d30 Rings

 Something neat about rings is that to use one (if we imagine it has some use), it's fair to say it must be warn with nothing over it, allowing it to be seen by all. This means that unless the players employ creative means, you're probably not wearing a gauntlet or thick leather glove on the same hand as your special ring, which has all sorts of great implications for trap mechanisms, venomous stings, and the like.

Some of these rings are mundane. Some are bad, whether they carry a potentially deleterious social consequence, are more conventionally "cursed", or punish you with more adventure. There's a broad spectrum of bad consequences that can come to a PC. It's nice to get a mix.

d30 Rings

1. Clan Ring. On an outsider, signifies adoption. Fraudulently wearing the ring is punishable by death.
2. Irregular Shaped Head. Used as a key, inserted into a mated circular lock.
3. Inscription on the inside, a password.
4. Hilt Ring. Odd head, but when twisted upside down it fits perfectly into the groove of a unique magic sword's handle, unlocking its powers.
5. Secret Society Symbol. 2-in-6 chance of favorably being noticed by (d10):
1. Officers
2. Rebels
3. Priests
4. Intelligent Undead
5. Politicians
6. Dwarves
7. Intelligent Extraplanars
8. Rangers
9. Shamans
10. Dopplegangers
6. Ruling Family's Signet Ring. Delightfully illegal to possess.
7. Hollow Jade Compartment. Currently contains Powder of Giant Strength.
8. Mouse-Pattern Etchings. Can roll around under its own power and will obey its owner if well treated. Too brave.
9. Lead-Button Ring. When pressed, fixes itself in space. When pressed again, unfixes it.
10. Obsidian Gem. When the ring is held out, the obsidian glows and sheds light light a bullseye lantern. Your hand likely has to be empty to get much use out of this.
11. Silver Fang Ring. When put on, bites for 1 HP damage. When removed, for as long as the blood is wet, shows a pinhole tableau of the person you have most hated in the world.
12. Copper Glass-Stone Ring. The next time you're electroctuted, instead of suffering harm the glass stone explodes.
13. Spinning Ring. When spun, shows a brief zoetropic scene of a sword dancer.
14. Flinty Gem. Creates a spark when struck against stone.
15. Centipede Ring. Legs on the outside, carapace on the inside. When set against a wall or ceiling, can swirl at high speed like a wheel on a zipline to carry the wearer side to side.
16. Narwhal Horn Ring. Itches and turns taupe in the presence of poison or bad air.
17. Whistle Ring. Blow into it to produce a sound that dogs can hear. Also other creatures.
18. Holographic Cameo Ring. Shows an important person's face.
19. Monkey Ring. When put on, it can't be taken off. The finger turns hairy and wrinkled. Grants one wish in a dickish fashion, then turns to slime. The finger is ruined forever.
20. Magician Ring. Can cast the following spells at will, and will use them to punish the wearer: Knock, Animate Dead (takes 1 minute, 60 ft. range), Charm Person (Touch only, not the wearer).
21. Larcenos. The command word "Larcenos" is written on the inside of this fine gold ring. Speaking it while holding the ring summons a bugbear to beat you to death with a club.
22. Soul Ring. Contains the mind of an ancient thief. Gain +3 effective thief levels for the purpose of thief skills, but save vs spells every time you have the opportunity to use one but don't want to.
23. Decision Ring. One edge is blue, one is red. Flipped by the indecisive to make choices.
24. Pearl Ring. Turns black when your true love dies.
25. Cracked Ruby Ring. That which you pick up in this hand combusts a few seconds later. Can only be removed at temperatures above 120 F (49 C).
26. Cloudy Yellow Gem. Explodes on contact with water. 2d6 damage, and save to salvage 1d3 other fingers, plus thumb.
27. Banker's Magnet Ring. Used to find counterfeit coins.
28. Moaning Gargoyle Ring. Drains 1d4 HP per round-- profound sizzling needling pain. Save each round to remove.
29. Wedding Band. By wearing this, you are officially married to the Prince of Dust, bound to him as he is to you. A merciless wizard tyrant, he is pleasant but not loving. Ring can't be removed without annulment, divorce, or death.
30. Wedding Band. By wearing this, you are officially married to the dryad-witch Candomede. Beautiful, but oddly shallow and careless for a witch. Always needs help dealing with more of the local pirates. Ring can't be removed without annulment, divorce, or death.

