Adjective
Form
You will need to adjudicate the item's effects, as well as its price. As a general guideline, I recommend choosing 1-3 dice worth of copper knuts, silver sickles, or golden galleons. If something seems unusually rare or powerful, multiply the result by 10.
Examples:
- Boil Tonic: a simple potion meant for curing boils. 1d6 knuts.
- Perfumed Teacup: infuses whatever liquid is poured into it with a pleasant floral smell. 3d6 knuts.
- Butterfly Candle: this candle’s flame takes the form of a fluttering butterfly. It can flap a short distance away from the candle, but swiftly goes out when away from its wick. 1d6 sickles.
- Sleep Gun: a curious silver-and-seashell blunderbuss that fires puffs of soporific smoke. 3d6 x10 galleons.
- Everlasting Muggle Artifact: a lightbulb that turns off and on with the flick of a wand. Doesn’t need to be plugged into anything. 1d6 sickles.
- Dragon Broomstick: the handle of this broomstick is a carved dragon head that can spit magical firecrackers. Loud, leaves a contrail of black smoke when flown. 400 galleons.
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Design Notes: in general I'm not a huge fan of spark tables. Coming up with ideas is the easy part - it's translating those ideas into usable rules text (or game prep, prose, finished illustrations, functioning code, etc.) that's hard. A general-purpose or overly-broad spark table is a machine for automating the easy part of the process.
Nevertheless, I found myself with a problem when it came to designing items available for sale in a wizarding marketplace, because essentially all but the most basic supplies you'd expect to find there are magic items. Designing useful and interesting magic items is hard! You could say that magical objects have become rare and hard to find in the post-apocalypse as a justification for only including them in the dungeon, but I don't think that would feel right. Shopping is a huge aspect of Harry Potter; it's one of the things that makes the series so eminently marketable and merchandisable. Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley are bursting with an abundance of delightful objects - more than are actually fully described in the books, and more than any one person could reasonably design. A trip there is characterized by being surprised by something interesting and colorful that you're tempted to waste your money on, so in addition to the stable inventories of specific shops I wanted a tool for generating interesting objects for players to stumble across.
Furthermore, magical objects in Harry Potter have a distinctive flavor. Pumpkins, chocolate, warts or pimples, bad smells, and things moving on their own are common.
In my opinion, a good spark table needs to be narrowly focused and highly specific*. I needed a quick way to generate a lot of objects with a particular flavor. A spark table seemed like the right tool for the job.
*You also need to stress-test it - it's not enough to just say "discard results that don't make sense". That still might be necessary from time to time, but you should be trimming out any entries that don't combine well. For example, I had the adjective "Goblin-Forged" in the table for a long time. It works great with a lot of entries: a goblin-forged bomb, dagger, or shield is immediately exciting. Others are a bit of a stretch, but still fun. What's a goblin-forged doll or biscuit? With a bit of effort you could make those interesting, if maybe not particularly useful. But a goblin-forged dust, egg, or cream? I don't know. Maybe I'll end up putting it back in if some other entries end up being problems.
1,1,3,2 - Acid/Swamp Candy/Drops - just what I wanted, wizards on LSD.
ReplyDeleteThey may be wizards, but they are also British!
Delete(I think I may have actually included Acid on the table with this specific interaction in mind, because there's a reference in one of the books to acid-flavored lolipops that can burn a hole in your tongue, which feels like a real OSR kind of item)