Tuesday 19 January 2010

Scrawling on the Walls makes it Home

While I'm wait for my copy of Mike Curtis' Dungeon Alphabet to arrive (may the blackest of curses rain down upon the work-shy post fondlers of the Royal Mail who withhold from me the precioussss!), I thought I'd horf up a few of my own humble ideas for dungeon dressing.

Now, taking to heart the idea of making a dungeon 'lived in' (as advocated by many of the lumineries of our little niche-in-a-niche hobby), what makes something more lived in than abuse? Notably graffiti:

So, roll d6, d10 and d12 (no d8 though, I hate that guy):

~ Language ~
1 Common
2 Demi-Human (pick race)
3 Humanoid (pick race)
4 Other (pick race)
5 Ancientese
6 Unknown

~ Medium ~
1 Chalk or Charcoal
2 Ink
3 Paint
4 Blood/other bodily matter
5 Magic (dancing lights, glowing runes, spectral voices, illusions, etc)
6 Paper Scroll/cut up newsprint (ransom note style)/glued poster
7 Tologwork/folk art
8 Chiselled/Incised (rough, elaborate)
9 Screwed-down plaque (brass or painted wood)
10 Inlay into the existing stonework

~ Content ~
1 Threats ("SILENCE! I keel you!")
2 Obscenities (pictoral or written)
3 Boasts ("I am 11 inches. That's big for a pixie.")
4 Message Board/Ongoing Dialogue or Argument
5 Faction, Tribe or Cult 'Tag'
6 Directions (arrows, scrawled map, patterns of bent lines indicating turns)
7 Warning (50% nonsensical, or seemingly so. i.e.: "keep off the ceiling")
8 Instructions (50% deliberately misleading)
9 Clue (roll 1d10 for reading on the Gnomic Inscrutability Scale)
10 Riddle or Enigma
11 Nonsense Rhyme
12 OOPS/Anachronism (contemporary or futuristic warning sign, cutlery godling cave paintings, cinema playbill, spraycan artwork, metacommentary, etc.)

Mix your outputs from these tables with your existing dungeon content in whatever way seems most outlandish, nonsensical and "Wuh?" The bizarre, slightly threatening whimsy of Gearworld, rather than the chinstrokey "urban artform" clever-cleverness of WebUrbanist, is my personal touchstone.

1 comment:

  1. love it! i've been concocting limericks occasionally for this purpose myself. added to my Binder of Homebrew & Doom.

    ReplyDelete

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