“…whenever anyone came to inspect it before purchase, the caretaker used to praise the house in the words that Nuth had suggested. “If it wasn’t for the drains,” she would say, “it’s the finest house in London,” and when they pounced on this remark and asked questions about the drains, she would answer them that the drains also were good, but not so good as the house.”

—Lord Dunsany, How Nuth Would Have Practiced His Art Upon the Noles

The upper part of the range of the d20 roll used to resolve #downtimes in the previous article determines whether the downtime was particularly successful or unsuccessful.

The lower part, indicating an average result, provides space for other complications, and consists of a seperate 1-8 table written for each available lodging, such as the default lodging of the campaign:

A Room at the Inn

An unpretentious room at a local inn, with a small fire in the grate. Recovery Rate: 1d6 CON/DT Ameneties: None. [Some kind of bonus to hiring retainers might be appropriate if we envision the inn as a clearing house for would-be adventurers.]

1-5: Pay Your Tab – 100cn upkeep (+50 per retainer) 6: Petty Theft – the cheapest gem, jewellery or other small treasure is taken. 7: Disturbed Sleep – Rowdy patrons reduce base recovery rate to 0 this DT. 8: Nemesis – If an enemy is looking to harm the PC, they gain access to the Inn.

So instead of having to remember to pay 25 coin every week for upkeep, the bill only comes due once a month on average. This might lead to unusually high or low living costs, but this can inspire fictional details – “we’ve had no trouble with the local youths since you started staying here – the room’s on the house” or “you’re traipsing through here every week with sacks of gold, you can afford to pay a little extra for our hospitality.”

For rangers, barbarians and skinflints, another options is:

A Camp in the Woods

Who needs the comforts of civilization when you can sleep beneath leafy boughs? Recovery Rate: 1d4 CON/DT Ameneties: None.

1-2: No event. 3: Good Foraging – Gain 1d6 surplus rations. 4: Weather – Roll on the weather table. If the weather is bad, the camp is negatively affected at the DM’s discretion. 5: Disturbed Sleep – The woods are not always a restful place. Reduce recovery rate to 0 this DT. 6: Random Encounter – Roll a forest encounter. 7: Rust & Rot – Next roll of 1 causes the item you’re using to break. 8: Ransacked – Roll a random encounter. The encounter finds the camp – wild animals may root around and eat provisions, humanoids may steal treasure etc.

And for those who like to keep things very simple:

A Guest at the Castle

Your patron has graciously made rooms available for your use, in recognition of services rendered – and services yet to be rendered. Recovery Rate: 2d6 CON/DT Ameneties: Depends on the patron, but may include library, training, chapel etc. Requisite: PCs must accept quests from the patron.

1-8: No event.

No upkeep or events outside of those dictated by the story (e.g. the villain lays seige to the castle), but the patron will require the PCs to go on regular quests for them.

Advanced Lodgings

So far so dull; these options don’t do much apart from establish that the PCs need somewhere to rest their heads and keep their stuff – but once the player starts asking “where do I want to live?” it can become a goal and another way to define their character.

An inspiration here is the lodgings from Fallen London. Depicted by evocative silhouettes and short descriptions, they imply a great deal about the nature of the setting, and suggest story possibilities.

Some examples (taken from the wiki, potential spoilers):

A Smoky Flophouse: Fleas, noise, smoke, Rubbery Men squealing as they're dragged out back and murdered. But you meet the most fascinating people.

Cottage by the Observatory: The blind men at the Observatory rent these out, to people who don't mind occasionally being assaulted by predatory fungus in the middle of the night.

Rooms above a Gambling Den: Noisy when it's open. Noisier when someone forgets to bribe the Constables and they stage a raid. But the conversation's good.

Rooms above a Bookshop: Rooms on three levels above a winding, dusty stair. The owner is melancholy and given to buttonholing you at the door and weeping into your hat. But he does have some interesting customers.

Decommissioned Steamer: Not a safe place, down by the Unterzee shore. Nor warm. But it's quiet, and offers good opportunities for beachcombing.

A Zee-Znail's Zhell: Whimsical echoes resound in the fluted vaults. Far out at zee, the lights of ships.

A Dripstone-Snared Third City Sub-Temple: A stalagmite: and at it's heart, a black space of silent sacred horror.

A guest room at the Brass Embassy: The luxury is sinful. The staff are always polite. Warm? I'll say it's warm. Good cigars, urbane conversation, and just the slightest possibility of accidental damnation.

A Room at the Royal Bethlehem Hotel: There's nowhere like the Royal Bethlehem Hotel. Its luxury is unparallelled: its guests, beyond baroque. Lock your door, or you don't know who you might wake up in bed with.

We have ambience, we have dangers, we have perks, we have NPCs! Suddenly home away from the dungeon isn’t just an off-camera void but a living place, with character and interest of its own. All in three sentences or fewer – easy enough to distill into a table.

