Maybe this is a misnomer. I don’t know! I built it for megadungeons.
A problem I have when writing a dungeon is that I often have a set amount of gp I want to give out, but just putting a pile of 4000gp in a room is fucking stupid. I need semi-interesting treasure generated, which I can then riff on and make more unique and actually interesting for the players to interact with. (At least as much as any player thinks the treasure is interesting.)
So I made this on Perchance. You put in a number, and then it generates a treasure hoard that is…well, a little bit over that number. (I couldn’t get it perfect. Sorry. Maybe I’ll go back and fix it up later. Or if you’re a wizard, you can do it and then let me know.)
I tried to embed it here all fancy-like, but WordPress kept deleting the iFrame I used. (LMK if you know how to fix that.) So instead, here’s the link: https://perchance.org/19lcfg71ts
A set of dominoes has 28 tiles. We take those 28 tiles, and we assign each a pair of rooms. Arrange the tiles as you like. (I don’t know how to play dominoes. Fuck it.) This gives you 56 rooms, including special hallways (the blank tiles).
I used the d6 drop table procedure from Cairn 2e for this, but ended up modifying the order slightly. (0 Hallway; 1 Special; 2-3 Lore; 4-5 Trap; 6 Monster.) So, you can use the d20 tables in that to generate what’s actually in the rooms. Or, modify that original d6 list and tailor the distribution to your heart’s content. (Honestly, “Treasure” should be an option here, but I already made the table.)
This table is formatted so you can write up what’s in your rooms on the right.
Would love to hear ideas about how to make this better. Hit me up on bsky or tag me on Discord; I’m in all the cool OSR servers (@onslaughtsix).
I hate rolling up treasure hoards. I’ve never found a good way to do it, either quickly or efficiently. It is the bane of my prep, the bane of my games. Once there is just a general description of some treasure, I can expand on that improvisationally–but coming up with that initial spark is very difficult for me. So, I did the work, and came up with a way to roll this shit up very quickly. You need 3d6 and the monster’s number of hit die, and these tables. (You can also make your own tables. Have fun!)
This is best used during prep of a dungeon, focused around a hoard belonging to a specific creature or faction, or at-the-table for random lairs (such as finding a “% in lair” monster). It is not particularly useful for on-hand individual monster treasure (as it’s too involved and not fast enough at the table).
I was reading a thread about build options in 5e (I immediately got diarrhea typing that) and someone repeated the common wisdom: “Well, fire is the most resisted damage type in 5e,” and I got pissed off again.
The only reason this is true is because the game has 800 demons and devils, every one of which is resistant or immune to fire damage. If you don’t fight demons or devils, you basically won’t encounter this problem.
I got pushback so I did the work. Here’s the numbers of every official creature in 5e with fire resistance. I’m not covering immunity, as I don’t think it’s as relevant: most categories have no creatures who are immune to fire, and those that do…make sense? (Yeah! Fire elementals are immune to fire damage!) Meanwhile, the numbers I have here do not account for the Volo’s and Mordenkainen’s “Legacy” content; I counted those monsters as one monster because you’re not going to encounter both “versions” in the same game.
So, that leaves us with hard numbers:
Aberration: 15, 10 of which are Slaad and 1 of which is YGORL, LORD OF ENTROPY
Beast: 2: Fiendish Giant Spider, Stench Kow
Celestials: 4, all of which are in setting or adventures
Construct: 7, all of which are in setting or adventures, except for the Sacred Statue possessed by an Eidolon
Dragon: 14, which, they’re dragons.
Elemental: 13, which shouldn’t be surprising as they’re elementals
Fey: 7, 6 of which are in setting or adventures
Giant: 6, 5 of which are CR 20+ titans from Bigby’s
Humanoid: 28, 17 of which are Dragonborn, Tieflings, half-dragons, draconic sorcerers or the Fiendlock
Monstrosity: 3
Ooze: 8, 5 of which are gray ooze variations
Plant: 5
Undead: 35
That means there’s a total of 147 non-Fiend monsters with fire resistance, of which 92 you are realistically going to encounter in your campaign.
In comparison, there are seven pages of fiends with fire resistance in 5e and four pages with immunity. Now, I’m sure some of that is doubled up from the “Legacy” content, I’m not going to dig through and find it. (The fact that I can’t filter out “Legacy” content is a real fuck up on D&D Beyond’s part.) But if we ignore that, that’s 140 Fiends with fire resistance. In other words, fiends take up like 50% of all monsters in the game with fire resistance. More if you ignore all the shit you’re not going to fight (like 5 gray ooze variations).
I’ve been thinking of doing a little revision to the way my inevitable 2024 revision of what else goes. (There are two alternative versions of this idea, always in motion, the future is: 5e Killer and _&_.)craphack goes.
I just don’t like the hit dice attached to certain classes in 5e. The grognard in me likes d4 HD wizards. At first I thought I could revise it so there were 3 groups of HD that all made sense together, but unfortunately there are four martials and 5 categories if we use every die, so it’s still a little fucky. Still, here’s the list I came up with:
So, let’s talk a little bit about what Hit Dice are used for in the game. Primarily they are used to determine your Hit Points. You roll your Hit Dice and add your CON Mod to determine how many Hit Points you get per level.
My new proposal is that PCs should add their CON Score (so, 13 instead of +1) at level 1, and then never again. So 1st level PCs would be much more survivable, but their HP total would be lower eventually. I haven’t mathed this out yet, but I really want to try it out.
You also use Hit Dice on a Short Rest to recover lost Hit Points. Perfectly good design, we won’t be altering it here (although we are altering Short Rests–more on that later).
Finally, I want to propose–I don’t know if I like this yet, but I want to propose–using Hit Dice for your Weapon Damage. Perhaps this will be one of the things that sets _&_ apart from 5e Killer. (Are these two products ever going to coalesce? Probably not.) Hit Dice are badly named in the legacy game and new players come with the expectation that their Hit Dice might actually be the dice they use to hit things. Why not indulge in that? Just make every class do the damage of their Hit Dice when they do weapon attacks.
This means you can alter the weapons table substantially, because the differences between weapon damage no longer exist. If we were starting from scratch, we could maybe use the weapons table from Wolves Upon The Coast but we aren’t, we’re starting from the table I’ve had for a couple years and recently redid to include WotC’s Weapon Masteries and then my own Martial Options (forthcoming).
I’m always interested in thoughts about design like this. If you’re interested, feel free to jump on the post, or contact me however you prefer. Stay gold.
