A Spell For All Time: Inaudible Intelligence

 OK, some backstory.

At GenCon, I picked up Matt Finch's "Eldritch Weirdness", along with one or two other items. One item included in compilation of interesting bits of magic for retro-clone style games was a random spell name chart, significantly richer in words than most others I've seen, which tended to have 25 to 50 entries. This has 8 major columns (A through I, without "H", not sure why), with each column having 100 adjectives and 100 nouns, for a total of 640,000 combinations, or about one-third as many spells as were published under the OGL in 2002. (Ba-dumb BUM!)

I had a thought. What if, I thought, I rolled randomly on the chart, and then took whatever I got and evolved it forward through successive iterations of D&D? 

Well, I think someone said "The thought is father to the deed", so, here you.

What did I roll? Did it make any sense? Can I pull this off? I don't know, I haven't rolled yet -- all these things are written live, I hope you knew that.

Read on to find out what happened... as I find out what happens, and write it down!

Midnight At The Well Of Souls

Many great science fiction novels and settings have been turned into RPGs, and also some not-so-great ones. This is not one of the not-great ones; that is, it's one of the great ones. Unlike a lot of great science fiction books, movies, or TV shows, it's also eminently gameable. The novels, five in the original series (which I've read several times) and a bunch more written more recently (which I have not read, but since they were published well after this game, they're irrelevant, and irrelevance never forgets), take place on the Well World, a kind of cosmic lab where the creators of all life in the universe experimented with different species. Think of it as a biological Google Labs. Some things got out of beta and were published, and some things, well, can we say "Google Wave", anyone? In any event, the world was divided into hexagons -- yes, hexagons -- each containing a unique biome and a sapient race, ranging from humans to centaurs to talking asparagus to incomprehensible energy beings, and they all shared the same world, and in some hexes tech worked and in others it didn't, and in some magic -- yes, magic -- worked and in others it didn't, and you can see how a setting like this, with hundreds of races, mixed tech and magic, and a legendary control center (the "Well of Souls") to quest for would be a perfect RPG setting. However, I'm going to bet you haven't heard of the RPG, and as far as I know it vanished rather quickly, leaving behind no supplements. Why? Was it a steaming pile of suck, deserving of a painful death, or was it just in the wrong place at the wrong time? We won't know until we crack open the book and begin!

Quick! Hit "Read More"! We have to begin!