right now…
Ha! I had a topic in mind for tomorrow’s post, but now I might have a new topic: Random Table Engine New Features!
Horrible title, A-Z Blog Challenge makes me do bad things to titles.
Closing Comments
I didn’t even get to some of what I meant to talk about today. I’m not sure if this is what an epiphany feels like, but it might be what an epiphany feels like. I think I see a way to make my life a lot easier, and it kind of derails my brain.
Some people might say I should outline things better, actually plan what I’m going to write day to day.
I’d probably get more predictable results. That’s usually a good thing.
But this is so much more fun!