Free NPCs, design tricks and a vault packed with zines
Crack open the Vaults of Vaarn
The Lost Bay Studio is now proud to carry Leo Hunt’s Vaults of Vaarn zines! Inspired by Dying Earth science fantasy like The Book of the New Sun, Dune and Mœbius comics, the “magic” of Vaarn dwells in advanced tech from lost civilizations eons past. We got our mitts on five zines for you would-be blue desert wanderers:
Vaults of Vaarn #1: This initial zine covers the base rules, character generation, bestiary and 30+ tables to get your Vaarn game started.
Vaults of Vaarn #2: Discover Gnomon’s city districts, factions, NPCs, Water Debt, merchants, and another 30+ tables to flesh out the metropolis.
Vaults of Vaarn #3: Survive the Blue Desert with this zine’s Wilderness rules, new Ancestries, bestiary entries, exotica, and yup, 30+ tables.
Vaults of Vaarn #4: Enter the Great Wall, a megastructure filled with factions, maps, new beasties, Wall traversal procedures and 20 location generation tables. First released May 2024!
Pariahs of Vaarn #1: Meet thirteen total creepies in this fully illustrated bestiary supplement, each of which has its own spread!
Not only can you build months of gaming with these zines, their contents pair well with other indie ttrpgs like Electrum Archive, ECO MOFOS, Ultraviolet Grasslands and Cloud Empress.
For now, The Lost Bay Studio is running a sale on Vaarn zines—the more you grab, the higher the discount—to help you start your Vaarnian adventures!
Inside The Lost Bay
Cascading Overloaded Encounter Tables
We’ve just released a text only preview version of The Lost Bay manuscript. If you’ve backed it, preordered it or snagged it on itch.io you should have access to it. If you can’t find it in your downloads, shoot me an email at contact@thelostbaystudio.com.
It’s a big boi, 90 Google Docs pages and counting! The manuscript is still a WIP, and a big chunk of it is still unedited, but it’s already packed with lots of tables and core design concepts.
Right now there’s a wild gang of designers writing adventures for The Lost Bay, and you can expect the TLB ecosystem to offer a variety of modules, each with their own gaming twist. That’s the beauty of the TLB community. But the core gaming procedure you’ll find in the book is Wandering, a fancy way to say pointcrawls, exploring the Bay and confronting Urban Legends.
I’ll get back to how Urban Legends are structured and to our pointcrawl procedure in a future newsletter. For today’s issue I’m super excited to talk about Cascading Overloaded Encounter Tables (COET?) and to share a free set of tables.
I love rich encounters. Interacting with cool NPCs is key to great gaming sessions in my opinion. It’s not too hard to write rich and fun encounters for a single adventure. But when those encounters are meant for a whole setting, made to be used for lots of sessions, they need to be highly reusable. A single table might not be enough. You need some randomness and variety. One simple solution is to add more tables. But rolling multiple times can be tedious. On top of this The Lost Bay is a d6 system. Rolling d6s implies either short tables, with only six entries and little variety, or huge d66 tables, with thirty six entries, which frankly would be a nightmare to write. Oh I forgot to mention, I’m writing ad hoc encounter tables for each of The Lost Bay districts, so that means LOTS of tables.
My first encounter procedure was a bit of a mess, it had you rolling different dice (d6, d10, d20) on four + different tables. You might’ve seen an early version of it in the First Look edition on itch.io (which is not supported anymore and has been replaced by the Manuscript Preview).
I wasn’t totally happy with it and I spent quite some time looking for a fast and simpler procedure, while still keeping the rich storytelling potential of the original. I struggled to find something to suit my needs.
Luckily Prismatic Wasteland showed me the way in a kickass blog post, Overloading the random encounter table. The core idea of this uber clever procedure is to combine several rolls into just one. Instead of rolling three d6s separately, for three different tables, you roll 3d6 once, add the results up, and consult only one table with 16 entries (the sum of the 3d6 results will always be between 3 and 18).
The three dice’s info is sort of baked into the resulting sum, and you can build a better table using that granularity hidden into the sum of the roll.
I’m not going to go into too much detail, but if you’re into game design I’d wholeheartedly recommend reading Prismatic’s post, it’s fantastic. In a nutshell, the beauty of this procedure is: while it requires a bit of sweat on the designer’s side, it’s much more nimble to use on the GM/player side.
Prismatic uses Overloaded Tables to build encounters for the published adventure Forge of Fury. One table, 18 entries. Super fun and rich. But as I was mentioning above we need a bit more than 18 entries because we are building random encounters for a setting which could probably be played hundreds or thousands of times (yes, totally exaggerating here). We’re looking for replayability and consistency.
Here comes the Cascading Overloaded Encounter Tables (COET???!!!)
It might sound ominous, but it’s really not! It’s fun to design and use.
How does it work? Roll 3d6 and use the results of the roll in a series of successive tables:
Dude(s): the NPC(s) you encounter.
Quirk: something weird and tasty about the NPC.
Mood: the TLB version of an NPC reaction table.
Role: the secret desires and deep flaws of the NPC (I’ve already shared a bit about why I love Roles over Reactions in a previous post, https://thelostbaystudio.substack.com/p/better-encounters-free-supplement).
