Tables of Possibilities

 “That is the exploration that awaits you! Not mapping stars and studying nebula, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.”

– Leonard Nimoy

I love randomized tables in roleplaying games. They offer a quick-reference, thematic list to help define some aspect of a setting. A character’s past experiences. Encounters for a particular environment. Things that go wrong when you roll a critical failure. Some keep it simple, others elaborate with extra information or reference to other tables to determine more details about the results. Most provide a die type to roll to randomly determine results, though one might simply glance down the table and pick something appropriate for the moment. I’m definitely of the “roll or choose” camp, leaving things up to fate when I can’t decide, or choosing something that best reflects where the action or characters are going; though I rely on the dice when using table related to character creation. But tables themselves provide only half the necessary material; gamemasters and players bring their own involvement, perspective, and creativity when enabling table results to add richness to their games.

Gaming Artifacts: Thieves’ World Boxed Set

The Thieves’ World city supplement from Chaosium was perhaps the first boxed campaign setting I bought way back in my earliest days in the roleplaying game hobby. The city of Sanctuary provided a wonderful yet deadly sandbox environment characters could explore. I used it decades ago with friends huddled over the fantastic city map, pulled it out again a few years ago to run with a re-tooled D6 fantasy system, and even turn to its massive random encounter tables today for occasional medieval-urban solitaire gaming.

I came to hear about the Thieves’ World boxed set and the shared-world fiction on which it was based in one of my earliest Friendly Local Game Store experiences. I’d received the Basic Dungeons & Dragons boxed set (Moldvay edition) as an Easter present from my parents; during the course of that spring I absorbed the rules, taught some friends, and ran several dungeon crawls into the Caves of Chaos for friends (and a few into dungeons of my own design). After graduating from junior high – and dreading adjusting to high school in the fall – I determined to dive further into D&D that summer. To that end I gathered my allowance and headed down to the nearby Friendly Local Game Store not five minutes from my house, Branchville Hobby. There I found the D&D Expert boxed set for $12 among the small yet growing pile of roleplaying games in the varied store more notable then for its HO-scale model railroad supplies and layout (before sports equipment took over).