PS, here's a generator with most of the magic items I've come up with over the years:

Some Bad Things that Could Happen to PCs

• Cool manta ray cloak. When you put it on, it bites your shoulders and halves a random attribute while doubling another. Taking it off requires surgery and a save vs death.
• Special jar into which you can put an organ. It makes you immune to getting that organ dismembered, but those who have the jar can smash it to really frick you up.
• Written curse near the entrance of a dungeon promising to bring pain and death to those who transgress the sacred environs within. When the PCs later return to their home, a giant wolf or an army of shrewmen arrive in fulfillment of the curse to ravage and slash at them.
• Clay jars full of angry flies are scattered around the room. The tomb robbers ready to fight the PCs for their claim don't intentionally shatter these jars, but it's likely to happen anyway, bringing sorrow to all.
• The tigerbrides want to kidnap a PC so they can wrap them in magic bandages which burn your flesh away and turn you into a hideous monster.
• The Haketzakata Sword doubles your effective level but reduces your HP maximum to 1.
• These warriors have a special swordfighting technique, with jagged slashes and lich-taught kicks. The death and dismemberment table is wildly different for wounds they inflict. To give an example drawn from G24: 
  
• Riknoomai Style
• 1-4: Forget the Riknoomai Artist for 1 round
• 5-6: Heavily bleeding. Take [lethal] points of stat damage to a random [physical or mental] stat.
• 7-8: Torso disabled for 1 month.
• 9-10: Fatal Wound
• 11-12: Puckered: Roll a SAVE. If you pass, gain a massive, complex scar. If you fail, roll a Ruesome Injury to... (d6)
  
• 1: ... the Soul. Reduce a random mental stat by 1d4. When inconvenient, count as undead.
• 2: ... the Brain. Roll SKLL when insulted or immediately surrender.
• 3: ... the Chest. Feel increasing pain in an organ. Every month, SAVE or it bursts.
• 4: ... the Nerves. Always fail saves vs sleep or illusions. Whenever an ally is felled, an attack seems to transform into the Riknoomai Artist who injured you, and you must focus your attacks to or flight from them. 
• 5: ... the Face. You can perceive no further than 40 feet with any sense.
• 6: ... the Tendon. Swelling reduces a random physical stat by 1d4. When you die, a new Riknoomai Artist will hatch from the limb.
• 13+: Fatal Wound and three random Madnesses
• Disturbing the room, even in some inoffensive way like picking up a book to examine it, causes you to be possessed by a ghost, frantically trying to use your body to slay the monster who killed it. Once this is achieved it will release its hold on you, so unlike most charm and domination effects you probably want the same thing, since you're both trying to end the effect as soon as possible.
• An unassuming wand, one half black and one half white. Difficult to identify, and contains only 3 charges. When brandished against another creature, relive the day over again but this time in each other's body. At the end of the day, switch back if both still live.
• The master of the dungeon had an edgy, cool swordswoman daughter. She didn't get on with her parent, but is certain she wants to avenge them and reclaim their gear and domain.
• Cave-in mechanic: a standard cave-sized cave has 48 Air Points (AP). Every person in the cave consumes 1 AP per hour. Every hour of digging at the entrance, make an Open Doors roll to try to get a Point of Progress (PP). A standard cave-in requires 16 PP to clear enough to get new air flowing into the cave. This means an average person has about a 50-50 shot if they have a 2-in-6 Open Doors roll and they don't sleep. Let people roll a d4 if they have a shovel, pick, or crowbar. You should also decide how many characters can work on a cave-in entrance at once. Make them sweat and think of something useful, like having the extra party members hold still and breath as little as possible, or killing the least liked hirelings.
• As the PC climbs some ill-secured rigging, it comes off the wall. By ill luck, they find themselves hanging by the throat or wrist or something in a way that's hard to quickly pull out of, and now the extremity is turning blue/they're seeing stars/they smashed their head and are bleeding in a way that can't be staunched in this position.
• A serrated knife leaves a wound that can't easily be closed. Lose 1 HP per hour as you decide what to do. Find a healing spell? Make a poultice? From what?
• A positive acquaintance from some earlier misadventure shows up proposing to fund an expedition sure to make you all rich, but it turns out they got bad directions and the supplies they brought aren't sufficient, and the people who made them promises upon which their plans were set weren't all that serious, and the whole thing goes pear-shaped in the middle of a hostile environment with no exit strategy.
• Orc bites can cause a hemophilic infection. Starting tomorrow, save each day or else all physical wounds against you deal +1 damage and dismemberment-level bleed effects cause a save vs death.
• Elf bites deposit immortal saliva in your bloodstream that doesn't filter out on its own. Elves can smell the saliva in you from more than 20 feet away, and they'll probably assume you're an escaped murderer or prisoner of war. If you get ghoul-paralyzed the area around the bite breaks out in a harsh rash, even if it has healed. A blood-alcohol level of about .2 is strong enough to drive out the saliva.
• Dwarf bites can cause a coagulating infection. Starting tomorrow, save each day or else take 1 damage to a physical stat of your choice whenever you run, swim, or roll a 1 on an attack roll. Some dwarves bite rats and then crack them open to use their blood as a poultice to close wounds.
• Gnome bites can cause a carbonating infection. Starting tomorrow, save each day or halve your weight and suffer horrific flatulance.
• This door's odd, tacky surface is an incredibly sticky glue. Even brushing your finger against it will indefinitely stick it fast to the door. Some kind of acid or something could free you, though painfully, but otherwise it's very hard to free yourself without losing even more of your fingertip.
• The DM will be careful to remember that you're carrying this unstable petard, and make a roll every time something happens that could set it off. For real, they're not going to forget this time.
• This special arrowhead sticks in the victim in a way that might be more "realistic" but which we normally aren't interested in modeling everytime someone is hit with an arrow. When someone diagnoses a friend's arrow wound (you can't do this for yourself), roll a d4:
• 1: You'll have to dig the head out and pull the arrow out the way it came in.
  
