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Ultimate Rumors

Unread postby icycalm » 27 Dec 2021 15:09

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This description of a tea house from a post in the Paizo forum gave me an idea for how I want rumors to work in Battlegrounds:

4-Looking Glass Tea House. Where it's always tea time.
Resources-In addition to tea and pastries, this is a good place to roll on the rumor table. The owner, Alice, has growth and reduction potions to sell. The upper crust comes here and can provide adventuring jobs.


I will make rumor-gathering a half-day action. You need to spend half the day to roll on the rumor table. This will help fill out empty days, stretch out the campaign in game-time, and give the players a richer logistical situation to manage and help them portray more realistic lives.

Moreover I am designing a system whereby events in one of our campaigns travel outwards from the originating point and arrive at a realistic time later in the other campaigns based on distance and terrain, so that they get added to the other campaigns’ rumor tables in due course. This will help players in the other groups who aren’t paying attention to the other campaigns catch up with developments in the world. Even the players who do pay attention will benefit because these added rumors will pad out their rumor table, making it richer and forcing them to spend more time rolling on it to get rumors that are more directly and immediately relevant to them.

And note what I said in the Discord earlier: half of rumors in D&D are bullshit. It’s not like a CRPG where every rumor is true. Pathfinder takes this even further with 1/3rd of the rumors being true, 1/3rd false, and 1/3rd half-true. So any rumor you hear in a Pathfinder game more than likely contains at least some falsehood in it, as you’d expect from a medieval world. (I guess the equivalent in a sci-fi setting would be fake news lol.)

People have made giant rumor tables and I am amassing them for our use. Those are the tables you’ll mostly be rolling on unless the adventure has its own table in which case it will supersede the generic one (and might also allow you to gather rumors at a faster pace than my generic system allows). The generic table also means players may choose to follow leads that aren’t in the adventure. Many of these will be red herrings that lead nowhere, but for the ones that are true I will be designing a brief encounter the players can pursue, with a small danger in it and a small reward. Nothing that would derail an adventure in other words, just a small dead-end that the players can choose to pursue thinking it’s tied to the main adventure, and realizing otherwise at its conclusion.
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icycalm
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Joined: 28 Mar 2006 00:08
Location: Tenerife, Canary Islands

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