d100 Morrisonic bits from Doom Patrol: The Painting That Ate Paris in this hex (fantasy edition)

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I've yet to really run a true D&D (or Deadlands: Hell on Earth or Rifts or Traveller) hexcrawl, but I've been thinking of doing so lately.  My mind has been drawn to my as-yet-unnamed sensual psychedelic fantasy setting over the past month or so, and I am getting something of an itch to run a hexcrawl within it.  The blame for this recent obsession might be laid at the feet of Critical Role's travels through Eisilcross.

A big part of hexcrawl play are the emergent stories that come from random encounter tables.  Matt Mercer's been using such tables excellently during this arc, epitomized by the sudden appearance of Avantika and the effect that had on his players.  That alone had a major effect on the generalized random encounter table below, spurring me to add the chance for random encounters that further the PCs' individual storylines.

As for how likely encounters should be in each hex, that's really an aesthetic decision by the DM (obviously.)  I learned my favorite method of determining the size of one's hex from an RPG blogger/writer/developer who sadly turned out to be a hideous and horrible human being, so I won't be linking to the articles.  Figure out how far your PCs are likely to travel in one day, based on their most common method of travel (walking v. riding v. sailing v. flying v. . . .) and the terrain through which they are travelling.  Multiply that by the amount of time, in days, which should probably contain each encounter ~ that is, do you want the PCs to have one encounter a day (1), one every 30 minutes (0.02), one encounter a month (30), etc., and call this number x.  Then figure out how predictable you want encounters to be.  Do you want the PCs to have an encounter in every hex?  Then there's a 100% chance for one.  Maybe you want to be really random with your encounters, for whatever reason, so maybe there's a 10% chance.  Or a 50% chance or an 83% chance or whatever.  Call this percentage of an encounter y.  Multiply x by this percentage, and subtract it from x (that is:  x-xy) and the result is the size of your hex.

Of course, like any algebraic equation, you can flip it around.  If you know how large you want your hexes to be, but not how likely you want the encounters to be, take that x you just figured out and subtract the hex size from it.  Divide the result by x again, and BAM you have a percentage chance!

• 1-29:  Ecological random encounter (the subtables here are worthy of a whole post of their own)
• 30-31:  Ecological random encounter from nearby territory, climate, or terrain
• 32:  Ecological random encounter from somewhere far away
• 33-58:  World-building random encounter (that is to say, an encounter that communicates or allows interaction with the cosmological, political, etc. aspects of the world; some of these change, but only occasionally as the currents of history flow)
• Each hex would have its own subtable, without approximately one interesting location, NPC encounter, or other such thing per square mile; some events (such as encounters with the military or powerful NPC/monster, deific interventions, the mechanics of life & death, or things like processions of Elves leaving Middle-Earth) are likely to show up on several hexes
• 2-mile hexes would have a d3 chart each
• 3-mile hexes a d6 chart each
• 4-mile hexes a d10 chart each
• 5-mile hexes two d8 charts each (admittedly, at this point, the options get a little bit too large to be easily done for every hex)
• 6-mile hexes two d12 charts each
• 7-mile hexes three d10 charts each
• 8-mile hexes four d10 charts each
• 59-78:  Story-based random encounter (if you have 3 or 4 players, make a d12 chart with 4 or 3 story events that could happen anywhere anywhen for each; if you have 5, make it a d20 chart with 4 each; these will usually get replaced as they are rolled up)
• 79-92:  And now for something completely different....
• Currently, this chart of Morrisonic bits is the only subtable here; I plan to grow a garden of these
• 93-100:  Roll twice.  This can cascade into many more rolls.

Grant Morrison is one of my favorite comic book writers, with numerous amazing titles under his belt ~ The Invisibles, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, The Filth, Doom Patrol....  I was reading the one remaining trade paperback in my collection of that last title recently, so I threw this together.

Part of what makes Grant's writing so perfect for this kind of thing ~ besides the fact that his writing is a major influence on my ideal of and preference for sensual psychedelic fantasy ~ is his baroque style.  Fed no doubt both by psychedelics and adaptations of William S. Burroughs's "cut-up technique" (and other things, most likely), Grant's books are filled to the brim with quick asides and mentions of things that spur the imagination into fresh and wild flights.  Often lasting for only a panel, or even less, these help build the sense of a truly weird and unknowable world whose dream-like rules only mimic sense, while allowing sensical stories to be told of the people who live in and by those rules.  In other words, they resonate strongly with the dice-driven bathos that is the very essence of RPG storytelling.

d100 Morrisonic bits from Doom Patrol: The Painting That Ate Paris in this hex (fantasy edition)

