Books! aka Droppin' Lore aka "Can I Read Before We Go To Sleep?"

Books!
Historically valuable, gamewise worthless unless they're a spellbook (at least in my game).
UNTIL NOW.

So here's the basic idea.

Books and Such

I've got a big table of book topics, each topic with a hash code so I can say "You find Book #156 - The Nature of Heaven" and they can write down just Book #156 if they want.
Table of generic book subjects here.

Every hour of study, roll a die based on how many books on the subject you've got available to reference:

Roll it on the following table:

Then ask a question and I'll give an answer based on what you rolled.
And that's it!

Discussion

For some time I had a limited number of uses per book (a la David Black or Vornheim), which has the unfortunate side effect of players ditching books when they run out of information juice.
Throw away books?! Not on my watch!

So instead books let you ask an unlimited number of questions on their topic, but it takes quite some time and you don't get many useful answers unless you have more books to reference.
This should hopefully encourage collecting books, hanging onto books, and maintaining a library. And it also means that finding the another book on the same topic is cause for happiness instead of indifference.
Each book takes up one encumbrance slot, so one of my hopes is that someone will hire a book-bearing retainer to porter relevant books around the dungeon for them.

You may notice that I haven't got anything in here in regards to the quality of a book's writing. This is intentional! I figure that book quality is abstracted, that way I don't need to worry about it. If one book's a light synopsis on the topic and the other's a long-winded rambling tome, you can use the one to inform the other.
If pressed, I can always say a really good quality book counts as two books or counts as a book on more than one subject. I probably won't, though.

The other thing I want to play around with is having, say, a frieze that counts as +1 book on a subject. So you find a frieze depicting the miracles of Jesus, and if you've got your Bible on you it counts as having a bonus book on the subject.
I've already got the National Library of Fortress-City Fate counting as a book on every topic, and that's made people become interested in it for the first time. Score!

Books for My World

Players: Please don't view this one. Is secret.

For everyone else: this actually turned out to be a good way for me to collate various lore garbage that may or may not ever be learnt by my players! Feel free to have a look, and use it as a basis for your own stuff.

Books of my world are here.
A side effect of giving the players quite a vague title/subject matter is that in some cases they'll have no idea what the book is even about until they spend a few hours "reading it" by asking questions.
If you've only got the title "Book #116 - Ur-Darghab, City of the Deeps" and one-word answers to your questions at best, it takes a bit of questioning to work out that this is a book about a Dwarf arcology city.

1d100 Retroactive Backstory

Update: Erika Muse/Arivia over at The Ice Queen's Throne has this improved version for Labyrinth Lord. Changes some of the more niche house rules, and removes a questionable reference to the Romani.

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I've been working on this off and on for the past couple of months.
The Backstory table is here.

The basic idea is that every time you level up, you roll 1d100 on the Backstory table.
Each has a hopefully-inspirational fragment of backstory and two potential outcomes.
So if you roll a 1, the DM tells you "You got into a confrontation with a bully who was way tougher than you. Did you fight or flee?"

Now the trick here is that the other players at the table decide what your character must have done, based on how your character's been acting in the game thus far. Debate is allowed and encouraged, as is swapping examples of supporting evidence, in this case probably times you stood and fought versus times you turned and ran.

The others come to an agreement or vote or whatever, then you make up a story of what actually happened. Who was the bully? Why did you do what you did?
The story can be as detailed or as sparse as you want, no pressure. Most of my players tied it into their failed career in some way.

Finally you get told what your new ability is! Each outcome of each backstory has its own associated power. In this example, "fight" nets you a +1 to hit vs enemies who have more HD than you, and "flee" grants you a +1 to fleeing rolls.
Score! Now your character is hopefully encouraged to live up to their new backstory.

An old one but there aren't really any better images when you search for "backstory"

This was all, as with damn near everything I ever make these days, chiefly inspired by Arnold K.
Specifically, his lifepath character generation thing.
It's a fairly involved process but at the end of it you have a character who's fleshed out in a way that Bob the Level 1 Fighter isn't.

Trouble is, I love quick char gen with an embarrassingly fiery passion. It's quick to get to the actual playing-the-game part of the game, I can get new players playing quickly, and I don't have to feel too guilty if a PC dies. It's the best.

