The leapfrogging chain of thoughts which led me from today’s prompt to the thing I’m actually going to write about is too labyrinthine to justify. I’m not even going to try.
Social play tends to be central to the games I run. This wasn’t originally a conscious choice on my part, but rather the emergence of a dominant strategy. As a referee, I don’t like mindless or animalistic monsters, I’m bad at enforcing language barriers, and I’m a sucker for a well-stated argument. My players discovered that these factors mean parley is often the most effective way to get what they want, so they do it a lot. This works for me. I enjoy running parleys, and I’ve leaned into it as my personal style. It’s common for creatures like wolf packs and zombies to talk in my games, just for the sheer pleasure of parley.
In order to better support this central aspect of play, I’ve begun incorporating Objects of Social Significance on my treasure and shop-population tables. I first mentioned this in my post about The Goblin Bazaar, but there was a lot of other stuff to cover there so I glossed over it. When the players visit a shop or find treasure, and I roll “Object of Social Significance,” what does that mean?
The first step is to figure out who this object is significant to. I’ll roll a random creature or faction, and sometimes I’ll instantaneously know what the object should be from that. For example, it has been established in my game that the Boastful Bovines (a faction of horrific cow-horse-human hybrids) are film buffs. They’ve got a working projector, and 6 movies they watch and re-watch ad-nauseum. So an Object of Social Significance for them would be a new film which the players could use to improve their relationship with that group.
For other factions no specific object will jump to my mind. In those cases I’ll usually just roll again, and whatever Object I roll can be Socially Significant to that faction somehow. This happened fairly recently when the party killed a nest of giant centipedes, and discovered Objects of Social Significance for the faction of giant spiders on level 3. The spiders haven’t been developed much, so I rolled for treasure again and got jewelry. This meant that the party came upon a number of spider corpses in the centipede nest, and those corpses were wearing jewelry. The following session the party visited the spiders to deliver the jewelry of their fallen kin, and the spiders were touched by their decency. The spiders now like the party very much—though after getting to know the spiders, the party actually hates them and is waiting for a good opportunity to betray them.
Of course, these objects can also function as normal treasure in varying degree. The jewelry could be sold at any shop in exchange for hard currency if the players didn’t want to bother with its socially significant aspect. There’s nothing wrong with that. Heck, I haven’t done this yet, but eventually I’d like the players to find an Object of Social Significance that they’ll be inclined to keep at their peril. They could find a wand of 100 fireballs with “PROPERTY OF MELCHIZAR THE MALEVOLENT” written clearly on the side of it. They’d definitely keep the wand, and Melchizar would definitely be annoyed if they ever found out.
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