Running Domain Play as a Carousing Table part1

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Whelp I had an idea for this , like 6 weeks ago and then didn't have a real chance to type it up and so wrote some "notes" so I can easily do it when I have a spare few hours and a computer and here I am in front of a computer resting my knee so I'm looking at my notes and fucks.

They are just a fucking mess of conflicting ideas and tangents and the suggest of unnecessary subsystems and introducing tarot cards because that always makes something seamless and easy to use




But first things first; the carousing table rule is where your characters spend gold , get some exp for it and then roll on a table, as seen here:

http://jrients.blogspot.co.nz/2008/12/party-like-its-999.html

Many people have made their own versions:

http://dungeonofsigns.blogspot.co.nz/2013/01/drunk-in-denethix-ase-carousing-table.html

http://killitwithfirerpg.blogspot.co.nz/2012/03/carousing-orgies-and-their-alternatives.html
Updated version, that is fancy:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RhJY8bJNGN3GXpB-IdJY568af0aaCjAohM5ky8TmQFU/edit

http://www.ageofruins.com/2013/03/29/new-downloads-dcc-carousing-and-thief-skill-reference-sheet/

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With me?
So the idea is if your players are now in charge of stuff but no-one really is interested in playing it in all its detail but it would nice if running the thieves guild meant something , even if you will always be busy travelling to the moon to fight laser mummys or something.

And presuming that any political situation is so complicated and crazed that you have no idea what exactly is going to happen as consequence of any action so tables

Ideas on how it could work:
@# you spend X amount of gold advancing your interests you get half ( or a d6X10 as a percentage) that in exp back and roll on a table. Table will need enough bad situations to make this not a given for players to roll on it

@# you just roll on a fairly balanced table at the end/start of each session to see what trouble and opportunity have winged in

@# the player puts a wager (gold, exp, land expansion , severe inconveniencing of a NPC) and you roll on a table to see what the results of that are

@# A  more complicated domain sub system that I will detail in a following post
As alternative to rolling on a table or as Random Event Generator entering random years into wikipedia gives a list off all those things that have happened then. Scroll down until you find something appropriate .


Also you could draw a tarot card and interpret that. Or assign various events to all the cards. Or just the major arcana. I thought about doing that on this blog post buuuuut not today.

here is an example of events table though so you have that atleast from me:
1. IF the player was trying something , the exact opposite happens. If they weren't , somehow their domain has a new reputation that is the opposite of what they actually do
2.Success, but player pisses someone off who was previous kindly disposed to player
3.Success but the continuance of it requires the on-going patronage of an insane person
4.Clusterfuck roll 3 times
5:.Failure and somehow a recent misfortune is now being blamed on player
6: Failure and a weakness of their domain has been widely exposed
7.:Successs but a new faction has entered the scene
8. Roll twice , the first is what you tell the player the second is what is actually going on
9.Failure: someone the p.c knows and likes is now in danger and prob desires to flee
10. Success and player's domain becomes some what inconveniently feared
11.Failure but player's domain's enemys are cautioned against acting against them
12. Failure and violent infighting erupts in players domain
13 Success but all on-going conflicts are escalated
14: Success and a previous enemy offers to join forces
15: Failure but valuable secrets are learned
16: Failure and the players position is threatened from below
17: Failure and someone allied is revealed to be a double agent
18: Success but will reverse if players domain does not appear to be innocent and peaceful for next 2 appropriate domain time units
19:Success but 1d4 foes are convinced now to make an alliance against player
20: roll again but read failure as success and success as failure

(note for success that will reverse if condition is not meet: if this nonsensical due to to the success being not really reversible , like learning something about someone, read a reverse as a random foe gains the same benefit.


I'm just screeding here rather than giving  a coherent useable system , but I guess thats what I do around here.
aaand it I figure its something pretty campaign specific so parts are more handy than plug and play system. OR I just can't stay focused. Whatever. My notes ramble on more from here but I'm going to break this post up into 2 parts so I can come back to the subsystem with more clarity than I feel I have now. It also has an attached table and that needs some chin-stroking and yeah to be continued..


Also

Sword of the Samurai should be played ASAP as how to run domain play 

oh look it's abandonedware

So basically it is a good example of tiered domains where you start out being in charge of village work then get promoted to being in charge of province , then a county  , then a region then the whole kingdom. And this is done by having the highest honour and being elected by the guy above you, until you just above the top and then its more or less open warfare for the Emperor-dom or whatever.
You can go to peoples houses and try and make friends or bait them into dueling you or wander the country side doing heroic things so your honour goes up or sneak into peoples houses and kidnap their sons or whatever. It's great.
                       

Just for the Record

Print PDF Just for the record Zak Smith is a friend of mine and I am trans.
 I have not found him to be transphobic or anything he has done to be transphobic.

