Monday, August 7, 2017

D100 Table: Hallucinations

So you ate the funny mushrooms...

This table was requested by someone who wanted it for an assassin who incapacitates victims with hallucinogens. She described the substance as “incapacitat[ing] them with Weirdness," which is why a lot of the results leave the character unwilling to move. 

Anyone using this table is encouraged to copy it into a text file. Then, after each use, you should delete the results you used during the session and replace them with new results of your own devising, ensuring that the hallucinations never repeat. Since, you know, that would be weird.

I am always willing to write up tables for tabletop gaming by request. For free.

  1. A bird's leg descends from the sky. It is inconceivably massive, and so tall that the bird's body is too far away to be seen. It is shortly followed by another, and then by the beak, as the cosmic-scaled bird tries to find out what sort of food is beneath the surface of this campaign world.
  2. A creature of titanic scale cracks open the sky from outside -- like a clamshell -- and starts eating bits of the world with brobdingnagian chopsticks.
  3. A gargantuan human-looking mouth opens in the ground at your feet and screams as if in terrible pain. The scream continues as long as the hallucination lasts -- if you run away from the screaming mouth, another one opens in front of you and now you have to listen to two screams.
  4. A quasi-humanoid face forms on the largest surface you can see (other than “the ground", “the sky", or “the ocean" -- maybe on a mountainside). It immediately begins criticizing your every decision as well as every aspect of your appearance and personality with incisive and hurtful accuracy.
  5. A small imp materializes before you. It refuses to answer any questions, but pulls out a quill and a book, where it begins meticulously documenting your every motion, word, and thought. If you leave, it follows you, still writing. It may hum to itself off-key.
  6. A spectral aye-aye pulls itself out from inside your head, informs you that living on your thoughts is boring, and that it's going to go eat the dreams of some innocent children. Then it scampers off.
    Baby aye-aye -- the perfect combination of “creepy" and “adorable".
  7. Alien abduction. Flying saucers, greys, probes, the whole shebang. Described in a setting-consistent manner, of course.
  8. All animate things within your field of vision are staring upwards and screaming. You're not sure why.
  9. All artificial objects are sprouting limbs and forming themselves into humanoid shapes, then sprinting away as quickly as possible. It might be wise to chase down your undergarments and your more important equipment.
  10. All containers are filled with bees.
  11. All insects, arachnids, & other such vermin are growing to hundreds of times their natural size. As they swell to monstrous proportions, you can see malice in their eyes.
  12. All living things within your field of vision turn straight towards you, open their mouths impossibly wide, roll their eyes back in their head, and moan terribly.
    Art by Jessica Hayworth.
    (Welcome to Night Vale)
  13. All natural features and large buildings in the area are actually giants wearing ill-fitting disguises -- how did you never notice this before?
  14. All openings, portals, holes, and apertures are prone to turning into a vast bottomless pit when you approach, providing a corresponding sensation of vertigo. This includes doorways, drinking vessels, anthills, small punctures in cloth, mouths, ears, &c.
  15. All senses inverted -- your eyes only see back into your skull, your ears only hear the sounds of your own internal systems, you can only feel the INSIDE of your skin, &c.
  16. All voices, including those of animals, are replaced with threats.
  17. Become utterly convinced that everything, including your “friends", wants to kill & eat you.
  18. Birds are conspiring against you. If you stay perfectly still and quiet, you can hear the hidden meanings behind the birdsong.
  19. Chanting in a language you've never heard before, at a deafening volume, is coming from all directions. You can see things starting to disintegrate from the arcane pressure behind the words.
  20. Did you read Dr. Seuss's The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins as a child? You now have that problem, except instead of hats, it's hideous & uncomfortable ritual masks.
  21. Discordant, atonal piping comes from nowhere. Ten-foot-high monstrosities with too many eyes and not enough skin emerge from every conceivable hiding place and begin dancing, carousing, and generally carrying on bacchanal-style.
  22. Elven abduction. Carried off to the Realm of Faerie for incomprehensible reasons, saw some bizarre and disturbing sights, then dumped back where you started -- after experiencing several subjective years in a few objective hours because that's how the Fair Folk roll. Bonus points if the GM quotes Sir Orfeo (or similar) at length.
  23. Everyone else is dead and rotting, but haven't realized yet and keep walking around. This applies to animals as well.
  24. Everyone is a demon in disguise. Including your neighbor, your neighbor's dog, the fleas on the back of your neighbor's dog, &c.
  25. Everything around you is melting; in about ten minutes, the only solid items will be you and the one-foot-radius portion of ground you're standing on, floating on a glutinous, deeply suspicious sea.
  26. Everything has eyes. They're watching you.
  27. Everything is mimics.
  28. Everything is suddenly one thousand times larger than it was. You must move carefully to avoid being eaten by roaches.
  29. Everything is suddenly one thousand times smaller than it was. You must move carefully to avoid crushing the town beneath your feet.
  30. Everything you touch turns to centipedes.
