Mundane Magic

Magic is awesome. Fireballs and sleep spells and summons, oh my!

Regular tabletop role playing magic, however, is mostly focused on what might be useful to, y'know, an adventuring party. While that is useful to the players, you'd think that in a world with magic people would come up with relatively mundane, day-to-day uses for it. Because what good is magic to a farmer if it doesn't help with the harvest? What is good for a merchant if it doesn't help her make a profit or balance the books?

 So here's some more everyday uses of magic, many of which conveniently duplicate things we've achieved via technology (i.e. we know they're actually useful). I guess the list could be looked at as a background detail generator table or some such - if you squint hard enough, that is.

1. Legal documents sealed/signed with drop of blood. Magic can then be used to verify identities of the relevant persons. Anyone who works with paperwork carries a special needle for drawing blood together with writing implements.
2. Enchanted ledgers that total up income and expenses on their own and are capable of updating them. (Sort of like magical spreadsheet apps. Only inkier.)
3. Harvest-mages wander the rural countryside looking for work. They mostly only knows spells that speed up harvest, such as Beltor's Fruit Shaker or Greater Wheat Reaper. They get a lot of call in wartime, when being able to bring in the harvest quick and with few people is important.
4. Mages specialising in pest control. Rats routed, bedbugs banished, termites terminated - or your silver back! Gives me ideas for wizards in coveralls.
5. Credit-enchanted items - work like our credit cards, but on magic, rather than technology. Come to think about it, if I were a wizard in a fantasy setting, banking in general would seem like a field that could benefit from magical expertise.
6. Pay crystal balls for contacting home when you're away.
7. Spells for copying texts from one sheet to another. Who needs printing again?
8.  Magically-powered keywords allow accessing relevant chapters of a book quickly. Useful in big manuals, encyclopedias and reference books.

Ogden's Hangman & Supernatural Executioners

Have you read Maurice Ogden's The Hangman? If you haven't, go read it on its wikipedia page. I'll wait.

(From here)

I don't remember how I came across this poem. It's got a message about witch-hunts and conformism and passivity towards evil and bla bla bla. But when I read it I immediately thought that the hangman as described would make an interesting opponent in a game session. My initial thought was just a psychopathic psion of an NPC who uses his power of suggestion to make people submit to his will and then kills them off one by one.

But now I have a set of tables & "rules" for spooky executioners.

Method of Execution

d6

1. Hanging.
2. Burning at stake.
3. Decapitation.
4. Being hanged, drawn & quartered.
5. Drowning.
6. Animal pit.

Nature & Motivation of Executioner

d6

1. Psychopathic psionic human, doing it for the kicks.
2. Non-psychopathic psionic human, seeks revenge against town for death of wrongfully executed parent.
3. A ghost, trying to free itself by putting the living to the same death it experienced. It doesn't work.
4. Limited manifestation of unknowable eldritch horror, using deaths to fuel entry into this plane of existence.
5. Incarnation of unjust capital punishment. Just following its nature.
6. Disembodied entity that keeps possessing a new executioner if the old one is dispatched. Feeds on the fear and suffering it creates.

 Also roll d100 for percentage of original population still remaining (at least 2 people, though) when  players enter town.

My idea is that people need to roll saves at a big penalty or submit and helplessly watch the executioner dispatch its victims... Or be the victim as the case may be. Repeat roll at every execution. Strong compulsion to attend executions - similar save as before to avoid. When attempting to leave town with the executioner undefeated, succeed similar save without penalty or lose conscienceness for 1d6 hours - or until next execution, whichever is sooner.

Hoarding Hedge-wizard's Horrible Habitat

Because so many mages, and especially hedge-wizards have a tendency to have bizzare laboratories stuffed with magical paraphernalia, it makes sense that many of them would have a hoarding problem.

Roll d8 for whatever may hinder you while visiting a home of one of these weirdos for some reason.

 

(From here)

1. 1d4 scrap golems (formed of residual magic field and random refuse) aggressively defend a corner they consider their territory. (Scrap golems are from Varlets &Vermin. But you could come up with your own.)
2. A stairway leading downwards has filled with random crud. Seems like regular floor, but if entered from a side without actual stairs, one tends to sink through the stuff. Roll d6 on subtable.
3. A crate of 1d6 unlabeled potions of unknown origin or purpose. Might also be expired. Have fun with this one - I recommend this table.
4. Giant friggin' cockroaches. At least 3d4 of 'em.
5. A disgrunteled homunculus-in-a-jar is trapped under some random garbage. Will offer information if freed. Has 50% chance of having gone insane, in which case the information will be absolutely useless.
6. A corner stuffed with stacks upon stacks of old arcane science journals. 10% chance of finding new useful spell. 10% chance of triggering random spell effect if disturbed. 5% of journals animating and behaving like a swarm of small flying creatures - such as bats.
7. Moving seemingly valuable item (staff, robe, book – whatever) releases disgusting mold spores. If inhaled, chances of being: 25% - halucinogenic, 10% - poisonous (save or die). If not either, then trigger coughing and sneezing, wasting time and attracting attention.
8. Precarious stack of junk. If fighting nearby, 10% chance of collapse. Randomize combatants affected, does 2d6 damage to each.

Stairway crud subtable

1-3. Sticky crud. Works like quicksand
4. Light and large and properly unsupported things. Works like a pit, except there's stairs out. Falling damaged still applies, though.
5. As 4, but there's something jagged or spiky and hard on the stairway. Works like spike pit trap.
6. As 5, but there's also something smeared on the jagged thing. Works the same, but there's also 50% chance of non-lethal poison, save or take 1d6/hour for 1d6 hours.

City defenses generator table

For all your city defense needs. Roll d10 for each table.

Fortifications & defenses

 

(from here)

1. Transparent dome of unknown material (gets stifling in hot weather)
2. Seemingly conventional walls & towers (actually hasty mock-ups built in hopes of discouraging an attacker)
3. Magically grown wall of semi-sentient trees that attempt to swipe at attackers with branches
4. Colossal golems link arms around the city, will attempt to stomp on attackers
5. A conventional castle on the most vulnerable edge of the town
6. Simple palisade fort
7. No walls, but closely placed towers of varying styles and colors
8. Maze-like system of rounded stone walls with no gates but only narrow passages
9. High natural cliffs of the plateau on which the city is located, the single path upwards protected by the defenders
10. Seemingly undefended city actually surrounded by a death zone of traps both magical and mundane (peaceful visitors met at the edge and led in and out by professional guides for a fee)

Defenders 

Where's your armor, soldier?! 

(from here, but I don't know where Hill Cantons got it)

1. Small pack of death-ray wielding homunculi
2. Hastily conscripted beggars & petty criminals, used as canon fodder to buy time for fleeing richer citizens
3. Trained bears – armored and armed with poleaxes
4. A cabal of experienced wizards (half of which are starting to grow senile)
5. Highly trained ballista crews
6. Sabre and lance wielding horsemen, dressed in bright colors and fond of making seemingly random charges
7. A small fleet of airships carrying arquebusiers
8. Local dragon, concerned with fate of source of tribute
9. Fanatical religious sect members – not terribly efficient in combat, but numerous and desperate to fight to the death
10. A small group of veteran soldiers and engineers who will wait for the enemy to enter the city and then engage in urban guerrilla combat