• 2: You'll have to push the arrow further in and pull it out the other side.
• 3: Shit! The shaft broke off but the arrowhead is stuck inside. Pepare for infections and pain.
• 4: Damn! it's hard to pull the arrow back out the way it came, but it can't get pushed straight through because it would hit an important organ.
• Instead of a trap room slowing filling with water, its floor slowly opens over a pool full of freak octopi. Bad enough, but imagine the poor fighter in plate armor who's liable to sink to the bottom if they're not careful!
• This plucky dog seems determined to follow you on your adventures and aid you in your battles. This always ends with a dead dog.
• Some Freak Fairy claims that when you got drunk together you made some unwise promises to them. You have no such memory, and in fact they're punking you, but they'll try to coerce you if you renege on the deal.

Simple Underdark Point of Interest Generator

 All credit to Spwack for his list to html generator.

Small Evidences (GLoG Hack + Scenario)

 A Halloween ago, I began a short-lived play-by-post game with G.R. Michael, HalflingTrouble, Josie, Locheil, Mergo-Kan, and Renfield. The curse of PbP games prevented us from getting very far, but I was proud of the prep I did, and have eventually decided to share it here. The work is incomplete, because I knew that if the PCs came to a dungeon, for instance, I would have plenty of time to flesh it out due to the nature of asynchronous communication.

The players were enticed by the premise of a "spooky Victorian glog play-by-post game." The player's handbook I offered them included many small hints about the game and how it would work, the sort of almost-jokes that DMs get very attached to. Like when you choose a background for your character, the Urchin background promises to have a "secret benefit" that would be revealed later. The Scholar class lets you attain various seemingly unhelpful Fields of Study like Anatomy and Orientalism, but each Field actually directly corresponds to one of the six types of creature you're likely to encounter in the game. In the equipment list, you might see a Bodak camera and think it's just a stupid D&Dified reference to a real-life camera featured in Dracula. But it also serves a secondary purpose to blind vampires. So if you think about it hard enough, I'm some kind of genius.

