How to use the Mystery Generator

This is a mystery generator. Or more properly, a mystery seed generator. Mysteries are not something that can be approached willy-nilly. They need to be planned out beforehand, with what actually happened, motivations, and alibis. So why did I need this generator? To get started. There are a variety of tricks, complications, crimes, motivations, and so forth that drive a mystery. And humans are terrible at being truly random. Once you have your seed, you can come up with details of the crime and the mystery.

MH: Android as Inhuman

Monster Hunter's 5 had four inhuman templates. But the race I wanted to play the most was actually the android, given just a single box of its own and barely mentioned otherwise. So I had to make one.

The android given is actually really close to 400 points -- as they said, roughly equivalent to a hunter. I was aiming for a 200 point template. The creation actually turned out a lot more customizable than I was expecting: the android's way to mental freedom determines a lot of things about it, and I left ways to get back the traits that were dropped that an individual might feel are really crucial to their version of the idea.

Letters as Dice: Gaming Without Moving Parts

This scheme allows one to use a printed (or written, or memorized) section of text as a set of dice.  You take the next letter in the sequence, and look up where it goes in the table. If you see a dash instead of a number, move onto the next number.

This isn't so much an alternate dice system for fun as it is a way to play in cramped quarters with limited resources (no dice, no computer, no cards). Though if you want to use it for fun, go ahead ...

The Table

History

I have a long history of doing 'table-top' gaming without a table. It started on long walks home from school with my brother. We just used the rules by rote. We needed to get home relatively quickly (rather, 2 miles is a long walk and if you dally you never get home), so we couldn't slow down to roll dice. And our dice were precious and we would never risk them out there. So instead we build a spinner out of a piece of foam board, a protractor, and some nice, new bailing wire. This was D&D, so one roll sufficed for most purposes. The first spinner worked well enough. Then it got smashed or something, and we never could make a fair one again.