1. A brutal hero of the realm followed by a crowd of bards and visual artists
2. An unbelievably powerful magic-user who is deathly afraid of dirt
3. A glittering fog monster that absorbs people
4. An abstract shadow of a man, half unseen, with a hole where his heart should be
5. A house with a door that locks behind you and can only be unlocked by reciting a list of names
6. A secret, sacred, sub-educational sanctum
7. A sentient golem cannot dream and yet tries to map the Plane of Dream and its inhabitants by interviewing those who can
8. A villain forgotten by history, now in hiding and very bored
9. A bodysuit that inhibits both movement and hearing
10. The White Room, a room whose perfectly smooth, spherical shape and uniform white color confer the illusion of limitless space
11. A completely uneducated air genasi barbarian
12. An army dedicated to the total absurdity of life, the gigantic hocus-pocus of existence, whose banners read "From this day on, Let unreason reign!"
13. Two overly-educated opium addicts contemplating the infinite majesty of the gods' creation as they look upon the constellations trembling in the blue, immeasurable chambers of the central heavens
14. A painting that can physically devour those who behold it containg an ancient and inhuman power with a nihilistic intelligence
15. An enigmatic and sadistic Count who collects art
16. An androgyne, entirely covered in bandages and floating in the air, contemplating a series of levitating Russian dolls
17. Someone warns the PCs to beware of men who aren't there
18. The yodelling skull of Tavistock
19. A statue of a mythological mother-figure, rescued from a war-razed city, that bleeds sour milk every 28 days
20. A spell to turn people into statues of glass
21. A temple to the Listening Gods
22. A spell that causes missiles to grow to enormous size once fired, causing their weight to pull them to the ground before they can strike
23. The Colliding Bishop among the Sweating Windmills
24. A portal to another plane that can be opened by means of any contradictory ideas or images
25. The avatar of contradiction
26. A race of people who gain simply unbelievable levels of strength when they're asleep; they all sleepwalk
27. An infinite recursive demiplane
28. A barbarian power that allows you to hit multiple people at once and send each of them into a different plane or demiplane
29. Light falling like snow, like chamber music
30. A multicolored polyphonic city
31. The sound a key makes when hovering
32. A surreal beach that disorients and makes it hard to concentrate
33. The Negative Spirit
34. A spell that puts you into an untouchable abstract state for as long as you can keep your thoughts non-referential and nonsensical
35. A broken jar which has spilled the viscous fluid that once fed the brain contained within
36. The Kingdom of No
37. Beethoven birds squawking for food; they eat musical notes
38. A totally humongous hoofprint
39. And his name that seats on him is Extinction.  And Oblivion.  And he is trapped in a painting.
40. A massive horse-riding knight rising out of the sea, as wide as the beach
41. Villains having to save the heroes they defeated fair and square in order to fight something else
42. The structure of a knights body in a scaffolding of steel bands, riding through the sky
43. The empty cage of its heart
44. A magical ritual powered by the embarrassment created by its performance
45. The defeat of Oblivion by Senselessness
46. A gun that shoots pigs instead of bullets
47. A Horseman of the Apocalypse reduced to a child's rockinghorse
48. A great hero of legend gone cataleptic, retreating into their mind where it's safe
49. A spell to act as a psychic conduit allowing someone whose brain you're touching to travel into the personal mindscape demiplane of someone else you're touching normally
50. A train with the infinity symbol for its engine number
51. The Psychocosmic Subway Demiplane
52. The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter
53. The surgeon comes, walking on blades, spider-gloves twitching in light gone stale
54. Someone named Baby Doll
55. An army composed of the psychic projections of a single person's personality aspects
56. A hulking knight with a heavy, thick helmet shaped like the head of a hammer
57. The Suffocating Dark, the Screaming Dark
58. An ogre who gains power from the childhood traumas of those it fights
59. A spell to immediately destroy something in the instant you first admit to yourself that you hate it instead of loving it
60. Fear the Sky, a group of assassins who ritually behead themselves, gaining a tiny planet as a replacement head
61. The Friend of the Children, who is unseen and unheard but is present abroad or at home when children are happy and playing alone
62. A golem or warforged experiencing the senses of touch and smell for the first time
63. The papercut ritual that summons an oracular head, a metaphysical agony aunt
64. Dermo-optical perception, the psychic power to see through one's skin
65. The Antigod
66. Pain surgeons gathering the dry skinflakes everyone sheds so they can sew them together with the old love letters people throw away when love turns sour.  The final product are the constructs known as dry bachelors.
67. The skins of murder victims stretched across bone frames whose occult geometry imprisons their souls
68. The Book of the Fifth Window
69. Three masked halfling riders who can ride on any surface, regardless of what gravity says, and transform those they look at into blind, smoking shadows
70. The psychic power to hear fear
71. The needle children, who cannot be seen through glass
72. The Cult of the Unwritten Book
73. A drunk man raising his bottle to toast a fight
74. A newborn baby born almost completely covered in tattooed words
75. The Shroud on Stilts (one of the Minor Grotesques)
76. A man with a wound that's slowly getting bigger, taking over his whole body; cultists use this wound as a portal to travel throughout the world and the planes
77. A plague of bodiless mouths disagreeing violently with each other
78. Windows of Warning
79. The Little Sisters of Our Lady of the Razor
80. Emu, we wail deviant for toy ego, lo!
81. Guilty guilty children tear like paper and milk
82. All the stars in the sky disappear
83. An enormous blue-lashed bloodshot eye in a shattering sky
84. Words disappear from books, books disappear from shelves, shelves disappear from libraries
85. Doctor Mirabilis's Most Excellent and Unusual Puppet Theater
86. Hoodman Blind and Hoodman Shame, who eat all the words on the tips of people's tongues and convert them into tame lightning
87. The Spider Bridge
88. The Cathedral of the Sacred Family
89. Walls dripping with the tears of children
90. Painted gods by whose power existence itself is brought to an end
91. Someday these doomsday bells will ring and this ghost of a city will reveal itself to the world
92. A whole cathedral of singing stone and choral architecture
93. A city trapped in a snow globe
94. A spell to create a temporary portal out of a smoke ring
95. One artificer complaining about another artificer's shoddy work
96. A series of doors ~ the Door of Boredom, the Door of Irritation, the Door of Panic, and the Door of Hallucination ~ leading to the Room Without Doors
97. A warforged's body wanting independence from its mind
98. An intelligent ape pushing a baby buggy containing a brain in a jar
99. An enchanted revolutionary beret that can only be passed to someone who defeats the wearer in combat or strip chess
100. Two brains in a jar talking to each other