More encounters from the City of Spires: the uplands

Second in a series of three 1d10 encounter tables, one for each of the three biomes that my PCs have been most active in recently. This post covers the uplands. Feel free to roll on them next time you need to stock a random hex!

1: Wooded hills dotted with overgrown ruins. There are many springs and streams, here, but not all are safe to drink from: some ancient catastrophe seems to have poisoned many of the aquifers, and the area is shunned by travellers, who fear that drinking from the wrong stream could spell their death. These lands are inhabited by clans of hidden folk, who live in concealed settlements deep in the forests, and keep watch on outsiders from afar. They are the only ones who know where to find the ruined, poisoned cities that their ancestors once fled from, and of which they consider themselves the ancestral guardians. Today these ruins are roamed by ex-human monsters over whom the clans maintain a sorrowful watch, believing them to be all that remains of those who did not flee quickly enough when disaster came.

2: Uplands inhabited by furry, bestial abhumans, who roam the vallies by day and creep back to their lairs by night. They have learned how to make crude gunpowder using the nitrate pools in the foothills: it's vile stuff, coarse and smoky and impure, but the abhumans love their bombs and blunderbusses and use them fearlessly despite their tendency to explode in the faces of their wielders. By these means they carry on an ancestral feud with the human mountain clans (see 3), killing them when they can and nailing their turbans to the walls of their hillforts as trophies. Though brave in battle, they live in fear of the cruel ghosts said to haunt the mountains, who carry their victims off into the heights and leave them to perish in the snows. Their king dwells in a ruined clifftop castle, his armoury stuffed with prodigeous quantities of black powder. 

3: Mountains claimed by rival clans who live by herding and raiding from inaccessible villages hidden amidst the scree slopes, their independence guaranteed by the impassable nature of the terrain, which they navigate with the same agility as the mountain goats they herd. They are easily spotted afar off amidst the rocks and snow by the bright red fabric of their turbans, though these are grey withinside and are worn inside out when the mountain-men do not wish to be seen. They are great travellers, roaming far and wide across peaks that anyone else would regard as uncrossable, and serve an important role as traders and messengers between peoples whom the mountains would otherwise have severed utterly. Outsiders passing through their lands are usually seized and held prisoner for ransom, though the clans do this entirely without malice, regarding it simply as the immemorial custom of their people. 

4: These hills are infested with rebels, who raised their standards a few years back, dreaming of rallying the people and sweeping their king from his throne. That didn't happen, and the king's men drove them into the uplands - but then his armies were called away by troubles on the border, and the rebels have been here ever since, lurking in the forested valleys, unable to return home while they are regarded as enemies of the crown. Initially many of the local communities supported them, but with each year that passes the 'contributions' they level on the nearby villages looks more like simple theft, and they are well on their way to degenerating into a mere bandit gang with a fancy flag. Their leader is a charismatic aristocrat who has discovered, somewhat to her own surprise, that she much prefers her new life as a terrifying bandit queen to her old life as an admired and accomplished young noblewoman. Her spiritual advisor, a saintly healer-priest, is quite besotted with her, and continues to insist on the obvious righteousness of their cause even as their grand rebellion declines into mere brigandage. 

5: High in these hills stand isolated villages, whose inhabitants practise a syncretic faith that combines the local state religion with worship of their ancestors. Each family traces its lineage back to one of a set of founder-heroes, to whom they maintain household shrines - a practise that has repeatedly got them into trouble with the religious authorities, who regard them as borderline-heretical and mistreat them accordingly. Their men are famous for their courage in battle, claiming their bravery comes from the knowledge that their ancestors are watching over them. The most closely-held secret of these villages is that their ancestors really are watching over them, having gained a ghastly immortality from deals struck with a dark spirit of the desert: by day they sleep beneath their ancient burial mounds, but at night they squirm from the cracks of the ground to watch over their descendants from afar. After so many years the ancestors have become bestial and barely-human, with wild eyes, claw-like nails, and tough, fibrous flesh covered only by their black and matted hair. They are a mad and bloodthirsty bunch, but their descendants are fiercely devoted to the 'grandparents' who have protected and watched over them for so long. Only the elders of each community are entrusted with knowledge of the hidden burial grounds where the ancestors 'live', and are charged with keeping them supplied and placated with offerings of blood. 

6: These rocky, forested hills were once inhabited only by solitary trappers and hermits, but the lands upon which they border are now ruled by a cruel lord who overburdens his subjects with conscription and taxation. Driven to desperation, a growing number of people have simply abandoned their old lives and fled into the woods, joining fledgling communities nestled in remote valleys where they hope the lord's men will never find them. They have acquired a protector of sorts in the form of a malfunctioning clockwork warrior with bladed wings, who was unwisely revived from deactivation by another local ruler, and promptly mutinied when it was unable to match its current circumstances with the memories recorded in its fractured mechanical mind. Paranoid and unhinged, this automaton assumes any soldiers it sees have been sent to recapture it, and murders any who trespass into its domain - a fact which has so far stymied the local lord's efforts to reclaim his errant subjects. He is growing increasingly irate about this, and has offered large bounties for anyone capable of destroying this mysterious defender of the woods.

7: Officially these hills are the site of one of the local ruler's hunting lodges, and nothing else. Secretly, however, he also maintains a hidden prison here, in a low, mossy fort concealed by screens of trees. Here he stashes those inconvenient individuals whose disappearance he has deemed desirable, who are dragged to the prison by night and kept in ignorance of its location. They are watched over by snarling semi-human guards, who have been alchemically modified by the king's enchanters to ensure their ferocity and remove their ability to speak. Here many people are held who are generally believed to be dead, including high-status individuals implicated in a recent rebellion (see 4).

8: Half of an ancient castle clings to a mountainside, here - the other half lies smeared and tumbled across the slope below, having been toppled in an earthquake centuries before. Once the seat of some ancient tyrant, it is now the home of an exiled magician, banished from her homeland for dealings with unholy beings who promised her knowledge and power - an opportunity whose loss she still very much regrets. Since taking up residence here she's managed to refurbish the flying stone skull-throne that belonged to the castle's original owner, an airbourne symbol of power and terror that has allowed her to convince the inhabitants of the surrounding villages that she's a terrible witch whose wrath must be placated with offerings of food, herbs, and flowers. Although amoral in the pursuit of knowledge, she's otherwise a decent enough sort, and far from the fearful hag the villagers imagine her to be, even if her years of living in isolation are making her increasingly eccentric...

9: Long ago, this mountain was partially hollowed out by a now-fallen empire as the resting place of its most honoured dead. Whole sections of the complex have collapsed over the centuries: what remains is accessible only by clambering through ancient elevator shafts, and is still defended by zomborg guardians, who stand watch over endless rows of ancient, embalmed corpses in broken glass cases. Few were buried with much treasure, but the halls are an antiquarian's paradise, and the cumulative value of all those rings and earrings and belt buckles is considerable. In the uppermost part of the complex the embalmers themselves still rest in cryosleep, though various freezer malfunctions over the centuries has turned their brains to mush: if revived they will mostly come lurching from their chambers crazed and screaming, some of them brandishing still-dangerous cybernetic limbs. Only one of them, an apprentice embalmer wearing a protective amulet gifted to him by his sorcerer uncle, is really reviveable alive and sane, though he will be utterly distressed to learn that his civilisation has fallen while he slept. 

10: Beneath this mountain lies a great vault, built to contain the egg of the Great Worm. At some point after the fall of the civilisation that built it, the egg hatched, giving birth to a vast, blind worm-god crawling endlessly around its prison. At some point after that a band of luckless refugees chose the wrong cave in which to seek shelter, and ended up being converted into worm cultists by the psychic radiation of the monster-god below. Now they and their worm-man followers labour endlessly to dig their way through the innumerable tons of rubble that lie between them and their buried god: already they have dug close enough that anyone descending into the lower workings will be enveloped in the dreams of the Great Worm, a hallucinatory dream-world of alien jungles that the Worm recalls through ancestral memory, but has never actually seen. The cultists have unearthed many relics of the ancient world in the course of their excavations, and will eagerly trade these for sturdy pickaxes and shovels if the opportunity arises. Vulnerable travellers who are unable or unwilling to hook them up with good shovel suppliers will be abducted and dragged down below instead, where the Great Worm's psychic radiation will progressively transform them into worm cultists as well. 