But another thing is that I already have some light character history at char gen via the failed career table. After their character's finished I ask the question that goes like "So you're a Necromancer who used to be a Bellringer. How'd that happen?" and have actually always received a good answer. The implication's meant to be that before that point they were a boring nobody, at which point they went off to become a Player Character and their life gets Interesting and their character's actual in-game experiences become their backstory.

Which is great and all, but making up the story about How Your Character Got Here is actually really fun! So this retroactive backstory is meant to be a sort of best-of-both-worlds approach. You get quick char gen, but as your character levels up you get to flesh out more backstory.

This also has the neat effect of making your character's personal story grow backwards as well as forwards, and means you sort of learn more about them as you play them. Plus from the DM's side of the table, you can tie current campaign events into backstory you just found out about.

As for the special abilities, many of them are based around my house rules, so you might need to change some of the specifics for your own thing.
Generally they either give you a little stat or skill bump, grant you some sort of conditional bonus, or give you a gimmick you can use once per session. Nothing's meant to be particularly powerful on its own, but some of the once-per-session ones are a bit wacky.
Something that came up in the comments when I posted this was what I meant by "+1 HD" under some of the benefits. It's just intended to be a bonus HD-worth of health until the end of the session, not a full extra level. So a Magic-User gets 1d4 more maximum HP and a Fighter gets 1d8, for example. Not that you have to do the same, of course!

Many of the individual backstory fragments were lifted from the Lifepath generator I mentioned before, and some of the powers were lifted from yet another Arnold post about player-player bonds.



Since I've instigated this thing mid-campaign, each player's been getting a new backstory a week until they catch up with their current level.
This means, unlike most things I post, it's actually been tested extensively as a gimmick. And it's been great!

Currently we've got a Necromancer who attempted to kill the tyrant who ran her village in a convenient bellringing accident, but tragically dropped the bell on her own family instead.
We've got a Cleric whose backstory is basically all centred on his prior "career" as a flagellant, particularly one crazy night at an all-night flagellant rave that got shut down by the local guard.
We've got a Muscle Wizard who was once a member of the Men of the Rooves, a group of shinglers who were part thief and part Robin Hood-style local resistance.
And many more!

So anyway, if you do try it out I'd love to hear how it went.
I'm still fiddling with the table, so if you notice anything bullshit in the abilities or come up with something better for anything definitely let me know!

The Beast in the Core of the Earth is the World

We are star spawn.

There is one true life form. There is no other. It is disparate and separate. It spreads itself through the vast gulfs of space.

It feeds on planets.

We were not here when it began to feed on ours. It is why we are here.
When the organic matter of its preplasmic mass first impacted our cooling lithosphere it was the catalyst for the long series of reactions and accidents that led to cellular life.
This happens sometimes.





It sustains itself on the nickel-iron warmth and rich silicates inside our planet, growing and growing to the slow heartbeat of geological time.
And smeared upon the planet's thin crust we grew from the organic detritus it left behind, oozing out of the oceans beneath the eerie light of the moon thrown free by its impact.

It has been growing for a very very long time.

The time of planetary lysis draws near.






It's dead easy to Lovecraftify something by just slapping some tentacles on it, describing it as "squamous" and tacking on some sanity mechanics. Now it's Lovecraft!
Well, not really.
It's not horrific because it's scary looking and will kill you, it's horrific because you've found out that the lives and works of everyone and everything you know are meaningless against the impersonal march of time, that everything to which you ascribe meaning is truly inconsequential. Our existence changes nothing.
Arnold's already talked about this here so I won't harp on further.

This is my ultimate truth of the world. I called it Shub-Niggurath in my notes but to my players it won't have a name. It's not something that has one name, if it has a name at all. It just is.
Shub-Niggurath is a great lifeform. It has the intelligence of an amoeba. When it is ready to reproduce it induces the destruction of the host planet, riding the ruptured rock outwards such that some few of the protoplasmic pieces of itself will impact suitable planets and continue the process.
It is an intergalactic disease, destroying solar systems on timescales that are meaningless to us.

Panspermia is an uncommon side effect of its life cycle. Sometimes the timing and conditions are right to catalyse life on a host planet. Very rarely this life survives to thrive and evolve as we have done. We are elevated pond scum clinging to the crust as it grows below us, uncaring and unheeding and incapable of either.

One day soon it will crack the world open and begin the next stage of its life cycle. It will destroy us forever without knowing that it did so.
Indeed, it has not the capacity to care.