In my monthly DCC RPG game recently, the players decided NOT to go to the Caverns of Thracia for their usual dungeon crawl of doom. Instead, they noticed a set of smaller ruins off the beaten path between their village and the Caverns (ruins that were created by Goodman Games for their Backerkit hexcrawl of the island of Thracia that I’ve been using as my overland map for the game).
Unfortunately, the entry in Goodman Games’s hexcrawl book doesn’t have much to say about these ruins: the villagers from the Hamlet avoid them, and there might be a tunnel/series of tunnels connecting this ruined village to another ruined village several miles to the west.
That’s it. That’s all I had to go on and use on the fly for this detour by my players.
I probably should have told the group that I wasn’t prepared for a trip to these little ruins and maybe we could just move on to exploring the Caverns, per usual.
But I didn’t want to take away player agency, so I figured I could improvise something using the details from the hexcrawl supplement. There are tunnels/a tunnel connecting two sets of ruins. Maybe something is in the tunnel(s)? Maybe they’ll find treasure in the other set of ruins?
My first mistake was trying to make all this up on the spot. I should have asked for a ten minute break to plan *something* instead of ad-libbing everything and ending up with a rather lame location and confusing encounter with a ghost.
I didn’t act prudently at all, and so what resulted was almost two hours of a weird, rather stupidly long tunnel that connected the two sets of ruins, a ghost with a missing hand who was full of hate but couldn’t actually do much damage to the players (DCC RPG’s ghost entry in the Monster section is pretty weak, and I didn’t know that before I decided to have a ghost be waiting in the tunnel… the ghost doesn’t do any damage just has these special abilities, and a lot of them didn’t make sense for what I had narrated already, so I ended up with a ghost who can show players a vision of their own deaths and not much else).
By the end of the encounter, the group had found the other set of ruins and I put a box with some treasure there so they didn’t feel it was a total waste of time, but honestly, it was a total waste of time. Not a very fun encounter, not a very interesting location, and all of it ended up confusing them instead of entertaining them.
Ugh.
Again, I should have simply asked them to go to the Caverns, promising to develop other locations and hexes for next time if they wanted to do more exploration.
But I didn’t, and we ended up with a weird and wasteful two hours of game time.
Instead of totally improvising and ending up with a mess, what if I had a ready-to-go toolkit for improvising locations and encounters on the fly? What if I could let the players explore things without asking them to wait until next session?
Hours after our game session ended, I realized I DO have a ready-to-go toolkit for improvising locations and encounters. I just didn’t bring it to the session. I didn’t even THINK to bring it the session, and that was a mistake.
I have Bob World-Builder’s Skrym zine, a toolkit for creating wilderness sites, encounters, and treasure (compatible with DCC RPG!) and I could have rolled up something in five minutes if I’d had it with me at the disastrous session.
There’s some ruins, eh? A ruined village, according to the Goodman Games supplement.
Okay, so roll for encounter in some ruins (2d6)… I got berserker.
I also rolled to see if maybe there was anything else near the ruins and I rolled again (2d6) and ended up with a cave. So maybe a little bit off the borders of the ruined village is a cave (and maybe this cave is where the tunnel is to the other ruined village miles away).
Random encounter for the cave… a giant spider.
Then I rolled four dice for a “small location” (the toolkit says roll 5d6, but I only had four dice at hand). Where those dice landed on my notebook page is where buildings are intact, ready to be explored. The number facing up on each die determines what’s in that location, so I ended up with a chest (6), two minion locations (4), and one hazard (3).
I decided the berserker was in one of the buildings with some minions. The berserker description in the toolkit mentions that its a dirty, cannibalistic human, so I figured the minions might be some giant rats he’s befriended.
I rolled for the hazard and ended up rolling “collapsing,” so that means maybe the wall of the building is unstable and will collapse if any rubble near it is moved, 1d6 damage or half if a Reflex save is successful.
Then I rolled for loot to see what was in the chest (maybe these were things the cannibal had collected after killing his victims?). Rolled up a hexarone handaxe (a kind of dwarven metal with special properties), a cask of mead, and a leg of turkey (maybe the players don’t know what kind of meat it is… fearing it may be human).
For the giant spider in the cave, I figured she had four victims in her web so I rolled up four more pieces of loot and ended up with a special longbow, special armor, 10 feet of chain, and some regular chainmail.
All of this random rolling took me roughly five minutes. I could have done it while the group was setting up their marching order and making some Sneak Silently rolls or whatever. I could have also done it as they went from room to room in the ruins. IF I’d had the Skrym zine with me.
Lesson learned. From now on, I bring this zine and if players ever go “off-book” into something I haven’t prepared for, all I need to do is spend a couple of minutes rolling on these tables and I’ll have a ready-to-go site and encounter for them to explore.
I feel stupid, of course, for having this awesome resource and not using it in my last session. And for someone else’s game, Skrym might not be the right tool. But I think it behooves any game master to have something like Skrym at the ready: a short, easy to use, on-the-fly toolkit for generating locations and encounters.
The Skrym zine is only about twenty-five pages; I printed it at home and stapled it, making a half-page booklet. Instead of trying to roll on random tables in a larger rulebook (like Shadowdark RPG or OSE) where some of this stuff is on different pages, Skrym has everything within a couple of pages; easy to flip through and fast to use. So whatever resource a GM uses, I would suggest it be short and sweet, something zine-like or even a single page maybe, that can be used quickly at the table without downtime or having to pause the action.
I feel foolish for my blunders in our last session, but going forward, I know I won’t make the same mistake again. And I won’t run a session of DCC RPG without bringing Skrym along to help me.