More encounters from the City of Spires: the desert

 A year ago I posted tables of 72 encounters from the City of Spires, as a convenient means of recycling material from my ongoing campaign into something that other people might find gameable. As the game is still going on (and now approaching the two-and-a-half year mark, or five and a half if it's considered as an extension of the previous Team Tsathogga campaign set in the same world), I thought it was probably time for an update.

Since taking over their city the PCs have been spending more and more time in the outlying wildernesses, so I'm going to be doing three 1d10 encounter tables, one for each of the three biomes they've been most active in. This post covers the desert. Feel free to roll on them next time you need to stock a random hex!

Deserts

1: Desert expanse roamed by nomad pastoralists, who travel between watering holes with their herds of goats, sheep, camels, and horses. Harsh experience has taught them to live in dread of the evil spirits of the desert, to whose wicked deeds they attribute all their misfortunes. A thriving market in protective charms, spells, and talismans exist among them, and the clans compete fiercely over those rare men and women believed holy enough to protect them from the devils of the wastes.

2: A trade road winds alongside the wadi here, watched over by linen-swathed desert giants, ten feet tall, leaning on gigantic spears. They are few in number and serve a human king, acting as his shock troops and honour guards, and demanding a toll from all who pass. The king's palace stands nearby, an ancient building divided awkwardly into human-scale and giant-scale areas. The giants are long-lived and more loyal to the palace than the man who rules it, transferring their loyalties each time it changes hands with little more than a shrug of their colossal shoulders. 

3: City built by the side of a wide, shallow oasis, surrounded by stands of date palms and overgrown with sedges. The people of the city are famous for the manufacture of papyrus: in the heat of the day they sleep, and conduct much of their business by night, in streets lit by innumerable papyrus lanterns. Their ruler is a once-vigorous man, now sinking swiftly into indolence. In the dusty caravanserais the traders mutter that the desert clans no longer fear him, and that their demands grow more outrageous every year. 

4: Here the desert clans have been driven from their watering holes by an aggressive race of diminutive lizard folk, who came surging suddenly out of the desert and have since been conducting excavations of certain long-abandoned buildings of baked brick that lie nearby. Their diggings have revealed walls painted with ancient frescoes, depicting beautiful androgynous figures dancing between pillars of fire. The lizardfolk are mute, and exactly where they came from and what they are looking for remains deeply unclear. The nomads who claim these lands would very much like them to be driven back into the wastes from whence they came.

5: A ruined city deep in the desert, raised up on a rocky plateau. In its central plaza a holy fire burns eternally, huge and hot enough to burn a man to ash. Any who come here are met by a white-robed spirit who asks if they come as pilgrims: any who say no are driven from the city by swarms of mute, dwarfish lizardfolk (see 4) who come pouring from the ruins to aid her. If they affirm that they are pilgrims then she will ask which of them is the celebrant: whomever is chosen will then be invited to step into the flame and be burned to death, so that their fellow pilgrims may ritually partake of their charred remains in the name of her god, whose name is both Fire and Hunger. Anyone who actually goes through with the whole ghastly rite will win the favour of her ancient divinity. A being of pure ritual, the spirit is easily confused by anyone who goes off-script, and quick-thinking PCs may be able to capitalise on this in order to escape. 

6: Desolate dunes roamed by desert zombies, dehydrated animated corpses with flames flickering in their hollow eye sockets. They guard the lair of an undead sorceress, whose body animates only in darkness: in the light she is merely a corpse, clad in tattered crimson rags. During the day she lies buried beneath the sands, her tame bone worm coiled around her, but when night falls she and her mount rise up to resume their unholy work. In life she was a great architect, and knows many secrets of the famous palaces and temples of the world, their hidden tunnels and concealed chambers, having been responsible for designing many of them herself. Now she seeks the resting place of an ancient god once revered in these lands (see 5), confident that she would be able to tap its power for her own purposes if only she could build a temple over it in just the right way...

7: Dusty hilltop ruin encircled by bandit camps. The bandits chased a bunch of wizards in there a while back, and have been keeping watch on the ruins ever since to make sure they don't sneak out again. They haven't gone in after them because the wizards, in desperation, activated the slumbering stone golems with which the ruins are littered: now they cower in the ruins of the very manufactory in which the golems were once mass-produced, relying for protection on the ancient ward-lines that once kept them out of the manager's offices. The wizards have no way of controlling the golems, which now randomly attack anyone entering the ruins, though they're very much hoping to come up with one before they all starve to death...

8: Oasis city ruled by an aristocracy with ash-grey skin, marking them out at a glance from the general populace, who have normal dark-brown skin tones. Each year, the city's emir makes ritual offerings to the spirits of the oasis to ensure the prosperity of his city. He claims to enjoy the favour of the spirits, and those who defy him are dragged off into the night by the Misery Men: anonymous enforcers with jet-black eyes, their presence announced by a cold, damp smell like the bottom of a half-dried well. Among the people, mentioning (or even acknowledging the existence of) the Misery Men is believed to incur extreme misfortune. The remains of an immense rusted tank by the side of the oasis suggest that something was once contained here, although whatever it was must have leaked into the oasis long ago... (No further details - my PCs haven't got to the bottom of this one, yet!)

9: Wasteland haunted by clawed, burrowing humanoid scavengers the colour of charred meat, who sense tremors through the earth and dig their way up to sieze unwary travellers by night.  Though savage and feral, they are smaller than men and do not like to attack except by ambush. The smell of cooking meat will attract them from miles away, and a funeral pyre will bring them in swarms. If killed the bones within them are found to be black and charred, as though burned by some terrible fire, and are filled with cinders where their marrow should be.

10: The desert clans shun this region, roamed as it is by damaged but still-functional obsidian warriors, huge and mighty and almost-indestructible. Beyond them, in the heat-haze, can be glimpsed the bulk of an immense structure half-buried in the desert sands, its walls riven in ages past by some unimaginable violence. Sometimes the wind carries strange sounds from this building - distorted voices, hollow booming, the scrape of metal on stone - but since the fall of the cult of he whose name is both Fire and Hunger (see 5), none have successfully run the gauntlet of the obsidian warriors to discover what lies within... (No further details on this one - my PCs haven't been inside!)

Major injuries: what doesn't kill you makes you stranger

In yesterday's game, one PC was rescued from captivity by the party, but not before undergoing some pretty severe torture. This presented me with a bit of a quandary: having him simply bounce back from such an ordeal after a couple of Cure Light Wounds spells felt wrong, but at the same time I didn't want the consequences to feel like a punishment. (The problem with most 'lasting injury' rules is that they make you weaker as a consequence for failure, which makes you more likely to fail again in future, which makes you even weaker... realistic, no doubt, but not what most people are looking for in fantasy adventure games!) In order to model what I think of as 'comic-book trauma' - the kind where undergoing severe physical suffering makes you different without necessarily making you less capable - I thus proposed the following off-the-cuff house rule:

1: When a character undergoes life-changing suffering (not just a regular injury, but an ordeal so severe that they will never quite be the same again), roll 2d6 of different colours. Declare before rolling which one is the good dice and which one is the bad dice.

2: The good dice shows how the experience has changed you for the better, as follows:

1. Gain +1 Strength permanently. Your ordeal has left you filled with a slightly crazed fury that drives you to train harder than you have ever trained before.
2. Gain +1 Dexterity permanently. Your experiences have left you jumpy and on-edge, sharpening your reflexes.
3. Gain +1 Constitution permanently. After what you've lived through, regular pain and hardship barely even registers anymore.
4. Gain +1 Intelligence permanently. Your experiences have made you hyper-vigilant, determined not to miss anything lest you expose yourself to further suffering.
5. Gain +1 Wisdom permanently. Your sufferings have given you a new perspective on life.
6. Gain +1 Charisma permanently. When your injuries heal, they leave you with the kind of scars that make you look cool and sexy and dangerous.

3: The bad dice shows how the experience has changed you for the worse, as follows:

1. Lose -1 Strength permanently, due to permanent muscle damage.
2. Lose -1 Dexterity permanently, due to permanent nerve damage.
3. Lose -1 Constitution permanently, due to permanent organ damage.
4. Lose -1 Intelligence permanently, due to permanent brain damage.
5. Lose -1 Wisdom permanently, due to lasting trauma and/or derangement.
6. Lose -1 Charisma permanently, due to disfiguring scars.

