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What’s under the church?

1 – Another church. Older, for a different religion; lots of crows, tapestries of a great and terrible crown. Roll again on this table to see what’s under this one.

2 – A roiling mass of worms. You can’t tell how far down they go, or what they’re surviving on down there. The door slams shut behind you.

3 – An underground cave system. Mostly it’s flooded, but the one dry-ish tunnel leads to the basement of a brothel in town.

4 – A forgotten library. It’s got the original religious texts of the church above it in there, but it seems like no-one knows it’s here. This would be an excellent opportunity to set yourself up in a prophecy of your own invention, if you’ve got a pen to hand.

5 – The anti-church. Built by a sect of True Neutral monks, this anti-church dwells beneath the above church and espouses completely different values for the sake of balance.

6 – A vault containing contraband treasure. Looks like it’s stamped with the insignia of the evil overlord who was cast down from his throne of blood thirty years ago. They (or anyone else who picked it up) would have a hell of a time shifting this. Why do they have it, anyway?

7 – A labyrinth, made out of repurposed wood. It’s filled with half-starving feral boars and the scant remains of the last people who came down here.

8 – A portal to heaven. At least: they reckon it’s a portal to heaven. It’s definitely a portal. The priests here are rapturing people from the local community after deeming them worthy of entrance into the great eternal. (God knows where it really goes, though. Would be a laugh if it actually was heaven, eh.)

9 – An enormous chasm, going way, way down. You can hear music – bells, flutes, pipes etc – and cackling coming from the bottom.

10 – A dark void. A magic hole in space and time, a portal to the elemental plane of No. The church was built on it to contain it, but their wards are failing, and now it’s only a couple of feet beneath the main altar.

11 – A vampire. Leave him alone! He’s trying to sleep.

12 – A suspicious quantity of arms and armour. Good stuff, too. Non-magical (aside from a handful of potions) but it’s of strong make, and there’s enough here to outfit a squad to do some serious work. Which is odd, because it’s hidden beneath a godsdamned church.

13 – A prison. They put sinners here. Sometimes they put food here. The town is calm and peaceful and crime-free, and they like it that way, so no-one asks too many questions about the black-masked priests who walk the streets at night and drag away the undesirables.

14 – A wizard’s tower. You’d think it’d be the wrong way up, but there’s a sky under here and everything; the tower is on a promontory overlooking a wild sea, and you can see something huge shifting under the waves. Wizard’s a bit of a weirdo; she says she’s studying the air currents here, and refuses to believe that there’s a church in her basement.

15 – Catacombs. But: round here, while you’re in mourning, you go and live with the dead under the church. Some folks never come out of mourning. There are about thirty people down there at any given time, and at the end of a funeral, family members are escorted down into the depths with the body.

16 – The same church, but last week. It’s one of the weird sharding effects of the cataclysm; the church is underneath itself, inverted, but the one underneath is a week in the past. As long as you visit the church once a week and stay on good terms with the vicar(s), you can effectively cheat death so long as you don’t mind getting kidnapped by your mates from the future every now and again.

17 – A hospital. The staff here are trying to hide the fact that there’s an outbreak of plague in the area; if it gets out, the panic would be impossible to handle. Their beds are filling up, and they’re on the verge of uncovering a cure, but time is not on their side.

18 – An opium den. None of the priests are actually priests; they’re drug dealers, and most of the town is in on it. They run a pretty solid operation, and don’t care about killing people who shove their noses in where they don’t belong.

19 – An orcish invasion. They’re tunnelling in from their world of darkness and fire and hate, and they’re hungry to see the light and feast on the pleasures of the surface world. You find evidence of an orc camp in the cellar, and then hear the unmistakable sound of iron-shod boots clattering against flagstones.

20 – Cogs from the machine that keeps the world turning. They creak and click at an incredibly slow rate, and beneath you, the sound of vast cthonic rumbling hints at something far larger beneath you. This is a maintenance access panel, but: do you really want to go exploring down here?


Remnants is a series where Chris and Grant, the creative leads behind Rowan, Rook & Decard, create a fantasy world through the use of Dx tables. Because who has time to read a full setting book?

[REMNANTS] Once upon a time, when the dragon-kings ruled the aetherealms and the Witch-Queens fought grand duels over generations with arcana of unimaginable power, the worlds split apart. There was too much magic, and reality couldn’t bear the weight any longer. The otherworlds splintered apart like ships crashing against a shoreline; but the pieces remained, shards of reality, and they pierced the material realm. A thousand dimensions, all attached to various degrees, to the prime material: some forgotten, some overrun with new inhabitants, some spawning monstrous creatures into the world, and some ripe for plundering.