  31. Everything, including you, is becoming perfectly spherical. In a few minutes, you won't be able to do anything without rolling around and bumping into other spherical objects like a game of billiards .
  32. For a brief period, you have the color vision of a mantis shrimp; your brain desperately tries to catch up and interpret what you're seeing, but mostly everything is psychedelic madness that you will never be able to explain to another person.
    There's some debate about whether they actually see the amazing range of color suggested by their 16-coned eyes, but their visual system is definitely different from what you're used to. And they can see polarized light.
  33. Fregoli delusion.
  34. Friction stops working. If you move, you'll slip on the perfectly-smooth ground and slide until you bump into a wall or fall in a hole.
  35. Gravity has decided to hate you; any movement of voluntary muscles will send you careening off through the air in a random direction.
  36. Half of the world drops away. You are now looking over the edge of a cliff that reaches on and on into a terrible infinite void.
  37. Horrible abominations live inside everyone's pupils, including your own.
  38. Hundreds of slugs the size of your forearm are performing an impressive aerial ballet. You never realized slugs could fly, but they're actually quite good at it. Take some time to appreciate the artistic merit of their performance.
  39. Inanimate objects begin to develop horrible fanged mouths that snap at you whenever you approach.
  40. Inanimate objects move around when you aren't looking. Their plans are detailed, wicked, and targeting you personally.
  41. It is suddenly absolutely clear to you that the world you live in is a crudely-made stage set. You can see the strings holding up birds as they “fly" by and the costume fastenings on that “monster" over there. Optional: All women are actually men in drag, since women can't be actors in this time period.
  42. It's raining goats. They bounce impressively, and ricochet unpredictably, bleating angrily the entire time.
  43. It's raining. But the rain is an acidic orange fluid of unknown provenance, and it's coming up from the ground & falling into the sky.
  44. Previously-unknown deity manifests in front of you, informs you that you are its chosen prophet, and begins dictating a holy book. Better write it down quick. (At GM's discretion, individual suffering from hallucination may successfully start small religion, perhaps cause previously-hallucinatory deity to actually exist out of sheer belief -- but it's a pretty crappy deity until they get a bigger cult.)
  45. Reversed gravity. Hold on tight.
  46. Sailing ships filled with tentacular things drift down from the sky and, inexplicably, start sailing through the ground as if it were water. The crew is grabbing any people around and pulling them aboard.
    Art by Raya Golden.
  47. Some sort of stinking ooze starts bubbling up from the ground and forming itself into monstrous shapes. Odds are good they want to eat you.
  48. Spiders the size of your hand keep appearing from nowhere, swarming towards you.
  49. Strange beings with cyclopean visages and horrible claws sprout out of the earth and slither about on their murderous business. They viciously dismember anything living, but you're pretty sure they can only see movement, like a badly-researched T. Rex.
  50. Strange limbs keep ripping through the fabric of reality, flailing around for organic matter, and retracting with their prey through the unsettling portals they created. DON'T LOOK THROUGH -- you don't want to know.
  51. Struck with sudden-onset omniscience, paralyzed by complete knowledge of all things. (5% chance any given piece of information learned from this episode is remotely accurate.)
  52. Sudden guerilla attack of sixteenthlings (one-eighth the size of a halfling) who tie you down Gulliver's-Travels-style.
  53. Swarms of sea urchins begin migrating across the landscape. Rather than use their wee little feet as would be expected, they move like deranged tumbleweeds, bouncing from spine to spine at an alarming pace.
  54. Tentacles keep poking out of everyone's skin-suits. If no people are around, this applies to all living things instead.
  55. The air around you is entirely composed of miniscule air elementals. They are making fun of you and taking an unsettling amount of joy in the fact that you keep accidentally inhaling them.
  56. The color drains out of everything you touch.
  57. The entire world is on fast-forward. Seasons fly by in seconds. People are a blur too fast to see clearly. Pigeons treat you like a statue.
  58. The floor is lava.
  59. The GM should choose a passage in Revelations and read it out loud. That's what's happening right now.
  60. The ground beneath you turns into quicksand. It is also full of various invertebrates mocking your plight.
  61. The literal Grim Reaper is stalking the landscape, and you have a horrible certainty that he's looking for you.
  62. The moon is made of green cheese and is falling out of the sky, the distinctive odor of aged dairy products preceding it. (If you get this result when the moon is not in the sky, then it comes over the horizon, rolling over all obstacles with a sound exactly like a giant ball of cheese squishing into things. (Bonus points if the GM simulates this by balling up some cheese and gleefully rolling it over the dice and various gaming accoutrements on the table.))
  63. The nearest reflective surface (ponds, armor, any reasonably-shiny metal objects qualify if you are away from actual mirrors) bulges and distorts. Gnarled hands reach out of it and stretch it like a rubber band. A twisted facsimile of you with a malevolent grin clambers out and makes its way towards you. You KNOW, deep down in your gut, that this thing wants to kill & replace you and nobody will ever be able to tell the difference.
