Ad hoc random table generation for Carcosa Wacky Races
Here’s my method for generating a random table I should’ve anticipated but didn’t, in 10 minutes or less:
Drive the kids to school, muttering to myself like a madman. Listen to whatever’s on the radio, ask them baffling questions. Then try to hook their baffling answers back to Carcosa, CoC, Vance or the Moomins.*
Thus:
What you get when you press the “cloudy-swirly-bubbly thing” button (D6)
1 jellyfish
2 tornado monster
3 shoggoth
4 “lightning spring”
5 bubble dragon
6 yog sothoth gate – whatever goes in it gets thrown out of one of the squirmy pentacles that are on people’s vehicles.
Devolver creature exchanger cannon (roll 3D6 in order)
A: threat level
1-3: animal
4-5: intelligent
6: eldritch monster
B: how does it move?
- Sessile/drifting – like a jellyfish, anemone, or Yithian
- Crawling
- Running
- Swimming
- Flying
- Exotic (teleport, suggestible pallbearers, “always there” in some associative, dream-logic way etc)
C: size of a…
- mouse -
- cat
- sheep
- man
- horse/crocodile
- elephant +
And then you just try to think of something that fits those important characteristics. In the worked example, a pelgrane is: 5 (intelligent), 5: flying, 5: horse-sized.
*What, were you hoping for a random random table table generator?
Stupid devolver cannon.
honestly, it’s way too unbalancing for any other game, and probably for CWR as well, as written. I may rewrite it based on some kind of “how is the result different from the input” basis, to make transformations less radical, or maybe have the transformation happen bit by bit, so you have a turn to decide what to do about it before you end up with a jellyfish instead of your means of propulsion or PC.
I totally stand by the result of its first use, though. If you’d wound up with a Yithian or a mackerel I might feel differently, is what I’m saying.