Ink Blots vs. Random Tables

In my ongoing quest to reduce the amount of work that I must do to prepare for sessions and to increase the time that I can spend doing the stuff I really love, I've come to appreciate the value of random tables. This is a no-brainer for those of you immersed in the OSR. Old-School D&D (and most other non-D&D Old School games) are chock full of random tables. I'm talking about encounter tables, random NPC personality tables, dungeon generation tables, treasure tables, mutation tables, yada yada yada. I love tables.

There are several problems with tables, however. Tables, by definition, are limited to what you put in them. It takes time to come up with large tables and unless you use large tables, you stand a fair chance of re-rolling a previous result at some point. And unless you have a big table, results might come to feel unsurprising or stale.

Another problem with tables is that there are an awful lot of them out there. How do you choose which tables to use? With idiosyncratic campaign settings or play-styles, the urge to design your own can become overwhelming. And though it can be fun, designing tons of tables conflicts with my desire to minimize game preparation.

(Another problem with creating my own tables is that if I put a cool new magic item in a treasure table, for example, I'm not going to want to rely on a random dice roll to get it into the game)

Anyway, playing with the Mythic Game Master Emulator has given me insight into another way of doing things. A key component of Mythic is the use of "ink blot" tables for random events (and in Mythic Variations, Complex Questions). The idea is that you roll once on two different tables to produce a combination of words and then use the first thing that pops into your head.

Let's take an example:

Let's say the game is dragging a bit and you need an urban encounter to spice things up. Rolling on the "Mythic Event Meaning: Action" table, I get "Passion". Rolling on the "Mythic Event Meaning: Subject" table, I get "Ambush". The first thing that pops into my head is that a serial killer has been watching one of the player characters. That character coincidentally fits the pattern of the killer's previous targets. The player character might be approached by a charming psychopath or simply attacked if they manage to get separated from the party.

There are an infinite number of different interpretations. The "Passion/Ambush" result could have led to an confrontation with a jealous lover, a duel with a romantic rival, or a chance encounter with an out-of-control domestic disturbance. With the current game context in mind, the result is almost certainly going to be relevant and interesting.

But isn't this just making stuff up? Yes and no. The ink blot acts as both constraint and inspiration. It forces you to act within the confines of the result, inspiring you to come up with something that may not have occurred to you. Personally, I find this approach useful for breaking myself out of creative ruts.

The Mythic community has taken this approach one step further. Instead of just using the Mythic Event Meaning Tables (two tables of 100 words each), all sorts of randomizers can be used to generate ink blots. One of the first suggestions that I saw for this was to use Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Choosing a random entry out of this book can lead to some excellent material and I find it particularly useful for generating mysterious phenomena or character descriptions.

I also use TV Tropes and Wikipedia, as both have a feature to call up random articles. And my oldest inkblot tool (one that predates my discovery of Mythic) is a Python script that randomly selects one or more images from my vast collection of downloaded genre art.

Let's take a look a some more examples:

The characters encounter an NPC party. What's the wizard like?

[TV Tropes]: Don't Make Me Destroy You 

Tall, powerfully-built, and clad in menacing black robes this wizard practically radiates power. He wants something and won't let anything stand in his way. But due to moral complexity or inscrutable self-interest, he doesn't want to hurt the party. This may give them a chance to negotiate a solution, turning a potentially lethal combat encounter into an interesting roleplaying challenge.

What's in the hex?

[Wikipedia]: Foolish Heart (1988 Film) 

Keying of the words "photography", "intellectuals", and "mental institution", I'd say that this hex contains a secluded estate for like-minded but mentally unstable artists. These bards, sorcerers, and wizards have retreated from society because their dangerously deviant artistic experiments are abhorrent to regular society.

What's in a this dungeon room?

[Mythic Event Meaning Tables]: Disrupt/Inside 

This otherwise featureless room contains an rune-covered wooden box. Anything placed in the box is disintegrated. Denizens of the dungeon use it for disposing of waste and threatening captured adventurers.

What's special about this magic sword?

[Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable]: Hop-o’-my-Thumb

First wielded by the halfling squire of a legendary king, this magical shortsword was enchanted to strike with as much force as a sword twice its size (i.e. a longsword). It is especially effective against giant spiders of all kinds, killing them with the slightest blow. Unfortunately, the weapon has an unfortunate reputation for bringing spectacular death to its those that wield it after they have achieved a noteworthy heroic feat.

Finally, I want to be clear that inkblots are not meant to completely replace good tables. I'm still going to make heavy use of classic tables and those created by the community. But I've found that inkblots are a great supplemental tool for when going to a table just doesn't seem to do the trick.