d101 Table for Random Curses, Quests, etc. from Ceephax Acid Crew

Speaketh thoust Spawn of Endra:

In between bouts of inadvertently spurring people to publicly state that they hate Rients' d30 rule, I was looking through a notebook of mine this week and found that I had written:

Dear xxxx, Imperviate the following with whatever significance you wish, but ....

And I thought, is that a word, imperviate? So I googled it and for once the Internet actually showed me something cool. Up came the following phrase:

Imperviate a Sowester

This turned out to be #13 of 101 New Years Resolutions for 2012 made by Ceephax, aka Ceephax Acid Crew, an old school acid techno DIY dude.

These would make a good random table for curses, ransom demands, quests, riddles, or whatever. Check it out here. Among my favorites:

• 6. Banish Poirot's irritating Pteranodon from your greenhouse.
• 18. Bribe quadrangles left right and centre.
• 26. Grandiose myself into all the various pageants located in the lost forests of Hurrrr.
• 41. Deliver all promises on the agenda without upsetting Terry the two toed terrier of terror.
• 46. Strike a blow at the concept of limitless krikey.
• 62. Release the tension inherent in the letter W.
• 64. Offer generous briskets of conversation to the most estimable Sheila of Scratby.
• 78. Win the U.S open with a Golden Graham and a toothpick.
• 84. Encircle Lord Faber with a jeopardy bojangle.
• 91. Acquiesce on Geoffrey's Trojan Amoeba plan despite the 98% probability of it causing a timeflop.

And so on. I'm not much of a techno fan, but I dig this guy's low-budge DIY vibe. You must also watch this video for "My Way of Life":

The epic saga of Commuter is also recommended.

Aleister Crowley, Master of the Random Table: d12 Weird Encounters

Thus spaketh thine beloved Spawn of Endra:

Every so often I pull some books off my shelf that relate to my early interest in the occult and the spiritual, and before I left Oregon I went back into a book I bought from a Mexican curanderia in downtown Fresno back in the summer of 1990, I believe. This is 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley, a collection of facsimiles of Crowley's essays Gematria, 777, and Sepher Sephiroth, published by Weiser with an editorial commentary by Israel Regardie. These were originally published in (what would amount to a zine of the time?) Equinox, and some of Crowley's jabs at his contemporaries would fit perfectly into an OSR blog. To wit, I think I've read this exact passage from the preface of 777 in someone's Penultimate post:

Every new sect aggravates the situation. Especially the Americans, grossly and crapulously ignorant as they are of the rudiments of any human language, seize like mongrel curs upon the putrid bones of their decaying monkey-jabber, and gnaw and tear them with fierce growls and howls. (777: p.x).

["them", refers to words themselves. It's kabbalah.] At any rate, I can pick up on that thread later, but to the matter at hand: 777 contains page after page of tables of correspondence that connect the 10 sephiroth of the kabbalistic Tree of Life and the 22 paths between them, which are mapped on the 10 numbers and the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, to all manner of mundane and occult phenomena. Too much to explain here, but if you're having a vision while traversing from Tiphereth to Netzach, you check against this giant concordance to see if it smelled and looked right for that particular path, or if you were being deceived by some entity or whatnot. Crowley was an empiricist. Here's a couple of pages.

A few subtables struck me as being interesting random tables for D&D random road encounters, weird visions, or at least for inexplicable flavor. Here I've given the concordance for the 12 signs of the zodiac with the magical images of the angels of the decans ascendant, succedent and cadent as three d12 tables. The demons ruling these are another set of tables, but this will get you started.

Crowley may have needed opium to make these tables work. Column XXLIV indicates that for the old school gamer, opium corresponds to rolling a d12. Enjoy!

d30 Table of Random Text Scraps

From the bowels of Hell, thine Spawn of Endra wails forth:

I'm packing up for a move to the east, and so I'm clearing out stuff, running across lost and forgotten items, and the usual. In one pile of papers I found my 2010 calendar that has random thoughts written throughout. Before I put this into the recycling, it looks like there's enough to make a d30 table that you might use for when there's a scrap of parchment in a room, or you need the title or subject of a book or a painting, response from an oracle, or you just want a random concept. Here you go:

D30 Table of Random Text Scraps

1. The '00s --> The Actually Decade - as the last faint recognition of the routine loss of reality. (1/5)
2. Yes, sex is destructive by nature. Leave it for your least elaborate castles made of sand. (1/8)
3. ABP: Ambient Bovine Parliament. (1/15)
4. Secretary of the Inferior. (1/19)
5. Oh, the frequency of thine reprehensible repast. (1/26)
6. By dreaming as deeply as we do of the West, we dispossess you of your land. (2/3)
7. Earthcake. (2/4)
8. Every person I met was less a person than those people. (2/7)
9. Aspiring towards a more VAST archaeology. (2/10)
10. Turn Corned Beef. (2/26)
11. Hector Littlepants National Holiday. (2/27)
12. Les McCann, Eddie Harris and Baudrillard: Tryin' to make it hyper-real compared to hyper-what? (3/2)
13. Oh great. Another overbearing white male I'm not getting sex from. (3/5)
14. How are you going to run the midget circus this year? (3/6)
15. Austrian City Limits (3/13)
16. Corned Beef Cured. (3/14)
17. Jesus Priced! (3/25)
18. You are leaning on the industrious class. Why? (4/2)
19. Yes, I am in complete agreement with Cat Ideology. But there is no Cat State. (4/9)
20. Sarmandira, an ancient princess. (7/6)
21. Gleefully drawn into a world of aggression by an inadequate aggressor. (7/25)
22. Hillbilly God, Uncle Norton's Camp. (8/7)
23. A PhD in the Archaeology of Sexuality seems the obvious next step, but granting it to anyone under 50 years of age is insane. (8/14)
24. Just because no one is listening to you doesn't make you a voice crying in the wilderness. You might just be a dipshit. (8/15)
25. Long distance relationships are difficult. For me it's the distance between fantasy and reality. (10/16)
26. A useful definition: Dysphoria is the opposite of Euphoria. (11/17)
27. The Sweet Hubris of the Autodidact (11/21)
28. Vulvateen Heterodyne. (11/22)
29. I come from the land where folks complain about too many public works projects. (12/11)
30. Oi fink it's tot-ullee de-fucking-skusting. (12/13)

Rock the d30!