Cheap Encounter Foreshdowing Idea Sketch

How about this for a super-short version of Toms foreshadowing thing.

Every time you roll encounter dice, roll two. Every roll *something* happens, or you find something, but only 1 in 6 is a full-on encounter.

(the DM remembers/improvises what each thing will be.)

1. Skeletons.   1. Sub-sensory ('aware' feeling.* )
2. Orcs           2. Tracks/Sign
3. Wolves       3. Spoor/remains/Victims
4. Bandits       4. Sound/noise
5. Rival Team  5. Brief/distant sight
6. Vampire      6. Encounter (They see you and respond)


So I roll 2,5. "Right at the end of the corridor you briefly see a shadow pass before the light. It looks like an Orc."

(Of course 4 or 5 could turn into an encounter if the players are fuckwits, but that's up to them.)

If they are being loud then you could say that the largest result rolled will always be in the right column, making a physical encounter more likely, but the monster maybe less threatening. if they are being stealthy, you could do it the other way round. Probably just an indication but the thing itself may be horrible.

So now the players are in a continuously 'alive' environment that they have to keep thinking about all the time. You keep the improv quality so the foreshadowing is not separated in time from the encounter, its not 'inevitable' or pre-set. (I know it wasn't in Tom's thing anyway.)

Its random for the fun and regular enough to represent a real space and environment. Its also a good return on result for minimal arrangement of data.

And they are always finding things out, just by being there, like a real place.

It might not work in the same way as Tom's foreshadowing as the phenomena don't always match in the same elegant way.

(*like horror movie music, somethings wroooong  wOOooOOoo)

Done Things

51. Muttering voices ghost you through the walls.

52. Gold-guarding golems confused by a rhyme.

53. A silver thread leads through the shadow gate.

54. Alric the organist pipes in his tomb.

55. Riddle-Twist caverns are half-drowned, but safe.

56. Murdered clones of you, naked, stripped and torn.

57. Hoarders of the mist-mould, under attack.

58. The Fear-King flees and begs for vengeful swords.

59. Mobius-Fort of the Queen that wove time?

60. The Arsenic road will get you there, half dead.

61. The darkness here cups lamps and puts them out.

62. Murdered map-merchant, his secrets un-found.

63. The wing of a dead moth reveals a plot.

64. Undead thieves guard the Twisted Gods crown vault.

65. Dive the vertical Archipelago.

66. Walls scarred by something trying to get away.

67. Thastrovect, the risk-mad gambling Lich.

68. The ghoul-priest gasps his final secret out.

69. This maze hides Life-Knights, Lawful Good undead.

70. Black-Smoker climb leads to Sulphurous wealth.

71. An evil Lord that hails you with your crimes.

72. Robuskinot, the fence of stolen spells.

73. The waterfall hides secret city gates.

74. The Palace of Sighs is ruled by a Ghost.

75. Insanity Crawl cannot be climbed sane.

76. Escaped slaves scream at the sight of you; flee.

77. Doomed Dao drifting on his carpet of gold.

78. Hot girls in danger from a secret foe.

79. The Maze-Monkey made his own, and hides still.

80. This sinkhole takes you past Hell, but it’s fast.

81. Sorcerers Delve with beings of horrid light.

82. Fleeing thief, level ten, twelve HP, rich.

83. The mine-monk holds heretic hordes at bay.

84. Port-Vertical is empty now, and still.

85. The silk-bridge spiders charge a fleshy toll.

86. The Psy-Lords Mind-Mines; cyclic escapees.

87. Devils-Financial, disguised as things meek.

88. The merchants guards are dead, the bandits too.

89. The Sons of the Consuming One wait here.

90. White-Diamond river hides silent stone isles.

91. The flesh-rift and its delicate consent.

92. Seller of swords; broken, brittle, bejewelled.

93. Dragon seeks recruits, interviews in dreams.

94. This truth-obsessed Drow broods still in her Hall.

95. A Frost-Giant ferry wades the fire, for gold.

96.Signs of your passage where never you were.

97. Phat-stacked abandoned aristocrat cats.

98. Abduct a princess, fat reward, you in?

99. The mages labours hid a mighty Delve.

100. Gigaplex Rapids need pilots with Math.

Lets try this again

1. Cancer bear camouflaged in carved marble

2. Crins Crack, three miles lonh, one deep, four feet wide.

3. Giant-Saints tomb, safe retreat for those unarmed.

4. Silk-train of guarded slaves in single file.

5. Temple to the Void God, empty when full.

6. Earth Elemental anchorite, enraged.

7. Tombs of the Sphere-Lords, empty now, and smooth.

8. Umbral-Town, arranged in shadowed segments

9. Blind Masons, traipsing and talking of stone.

10.Olm on a vision-quest, what does he see?