4: If you roll a double, then you've somehow passed through your ordeal largely unscathed. In retrospect it probably seems more like a bad dream than something that really happened.

(Naturally, in yesterday's session my player rolled a double and the whole thing was wasted, but we might use it again in future...)

Do note that using these rules freely enough will increase the chances of characters drifting towards the extreme ends of the stat distribution range, though this is probably pretty appropriate for people who've been through as many extreme experiences as they have!

Upstairs, Downstairs: d20 Power Relations

You know what makes for good drama? Unequal power relations!

You know what makes for even better drama? Power relations that are not what they appear to be!

Gerard ter Borch, Young Woman with a Maid (c. 1650)

Next time you introduce two NPCs, make clear that one of them is higher status than the other. This can be obvious (noble and servant, employer and employee, lord and villein, officer and soldier, teacher and student) or more subtle (two members of the same guild, community, regiment, or family, one of whom is just slightly senior to the other), but it's something that they're both acutely aware of, and it inflects every interaction between the two of them. 

Then roll 1d20 on this table to find out what the relationship between them really is!

1. Exactly what it seems to be. The high-status NPC is in charge, and the low-status NPC respects their authority.
2. Creepily extreme. The high-status NPC makes all the decisions, and the low-status NPC obeys instantly and without question, having apparently reduced themselves to a mere instrument of their superior's will. 
3. One-sided. The low-status NPC is sycophantically devoted to the high-status NPC, to an extent that obviously makes them uncomfortable, and keeps making desperate attempts to prove the extent of their loyalty.
4. Emptily theatrical. They make an enormous show of performative authority on one side and performative deference on the other, but anyone paying attention will notice they both actually just seem to do whatever they want. 
5. Performatively informal. The high-status NPC makes a big performance over being the low-status NPC's friend, treating them as an equal, etc, but in practise they expect their authority to be accepted without question. 
6. Erotically charged. The pair of them seem to be enjoying this whole 'giving and taking orders' thing a bit too much, in ways that may make people speculate about exactly what goes on between them behind closed doors.
7. Founded on lies. The high-status NPC is actually the lower-status of the pair, and is trading on some kind of falsehood (e.g. forged qualifications, fake titles) to invert the power relationship that would otherwise exist between them. 50% chance the other NPC has started to suspect that something weird is going on. Obviously they'd be furious if they learned the truth. 
8. Overt dependency. The high-status NPC makes a show of calling all the shots, but it's blatantly obvious that all the real decisions are being made by the low-status NPC. 
9. Puppet show. In public the high-status NPC appears to be in charge, but actually the low-status NPC wields all the real power, either through some external hold (e.g. blackmail) or just through sheer force of personality. Their 'superior' would never dare to do anything that went against their wishes. (50% chance that the high-status NPC is actually OK with this state of affairs; 50% chance they resent it bitterly.)
10. Covert subversion. The high-status NPC makes all the decisions, and the low-status NPC pretends to obey, but secretly tries to undermine and sabotage them at every opportunity. 
11. Overt subversion. The high-status NPC makes all the decisions, but the low-status NPC openly mocks and defies them at every chance they get. 
12. Covert equality. The two NPCs go through a charade of authority and submission in public, but actually regard one another as trusted equals and genuinely seek one another's input and guidance, though they may need to conceal this due to the status difference between them.
13. Stiffly formal. The two NPCs have a very clear understanding of the exact nature and limits of their duties to one another, and scrupulously observe these at all times, making a great show of observing their obligations to one another to the letter without exceeding them.
14. Founded on love. The two NPCs genuinely love one another, romantically or otherwise, though depending on the status difference between them they may need to keep this secret.
15. Founded on fear. The low-status NPC only obeys the high-status NPC out of fear of punishment. If they can safely get away with disobeying them without consequences then they will happily do so.
16. Founded on self-interest. The low-status NPC serves the high-status NPC only because they currently believe it to be in their best interests to do so, and will desert them in a heartbeat if a better opportunity comes along.
17. Founded on abuse. The high-status NPC ensures the subservience of the low-status NPC through physical and emotional cruelty. The low-status NPC hates them bitterly, but is too beaten down to resist them unless they're absolutely sure they'll get away with it.
18. Chronic misunderstanding. The low-status NPC is apparently loyal to the high-status NPC, but somehow manages to comically misunderstand almost every order and instruction they are given. (50% chance this is a campaign of passive resistance on the part of the low-status NPC; 50% chance they really are just that dim.)
19. It's complicated. While the overall status difference between the two NPCs is clear, there is one significant area of life in which the low-status NPC is actually higher status than the high-status NPC, and can expect to be treated as such. (E.g. higher educational attainment, higher professional standing, higher religious status, higher military rank.) 50% chance the high-status NPC acknowledges and respects this; 50% chance they're furious about having to defer to someone they normally regard as an inferior. 
20. Masquerade. The two NPCs have swapped places, with the low-status NPC pretending to be high-status, and vice versa - there may be a good reason for this, e.g. fear that an assassination attempt may be imminent, or it may just be a random whim of the high-status NPC. Neither is performing their assumed social role very convincingly. 50% chance the low-status NPC is still loyal to the high-status NPC despite their apparent role reversal; 50% chance they're scheming how to make their change in status permanent.

Game-enhancing powers, game-ruining powers, and yet more magic items

I've been running OSR D&D more-or-less weekly for over five years, now, with a heavy focus on exploration, problem-solving, and diplomacy. Combat happens, but I learned early on that the kind of combat power-ups that most later D&D editions obsess over were almost irrelevant: when most fights are either one-sided ambushes or desperate fighting retreats, the shift from 1d8 damage to 1d8+2 damage is really not that big a deal. My players regularly forget which magical weapons their PCs are carrying. What they never, ever forget is exactly who is wearing the Ring of Invisibility to Undead. 

FORGOT WHO WAS WEARING THE RING.

Whether in the form of magic items or spells, I've tended to give my PCs access to lots of utility magic, in order to enable the kind of improvisational problem-solving on which such games thrive. But there's utility and then there's utility, and a power with too few limitations can quickly break a game. Previous games, for example, taught me the hard way that giving PCs high-speed at-will flight is a genie that's really hard to get back in its bottle once released, trivialising everything from difficult terrain ('I fly over it') to tripwires and pressure plates ('I fly over it') to melee-only enemies ('I fly over it and kite it to death'). And the Team Tsathogga game taught me that even the humble Charm Person could become hard to manage once the PCs had enough spell slots. ('We hide in the bushes and cast Charm Person on him twelve times! One of them's bound to work!')

Of course, these problems are context-dependent. A more superheroic game could probably have taken both flight and mind control in its stride. (Although maybe not: every Exalted game I ever played in ended up crashing and burning due to the difficulty of challenging PCs with near-unlimited powers of mobility, persuasion, information-gathering, and stealth.) But assuming you're after something resembling traditional fantasy, in which 'a castle' or 'a troll' is a dangerous but solveable problem to a clever and well-equipped party of adventurers, then here are my notes on the kinds of powers that make for good, enjoyable problem-solving tools, as well as the kind that can easily spoil things for everyone unless counterbalanced by significant downsides or limitations, and a handy list of magic items to go along with both... 