The first table Dude(s) already gives you plenty of info, and depending on how detailed you want the encounter to be you can move down the list of tables to add flavour and meaning to it. We’ve got four tables, sound familiar? Yes, except for this there’s only one roll, with the tables all being connected. There being only one roll makes it easier for the player, and that connection between tables offers us interesting design opportunities.
Here’s a simple breakdown of how the four tables utilize the roll.
Dude(s): the sum of the 3d6, results between 3 and 18
Quirk: the sum of the 2 lowest rolls, results between 2 and 12
Mood: the sum of the 2 highest rolls, results between 2 and 12
Role: the middle die.
The beauty is that 2d6 and 3d6 don’t provide linear curves, meaning some results will be more likely. Allowing us to design the table(s) while taking into account all this probabilistic gravy. Some NPCs will pop up more frequently, and that’s super useful to know for when we’re designing the Setting.
A simple example. Take the roll 6, 6, 6. 666 is gonna be a baddie right? It’s one of the two less likely encounters to happen. It’s gonna be epic. The roll will provide the following results: 18, 12, 12, 6. We’re going to bake as much evil information as possible into each table result, see below:
With that you’ve got an NPC with a whole lot of depth in just one roll.
Another roll containing just one or two 6s can be some level of evil. Maybe they’re not an antagonist but their quirk is 12, and their body is rotting, that’s gotta push the fiction somehow.
That is the beauty of Cascading Overloaded Encounter Tables (COET!!).
But wait, there’s more!
You know what else could we do with that single 3d6 roll? NPC stats! For your average Lost Bay NPC, stats tend to be pretty simple: they consist only of Heart (their HP if you will) and Harm (default damage).
Let’s add those.
HEART: the middle die.
HARM: default harm is 0, +1 harm for each 6.
Hang on a sec, let’s add a ‘lil bonus
Doubles of any #: Dude sneaks up on PCs, gets a surprise turn if in combat.
See where the 6, 6, 6 roll is going? Maxed Heart, 3 Harm, surprise turn. That’s tough MOFO!
There’s more fun things happening in TLB encounter tables, but I’ll let you retro engineer those for yourself. I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface of COETs. They’re already being used for node generation, and I’m experimenting with using them for character creation as well. One 3d6 to give you a vibe, stats, powers, background, gear. Your whole character, generated in just one roll!
You can get the Desert Cascading Random Encounter Tables here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hSplRzCKn_jGI5WvPpJPQY_GcWwwh3nd58e7uZV2-IY/edit?usp=sharing
Or even better you could snag the game on itch https://the-lost-bay.itch.io/thelostbayrpg or preorder it on our store http://thelostbayrpg.com/
That’ll give you access to the preview manuscript and to a lot more cool tables!
Visions of the Bay
Uzumaki, manga
I’ve fallen into a spiral of horror and mind blowing art. Folks in The Lost Bay server unanimously recommended Uzumaki, the 4 lbs. manga hardback by eminent author, mangaka and director Junji Itō. I’m glad I listened. Uzumaki is a collection of serialized, independent short stories which show two young characters Kirie (she/her) and Suichi (he/him) uncovering the mysteries of the Spiral curse plaguing their town and lives. Each story can be read on its own, but the stories together build something uncanny and mesmerizing. I’m a bit scared reading it, but I can’t quit. And my guess so far is that the author is not just playing with our brains and senses to frighten us, he’s telling a more intimate story, one of the damage that Obsession can cause.
Aside from the fact that it’s a fantastic book, it’s been really inspiring in terms of game design. It strikes that chord where the horror is as devastating as it is familiar. In Uzumaki if an ancient cruel creature is lurking, it’s probably right next to you or possessing a close one, in some kind of un-cosmic horror twist I think you’d like.
World of horror, videogame
A nice segue from Uzumaki, World of Horror is a Lovercraftian 1-bit video game where you solve mysteries infecting your little home town by point-and-clicking on a beautiful pixel-art interface heavily inspired by manga. While the sound design is particularly intoxicating, the familiar high school setting turned enclosed labyrinth gives me the creeps! Somebody should write a TLB adventure module set in a high school. Please!
Unhallowed, solo RPG
You’ve lived on the edge of the forest all your life. You know that those tall gnarled trees are a bad omen. You glance through the window and see your little sister walk towards the woods and disappear in the darkness. Run after her and embark on a solo journaling adventure with Unhallowed by Allen Hall. In a mere two spreads Allen gives us a beautifully designed stress inducing trip into darkness. It’s just two bucks, go get it!
https://m-allen-hall.itch.io/unhallowed
The Squat, secret movie
I shared this video some time ago, when The Dispatch had just a handful of subscribers: a hidden and secret movie on my youtube channel. It’s shot in the “real lost bay” and tells a story about a squat and a giant spider. This is actually an excerpt from a one hour movie that won several awards. I might upload it to YT some day. If you’re a film buff, or are curious about what Mediterranean French-speaking suburbia looks like, give it a look.
That’s all we got for today. Stay tuned because in just a few days we’ll take you on an RPG trip to Paris, France, mais oui, with a truckload of zines and an exclusive interview.
Have a great Sunday.
Iko, Chris Airiau, Wren the Forrester