Bar Fight Ingredients!

Sometimes, the players just want to break something. Anything, really.

That's when it's time to mix up a Bar Fight cocktail.

Oh, sure, they could enter some arena combat, or start a scrap with the local City Watch, but those are life-or-death fights with potentially disastrous physical and social consequences. I'm just talkin' about some good old-fashioned fisticuffs. No weapons (except for the occasional chair), no dismemberment, no lifelong prison sentences.

What's the first thing you're going to need? NPC punching bags, of course.
James R. "Grim" Cone (who seemingly stopped posting way back in 2011) put together a solid Random Tavern Patron table for Swords & Wizardry. You don't always have time to random-roll a bunch of colorful NPC's on-the-fly when your players suddenly decide that it's clobberin' time, though.

So I went ahead and cobbled together an Abulafia Random Tavern Patron Generator to do the work for you. It's mostly comprised of Grim's characterizations, but I added attributes and hit points to round out the NPC's for social and combat mechanics. Every once in a great long while, an NPC will pop up who has an attribute higher than 18. Clearly they have a legendary magic item on them, or they were blessed by the gods, or they're a frickin' werewolf. It's up to you to decide what's really going on underneath.

Obviously, you can use this for more than just tavern brawls. You can populate the dinner car on the Orient Express with it for your murder mystery game if that's what tickles your pickle. The generator will deposit 10 NPC personalities neatly in your lap whenever you want. The only thing they're missing is names, mostly because these people are meant to exist in the background. If you or your players decide that one of them is interesting enough to bring into the limelight, then I guess you're just going to have to come up with a name on your own.

Random-Generator: d100 Crazy Things on the Beach

Let's say that you would like to use my Secret Santicore d100 chart of, admittedly, wack-a-doo stuff that could show up on the beaches of your game-world.

However, for whatever reason, you don't have the time, or inclination, to manually roll up those results on-the-fly during your games.

For DM's just such as you, I have deployed my patented ProcrastinationAndLaziness Encouragement Engine (P.A.L.E.E.) to develop an Abulafia generator that does the heavy lifting for you.

Here it is, in all of its glory: http://random-generator.com/index.php?title=D100_Crazy_Things_on_the_Beach

Go forth, and terrify your players with cursed pirate treasure!

Hireling Traits, and Shameless Theft

Telecanter, as usual, had a really great idea.
I, as usual, didn't learn about it until long after the fact. I'm a little slow sometimes.

Nevertheless, I was very drawn to Telecanter's handling of the situation. There are a ton of Hireling Generators out there on the web, and static tables printed up in books. None of them have ever really done it for me, though. Sooner or later, you're going to run through all of the interesting traits on those charts, and all that's left is the boring dreck. That's especially true in Old-School games, wherein hireling death-rates border on genocide.

"Congratulations, Grand-Wizard Eloatia. You've just hired a beet farmer with fungal growth under his toenails to carry your most priceless treasures through the Underdark."

Whoop-dee-doo.

Instead, Mr. T outlined very broad categories of traits that hirelings can have, with the rest left up to the DM's diseased imagination when rolling the NPC up. That way, your players never have to encounter the same bastion of the unwashed masses twice.

I'm with you, but also quite lazy, so I made an Abulafia page to randomly generate these poor,  hapless hirelings for me on the fly when I need them. The only major change I made to the original tables was to include transgendered and cross-dressing people to the gender chart, because why wouldn't I?

I now share this blatantly ripped-off resource with all of you.

Click here to start the funsies: Hireling Traits generator.

I Made a Thing!

Hark! I have heeded the decree of Wil Wheaton to "Get Excited and Make Things!" Okay, so he was talking about print-on-demand projects, but the man does love his D&D, so I'm sure he wouldn't object to my conversion of his trope here.

"Things" optional

My caffeine-fueled delirium and I put together an Abulafia generator for the "Creating Campaign Regions" section of Kevin Crawford's insanely useful An Echo, Resounding.

 

Usefulness + Samurai...   Samurai sold separately

If you're a DM/GM/Ref/Judge/Keeper/whatevs , and you need a quick sandbox (with optional Domain-level actions) for your players to, you know, play in, then you are totally in the luck. The generator is located here: http://www.random-generator.com/index.php?title=InstantRegion .That page alone should give you plenty of demented ideas, but you'll need the book if you want to understand how the modifiers are used for Domain management. It's well worth it, because Sine Nomine Publishing consistently pisses excellence. This is the easiest system I've found for PC's who want to literally rule (portions of) the world. Well, it's the easiest that doesn't involve rock/paper/scissors anyway.

Credit where credit is due to Zak S. and -C for bringing Abulafia to my attention in the first place. That site is chock full of hella-useful random generators for RPG's and writers. OSR ftw!