Header image by fly on Flickr

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What are you a cleric or paladin of?

1 – Justice. And not the wishy-washy, platemail-clad shining sword shite that the other paladins talk about – actual, legal, by-the-book justice. You have an encyclopedic knowledge of the laws of the land, which is backed up by several actual encyclopedias that you carry on your back out of devotional respect. You are a lawyer, first and foremost, and you’ve let more than one “evil” necromancer go because they haven’t done anything wrong. (That said, you got that dragon on charges of livestock theft, and he’s still in jail, so.)

2 – Rocks. Can’t go wrong with a good rock. When everything is confusing and your adventuring companions descend into arguments, you focus yourself on the zen heaviness of rocks. Rocks know what’s what. You lift them a lot, to understand that heaviness better, so you’re pretty strong too. Mountains are kind of like gods to you, but the sort of gods you can climb and have a picnic on.

3 – Wayfaring. Your order used to possess the secrets of interplanar travel, and your ancestors would protect the barriers between worlds. But: that all collapsed, and now you’re a gang of dispersed guides, bodyguards and travellers who aid passage through the unstable and forgotten routes to the otherworlds that crashed into the prime material.

4 – Goblins. Due to a misspelling of “goblet” in your sacred tome, you are part of a sect that reveres goblins as the true vessels of the divine. So adaptable are goblins! So eager to spawn, so ingenious! Everywhere you look, there’s a goblin, and it’s showing you its arse! You find goblins fascinating, and your search for the goblin used to hold the blood of your god continues apace.

5 – A family line. The Von Helsbrecht family are, as far as you’re concerned, gods on earth; hundreds of years ago, they ruled this land as benevolent dictators. After a series of brutal and bloody wars, the family were dethroned and the members exiled or executed. You still draw holy power from their divine right to rule, and you are on a mission to track down the surviving members – however watered-down their blood might be, and whatever sort of wastrels they’ve become (some of them are even adventurers) – then help them take over the country again.

6 – A bound demon of world-shaking power. Your order bound a demon the likes of which the world had never seen and trapped it in a vault of ivory-white stone, far beneath the city streets. The thing has such vast power that you and your allies can tap into it to cast magic spells and summon miracles – though they all have a hellish edge to them, and you’re often mistaken for dark magicians yourselves even though your cause is a righteous one. So long as the demon doesn’t ever break out and come to track you down and kill you, or send agents against you to do the same, you’ll be fine.

7 – A genius loci. There’s a hill, or a lake, or a mine, or some other large natural feature near you that has a god in it. (Maybe it landed there during the sundering; maybe it’s always been there.) You worship it, and protect the lands around it, and it grants you power in exchange. Now, as you go out on adventures with your companions, you are gifted with some token of the place – a glowing seed from the great tree, a crystal vial of water from the lake, stone chipped from the temple’s inner sanctum – and instructed to plant it elsewhere, and tend to it, to make new genius loci across the land.

8 – The People. You fight for the little guy, and not because some god tells you to; you do it because you need to help each other out. You’re at the forefront of demonstrations, you organise aid handouts for the poor and needy, and you kick the tar out of corrupt police officers. (And, sometimes, non-corrupt police officers, because they’re part of a corrupt system.) You draw power from the roar of crowds, the heartbeat of nations, and you march at their head with bloody banners held high.

9 – The Door. They call it the Heaven Door or God’s Door or just The Door, and it appears wherever humans are in place of other doors. It leads to a great and powerful kingdom beyond our own, and you have devoted your life to tracking it down wherever it manifests and killing the things that come out of it.

10 – The song that ends the earth. You know the truth – that the world is being sung into being by a mad god, and when the song is complete the world will end. Your order taught you some tiny fragments of the song that you can use to change the world in small ways, but your primary goal is to counteract the end of the world; either by continuing the god’s song, by building wind-powered instruments on mountaintops, or confusing the cosmic melody by laying down anharmonic discordances and tricking the god into starting again from the top of the verse.


Remnants is a series where Chris and Grant, the creative leads behind Rowan, Rook & Decard, create a fantasy world through the use of Dx tables. Because who has time to read a full setting book?