The Good Stuff - abilities that facilitate creative and intelligent play

• Levitation: Slow, vertical-only flight. Allows for all kinds of ingenious problem-solving but requires careful set-up, not particularly useful in combat, and generates hilarious mental images, especially if you allow levitating characters to be moved horizontally by party members pulling them along on ropes from below!
• Invisibility: This might seem very powerful, but if it genuinely is only invisibility - meaning that you still make sounds, leave scent trails, make footprints, etc - then there are so many potential failure points and counter-measures that it's more likely to be used as an ingenious component of a cunning plan rather than as a slam-dunk victory condition. Partial invisibility (e.g. you still cast a shadow) is even better. 
• Illusions: The power to create intangible visual and/or audible illusions enable more demented ingenuity than just about any other ability. Endlessly flexible, and the lengths that PCs will go to in order to make sure no-one reveals the trick by just touching their illusionary treasure / monster / whatever are the stuff that truly insane PC plans are made of.
• Tunnelling: Magical dig-through-stone-walls tunnelling can often short-circuit scenarios, especially in dungeon environments, but having a character with the ability to burrow through sand and loose dirt at semi-realistic speeds opens up all kinds of unorthodox approaches to break-ins, getaways, etc. 
• Light and darkness: These are good, flexible powers with a wide variety of uses relating to stealth and detection, most of which require a bit of set-up if PCs are going to get the most out of them. (If you're going to use darkness to cover your escape, how will you see while inside it?)
• Disguises: Powers that let people disguise their appearance to match someone else's are a particularly interesting form of illusion, because the potential pay-off is so large but the dangers of detection are so high. I feel that these are best when they perfectly mimic appearance but only appearance: when it comes to mimicking voice, gait, mannerisms, knowledge, etc, the PCs are on their own!
• Movement effects: Things like Jump, Spider Climb, etc - powers that let you get into places you normally couldn't reach. Allow problems to be approached from unusual angles, often quite literally. 
• Environmental manipulation: Things like creating heat, cold, fog, rain, etc - not inherently beneficial in and of itself, but capable of creating a new situation which cunning PCs may be able to turn to their advantage!
• Construction abilities: Essentially a subtype of environmental manipulation - the ability to e.g. rapidly reshape earth, construct barricades, etc. Anything that lets PCs reshape an area on the fly and thus shift the spatial dynamics of an encounter. 
• Water breathing: Like tunnelling, water breathing abilities open up new opportunities for getting into and out of places, and allow locations to be connected together in new ways via underground rivers, water pipes, etc. 
• Enhanced senses: Things like enhanced hearing, the ability to see perfectly in poor light (not total darkness), the ability to follow scents like a bloodhound, etc, opening up new and unexpected avenues for acquiring information. 
• Communication abilities: The more things your PCs can interact with, the better. Let them talk to monsters. To animals. To rocks, plants, corpses, water, air... As long as whatever they're talking to is not guaranteed to be useful or co-operative, giving them more opportunities for communication can only enhance their options for creative problem-solving. ('OK, how do we bribe the trees into helping us?')
• Temporary intangibility: The trick is to not pair this with invisibility, by either making it ghost-style phantom projection, or literal gaseous form. It then creates an interestingly asymmetric situation - you can see and be seen, but can't affect or be affected by anything you're seeing. Can be used either for scouting or for one-way infiltration - you can walk through the walls to get in, but then how are you going to get out?
• Very specific immunities: Complete immunity to fire, for example, or to falling damage. Abilities like these may be intermittently useful in combat, but they also allow situations to be approached in completely different ways. ('So I'll fly over the castle in a hot air balloon, jump out, drop a thousand feet down into the courtyard, and then open the gates from the inside...')
• Limited telepathy: Things like the ability to sense someone's emotions, or read their surface thoughts - just enough to give the PCs an exploitable edge in social situations without having to worry about every mystery collapsing on contact.
• Emotion control: Genuine mind control can easily become an 'I WIN' button, but the ability to scale up a specific emotion requires much more care to use effectively. 'I can make people feel really angry' is not, in itself, likely to solve many problems, but can easily be a component in such solutions...

The Bad Stuff - abilities that short-circuit play without significant limitations

• Unlimited flight: Trivialises too many kinds of obstacles and opponents, especially if it comes with perfect manoeuvrability as well. If you want to give your PCs access to flight, try to build in some serious limitations. 
• Unlimited intangibility: Genuine walk-through-walks-style at-will intangibility tends to trivialise information gathering, infiltration, escape, theft, etc - everything except combat, essentially.
• Mind control: This includes 'super charisma' powers of the 'I'm just that persuasive!' variety. Anything that means PCs can simply steamroller interactions with NPCs rather than having to actually work out how to befriend or manipulate them is likely to lead to much less interesting play. 
• Mind reading and lie detection: Short-circuits any kind of investigation or mystery and makes diplomacy much less interesting. 
• 'Sniper' attacks: Very powerful, very accurate, very long-range attacks can make for very one-sided, non-interactive combat scenes, and thus for very boring gameplay. This can easily become an 'everything looks like a nail' situation. 
• Unlimited information effects: The ability to commune with near-omniscient beings, for example, or powerful divination effects that always return accurate answers. It's usually OK if PCs are allowed just one question, but if this is a power they have repeat access to then it becomes very hard to maintain any kind of mystery, or even ambiguity. 
• Speed/mobility effects: When confronted with any kind of enemy, one question the PCs are always going to ask is 'can we just kite it to death?' This is a fair question, but if the answer is always 'yes' then the temptation to resolve every possible encounter in exactly the same way becomes very strong. I'd thus advise caution in granting mobility effects that allow PCs to engage opponents without ever allowing their opponents to engage with them: speed effects, for example, that let them move at full speed while still attacking. It's fun the first time, but it can become very boring very fast.

1d20 magic items for ingenious problem-solvers

1. Mat of Levitation. Anyone sitting cross-legged on this threadbare prayer mat can levitate at will by concentrating. If they stop concentrating for any reason then they fall. Only vertical movement straight up or down is possible. 
2. Ring of Near Invisibility. Anyone wearing this ring becomes invisible, but still casts a shadow. The ring itself does not become invisible, and may be spotted floating around by alert observers.  The ring does nothing to mask the wearer's scent, sound, or footprints.
3. Amulet of the Mole. This amulet permits its wearer to dig tunnels through sand or dirt (not stone) like a mole, at a rate of 5' per minute. Tunnels will only be wide enough for the person who dug them to crawl through on hands and knees. It does not grant any ability to see in the dark. 
4. Hatpin of disguise. Prick someone with this pin hard enough to draw blood, and the next time you place it in your own hat or hair you will take on their physical appearance until it is removed. (This is a visual illusion only, so if e.g. they have a beard and you don't then anyone touching your chin will realise something is amiss.) Your clothes and voice remain unchanged.
5. Armbands of the ape. Anyone wearing these chunky brass bangles gains the ability to climb and brachiate like an ape or monkey, rapidly scampering up trees or walls and swinging easily from branches, ropes, chains, etc. Wear them as anklets and you can swing by your feet, instead. 
6. A random weather bag.
7. A random emotion bag.
8. Tree Phrasebook. This enchanted book allows you to talk to trees... sort of. Reading from it gives you enthusiastic-tourist levels of ability to understand and be understood by trees, mostly by making alarming groaning noises with your throat. It does not make trees inherently well-disposed towards you, though they can be bribed with fertiliser or threatened with fire. Similar books may exist for communicating with rocks, rivers, etc. 
9. Thought interceptor earring. If anyone within your line of sight thinks a really big thought (e.g. 'OH MY GOD I LOVE HIM SO MUCH' or 'I WILL FUCKING KILL HIM') while you are wearing this earring, then you will 'hear' it as though it had just been shouted into the ear to which the earring is attached. Such thoughts are 'spoken' in the wearer's own voice and it will not always be apparent whom they are coming from, though context will often make this obvious. If you're in a whole crowd of people all thinking really big thoughts (e.g. a panicking mob trying to escape a fire) then the effect is simply deafening. 
10. Torc of water breathing. This golden torc is decorated with engraved gills. Wearing it allows the wearer to breathe underwater. It does not provide any swimming abilities, or the ability to see in the dark. 
11. Cloak of limited flying. Once per day, this bright red cloak permits its wearer to fly rapidly for 1d10 rounds - this ability is triggered by simply leaping into the air. The user is unaware of how long the duration is, and will only know the magic has stopped when they start dropping out of the sky. 
12. Ghost juice. Drinking this potion causes you to temporarily die and become a ghost for 1d6 hours. During this time you are intangible, allowing you to float around and walk through walls, but you are not invisible, and are clearly recognisable as a ghostly, ghastly version of yourself. You can talk during this time, though your voice is thin and tends towards wailing. You are immune to non-magical damage for the duration, and cannot cause physical harm to anyone else. At the conclusion of the effect you are sucked back into your body and return to life. 
13. A double-edged potion.
14. Divine Pass Note. Write a single factual yes-no question on one side of this enchanted papyrus, wait five minutes, and turn it over. God will have written YES or NO on the other side. Shortly afterwards, the note will spontaneously combust. Anyone trying to use this item to learn things that Man Was Not Meant To Know will find that they spontaneously combust, instead. 
15. Acoustic Amulet. Wearing this amulet enhances your hearing tenfold, allowing you to listen in on conversations thousands of yards away. Any kind of loud noise that occurs nearby while you are wearing them will be painful if not deafening. 
16. Hammer of the survivor. This worn construction hammer is stained with zombie blood. As long as suitable construction materials are available, it allows stockades and barricades to be constructed at twenty times their normal speed. 
17. Magic Feather. As long as this feather is gripped tightly, no fall from any height will cause any damage to the holder. 
18. FX Box. Looks like a complicated wind-up music box with a directional speaker. A wheel on the side can be set to any one of dozens of options (e.g. 'thunder', 'sounds of battle', 'screaming', 'birdsong', 'suspicious conversations', etc). When the crank is turned, the selected sound will be heard emanating from the place that the speaker is pointing at for as long as the user carries on turning the handle.
19. Black Breath Choker. Wearing this onyx choker allows the wearer to exhale huge clouds of blinding darkness, which completely block all light and dissipate like smoke (meaning that they'll vanish much more quickly in a high wind or similar). Each exhalation exhausts its power for 1d6 minutes. The choker does not grant the ability to see through darkness.
20. A bag containing 2d4 items from this list.