11. Deep-Elf slavers, prepared, waiting for you.

12. Mermaid Falls, water singing over bone.

13. Igneous-Villa, civilised and Black.

14. The MoonMaster General with his white guard.

15. Temple to an expunged god, sunk long past.

16. Husks of boys, abandoned by the child-thief.

17. Foxfire warrens, threats hide within the lights.

18. Elf-Wait city, sinking slowly in time.

19. Archean adventurers, statue-slow.

20. Time’s mandala, it’s never-ceasing monks.

21. Grimlocks with night-lamps and eye-seeking darts.

22. The fortress-climb of Uncle Spine, well hid.

23. City of the Opaque Eye, ruled by Doom.

24. Olm on an epic migration rappel.

25. Prison of the Daemon Choir, feared by all.

26. Spider-Riding suicidal death-dwarves

27. Subducted Rocket Silo, ancient make.

28. Dugout town, built in old workings of war.

29. Bat-Riders, taking the tunnels at speed.

30. Sacristy of Gloom, cloaked in sombre light

31. A Speleo-Mage and her seven thieves

32. Tumour-Mound of the Termites Chaotic

33. Mirror-Ville, accessed through volcanic glass.

34. Stew-merchants carting their cauldron of slops.

35. The Energy Saints electrical prayers.

36. Frantic Cambrimen looking for a fight.

37. Shifting conch-cave of the stone-smuggling thieves

38. Hell-Town, kept by Cop Daemons bound in pairs.

39. Sleepy mage, cradled in her golems arms.

40. Touch-Cut braille stone of the blind creator.

41. Wall-crawling goblins guide organised orcs.

42. Cavern-plain of endlessly shifting stone.

43.Fishing village hidden under the falls

44. Crime Bird rules a wandering orphan tribe.

45. The Llama-Troll, regenerating dreams.

46. Lamenters and lunatics migrating.

47.Cave of Neutrality (not much goes on)

48. Cold-Volcano market of slaves and souls.

49. Library of slaves, each memorised books.

50. Lone child whose guard is the border of night.

The ballad of Fiddlin' Joe

Beware. in-character AP below.

Because no-one demanded it, more Ruskin

Make if BIGGER

“For there is a crust about the impressible part of men’s minds, which must be pierced through before they can be touched to the quick ; and though we may prick at it and scratch at it in a thousand separate places, we might as well have let it alone if we do not come through somewhere with a thrust : and if we can give such a thrust anywhere, there is no need of another ; it need not be even so “wide as a church door,” so that it be enough.

And mere weight will do this ;  it is a clumsy way of doing it, but an effectual one, too ; and the apathy which cannot be pierced by a small steeple, nor shone through by a small window, can be broken through in a moment by the mere weight of a great wall.”

Fuck ribbons, frankly

“”is there anything like ribands in nature? It might be thought that grass and seaweed afforded apologetic types. They do not. There is a wide difference between their structure and that of the riband. They have a skeleton, an anatomy, a central rib, or fibre, or framework of some kind or another, which has a beginning and an end, a root and head, and whose make and strength affect every direction of their motion and every line of their form.

The loosest weed that drifts and waves under the heaving of the sea, or hangs heavily on the brown and slippery shore, has a marked strength, structure, elasticity, gradation of substance ; its extremities are more finely fibred than its centre, its centre than its root : every fork of its ramification is measured and proportioned ; every wave of its languid lines is lovely. It has its allotted size, and place, and function ; it is a specific creature.

What is there like this in a riband? It has no structure : it is a succession of cut threads all alike ; it has no skeleton, no make, no form, no size, no will of its own. You cut it and crush it into what you will. It has no strength, no languor. It cannot fall into a single graceful form. It cannot wave, in the true sense, but only turn and be wrinkled. It is a vile thing ; it spoils all that is near its wretched film of an existence. Never use it. Let the flowers come loose if they cannot keep together without being tied ; leave the sentence unwritten if you cannot write it on a tablet or book, or plain roll of paper.”

Also, railways.

“Another of the strange and evil tendencies of the present day is to the decoration of the railroad station. Now if there be any place in the world in which people are deprived of that portion of temper and discretion which are necessary to the contemplation of beauty, it is there. It is the very temple of discomfort, and the only charity that the builder can extend to us is to show us, plainly as may be, how soonest to escape from it.

The whole system of railroad travelling is addressed to people, who, being in a hurry, are therefore, for the time being, miserable. No one would travel in that manner who could help it – who had time to go leisurely over hills and between hedges, instead of through tunnels and between banks : at least those who would have no sense of beauty so acute as that we need consult it at the station.

The railroad is in all its relations a matter of earnest business, to be got through as soon as possible. It transmutes a man from a traveller into a living parcel. For the time he has parted with the nobler characteristics of his humanity for the sake of a planetary power of locomotion. Do not ask him to admire anything. You might as well ask the wind. Carry him safely, dismiss him soon : he will thank you for nothing else. All attempts to please him in any other way are mere mockery, and insults to the things by which you endeavour to do so.

….

Railroad architecture has, or would have, a dignity of its own if it were only let to its work. You would not put rings on the fingers of a smith at his anvil.”

A Lithic Cosmology

(81-86)

Why aren’t summoned earth elementals the dominant form of warfare underground?

In the Monster Manual they are slow, can travel through any kind of solid ground and can kill the fuck out of ‘anything that rests upon the earth’, which in Veins, is everything. They are also stupid. 

So.

The reason summoned elementals are stupid is because most earth elementals are highly intelligent and very busy and very far away. From the perspective of earth elementals the cosmos looks like this.

They are at the centre. This is where they do most of their work. A huge city-continent-planet where all the hyper-complex life and endless internal politics of the Plane of Earth goes on. We hardly hear about any of it. This is the ‘first world’ from their perspective.

Around it is a mixture of fire and earth. This is considered almost as good as Earth by earth elementals. To them it’s like China or Brazil are to the West.

(They don’t really think of the elements as having their own planes. Most elements are cultural chauvinists.)

Then beyond that a kind of halo of veined, light, easily-eroded dead rock full of water and air. This is like a pirate archipelago to the Elementals of Earth. Like Somalia or some other poor chaotic backwater. It’s a place civilised people would never want to go. But it can be useful, things can be done there that cannot be done anywhere else. Meetings can take place, plans can be made out of sight. And if you are desperate, or subnormal, if you can’t make it in the ‘real’ world, you can go there to hide.

A mages summoning spell is the equivalent of an incompetent alien abduction sweeping through a backwater. Even there, most people (Elementals) are strong or smart enough to simply wave it away like a grasping hand of smoke. The only ones that will be caught are, from their perspective, animal-level elementals.

It’s as if the aliens abducted a cow or a dog and dropped it in mild acid. That’s why summoned earth elementals are stupid and violent.

If you pull the same shit underground, deep underground, things are going to be a bit different. You are a lot closer now, closer to the core, to the ‘real’ world. The Elemental you summon won’t be a dog or a cow. But they won’t be a ‘real’ citizen either. You will have got yourself in shit.

Summoning the Earth Elemental; Ramifications.

You have actually summoned.

1. A fugitive. Dangerous, wont leave, being hunted. Cops coming.

2. A child, terrified, acts out, parents on their way.

3. ‘Traveller’, likes to interact, non-violent, surprised you aren’t.

4. Refugee. Desperate not to leave, more arrive, one each turn. Geopolitical blowback.

5. Lone messenger on high-level business. You are now the baddies of a Tom Clancy film.

6. Criminal element, organised, violent, has specific plans for you. Smarter than you.

They look like.

1. Hugely segmented snake of perfect spheres.

2. Rippling flame of shifting stone

3. Bodybuilder, legs fused, stands en-pointe, moves like a tornado

4. Pangolin

5. Gorilla shape of tessellated polyhedra, constantly rearranged.

6. Giant crawling baby.

Made from.

1. Grey-black fine-grained Basalt.

2. Pillow grey Komatiite with dendric feathery crystals of green Olivine.

3. Corse-grained Peridotite with thick black pyroxene crystals.

4. Fine black Andesite with almond shaped white crystals of zeolite.

5. Rose-coloured Rhyolite.

6.Rough textured thick-crystal’d Diorite, white and black.

With

1. A gawping Noh-Mask face.

2. Eyes like orbs of wheeling iron, casting a hammering heat.

3. Vertical face like a chasm in the earth. Deep. Causes vertigo.

4. Concave human features, animate and wry.

5. An endlessly-opening rose of nuclear fire.

6. Spouting torrent of sand in which shadowed faces form.

The Vault of the Dao

(75 - 80)

 Dao love gloom and the beauty of huge masses of worked stone. They like sculpture but loath painting and fresco’s, as well as any material that pretends to be what it is not. They can tunnel through both stone and soil but not worked stone. The greater the mass of masonry around them, the safer they feel (from other Dao).

The least of the Dao has the capacity to match the greatest of human architects. Yet they belong to an aristocratic culture that denigrates useful work. Any Dao that built their own maze would be mocked by others. The building must be done by slaves. Status can only be displayed through non-functional work.

Dao are the only monster pleased to see you pass through their dungeon, they rarely get the chance to question anyone about its effectiveness. They may request ideas from you* for improving the dungeon you just got through to meet them. The mazeworks are like riddles, if everyone can understand them then they are worthless, if no-one can then the same is true. Only the right kind of person can pass through.

Two schools of architecture exist. The first, Umbral, regards the placement of massy shadows of prime importance and arranges all stonework to produce precise gradations of shadow and depth.

The second, the Lithic, regards the placement of shadowed mass to be the true path to beauty and arranges all shadows to highlight masses and arrangements of stone.

Few but the Dao can tell the difference between the two schools, though they loath each other.

“You may call me..”

	“The”	“Of”
1	Shaker of	All Knowledge
2	Omnipotent Dream	The Quaking Earth
3	Timeless Lumitor	Sleeping Stone
4	Prince Tectonic	Continental Grind
5	Lord Sedimentary	The Flawless Fault
6	Igneous Composer	The Mountains Heart

Amusements of the Dao

1. Smashing in thier vaulted roof, slowing it in time, having chained-up poets scribe the falling stone.

2. Naked girls in golden cages locked 1001 times. Each good story earns a key.

3. Tattooing children’s backs with idle thoughts, making them run around till sentences form.

4. Collected court of clerics of each god, Dao converts to new religion every hour.

5. Archean orchestra on toxic instruments, so slow it plays one note each hour.

6. Forcing scholars to debate the merits of a grain of sand. Winner rewarded, loser killed.

Opulence of the Dao

1. Slaves wave slow pennants of black velvet in their shadowed wake to intensify their gloomy majesty.

2. Kebabs on silver skewers which they use to pick their teeth, then throw away.

3. A ticking harem of clockwork courtesans in polished ebony and blazing gold.

4. Evert stone and tool and fold of cloth enchanted to whisper their praises with each move, the air fills with a susurrus of quiet adoration.

5. Zoo of surface animals kept petrified when not in use. Awakened and re-petrified with insanely expensive potions sprayed from golden tubes.

6. Lamps are petty elementals bound in silvered skulls of elves.

In their endlessly-rebuilt palaces deep beneath the earth, the Dao are often troubled by strange dreams. Explaining the troubling dream in an effective way, without inadvertently insulting the Dao, can vastly raise you in their esteem

Strange Dreams Of The Dao

1. “I stand upon a yellow shore. A silver ship burns. A survivor turns to me and smiles. ‘Is this ever acceptable?’ he asks.”

2. “I am a Lion (which I know is good) and eat a ghoul (which is bad). I taste cinnamon and sleep for seven days.”

3. “A city of glass and shadow. I wait. The dawn comes, but not the dawn star. Why?”

4. “I am speaking to a giant that crawls around my house tying knots in my columns and doors, the giant whispers names I cannot hear.”

5. “I crystallise, memoryless, in the magma chamber under the hill. It will not let me out.”

6. “I am a souk in the City of Brass, merchants trade in my veins, thieving children run across my golden heart, yet I protect them.”

Intervening in the murderous and easily-triggered rages of the Dao can be deadly, so can not intervening in them.

Petulant Rages of the Dao

1. Constructions of anything but stone. The existence of ‘plaster’ and ‘wall-paper’ Dao has never seen them but hates them.

2. “There is a forged coin somewhere in this room. Find it! By the stones of the abyss you will bleed fire till it is found!”

3. “You Efreeti Fuck!” Dao thinks the fire in a lamp is laughing at them. Hunts and smashes lamps, lights and flames till it is found.

4. Dao convinced reflection in a particular pearl exhibits a single flaw. Curses pearls, casts them aside then hunts through them, demands larger and larger pearls.

5. Dao stricken by violent self-loathing over inferiority of own mazework. Belives counter-arguments proof of secret contempt.

6. Universal and malignant incompetence of inferiors. Demands your agreement then turns on you. Demands agreement of others re – your worthlessness, then turns on them.

Dao wear rings of iron with a high level adventurer bound within each one for a certain number of services. This is the prison of the Dao. The captives age slowly in the iron cells inside the ring and may die of old age before their deeds are done.

They love beauty but only bound. Free beauty is nothing to them, but lock it in an object or trade it as a service and they love it.

Treasures Traded by the Dao

1. An iron ring that holds a hero’s soul. Bound for seven services.

2. A pet fire elemental which will serve you so long as its golden chain is linked.

3. An eye of Lapis Lazuli which terrifies the spirits of the earth. (Must remove own eye first.)

4. A functioning phylactery which you may bind to you with blood.

5. A Serpentinite torc that becomes a venom’d sword at your command.

6. On a book of sliver-thin slate, the means to make golems of stone.

And Their Demands

1. “Illithid-blood ink for my poetry, and quickly, before the muse passes!”

2. “My weight in gold, or holy bone, or both.”

3. Delivery of this (sexually degrading) letter to a Medusa, and its reply.

4. “A powerful cleric of Lloth, alive and willing. I have questions.”

5. “I owe a Knotsman, this offends me. Have him forgive the debt.”

6. “Kill this Efreeti that mocks me so I might etch poems on his burning heart.”


*Often with a multiple choice form