You can look at the hack (with my comments added in the janky form of google doc comments) HERE.

The format of the scenario was a small sandbox, the Swiss canton-like region of Avenir in a Victorian Europe-like Europe where all the countries had slightly stupider names. The party sought the missing Doctor Temperli, a professor of New Sciences at Mittenberg University. The region was small, made up of a six-by-six grid of ambiguously-sized squares that they could traverse at a speed of 1d6 squares per day (conveniently variable due to terrain and weather), no diagonal moves allowed.

Just as Switzerland is culturally influenced by French, German, and Italian neighbors, Avenir had three major towns, each culturally related to Lence, Almegh, and Reme. The most beloved part of the game seemed to be a chart I made to describe the nation-states around Avenir:

Hair/Sterotype/Attire/Folkways/Hat Shape

• Linch: Much, brown/Sullen, small, funny, syphilitic/Tight leather, buckles, floppy hats/War, horse marriage, wine, war/ɷ
• Almish: Wiry blond/Stingy, fierce, canny, syphilitic/Vests, sacks, puffy shirts, grease/Long knives, clockwork, gender/Δ
• Remic: Curly black/Loud, shallow, noble, syphilitic/Red aprons and hats, riding boots/Earthworks, dance, self-education/η

(and further afield-)

• Brutish: Dirty blond/Perfidious, rich, rude, syphilitic/Suits, lace, memento mori/wagers, industry, extortion/♖
• Iberish: Salt and pepper/fanatical, vengeful, sexy, syphilitic/half-capes, sequins, sackcloth/Bloodsport, charity, cattle/ሎ
• Vespian: Sandy blond or sandy pepper/cavalier, simple, contentious, typhoidious/Buckskin, Pistolas, Gloves/Cavaliers, expeditions, elections, sewing/൧
• Kaptev: Much, black/Inspired, insular, stupid, syphilitic/Pastels, sash belts, fur hats/Science, tenant farming, assimilation/፴ 

Just as Victorian novellas requre an abandoned castle, evil Catholic-themed monastery, and decadent palace, it had those things too. Each square on the map had a landmark and potential encounter, as well as some kind of clue to the past and whereabouts of Temperli or to the types of monsters that inhabited Avenir.

The encounter table is notable. It's a d6/6 table, where the first d6 roll tells you what kind of monster table you're rolling on and the second is the exact encounter, with better outcomes resulting from higher total rolls. So in theory rolling a 1 (vampire table) is the worst and rolling a 6 (angelic intervention table) is the best. Some dungeons and overland squares had items or events which could mess with your rolls, giving you a different kind of encounter with the same 2d6 total if possible, such as a holy relic that made the encounter roll prefer angel encounters. This encounter table was intended to drive a lot of the story, so I'll reproduce it in total here.

Random Encounters

1. Vampire
   2 council of vampires
   3 vampiric agent, in disguise, seeking to kidnap a victim for the cloister.
   4 oddly driven wolves
   5 drunken monk, genial and misleading
   6 driver, giving notice the monastery is a patron of adventurers. May offer a ride.
   7 peasants, fearful of strangers but well-armed with folk charms against vampires
2. Ghouls
   3 ghoul platoon, seeking a suitable spouse for the Secret Master
   4 near-literal flood of rats, fleeing adversaries of the ghouls. Where there are rats, the area is safe from ghouls
   5 virtuous magic user hireling with ghoul fever
   6 drunken boneyard singing of the damned
   7 sated ghouls seek work as laborers and retainers
   8 skeleton gives dire warning. Clarity based on reaction roll. Roll on this table next encounter
3. The Monster (Frankenstein dealio)
   4 the monster, wantonly wrecking peasants
   5 minor mockeries (as zombies) doing work but with a hair trigger temper
   6 new doctor, selling new cures with new and wild side effects
   7 two Brutish resurrection men, Morris and McCab
   8 the doctors— an alchemist of old science and a kaballist of new faith— seeking their Monster
   9 the monster, wetly and sadly stitching herself
4. Werewolf Aristocrat
   5 werewolf forlornly hunting
   6 werewolf snacking on a new victim
   7 wolves, displaced and harried
   8 shifty servants seeking their master
   9 wolf hunters, resolute
   10 aristo’s priest and friend
5. Vampire Hunters
   6 bitten and delirious hunter, Valentin Fack. Son of hte devil, he has a bible tattooed on the back of his hand. Sympathetic and intuitive, easily wounded. His family is secretly a court of devils.
   7 suspicious investigator duo-- the short one Maxime Beyeler and the tall one Elijan Arbenz. Arbenz is a conformist, reliably but uncreative, secretly dreams of seeing the world and slowly dying inside.
   8 amphibious hunter— hunts ghouls, werewolves, or new life
   9 kindly elder gives haven to party
   10 triumphant mob led by a hunter
   11 vampire hunter mobile base
6. Angelic Intervention
   7 dreams of a glowing woman giving a part-muffled warning. Have vision of next random encounter, and win initiative automatically.
   8 glowing woman leads you to a dying commoner in need of warmth and aid. Will gratefully vouch for PCs later if helped, even offering to lodge them if they are ever in their square.
   9 glowing woman leads to another encounter, roll advantage on reaction
   10 glowing woman leads you to Heinz Nimrod, monster hunter
   11 glowing woman leads you with sudden alacrity to the object of your journey.
   12 glowing woman offers a gift or blessing to each of you