Magic bags and the things inside them

I've always thought that Aeolus's bag of wind from The Odyssey would be a great item for a D&D campaign. It's a bag with a wind inside it: point it in the right direction and open it to blow your ship across the sea, or knock your opponents down, or blow out a fire, or whatever. The effect is powerful enough to be useful, but specific enough to force players to think about how to turn it to their advantage, and the fact that it's a one-use item means you don't need to worry about the PCs suddenly upending your whole campaign setting by generating winds on demand. 

I reckon that the same principle could be applied more broadly. What other intangibles could a magician put inside a bag?

Category (roll 1d3)

1. Weather bag.
2. Emotion bag.
3. Abstraction bag.

Weather Bags (roll 1d8) - When opened, these create a localised weather effect in a radius of 1d10x100 feet around the bag, which lasts for 1d6 hours. (The wind bag is an exception - see below.)

1. Blizzard bag: Cold to the touch, and shakes and shudders violently. When opened a whole blizzard bursts out, filling the surrounding area with screaming winds and freezing, blinding gales of snow. Visibility drops to almost nothing, flying is impossible, and surfaces will be rapidly covered with snow and frost, making them very slippery and difficult to cross for anyone who isn't moving very slowly and carefully. 
2. Cold bag: Cool to the touch - you could put it in a crate to make a crude refrigerator, or make a tiny hole in it to release a steady stream of ultra-cold air. Opened all at once it releases a burst of intense cold, enough to make a scorching desert feel pleasantly cool, or a temperate day feel like an arctic night. (If it's already an arctic night, you'll be in instant-death-from-hypothermia territory.) As well as the obvious effects on living things, the sudden drop in temperature may freeze nearby water and cause surfaces to become slippery with frost.
3. Fog bag: You could make a pinprick in the side and use it for spooky dry-ice-style mist effects, but if this bag is opened a huge cloud of fog will pour out, reducing visibility in the surrounding area to almost zero. Good for covering escapes and other acts of stealth.
4. Heat bag: Warm to the touch - you could use it like a hot water bottle on cold winter nights, or make a tiny hole in it to release a steady stream of heat powerful enough to cook or burn with. Open it all at once and it releases a burst of intense heat, enough to make a polar ice waste feel temperate, or a temperate day feel utterly unbearable. (If you're already in the tropical heat, it will raise temperatures to unsurvivable levels.) As well as the obvious effects on living things, the sudden increase in temperature may melt nearby ice or cause nearby water to evaporate, and will create a powerful localised air current - after all, hot air rises!
5. Rainstorm bag: Moisture continually osmoses through the fabric - handy if you have something you want to keep moist. Make a tiny hole in it and water will trickle out: the total amount you can get out of it is finite, but it's many, many times larger than the bag could possibly physically contain. Rip it open and a drenching, monsoon-style rainstorm bursts out, cooling and soaking everyone within the affected area, massively decreasing visibility, and extinguishing open fires. Surfaces will be slick and slippery within minutes, and if there's nowhere for all the water to drain off to then localised flooding will soon ensue. 
6. Sunlight bag: A faint glow emanates from between the closely-woven fibres of this bag, equivalent to soft candlelight. Make a hole in it and a beam of strong, bright sunlight emerges that you can use like a flashlight, or as an anti-vampire laser. Pull it open and hot, bright, dazzling sunlight pours out, floodlighting the whole area as though under a noonday sun, making stealth difficult and potentially causing temporary blindness in areas shifting rapidly from dark to light.
7. Thunderstorm bag: Shakes violently and makes loud rumbling noises. In most respects this is just a noisier version of the rainstorm bag, but if you pull it open you get flashing lightning and deafening thunder as well as just rain, making it extremely hazardous to anyone standing on top of tall objects and/or waving conductive objects around.
8. Wind bag: Trembles continuously. Poking a hole in it causes a strong stream of air to pour forth - potentially useful for blowing out flames, for example. Opening it fully causes a powerful gale-like wind to pour out of the bag for the duration. Unlike all the other weather bags, this wind does not simply create an environmental effect in the area around the opener: instead it is directional, with wind continuing to blow outwards in whichever direction the bag is pointed, allowing it to be used to propel ships across water, used as a weapon to knock people over, etc. Once the bag is opened there's no way to shut it again - the wind will just keep blowing out until it's exhausted. 

Bag of Emotion (roll 1d10) - When opened, these create a localised mood effect in a radius of 1d10x10 feet around the bag. Anyone within the affected area when the bag is opened must save or be affected by the relevant emotion for the next 1d6 hours. Many would make good missile weapons as long as you can be sure of them bursting on impact.

1. Bag of anger: Anyone affected will be filled with irrational rage for the duration. The tiniest setbacks or disagreements will prompt screaming arguments and howls of fury, minor provocations will lead to fistfights, and serious insults or challenges are likely to provoke lethal violence. 
2. Bag of confidence: Anyone affected will be filled with irrational confidence for the duration. This isn't insanity - they won't believe they can do something impossible, like fly or breathe water - but will tend to make people very, very reckless. Rank amateurs will gleefully attempt tasks that they would normally leave to trained professionals, while experts will throw all their normal caution to the wind. These effects can be helpful - e.g. to give someone with social anxiety the confidence to speak publicly - but will always tend more towards 'manic overconfidence' rather than 'calm self-belief'.
3. Bag of curiosity: Anyone affected will be overwhelmed by curiosity. What's behind that door? What does that lever do? Why does that guy always look pale whenever anyone mentions snakes? Very occasionally, this can be a good thing, prompting people to solve puzzles and unravel mysteries they would otherwise have left untouched. More commonly it will lead to broken friendships at best ('What did happen on that night you told me never to ask about?') and broken limbs at worst. ('I wonder what happens if you push the button marked 'do not push'?')
4. Bag of envy: Anyone affected will have their feelings of envy and resentment magnified manifold. This makes most social interactions enormously difficult: even something as simple as handing out jobs will cause intense bickering as people argue over all the ways in which they are being unfairly slighted. Anything that would normally cause envy anyway (e.g. seeing someone else with something you powerfully desire and/or believe should be rightfully yours) may well lead to acts of theft or violence. 
5. Bag of fear: Anyone affected will be consumed with overwhelming anxiety, convinced that something absolutely terrible is about to happen. Even minor stressors (e.g. someone jumping out unexpectedly) will cause screaming and cowering, while something that would normally be scary (e.g. a fire, a battle) will prompt either fainting or panicked flight.
6. Bag of friendship: Anyone affected will be filled with warm, fuzzy, happy feelings, like the kind you get after three or four drinks with really good friends. Enmity or hostility will still be regarded as such, but any kind of friendly behaviour will be enthusiastically reciprocated, even when it comes from complete strangers. Those affected will also be much more trusting than they normally would be. 
7. Bag of guilt: Anyone affected will be consumed with guilt over every shameful thing they've ever done. If they're already feeling guilty about something, then the amplified feeling will be so powerful that it may prompt dramatic confessions, spectacular attempts at restitution, or even suicide attempts. Otherwise it will just make them really miserable and self-involved, too caught up in beating themselves up over everything they've ever done wrong to notice much of what is going on around them, and too crippled by self-loathing to accomplish anything more than the most basic and routine tasks for the duration. 
8. Bag of sloth: Anyone affected is overwhelmed by feelings of laziness. Every task is carried out in the most half-assed fashion possible. Every corner that can possibly be cut will be. (Depending on exactly what they're currently doing, this may be extremely dangerous!) They will still try to protect themselves against immediate threats, but will never do more than this: they will not, for example, pursue a fleeing enemy.
9. Bag of happiness: Anyone affected will feel happy. Really, really happy. Singing and dancing and laughing for no reason levels of happy. Negative emotions (e.g. fear, depression, anger) will simply vanish. Pain or exhaustion don't go away, but become nothing that can't be handled with gritted teeth or the aid of a rousing song. The effect is really, really enjoyable, and highly addictive. 
10. Bag of misery: Anyone affected sinks into utter misery and despair for the duration, unable to do anything much except sit and weep about how unhappy they are. If threatened with immediate harm they will still try to protect or defend themselves, but are unlikely to be very good at it. 