People are calling him transphobic or passing on that other people are saying he is transphobic without checking that out.
 Which is shit because
a) It's a fucking lie
b) Transphobia is something that is bad and important and as a transperson I fucking hate you if you are using it to shore up some shitty argument you are having. Show me why you are saying this so I can know and make effective decisions or all you are proving is transphobia means fuck all to you.



Anyway here is collection of tables I did on g+ UPDATED I found the cleric one

DUELS OF THE GUILD ELDERS:
1. The tea makers : Scald match: a large kettle each of boiling water. Stances like knife fighters, feints and lures to encourage the other to waste a splash , some stay out of range until the kettle has cooled and then charge at use it as a bludgeon, the more water kept the heavier the kettle. Others little strategic splashs to the face or hands.
Duel goes to submission, unconsciousness or death as dictated previously
2. The bakers : each duelist bakes an army of gingerbread men, muffin marauders, swiss rollers, croissant crabs and the like and sends them to the bakery of the other. A simultaneous siege and marathon bake off, each baker desperately replenishing their forces, juggling bake time schedules , and the merits of scale and economy and their own fatigue. The loser will be forced into their own oven by the others army when they can defend their kitchen no longer.

3.The wig makers A simple hand to hand combat. Except any weapons or allies are legal as long they can be concealed in the duelists wig before the duel is commenced.

4. The candle makers Both are covered in pitch a


5 The Grave diggers With shovels in a pit being slowly filled from above

6 The tailors A duel with foot long needles , suspended above even more needles, by a tangle fabric scraps and tiny threads. Each duelist must sewn and weave a secure position anchor point before risking attack


7 Cheese makers have a month to prepare their bodies with custom diets and then a month in a dark room to make and hone whatever weapons and armour they can out of cheese. They must provide the milk with their bodiesnd then must navigate a dangerous trap filled maze with only a small candle to initially light their way, and from there may make additional candles from anything they find or catch. The duel ends when one is set a flame by the other.



THIEFS AND SPYS:
more than just criminals , these clandestine fellows are:
1 Believe they are all the same person, just different aspects of them. Everything belongs to them for they dream everything into existence. When they want it back they have to sneak it back, directly confronting the dream risks shattering it and forcing them to dream another into existence.

2. Learn their skills from a shadow group of alien documenters, in exchange for fulfilling various weird research and espionage assignments.
Alien documenters desire to bring city consciousness through painstaking manipulations of the flow of information in it


3. Thuggee cult

4. Revolutionarys splintered endlessly into in esoteric factions, generations ago. Now political discourse serves as dogma and arcane shibboleths and dictates the style, targets and methods of their crimes

5. The members believe being in life means being in debt ala original sin and all just laws gain their authority from this. Their initiaon is to die and then sneak out of the shaded realm (go look for resurrection side effect tables) , thus getting out of the contract. Then believe no laws apply to them, yet still believe in the rightness of law as it applies to everyone else


6. Run by members of a proud untouchable caste. Train more members who are not members of the caste so the wrathful ghosts of the betrayed ruling caste will claim them instead when they escape out of the hellish afterlife bondage the undercaste tricked them into.

7. What bizarre environment would allow for the professional codification of criminal talents? (okay other than this one) Some kind of hellish Apokolips planet megacity which folds its way into all other possible cities by virtue of its density and bullshit., that is what! So thieves are basically all mister miracles.

8.  Agent Provocateurs , misdirectors and sowers of vast suggestions of conspiracy . Editors of history and archeological vandal, defilers of vaults and tombs. What for? To always confuse the actual history of the world. They do not know the true history,but just know it never should be known. The possibility of It gnaws at them. The founder knew but took his own memory before starting the guild. This is one story. Others are told. Like post-modernist but even more neurotically driven.

9. reincarnating immortal deviants who have their higher souls stolen and hidden in 1000 different objects as part of an elaborate and amusing scavenger hunt.

10. If illusions become too real they ascend to the next level of reality which is the current campaign one, but now they have thief skills to represent their flickering detachment to physical laws. Even if in the previous reality they were an illusion of a door or a plate of fish.