[REMNANTS] Once upon a time, when the dragon-kings ruled the aetherealms and the Witch-Queens fought grand duels over generations with arcana of unimaginable power, the worlds split apart. There was too much magic, and reality couldn’t bear the weight any longer. The otherworlds splintered apart like ships crashing against a shoreline; but the pieces remained, shards of reality, and they pierced the material realm. A thousand dimensions, all attached to various degrees, to the prime material: some forgotten, some overrun with new inhabitants, some spawning monstrous creatures into the world, and some ripe for plundering.

Cover image by Bit Boy on Flickr

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What’s this guy selling out the back of his car?

old car

Header image by Charlie on Flickr.

Roll 3D20 to determine what he’s got in stock today.

1 – Rosaries. They’re made out of bone and he assures you that they’re all “used,” whatever that means.

2 – Cats. He sells them by weight, using a pair of antique scales he’s set up on the pavement.

3 – Faberge Eggs. They look real. He claims to have located “the Faberge goose.”

4 – Handguns. These ones have fresh serial numbers on, painstakingly etched in with surprising skill, which point to recent (or upcoming) murders.

5 – Pot plants. He says they’re all tremendously venomous, and when you tell him that there’s a difference between “poisonous” and “venomous,” he rubs at a bandage on his wrist and tells you he understands the difference all too well.

6 – Blood bags. He does part-exchange, too, and pays a top dollar for unusual blood types.

7 – Fingerprints. They’re made out of hot wax, look like someone else’s fingertips, and last about twenty-four hours before they wrinkle up and drop off like scabs.

8 – Comedowns. He siphons off hangovers and comedowns, distills them into pills, and sells them to the sort of weirdos who want to skip the high and go straight to the torment.

9 – Condoms. He says they’re made of enchanted sheep guts, guaranteed to help you sire a child of strong limb and keen mind. (So: they don’t work.)

10 – Pages from books. He displays a random collection of pages from weird and esoteric books, some of which you’re pretty sure don’t exist, but he doesn’t seem to have the actual books themselves. You’ll need to keep coming back to buy them in installments, it seems.

11 – Meat. Good stuff, too! Completely above board – you’d expect it to be dog or human or something, but this is top-drawer primo horse meat.

12 – Eggs. Not guaranteed to be from chickens, but “most of them are.”

13 – Thorns. He says you can fashion them into crowns or armour that will keep you safe from fey magic; he’s wearing a full set, and bleeding quite a lot.

14 – Bottled spirits. By which we mean, of course: ghosts, condensed down into glass vessels. Take a drink, and normal folk get a brief hit of the ghost’s most important memory; those with the Sight get transported back to when it all happened.

15 – Injectable madnesses. Fancy trying out depression for the evening? Want to experience schizophrenia, but be able to go back to your normal life at the end of the weekend? Bored of a single identity, and want to dissociate into some others? He’s got your back.

16 – Music. Not sheet music or CDs, though. You give him the money, and then the tune follows you around like a faithful hound, appearing in adverts on TV and being hummed absent-mindedly by passers-by. He also sells removals.

17 – Happy families. Fully-functional, paint-by-numbers families that will move into your home and do… family stuff. The families are unaware that they were purchased out the back of a car, and it’s recommended that you don’t tell them.

18 – Moody jewellery. He maintains that all of it has been stolen from graves, or at the very least, that someone died wearing it. He has an excellent selection of widow’s wedding rings, some with the fingers still in.

19 – X-ray specs. And all other kinds of 1950’s/60’s spy gear and practical jokes from the back of a magazine, except it all works as advertised. (And it gives you tumours, too. But, hey – x-ray specs!)

20 – Experience points. He claims to have access to knowledge of “the great game” which you’re all in, and offers ways to increase your skills by making scratches on a piece of paper with your name on. Sounds daft, but it seems to work.


Glimmers is a series where Chris and Grant, the creative leads behind Rowan, Rook & Decard, create an urban horror world through the use of Dx tables. Because who has time to read a full setting book?

[GLIMMERS.] The city is alive. The city is connected, with streams of light and noise and people, to every other city; they are all the same being, all branches of the same concrete-and-glass tree. There are streets between them, forgotten streets, with secret names and grim inhabitants. (And: there are wild-lands, dark places, the Spaces Between, where nothing seems right. Airport waiting rooms. Churches, at night. Backwater villages.)

There is vast power in the thrum of machines and the buzz of traffic, and it can be yours, for a price.