Bag of Abstraction  (roll 1d10)

1. Bag of darkness: Opening it a little bit is like dimming all the lights in a room, which may be handy if you're currently trying to sneak around. Opening it all the way releases a cloud of impenetrable magical darkness that persists for 1d6 hours.
2. Bag of dreams: Opening this bag a crack will let a dream slip into your head, good for 1d3 hours of pleasantly surreal lucid dreaming. Ripping it open will force everyone within 1d6x10 feet to save or be plunged into a hallucinatory dreamworld for the next 1d6 hours, during which they can perceive reality only dimly, as though half-asleep. Suffering physical pain or damage will wrench them awake. 
3. Bag of energy: Just letting out a little bit is enough to remove the fatigue of an hour's hard labour. Opening the whole bag will cause everyone within 1d10x10 feet to race around like rabbits on speed for 1d6 hours, after which they must save or crash spectacularly for the next 2d6 hours. 
4. Bag of ideas: Just a sniff from this bag is enough to give you new ideas, allowing a reroll on Intelligence rolls or similar. If the whole bag is opened, everyone within 1d10x10 feet must save or be overwhelmed by too many ideas, spending the next 1d6 hours frantically trying to scribble down notes, build prototypes, etc. (Note that this doesn't grant any skills you don't already possess, just new ideas for how to use your existing ones.) They will still protect themselves if threatened, but will otherwise be lost in worlds of their own for the duration. If they have the ability to write down or otherwise record their ideas then they will each find 1d10 really good ones buried amongst all the gibberish after they finally come down from their intellectual high. 
5. Bag of motivation: Inhaling a sniff of vapour from this bag is enough to motivate someone to push forward through hours of boring, difficult, and/or exhausting labour, but watch out - if the bag ever bursts, everyone within 1d10x10 feet must save or suddenly find the motivation to do whatever it is they've been putting off for their whole lives, which probably means they all instantly run off to take up singing or confess their love to their childhood crush or whatever.
6. Bag of pain: This is a nasty one - even touching it hurts a bit. You can release it onto someone a trickle at a time as a form of torture, or throw the bag to unleash a cloud of incapacitating agony, forcing everyone within 1d6x10 feet to save or drop to the floor screaming in pain for 1d20 minutes. They can still try to defend themselves, but will do so with greatly reduced effectiveness.
7. Bag of pleasure: Sniff a bit for an instant high, or throw it to make everyone within 1d6x10 feet save or drop to the floor in blissed-out stupefaction for 1d20 minutes, during which time they will do nothing but smile vacantly and maybe quiver a little. Anyone who wants to be affected can voluntarily fail their save.
8. Bag of sickness: Not the airplane kind: instead, these are create by medical magicians, who pull the diseases out of their patients and place them inside these bags. If opened, everyone within 1d10x10 feet must save or become seriously ill, spending the next 1d20 days mostly bedridden by pain, fever, nausea, vomiting, and various other unpleasant (though not life-threatening) symptoms.
9. Bag of stupidity: Created as a by-product of magical intelligence-enhancing rituals, during which wizards deliberately suck out their own stupidity and seal it away in enchanted bags. If the bag is opened or broken, everyone within 1d10x10 feet must save or have their effective Intelligence and Wisdom halved for the next 1d6 hours. 
10. Bag of time: Who doesn't need more time? Opening it just a crack will allow a few more seconds to slip out between one minute and the next, which can be crucial when performing exacting tasks under pressure. Opening the whole bag will release a bubble of compressed time with a radius of 1d10x10 feet: from inside this bubble the world outside appears to be frozen for the next 1d6 hours, whereas from outside everything that happens in the bubble during those hours appears to occur instantaneously. Nothing from inside the bubble can leave the bubble until the compressed time has elapsed. 

Local gods and the spiritual technology of rulership

There's a legend about the Battle of Brunanburh, at which King Aethelstan confronted the allied kings of Scotland, Dublin, and Strathclyde in 937 AD. Before the battle, one of Aethelstan's soldiers was lying sick: he happened to be a Devonshire man, so in his sickness he prayed to his local saint, the martyr St Nectan, to heal him. That night he had a vision of St Nectan, and in the morning the sickness was gone and he was well enough to fight.

The interesting bit isn't the healing: it's what happened next. The Devon man told everyone about his miraculous recovery, and soon word reached King Aethelstan. Aethelstan was understandably nervous about the coming battle, so he asked the soldier which saint it was who had proven so receptive to his prayers. The soldier told him about Saint Nectan, and assured him that Nectan was always swift to intercede on behalf of those who had faith in him. Aethelstan prayed to St Nectan, won the battle, and was a generous donor to the cult of the saint thereafter.

Just think for a moment about what this sequence of events implies about Aethelstan's mindset. He's king of a sparsely-populated nation made up of hundreds of scattered communities, each with their own local shrines and saints and martyrs and holy wells, most of which have never been heard of by anyone outside their local area. He takes it as given that these saints are capable of interceding with God on his behalf, and that some of them are more likely to do so than others, but crucially he doesn't know which ones. The obscure hermit-saint revered in some provincial village might turn out to be exactly the guy you need to pray to in order to resolve a major national crisis. Working out who to pray to under which circumstances isn't a matter of set dogma, established long ago and handed down by recognised authorities: instead, it's a work in progress, to be figured out by trial and error. Building up a working knowledge of all your national saints, and cultivating suitable relations with their respective cults, becomes a potentially important element of kingship. 

This is a mindset that would, I think, have made intuitive sense to the Tengriist and Shamanistic cultures in the history of Central Asia, for whom the question 'which spirits have authority here?' was one that every nomadic people had to confront regularly as they roamed from place to place. It would have made sense to the Romans, for whom working out which set of local gods to buy off was an integral part of the process of conquest. It is, however, a mindset that seems to be very rare in D&D and associated games, where most fantasy religions seem to have completely codified understandings of the sacred rather than the more experimental approaches that have historically been so commonplace. This strikes me as a bit of a pity - there's so much more gaming potential in the latter!

Imagine if, instead of being a fully worked-out institutional religion like counter-reformation-era Catholicism, your cleric's faith was something closer to Aethelstan's version of Christianity, a hacky work-in-progress always subject to revision based on the latest discoveries. A huge amount of your adventuring could be motivated simply by the desire to learn more about different local gods or saints or spirits, which you would do by visiting lots of different shrines and making lots of different offerings just to find out which ones work best. In a world where most people stick close to home, worshipping their local gods, an adventuring cleric who's been all over the place could become a real asset simply because of their breadth of spiritual experience. ('Actually, my liege, over the mountains they have a saint that they pray to in exactly this sort of situation...') 

Probably the easiest way to represent this mechanically would be to have knowledge of certain spiritual practises grant access to new cleric spells. In most cases these spells might only be available to clerics who'd actually gone to the trouble of visiting whatever remote shrine they are associated with, but sometimes just knowing the name and rituals of the associated god or saint might be enough. Imagine the prestige to be gained in being the cleric who brings such knowledge back to their cult centre and thus unlocks a new spell not just for themselves, but for their entire religion!

And it works for quest-givers, too. Obviously every ruler is going to want to have the latest, sweetest spiritual technology on their side. Obviously they'll want to aggressively investigate rumours of holy sites, obscure shrines, sacred springs, and so on, in the hope of giving themselves and their clergy an edge over their rivals. Everyone knows about all the most famous gods and saints, so they just cancel out: the real advantage is to be gained from being the first one in on a hot new discovery, and they're almost always going to come from way out in the hinterlands, or someone would know about them already. Of course it's going to fall to your party to make the long, dangerous journey through the wilderness to the half-ruined shrine of some obscure local spirit or hermit, so that your cleric can check whether they have enough spiritual mojo to be worth adding to the national liturgy.

Just think of the adventure opportunities!

1d10 local god adventure opportunities

1. The king wants to develop a new industry, but because it's not been historically practiced in his kingdom he doesn't know who the appropriate gods/saints/spirits are who oversee these things. Your job is to go to some foreign land where this trade is already established and surreptitiously steal all their knowledge about how best to honour, petition, and placate the relevant spiritual beings, all without giving away the secret of the king's economic plans. You'll get a bonus if you can learn the secret rites their guildsmen carry out behind closed doors!
2. In your grandfather's day there was a weird old hermit living in the mountains. Now people are claiming to see him in their dreams and there are rumours of miracles occurring near the remote cave where he once lived. Your job is to get out there, try to work out if he really has become a legitimate god/saint/spirit, and - if he has - find some way to integrate him into the local religion. (Maybe a shrine could be built in his cave? Or maybe you could find his bones and take them to the local temple as holy relics?)
3. The king is trying to integrate a recently-conquered frontier region into his kingdom, and he needs someone to do a spiritual survey. Your job is to roam from shrine to shrine among a resentful and rebellious population, cataloguing their local gods/saints/spirits and working out which of them, if any, might be worth adding to the national cult. 
4. Old chronicles speak of a god/saint/spirit who once bestowed powerful blessings upon their worshippers, but its cult centre has long since fallen into ruin, and no-one remembers the rites by which it was once honoured. Might there be something out there worth salvaging? You'll have to voyage though the wilderness to its abandoned shrine and start making experimental offerings to find out!
5. The king has a major project planned and he needs as much sacred mojo as possible. Your job is to visit the shrines of the relevant gods/saints/spirits, obtain their sacred items and holy relics by whatever means necessary, and bring them to the capital to ensure the project's success. Naturally, you can expect the locals to violently resist the removal of their treasures.
6. As 5, but from the other side. A bunch of thugs with a royal warrant just rode into your local shrine and carried off the relics of your local god/saint/spirit to the capital, claiming that the king needs them more than you do! Now your community looks to you to steal them back, and to establish a new, secret shrine where they can be safely kept in future.
7. The king is planning to hold a major religious festival to bring the blessings of heaven upon his newly-built navy. It's going to cost him a fortune, and he needs to be sure that he's getting the maximum bang for his buck. Your job is to roam the remote storm-wracked islands and pirate-haunted headlands where all the best gods/saints/spirits of the sea seem to have their shrines, and find out which ones are most worth honouring in the festivities. Expect every single priest you meet to try to hustle you about this.
8. There's been a disaster - but all the priests insist that they've been carrying out their ceremonies perfectly! Clearly some unknown god/saint/spirit is offended - but which one? Your job is to divine which obscure spiritual entity has been neglected, make a pilgrimage to their remote place of power, and make whatever offerings they require in order to slake their wrath before the kingdom suffers even further calamities.
9. Sometimes the god/saint/spirit you need to pray to has their holiest shrine in a really inconvenient place, like the other side of a monster-haunted wilderness or the middle of an enemy kingdom. Your job is to undertake the perilous journey there to make offerings on behalf of your king, so that he can win their favour for his latest scheme.
10. Out in the wilderness the remains of some forgotten shrine to a god/saint/spirit have been discovered, but no-one recognises the names carved on its ancient stone. Is it holy or unholy? Does power still reside here, and if so, is there enough of it to make it worth re-establishing whatever vanished cult once built this place? Best do your research first: trial-and-error offerings may risk causing offence that your kingdom can ill afford...

Elements of incongruity

I've written before about the dangers of simply doubling down on the same ideas ad infinitum, leading to extremely one-note characters, settings, and situations: barbarians primarily characterised by their barbaric barbarism, rogues notable for their roguish roguery, and so on. Not only does this tend to make scenarios more boring on a conceptual level, it often also leads to less satisfying actual play. If the Pyromantic Fire Coven of the Burning Flame Witch are totally all in on fire magic, then once the PCs have developed viable anti-fire-magic countermeasures they really have no reason to respond to each thing the Coven throws at them with anything other than 'the same again, but more'. But the best play thrives on complexity, on situations fraught with tensions and contradictions that the PCs can get their claws into and turn to their advantage. 

One easy way to create this is to ensure that each creature, community, organisation, or whatever includes at least one element of incongruity. This is the wrinkle in their otherwise smooth conceptual facade: the thing that not only makes them more interesting and memorable, but also provides hooks for more nuanced play, making them resistant to the overconfident and vulnerable to the well-prepared. 

So here are some examples. To come up with one for your next NPC or faction, try rolling 1d3 and 1d6...

Incongruity type (roll 1d3)

1. Incongruous character trait.
2. Incongruous individual.
3. Incongruous nature.  

Incongruous character trait. Children's fiction uses this sort of thing all the time. ('It turned out that the dragon secretly loved dancing!') This sort of thing can serve to trip up players who make over-hasty assumptions about how such characters will behave, while also providing resources for those who bother to get to know them properly, allowing them to be more easily befriended or manipulated by the PCs.

Assign an incongruous trait by rolling 1d6:

1. Incongruous belief. This person has one sincere and deeply-held belief that could not easily be predicted from their general worldview or ideological position. Maybe an otherwise-rational person has one superstition they take really seriously, and cannot be argued out of; maybe an otherwise-conservative traditionalist has one topic on which they have surprisingly liberal views, or vice-versa. An important sub-type is the incongruous moral position, whereby an otherwise-decent person turns out to harbour some horrible prejudice or moral blind spot, or a seemingly-wicked or amoral person turns out to have at least one moral line they genuinely will not cross.
2. Incongruous personality trait. This person has one character trait that is apparently out of keeping with their social role. Immense personal vanity is predictable among aristocrats, but perhaps more surprising in an orc raider; tremendous interpersonal aggression might be common among street thugs, but is more unexpected in a librarian. They may have found a way to make this trait work for them - maybe the librarian has terrorised all his rivals into submission! - or it may form a barrier that they need to work around in order to fulfil the role expected of them. 
3. Incongruous interest or hobby. This person is fascinated by something unexpected, like an absent-minded sage turning out to be a bare-knuckle boxing enthusiast, or a brutal ogre who actually has a deep and genuine appreciation for music. They may be ashamed of this interest and keep it secret, which will only make them more eager to share it with non-judgemental fellow enthusiasts.
4. Incongruous background. This person wasn't always the way they are now. Maybe they've experienced a massive rise or fall in social status (e.g. the street thief was actually born into a noble family, or vice versa), or maybe they've undergone some huge cultural shift, moving into a religious, cultural, or ideological position very different from the one they originally held. They consequently possess a body of skills and knowledge incongruous with their current position - that street thief may actually have a surprising knowledge of aristocratic etiquette left over from their privileged childhood!
5. Incongruous relationship. This person maintains a relationship (personal, familial, or romantic) which connects them to a sphere of life otherwise remote from their own. Maybe the bandit chief's sister is the city archivist. Maybe this weird, smelly hermit was once the baron's childhood friend. The relationship means a lot to both parties, even though they might feel some embarrassment about it. 
6. Incongruous ambition. This person has always aspired to something utterly different to their current life. Maybe they wanted to pursue a very different career, like a sailor who always wanted to be an artist instead, or vice versa; or maybe they harbour a secret crush on someone from a very different social sphere, and dream of running away with them and living happily ever after. Depending on context, this ambition may be something they talk about all the time, or something they keep carefully hidden. 

