Recovered: I think I might know someone…

When I first moved to Buffalo and didn’t know anyone in the area, I ended up staying with my girlfriend’s roommate’s mother’s friends in the area (they were great people). When someone on the OSR discord was asking for a good contacts system I thought I would try my hand at one that reminds me of that connection. I figure this is probably half a solid contacts mechanic, so I hope someone gets use out of it.

A Happy Meeting, Pompeo Massani 1920, via Wikimedia Commons

Draft One

Roll	Relation (1d20, 1d10)	Ability (1d6)	Strength (1d8)	Weakness (1d12)
1	classmate	fence item	loaded	owe them money
2	roommate	carry stuff	trustful	addiction
3	friend	employ party	respected	snitch
4	fiance(e)	get information	loyal	hunted
5	drinking buddy	get item	manners	dumb
6	ex	teach skill	cautious	cowardly
7	landlord	learned	unwashed
8	tenant	strong	hidden
9	coworker	bad blood
10	boss	cursed
11	brother	mad
12	sister	busy
13	cousin
14	uncle
15	aunt
16	niece
17	nephew
18	mother
19	father
20	grandparent

This is what I made initially, and you can see it with a little more in the Google doc. When you have a chance to meet new contacts, you can roll up a contact at two removes (e.g. 1d20 and 1d10 under “Relation”). If that contact doesn’t work out for you, add another d10 to relationship, then another d20,¹ and so on each time you need a new contact before you can naturally make more.²

Draft Two

Then I thought I’d try automating this process, because that’s trendy these days. This generator owes a lot to Betty Bacontime and Spwack’s work, but I had to rework it to make it do what I wanted it to.

Visit to the Prison, Theodor Leopold Weller 1835, via Wikimedia Commons

This post was first shared on February 7, 2019.

Alternating d10 and d20 avoids awkward results like “my brother’s sister” because all the family relations are in 11-20.↩︎
the idea behind the tertiary contacts is that the relationship is more tenuous, your information less sure. That’s why you wouldn’t start there, but it’s what you’ve got to work with unless you can spend some more time meeting people (at the expense of some resource).↩︎

Date

October 20, 2023

Up next

Death in the Catacombs Assuming Cairn or a Cairn-like baseline. Inspirations include the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the short-lived Ghostwalk campaign setting, and Anne’s

Previously

Deeper Catacombs Returning to my example tracking system in the catacombs. Several bits of feedback were gathered from playtesting and some weaknesses became