  64. The sky is the sea, and it's falling towards you.
  65. The sounds of revelry approach! When you look, however, you see a carnivalesque parade of unspeakable horrors. The GM should describe in obscene detail the things gibbering, waving flags, eating humans-on-a-stick, singing songs of madness, &c.
  66. The stones are talking to you, but they're strangely supportive and approve of your dress sense.
  67. The sun and moon are eyes of some colossal being... watching you, personally.
  68. The sun is being pushed across the sky by a giant dung beetle. The beetle hates you.
  69. The world around you is incredibly fragile. A sudden movement could cause you to rip through the ground like it was paper and plummet to the center of the earth.
  70. The world blinks out of existence, and you are floating in an endless void.
  71. There are horrible monsters, the size of a large dog, roaming the streets. Nobody else can see them. They regularly steal things, which people seem to assume they have dropped and lost in a completely innocuous way. They also eat people, and nobody seems to notice.
  72. There is a huge shadowy creature lurking nearby, stalking you. If you point this out to anyone else, it manages to hide just before they look in the right direction.
  73. This region is haunted by everything that has ever died here. This includes huge swarms of ghostly bugs.
  74. Unusually aggressive crabs scuttle out from hundreds of tiny, previously-unnoticed trapdoors and menace you with surprisingly dangerous-looking claws.
    This is actually a fiddler-crab mating ritual. So maybe the crabs aren't menacing you, exactly...
  75. Up is down, east is west, north is left, south is out, right is backwards in time, and in no longer exists.
  76. You are a turtle. Drop whatever you're doing and do turtle things instead.
  77. You are acutely aware of the movement of the tectonic plates, the rotation of the planet, the slightest currents in the air and water, the sound of sand grains moving against each other, and every other natural process that people normally do not notice. You cannot focus on anything else.
  78. You believe very strongly that you are dead and beginning to rot.
  79. You can hear the GM and the players talking at the table.
  80. You can hear the incomprehensible-yet-clearly-malevolent thoughts of the massive mollusk hive-mind a mile below the earth.
    The ALL-CONSUMING MOLLUSK HIVE-MIND is the true master of the earth, and it thinks you surface-dwellers are but IRRITATING PARASITES.
  81. You have an incredibly vivid vision of the distant future. It may or may not be accurate, but it is horrifying on an existential level. You cannot move or react to anything until the vision is complete.
  82. You have an incredibly vivid vision of the distant past. It is accurate in every particular. You cannot move or react to anything until the vision is complete.
  83. You have an incredibly vivid vision of the near future. It is accurate in every particular. You cannot move or react to anything until the vision is complete.
  84. You have an incredibly vivid vision of the near future. It is completely fictional, and seemingly designed to play into your most paranoid fantasies. You cannot move or react to anything until the vision is complete.
  85. You have an incredibly vivid vision of the recent past. It is accurate in every particular. You cannot move or react to anything until the vision is complete.
  86. You have an incredibly vivid vision of the recent past. It is completely fictional, and seemingly designed to play into your most paranoid fantasies. You cannot move or react to anything until the vision is complete.
  87. You have microscopic vision; your eyes seem stuck on 500x zoom. The microscopic world is bizarre and you can't really get a grasp on what's going on at the macro level when you can only see tiny bits of it at a time.
  88. You suddenly notice that you're standing on a sleeping dragon. Hold... very... still...
  89. You suddenly realize the nearest person is a beloved childhood friend in disguise. If there are no people within eyesight, this applies to the nearest living thing. You cannot be dissuaded from this belief in any way.
  90. You're turning to stone. You have maybe five minutes before you are nothing but a statue.
  91. Your arms, legs, and neck are all growing longer at a rapid pace. Your hundred-foot-long-legs are too clumsy to control, even if you could see what you were doing from atop your eighty-foot neck.
  92. Your ascension to godhood is imminent. Remain still and await apotheosis. Dramatic poses are acceptable.
  93. Your blood is made of ants. They bite.
  94. Your digestive tract is full of angry hornets. Sit down, keep your mouth tightly shut, and don't move; it'll be so much worse if they get out.
  95. Your ears have turned into bat wings and your head is flying away. While you struggle to get control of the wings, you pretty much have to accept that your body below the neck is a lost cause, as it's already somewhere out of sight behind you and you can't access the muscle systems anyway.
    From the 2e Monstrous Manual.
  96. Your limbs detach themselves and crawl off to take care of their own inscrutable business.
  97. Your shadow is not your own.
  98. Your skin is independently alive, mobile, and it hates you.
  99. Your teeth begin carrying on a vicious debate about impenetrable skeletal politics. A few of them “storm out of the room" by uprooting themselves, sprouting legs, and either hopping onto the ground or stomping off down your throat.
  100. Roll twice; reroll contradictions. Both are happening simultaneously.
You have my permission to use this, and any other resources on this blog, as long as you tell me how it went.

1 comment:

  1. THIS IS PERFECT FOR MY PLAYERS EATING MUSHROOMS

    ReplyDelete