Incongruous individual. When it comes to individuals in groups, lots of RPG adventures tend to go for the 'chocolate ice cream with chocolate sauce' approach: so if the group are violent savage, their leader or champion will be notable for being even more savagely violent. But you can get much more mileage out of having a difference, instead: something that sets them apart in kind rather than just degree, a difference which can serve as a source of strength or as a wedge to drive them apart. Assign an incongruous individual by rolling 1d6:

1. Incongruous ideology. The group all do the same things - they wouldn't be much of a group, otherwise - but one of them does them for different reasons to the rest. Maybe, in a band of outlaws otherwise motivated by greed, one actually sees their criminal activities as a way to strike back against the unjust social order. Maybe most of the soldiers are fighting because they actually want to win the war, but their commanding officer is only here to pursue a private vendetta, or out of a sense of religious obligation. Whatever the split is, it's not enough to stop them from working together on a day-to-day basis (or they'd have gone their separate ways ages ago), but it might well come to the forefront in moments of crisis. 
2. Incongruous quality. One person in the group is just much better or much worse than the rest in some significant way. Maybe the thieves are mostly mere brawlers... except for one of them, who's the best knife-fighter anyone's ever seen. Maybe the hobgoblins are hardened warriors... except for one of them, who's someone's little brother out on his first campaign. Either way around, this difference probably arouses a complicated mixture of positive and negative feelings in the others: unusually strong characters will be regarded with mingled respect and envy, while unusually weak ones may be viewed with a mixture of protectiveness and resentment.
3. Incongruous culture. One individual in the group has a very different social or cultural background to the rest. Maybe they're part of a different ethnicity (or a different species, in a fantasy setting); maybe they follow a different religion, or were born into a different culture or social class (e.g. one member of a band of aristocratic rakehells who was actually born poor, and is extremely self-conscious about it). This difference may be a source of strength, providing skills and knowledge that the group would otherwise lack, but can also be a source of tension that scheming adversaries may use to pry them apart. 
4. Incongruous ability. One individual in the group has some surprising ability that the others lack: a scholar in a band of beggars, a skilled diplomat in a gang of orcish raiders, a talented huntsman in an office full of bureaucrats, etc. For fantasy games this may also take the form of a magical talent. 
5. Incongruous virtue. One person in the group has some important positive quality - e.g. mercy, loyalty, tolerance, courage, compassion - that the rest of them lack. This virtue can't be something that gets in the way of the group's day-to-day activities - a pirate who refuses to steal isn't going to be a pirate for long - but may well surface at crucial junctures, when one member of the group unexpectedly breaks from the rest to take some kind of moral stand.
6. Incongruous vice. One person in the group has some important negative quality - e.g. sadism, cowardice, deceitfulness, addiction, greed - that the rest of them lack. Depending on the context, this vice may be something they perform openly or something they try to keep secret, but it's a big enough part of their personality that anyone who observes them closely is likely to pick up on it. As with virtues, such vices are particularly likely to reveal themselves at crucial junctures, when one member of the group abandons or betrays their comrades or otherwise gives way to their worst impulses. 

Incongruous nature. The character is not who they seem to be. The face they present to the world is a performance, but their true nature is very different to what they pretend, and at moments of crisis the real them shines through. Their true nature could be anything as long as it's sufficiently distinct from their public facade, but to pick one that'll work for almost anyone, roll 1d6. (And, yes, these are all Natures from the old World of Darkness system...)

1. Covert monster. Whatever the person pretends to be, the reality is far worse. If they pretend to be good, it's sheer hypocrisy. If they pretend to be normal, it's protective camouflage. If they pretend to at least be loyal to their mates, then they're actually just waiting for the right time to sell them out. Everything they do is actually intended to multiply their opportunities to benefit themselves at other people's expense. Even the things that seem most benevolent. Especially the things that seem most benevolent. 
2. Covert caregiver. Whatever this person appears to be, they're actually a real softy at heart. They might still do harmful things, but it's only because they believe in tough love, or because they hope that the ends justify the means, or because they're trying to protect their friends or to teach you a lesson. At the end of the day they will always try to nurture their allies and minimise harm to their enemies, although they might pretend otherwise for appearance's sake. 
3. Covert conformist. This person only acts the way they do because they feel it's expected of them. They might appear to be cruel, or kind, or artistic, or scholarly, or shy, or whatever... but it's all just a show, a performance for other people's benefit. Put them in a different social context and they'd act completely differently. Put them in no social context and they might even start the long and painful process of working out what they want, instead. 
4. Covert judge. This person is actually a moralist at heart. They might pretend to be anarchic or forgiving or amoral or nihilistic, but secretly they are always, always judging. Everything they do is secretly a test, even when it's disguised as an act of mercy or sadism or hedonism or indifference, and when it comes right down to it, the way they treat you will depend on the secret score they've been chalking up for you in their heads this whole time. 
5. Covert child. This person never really grew up. They can manage a passable performance of adulthood, including pretending to have proper adult motivations, but underneath it's all just childish curiosity and clinging and tantrums and I WANT THE THING NOW! Such characters will often gravitate towards substitute parent-figures, although they'll usually claim that these relationships are romantic or political or professional, instead. 
6. Covert idealist. This person really, seriously believes in some kind of big ideal: Freedom, Justice, Faith, Honour, that sort of thing. They probably don't make a big deal of it, because they know most people will either laugh at them or assume they're lying, but when push comes to shove they are actually, genuinely willing to kill or die for their ideal, in a fashion that is likely to be equal parts inspiring and terrifying.

Incongruity in Action: the Backwood Bandits

Let's apply all these possibilities to that most uninteresting of fantasy cliches, the bandit gang. Hopefully it will be clear how any or all of these could lead to more interesting actual play! (And yes, if you wanted to, you could apply all eighteen at once...)

• Boring version: The bandits are robbers who live in the backwoods. Their leader is the biggest, meanest robber of all.
• 1.1: The bandits are, in their own idiosyncratic way, deeply religious. They refuse to rob on holy days, and will not harm members of the clergy.
• 1.2: The bandits hate lying. They may kill and rob you, but at least they'll be totally honest about it.
• 1.3: The bandits love music. Their rousing sing-alongs echo through the backwoods, and they'll go out of their way to steal musical instruments and kidnap musicians.
• 1.4: The bandits actually started out as a bunch of university drop-outs who took to robbery after being expelled. For a band of forest-dwelling robbers they're a surprisingly learned bunch.
• 1.5: The bandit chief is in love with a local cleric, whose temple he's been surreptitiously visiting by night, though both men are deeply conflicted about the relationship.
• 1.6: The bandits actually intended to become legitimate merchants - the robbery was just intended to raise enough capital to start a business. But one thing led to another and now they're all wanted by the authorities and stuck living in a wood...
• 2.1: Most of the bandits are just in it for the money, but one of them really believes that robbing people is her holy duty, and that she is the instrument of heaven's vengeance upon an unjust society.
• 2.2: One of the bandits is so much better at woodcraft and archery than the others that it's positively obnoxious. All her comrades hate her.
• 2.3: One of the bandits is a goblin, who acts as the group's scout, but is acutely conscious that the others will never really regard him as one of the gang.
• 2.4: One of the bandits has natural magical talents, though he's totally untaught and has little control over how they manifest.
• 2.5: One of the bandits is totally committed to the gang, and would happily lay down her life for them. (They would never dream of doing the same for her.)
• 2.6: One of the bandits is an awful alcoholic, unable to resist the lure of alcohol even when he knows that he really should.
• 3.1: One of the bandits is a sociopathic monster who is just biding her time, waiting for the chance to sell out her 'friends' and escape with all the loot.
• 3.2: One of the bandits always secretly tries to make sure that no-one on either side gets hurt during their robberies - he claims his motives are purely pragmatic, but actually he just genuinely hates cruelty and violence.
• 3.3: One of the bandits only got roped into a life of crime because of peer pressure. He talks a lot about the love of freedom and the injustice of the law, but would happily resume a blameless life of honest labour if given half a chance. 
• 3.4: One of the bandits is secretly testing the rest of the gang to see if they're truly worthy of her loyalty, willing to dedicate her life to them if they pass, or to betray them to the authorities if they fail.
• 3.5: Beneath his ferocious exterior, one of the bandits is secretly a mass of insecurities, clinging to the bandit chief for reassurance in a world he's never really learned to understand or deal with.
• 3.6: One of the bandits is an absolute true believer in personal liberty, and would rather kill or die than accept any kind of restriction or restraint.