Sunday 5 February 2023

Working on a #dungeon23 meta (mega?) spark-table-of-spark-tables

As you may know, this month I am very much thinking about procedure. Being a fan of procedural generation generally, and spark tables specifically, I'm building up a mega meta-spark-table where each entry references another spark table (or set of spark tables).

For level 2 of my megadungeon I rolled "Fungal Wasteland" on my original d100 spark table, so for further inspiration I built some more quick spark tables, for "Fungal" and for "Wasteland" specifically:

Fungal

Adjectives: toadstool, spore, rotting, corrupted, infested, slime, mushroom, fermenting

Places: farm, forest, spore-field, giant cap

Antagonists: mycologists, fungusfolk, harvesters, cultists

(NPCs will come from the above)

Things: world-stool, spores, juice/extract, truffles

Situations: infestation, hallucination, feast, rot

Wasteland 

Adjectives: feral, forgotten, jury-rigged, wasted, disused, rusted, barren, scrap/junk

P: ruin, wastes, refuge, camp

A: raiders, survivors, prospectors, treasure hunters

T: artifact, cause (of the desolation), prophecy, scrap heap

S: collapse, ambush, awakening, restoration

Sparking

Rolling a few times on these (an Adjective from one + something from the other) gave me this little lot of potentially useful ideas:

"Rotting survivors"

"Slime refuge"

"Infested prophecy"

"Corrupted collapse" 

"Scrap/junk farm"

"Jury-rigged fungus-folk"

"Rusted spores"

"Forgotten feast"

...etc

The idea being that these sub-spark-tables would combine differently if the initial spark was different. For example the lists for "Fungal" combined with e.g. "Labyrinth" would build a different set of spark tables for "Fungal Labyrinth", similarly for e.g. "Antimagic Wasteland" and so on...

I'm behind with my rooms but will try to get caught up next week, but what ideas do the tables give you?

1 comment:

  1. I like this idea - have been a big fan of the spark table approach that Lizardman Diaries did for buildings in weird city suburbs - an atmosphere, a threat, who dwelt there, etc - which gave tons of combinations.

    I like the idea that you could have a big campaign theme spark list and then combine that with local (site, region, whatever) lists to get distinct ideas but keep the whole thing coherent.

    ReplyDelete

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