DUNGEONS
THAT ARE:
1. Wasp galls. Either giant or small but dimensionally twisted
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall
2.Enamel formations in giant teeth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinthodontia

3. Hollowed out ossified cloud, still afloat
4. Fog banks
5. Giant bodies and/or stomachs. Either fresh, dead, alive or hard rotten or frozen
6.Dimensionally tunnels in everyday space like those mirror worms in Donnie Darko
7. Flat land style , 2 dimensional cave painting dungeon or rogue geometry book trap
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Land

8. Fulgurite formation in a desert
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgurite

9. A syconium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syconium, but like with more Aliens body horror

10. Gods heart, 4 part interlocked

11. Frozen waterfall, more of vertical dungeon

12. Iceberg

13. Fumaroles

Wizard gimmicks:

1. Snail eyes that can extend really far
2. Eats (silences) the speaking of their own name if it is pronounced just right. Wouldn't die from not feeding this way but will go into extreme cranky withdrawal
3. Claims to have pet shape shifter. Might just be talking to random objects and animals.
4. Spare brain in a jar around neck. Memorizes double the amount of spells but needs assistance switching brains.
5. Hat on close expectation seems organically extruded. Can withdraw into hat like a snail but several magnitudes more creepily.
6. A baleful face on their tongue is actually doing the speaking and thinking. Eats via nose straw and grotesqueres.
7. Always looking up. Waiting.
8. Doubled up like a king or queen on a playing card
9. Sleeps in the arms of an ogress nursemaid. Suckles from her.
10. Waters congeal into algae slimes in her presence 

So this oppressive warrior elite are notable in that;

1. Centipede grafts of random size and placement
2. Never make a noise, except when they die, all the words come out at once in a sonic explosion
3.Gain another pair of arms each time they win a duel (from the loser of the duel)
4.They eat only live food which they fight while eating in it
5. Start their initial training with an assigned partner. At some point at the last grueling challenge they and their partner have to decide which one dies and becomes a skeleton armour set for the other to wear the rest of their life. Those that best their partner with force will have an armour that plots against them, those with trickery an armour they can never trust or one too foolish to trust.
6.Value the use of a missile weapon above all else , refusing to fight in melee . If they can be engaged in melee , they have failed in the principals of observation, stealth, surprise, misdirection, and controlling the terrain.
The society in which they lord over can be compared with that prison , the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon combined with Samurai snipers.
7. Like the aztec with their jaguar knights and eagle warriors. But each animal cult is an evasive masked and secret band protecting/marauding the streets at night. Like gangs of aztec batman. Each gang/animal cult has a different month in which it is dominant and different code of laws to enforce.
8. Trepanning their 3rd eyes open to shoot murder beams at you from all the angry spirts they consume and store from the brains of crazy people. Have raids were they capture people to store in asylums in order to drive them insane so they can consume their brains to reload their murder beams.
9.One armed swordswomen.  Their other arm ("the child holding arm")they remove and use to form the bone blade of the sword.
10. Murderous long steel straws they use to literally drink the blood of the working class









Worshipers of gods, intoners of rites, pointers of bone;




1. Dirt eaters. The earth is the mother they worship and she loans them her power by the eating of dirt. 100 grams per spell level. Returned in the usual way.




2. That idea that gods are empowered by belief? Not here. Here the reverse. Belief sucks the strength and essence away from the god in question, everytime certainty is needed or a doubt soothed , the god bleeds. Spells most of all. The gods here are secretive things, big shapeless mass of night , quavering and pitiful. Illuminates seek them out and jealousy guard their names and forms. A god might be good for anywhere from one to a thousand spells before it dissolves utterly.




3:VARIANT: regular believe empowers the god, spells hemorrhage it. Gods shyly present themselves to simple folk, fearful of being discovered and used by the Hierophants, slying updating and changing the canon and scriptures as they drain one god after another.

4. Ancestor ghosts hang around until they are destroyed utterly to power the spells invoked Crematior entrusted with this grim mantle

5.There are no stories of gods here just stories but as long as people discuss, read, debate and believe the stories, and more importantly what people say about people saying about the stories the Canonists can rewrite the world as needed to make it more like the stories

6.Paranoia , apothenia , and the deduction of vast conspiracys empower these Iconclists. They worship nothing , but claim to see the connections and natures to all things others do not and this gives them power.


7. Their gods here are small and personal and curled up their brain , a godworm. The physical limit to how much godworm can be curled inside you acts as a level limit to the Custodians.


8.. The gods dream in a ocean and trash washes up from this ocean. Scavengers go down their secret wells to the astral shores and pick through the debris of divine dreaming , evading the strange crabs there. Their spells are always a mishmash of every pantheon, sometimes satirical , semi-sensical or alien


9.
Inventors who believe in the future, wielding their unstable prototype devices to do great things.

but somehow each device falls apart after a single use, to be angrily discarded and condemned by the inventor.

They move on to their next theory or insight and the practications there-of, not knowing that they consume some of their cultures actual psychic potential for change and advancement with each of these devices, condemning their society to stagnation.



10. Sheppard tend the flock. And the flock should really think about that metaphor harder as they unwittingly consign their souls to be consumed utterly by the godbeasts waiting for them on the otherside. The godbeasts send a few crumbs of power the Shepherds way in order to from them to enact minor miracles.