There were plenty of enchanting or dangerous places to stay in my #RedHack / Ultan’s Door campaign, to list a few:

• An upstairs room at Bar Saturn.
• Cycladic apartments on Enraptured Isle.
• A modest Rastingdrung Tenement.
• An undersea bedroom at the Sunken Spire.
• A Studio in the Stables of the Guides.
• Guest at the Court of the Chatelaine.
• Mimsy’s Manse.

A simple lodgings table for each automates the ever present benefits and risks of living in such a place, such as the capricious requests the Chatelaine may make of her guests, or the comings and goings of Zyan Between.

On the one hand, writing #downtimes has been one of the most rewarding parts of running games with #RedHack. On the other, it’s also the most time-consuming and demanding, equivalent to prep for the game itself.

So as well as providing for a range of downtime activities and results, I’m looking for ways to reduce bookkeeping.

In a addition to resolving downtime actions, I like the idea of Lodgings: Allowing PCs to trade upkeep costs for ameneties and the security of their possessions and persons, but there’s a risk of ending up with many steps of bookkeeping for each character – deducting upkeep, checking for illness, robbery, poor maintenance of equipment and so on, applying any perks, before even getting into downtimes and having to design progress clocks and roll for complications.

How much of this can we concentrate into one roll?

BenL's downtime system uses a 2d6 PBtA style roll, and recommends ability modifiers of +1 for 14-17 and +2 for 18. My system only has one tier of ability bonus or penalty (attributes are either High (16+), Low (6 or less), or Average.)

Converting these odds into odds out of 20 and massaging them a bit to offset my more stingy modifiers and to keep the odds of an 'Average' result consistent, we end up with:

Every downtime each PC rolls a d20 and reports the number rolled.

If the result is a 1-8, an average downtime result is recorded, and the number is passed to a Lodgings table.

9+ means a good or bad result on the downtime. 17+ is a good result. (15 or better with High ability, 19 or better with Low ability.)

This isn't very intuitive; it would be nice to have the bad results at the bottom of the range and the average ones in the middle, but putting the average results first lets us pass the number on unchanged to a 1-8 table, which handles all of the upkeep costs and random events arising from wherever the PC happens to be living.

So from one roll we get two salient pieces of information for each character: Their downtime result, and either a complication/benefit to the downtime or some complication arising from their domestic situation.

That is, assuming the ‘average’ result for most downtimes is also the simplest outcome, which is only sometimes the case in Ben’s system – for Revelry and Learning a Skill, but not for Cultivating a Relationship or Building an Institution. I need to consider whether to diverge from this in the name of streamlining.

Another question is how to include other sources of random events and DT modifiers, such as Institutions. Perhaps a PC who owns a cafe gets to count a range such as 9-11 as ‘Good’ results on Gather Information downtimes.

I'm looking at rules for #downtimes, in particular the creation of minor magical items. I'm happy with magic items being born and not made, but for consumables such as potions and scrolls I want PCs to be able to make them during downtime, but need to limit supply.

In the 1E DMG Gary requires monster parts for potions, scrolls and spell research. This is clearly a way to drive players back into the dungeon and keep supply linked to risk.

For scrolls not only do you have to buy some (admittedly not very expensive) fancy paper and pluck a harpy to make your quill, you also have this wonderfully convoluted process for making the ink:

And who can say this doesn’t rock? I love that Gary stayed up all night coming up with the precise ritual for making the ink for a Protection from Petrification scroll. It reads like a schoolgirl’s recipe for a love potion and I say that with nothing but admiration.

From a practical point of view, it’s hard to see this ever getting used. Once you’ve fought the medusa, the basilisk, and the cockatrice you simply aren’t going to need a Protection from Petrification scroll – either you’re already a statue, or you’re already pretty good at not being turned to stone.

Since scrolls are essentially additional charges of your existing spell repertoire, I decided to use a more forgiving resource bottleneck – you can make spell inks out of just the crushed gemstones. And we already have a table that sorts gems neatly into 8 colours, and there are 8 schools of magic, so we can create a little extra bottleneck there by requiring the colours to match.

The next step was to assign a colour to each school:

Divination White Evocation Red Transmutation Warm Abjuration Green Conjuration Blue Enchantment Purple Necromancy Black Illusion Prismatic

White gems (with the exception of pearls) suit divination because of their clarity. The association of red with fire and energy is straightforward. Warm was one I had to ask some help with, but then a friend mentioned the philosopher’s stone-

It is often said to be orange (saffron colored) or red when ground to powder.

-so that gives us transmutation. Green seemed to have associations of safety, protection, and occasionally curses. Blue is the colour of water, from which all things spring (at least if you side with Thales) and purple is the colour of mind and psionics because my partner, Lady Amethyst, said it is, and who am I to say otherwise?

Thus, we have a concrete list with at least least a slight rationale for each association. Now I just have to figure out the right value of gem dust per level of inscribed spell to make the system appealing without leaving the party awash with scrolls.

The generated image above has confused the quill with the ink, and sparkling ink with ink made out of sparks, but that gives me the idea that perhaps scroll inks aren’t strictly physical, and it’s not the physical dust of the gem that is invested into the scroll, but its sparkle, its very lustre, extracted by some arcane means.