AP Rumor Mechanics

[Skeld]

I love rumors in an adventure. They mess with the players, muddy the water, and let them draw erroneous conclusions. Various AP volumes have used rumors, but they could be beefed up.

In a homebrew campaign I ran years ago (started under 3e and transitioned to 3.5), I used rumors extensively at a couple points in the campaign, notably when the players were trying to figure out their next move or about to make a move (such as equipping and heading out of town to explore the old castle or whatever).

I would have a list of one-line rumors, from strange or absurd (DC10) all the way to highly insightful (DC30 or so). Each character would get to learn 1d4+ChaMod (min 1) rumors. Each rumor was a Gather Info check (which would be Diplomacy now) rolled in secret by the GM (so the player doesn't know how good the info is on a 1-20 scale). Results of less than 10 resulted in the player learning nothing. Rumors on the low end tended to be false or, at best, misleading. Rumors on the high end tended to be true, but might have an important detail missing. Combining these various rumors could give players insight into something they otherwise might not piece together on their own, or send them chasing a red herring. This gave socially-oriented characters a moment to shine out of combat and this worked exceptionally well in a murder mystery adventure that was part of the campaign.

I'd like to see more of this kind of thing included in APs. I'm not hung up on the mechanics, I'm more interested in seeing the authors/devs include more rumor material into individual adventures (especially urban adventures).

-Skeld

EDIT: "Results of 10 or lower" to "Results of less than 10"

[Evil Lincoln]

Nice!

[Elorebaen]

More rumor tables, please. Could not agree more.

[Mr. Pleasington]

When doing rumours I've always had pretty good luck by writing down a good mix of rumours on slips of paper, with a good healthy amount of false ones and nearly true ones mixed in, and placed in a bowl. The better the Gather Info check was the more rumours the player got to draw and read.

[Joseph Wilson]

Elorebaen wrote:

More rumor tables, please. Could not agree more.

For anybody looking for more of this kind of stuff, I highly highly recommend Richard Pett's Your Whispering Homunculus from Open Design.

[Set]

The best vampire LARP I played in had rumors handed out every month based on your areas of influence. If your character had medical and transportation influences, you'd get rumors about something funky going on in the big dig tunnels, and the disappearance of some medical research, etc. Politically connected folk would get different rumors, and the more 'dots' you had in a particular area of influence, the more detail or juicier rumors you'd hear.

In PF, tying rumors into factions and your rank in various factions or organizations (such as your church, for a cleric, or whatever thieves guild you have ties to, for a rogue, or mercenary guild or wizard's academy or whatever), could be cool.

OTOH, it would be a big change to tie *everyone* into some social groups, family structures, barbarian tribes, monkly schools, guilds, academies, sorcerous bloodline organizations, druidic circles, witchly covens, churches, organizations, merchant clans, etc. and give them strong motivations to be something other than just the typical gangs of 'murderous antisocial hobos' that the average adventuring party has traditionally been.

[angelroble]

In the CotCT AP i'm using an excel sheet to generate random numbers. I take some of them and look in the Korvosa guide which pages those numbers correspond. For ex. if the number is 17 I look at the page 17, which has information about two taverns and the temple of Asmodeus. Another column in the excel sheet generate the row number, for the case I am not quite sure of the subject of the rumor. For ex. the row reads "Most of the prof its made by the semi-independent Gilded Orrery funnel directly into the Acadamae’s coffers." Third to sixth column have random Diplomacy rolls for each of my players. Seventh have a formula that tells me if the rumor is false, depending on the rolls, but this is not definitive if I don't think it should.
I come up then with a rumor, like "Gasta Weagra, the owner of the Guilded Orrery and niece of the Acadamae's Headmaster Toff Ornelos, is making awful deals, and the shop is near to bankruptcy. Ornelos is really upset". I sometimes mix true and false information, if the diplomacy rolls have been both low and high.
Sometimes I use not the city guide, but one of the books of the AP, the Inner Sea guide, etc.