While developing Divine Trappings, I’ve created way more random tables that I imagined I would. I expected to have random tables in the domain descriptions. I didn’t expect to come up with so many generic random tables… but they all look useful.
Domain Field Tables
Still working on it, but as Yelling at Clouds (Air Domain update) shows, most fields can be presented as tables. Very simple tables, but tables nonetheless. I won’t list them all here, that list wouldn’t add much yet. They’re specific-purpose tables that really only have meaning where they are.
When I publish Divine Trappings, odds are very good that I’m including a workbook that has these tables. Pick your deity’s domains, scan and pick (or roll) elements as needed. I might even write software to make it easier, but for now it’ll be a workbook.
While I won’t list all of them now, I do have some examples from the Knowledge domain.
- Actors and People of Interest provides epithets by role or what the person does.
- Quest Targets gives examples of elements related to the domain, as from Quests and How to Define Them.
- Events
- Information
- Locations
- Organizations (blank)
- People (would use the Actors and People of Interest table)
- Things
Each domain is going to have tables like these, but I don’t have all the tables at hand yet. When I do, the book is probably done!
General Tables
The more general tables can be more useful, though, and I want them to be easy to find. These ones I’ll list and give links to.
- Armor: protective gear to keep you safe and unarmed. Hopefully.
- Artifact Names: what to call your nifty thing. Though at this point it’s the set of rules rather than an actual table.
- First cut, which I refined for the table above.
- Clothing: things you wear to keep you warm, cozy, and looking sharp.
- Colors: all the hues of the rainbow, and then some.
- Covenants: doesn’t actually have a table right now, but it should. I’ll come back and make one sometime.
- Deity Name Generation: no full tables, more description of how I do it… but there are some partial tables and rules available, so still useful.
- Domains: d66 and d88 tables for randomly selecting domains, plus tables for druid domains. Honestly though, I use a set of cards I created.
- General Object: other useful stuff to carry around, or more honestly ‘everything else’.
- Jewelry: things to wear to look pretty… or be imbued with power.
- Landmarks: things you find in the overland map.
- Materials: stuff things are made of: dirt, gems, metals, organic, stone, wood, and many examples of each.
- Objects: items of interest, or at least the physical part.
- Quests: pairing missions and targets (originally described in Gaining Favor of Patrons and repeated in Quests and Trials).
- Terrain: various land forms/biomes.
- Weapons: things to hurt things with.
None of the tables above tries to be exhaustive. The weapons table is very abbreviated: humans have made so many more ways to try to hurt each other. But it’s enough to work with. Colors too, there are many more colors than I’ve named here. I kept the names I thought would sound cool. Similarly, the Anatomy row of the General Object table has only 12 entries. I can easily name 5 more without touching my favorites.
… that sentence went bad.
Anyway, the tables don’t try to be exhaustive, but evocative.
Closing Comments
This post will be built on as I add more tables to the blog. Depending how things go, I can see myself creating a general ‘table index’ for the site.