Each of the major genre of monster would have a long list of weaknesses, quirks, and abilities. I didn't finish them all, but here's an example:

Vampires: HD 4+. F5 R 3 W 2. C 15, +2 to-hit

• Can turn into elemental dust, taking a full round.
• Can turn into a large bat, owl, rat, or bat.
• Affinity with creatures of the night.
• 5-in-6 chance of successfully sneaking up on a sleeping person and sucking their blood, -1 for each countermeasure. If those they feed on ever die, they become a vampire.
• Perfect Darkvision
• When slain, go as dust to a coffin full of desecrated earth to rejuvenate.
• Some vampires have class features
• do not eat, cast no shadow, in the mirror do not reflex, show up not in photos
• Cannot transgress thresholds
• In the daytime, cannot change shape or use class abilities.
• Must be carried over running water, and to touch it destroys them
• Cannot get within 5 feet of garlic flowers, crucifixes, wild rose branches, or mountain ash.
• Sacred bullets inflict bleeding wounds, as do stakes through the heart and decapitations.

I didn't have all the details about the plans of these six groups, but here's some of what I did have:

• The vampires seek to turn Temperli into their ancient progenitor demon Turst, seeking the raiments of his ancestor Rolan. The abbot wields a tongue of flame which makes people solatics, the opposite of lunacy.
• The ghouls seek the flesh of Old Gargy [a giant trapped underground] for an eternal feast. The Secret Master [their leader] seeks also a consort to birth a dragon with [the sentence cuts off there]
• The prince has lived as a werewolf for most of his life, bitten as a boy by his uncle Retho Wolfli, a burgomaster of Chavornay. His cruel twin brother (and estate guardian), Waldemar, throws a nonstop fete to distract him and stalks about to blacken his brother's name out of mad depravity.

And here's the dramatis personae:

• Abbot Riccardo Sturzenegger- vampire magician. Passionate and devoted, heart broken by ancient jilting. Miserable. Seeks to regain his lover and sire, Rolan Temperli.
• The Secret Master- athletic and folksy ghoul. Lacks sophistication and easily fooled. Out of her depth.
• Doctor Alexander Bontravail- ivory tower intellectual. Alchemist finding it hard to cope with these conditions
• Doctor Shiri Chertok- one of those woman doctors, a student of miracles and the names of god. Has been everywhere, but lacks real connections. Seeks something to live for, now that this has gone bust.
• Prince Nordin- werewolf aristo. Bubbling with love of life, but so quirky he doesn't easily fit in. Finds it difficult to conform to the measures he must take to avoid hurting anyone.
• Prince Waldemar- Nordin's evil twin brother and trustee of the estate

That's pretty much it. Please look at the linked hack above if you haven't already. I'll end by posting a couple floorplans I found that would have formed the basis of a couple of the dungeons: