crowns of the empyreans: randomizer
I posted before about a scenario where 5e class features are scattered across the map for players to pick up as treasure. I called it Crowns of the Empyreans, and I think that's a cooler title than its previous title, The Spirit Forge, but today we're going to look at that older version.
First of all some context for all the nonsense you're about to see. Here's the basic setup of the scenario, for 4 players. Players come from a land of dwarves and halflings, underground, and all history has been forgotten before about a generation or two ago. A mysterious "spirit forge" appears one day, it's a large building with one door. It's bigger on the inside and it's where most of the adventure happens. The evil dragon who rules over the dwarves forces them to explore this thing and bring him back the treasures within. He gives them each a special dragon weapon that can turn into any kind of weapon, and a special dragon armor that can turn into any kind of armor or shield, but they're not magic. They're living dragon flesh and they can die. Players can share if they want one guy to have two weapons or whatever.
The forge is basically a big VR simulator (but if you die in the forge, you die for real). It has an AI guide called IOUN. It creates scenarios from history and makes you navigate them. (IOUN tells you the "goal" of each scenario. Complete this and you can progress.) The history in question is centered around several legendary treasures, and you can affect which scenarios you'll encounter by pursuing specific treasures when you enter. In other words, each party member declares a treasure to pursue, and you, the GM, put those choices into the spreadsheet and it generates everything. (They don't have to all be different.) They are themed around different sorts of character goals so players can roleplay it if they want.
The treasures are named as follows: SWORD of PERFECTION, whose wielder MORGORA STEELFIST became a dragon and conquered dwarfkind. CHALICE of FREEDOM, from which ASTRID STENSDOTTIR drank the blood of humanity's oppressors. CASKET of REVELATION, inside which the mysterious IOUN sleeps awaiting events unknown. NAILS of REVERSAL, which SIGURD BJORNSON used to build the Spirit Forge itself. CHAINS of INFLUENCE, used by CLAIRA SIANNODEL to steal the memories of every living being. LANTERN of FINALITY, carried by the mad nihilist KATHRA EVERSHARP.
HERE IS THE SPREADSHEET OF THE LOOT DROPS.
It's assumed that no one will survive the first few attempts at exploring the Forge. Until the whole party dies, each dead character gets to continue as a ghost, and damage that comes their way gets redirected to a living person instead. Otherwise they're the same as they ever were, they can still do stuff, no special ghost powers though. You can unlock new types of characters (races and "backgrounds") to send into the Forge as you go. I had a list of subquests that would unlock them. My races were DWARVES, HUMANS, ELVES, and HALFLINGS. My "backgrounds" were numerous and included things like "Warrior - gets +2 damage in melee" and "Believer - increases party's chance of finding higher-level loot." So when you see "# of Believers" in the spreadsheet, that's what that is. They believe in the goddess of luck. Tymora is her name in D&D.
Anything you see in there with an asterisk next to it is UPGRADEABLE. Basically these are features that would, in normal D&D, get better as you level up, and in this scenario you can make them better by investing GRATITUDE CRYSTALS. You get a Gratitude Crystal every time you do a favor for a dwarf. There are a bunch of dwarves in there. More in certain worlds than others. When you invest a crystal, the feature improves to whatever the next tier of it is in the PHB. Ex: Bardic Inspiration can change from a d6 to a d8. I think you should eat the crystals.
Certain features are KEYS and some are LOCKS. A LOCK doesn't do anything without a KEY and I don't want players getting a bunch of useless features, so instead, the spreadsheet only offers you LOCKS if you have the appropriate KEYS. Ex: You will not be offered Divine Smite if no one has Spellcasting. The GM inputs which keys you pick up as you go, which re-rolls the whole world but whatever. The players don't know that.
When players complete a scene's goal, they get offered a preview of what loot is in the next scenes. They can only go into one of the scenes, the other ones vanish. Usually I would offer two scene options, but I set up the spreadsheet so you can have as many as 10, that way the GM can ignore any that have too many repeats or whatever. I recommend only revealing the category of each reward (shown in the "Room N Previews" column) but you could reveal more if you wanted. Words with duplicate vowels represent higher-level rewards -- they are rolled from the next tier up, and are rarer. Depending on the situation these might just be places you physically walk to or they might be total VR scene changes.
Whenever somebody gets Spells they get the ability to cast spells. They pick what ability they use for it, and they use that for all their spells. You'll have to figure out spell slot progression on your own I'm afraid. I think maybe everyone levels up after each scene. Components don't matter in this. I mean you usually still need a free hand but ignore the material components. You'll go insane otherwise.
The actual content of each scene is also randomized of course. They also have variables within them, and many of these variables can be found out while you're in other scenes. When in doubt about what to do to reward some clever play, give out a piece of info. The world generator is unlinked from the loot generator, it won't reroll unless you tell it to.
HERE IS THE SPREADSHEET FOR VIGNETTE VARIABLES.
And HERE IS THE DOCUMENT OF ALL THE VIGNETTES AND BOSS FIGHTS.
A few more notes about the setting and stuff: Elves can "project" memories of the dead; if enough elves knew someone, the projection is pretty close to how they were in life. They do this all the time, whether they want to or not. Elf communities are full of dead people. You can use this to send a dead character back into the forge, if you have elves in the forge-crackers' guild, which you'll have once you get far enough into the forge to understand that there are elves at all. They just start showing up. Once they do, you can pick elf as your race when you roll a character. They live on the surface world, above the dwarfland. Humans live on the other surface world, beneath the dwarfland. Humans can see "hidden paths," which are like wormholes through space, fairy paths. Humans should maybe get an extra choice of vignettes sometimes because of this. Halflings can be born into any race, they're considered lucky because being born so small is unlucky and the goddess of luck is fair enough to balance it out with good luck in life. Halflings can see "shrine mysteries," which are riddles you put in shrines. Oh yeah, shrines exist. Shrines are where the party gets to take a long rest. They're shrines to the goddess of luck. Each one should have a riddle in it, and you track how many riddles are solved, and use it as a progression tracker for unlocking backgrounds and stuff. Only halflings can see the riddles though. One of the things you can unlock is the ability to fabricate replicas of loot items of your choice from your previous run. Dwarves probably do that.
The places in the forge are real, but you're not actually in them when you're in the forge. You can go fight the evil dragon Morgora Steelfist in the forge but you can also fight him outside the forge and if you kill him there, he'll die for real. You can use teleportation magic to leave the forge. If anyone ever leaves the forge, they keep whatever they found there. This last part, you should make absolutely super clear from the outset. If anyone ever leaves the forge, they keep whatever they found there.
You should track supplies. The players probably start with only a day's rations but later on they can carry more in, if they want. Kill them if they run out. Kill them for any reason. This is a Rogue-like.
Yeah.