11 thoughts on “What are you doing to determine treasure in Freebooters? Using the DW treasure table, or something else?”

  3. No dumb questions!  I just re-found the PW treasure stuff the other day.  For the first few sessions, I was just winging it.  I’ve got one group ready to level up to 2nd with about 300 sp stashed each, and another group that just hit 3rd who have 4-500 sp stashed and a magic sword.  It’s kind of hard to tell if I’m being overly stingy (my players opinion) or overly generous (my own instinct) 🙂

  7. Michael Prescott I had a chance to use the PW treasure tables last night, and thought folks might be interested in how it worked.  The party were headed to a a burial mound where a famous pirate captain had been buried in one of his ships along with a bunch of dead crew members enchanted to rise as undead if the mound was disturbed.  I made the crewmen a zombie hoard, and the captain a Spectre. The Spectre’s damage die was a d10. I decided he was a hoarder so took the best of 2d10, and since he was a leader I added +1d4.  I had the players roll and they ended up with a 9, which was a chest with 3d6X100 sp worth of coins and gems.  They rolled a 7 on the 3d6 roll, so the chest was worth 700 sp.  For the zombie I arbitrarily decided that they’d get 2 rolls of their damage die of 1d6 (I planned for 2 groups of 6-8 zombies each in the mound).  They rolled a 4 and a 5 for a small valuable art item and a minor magical item.  For the art item, I had them roll on the specific item tables and got an orb, sigil, or rod.  I interpreted this as a necklace on the body of the pirate king with his personal symbols (possibly useful when dealing with modern pirates).   For the minor magical item I had them roll on the PW Details charts for magic type and Element and got “summoning” and “water”, so I put in a necklace that summons 5 small water elementals (3 inches tall).  Finally, I wanted to set up for future maritime adventures (our campaign takes place in an archipelago), so I had them find a set of nautical log books (I treated these as a “bag of books” but only useful for nautical questions) and an old chart of the region showing some adventure locales on the outer islands.  Of course, for all of the die rolls I didn’t tell the players what they were rolling for, I just asked them to make the rolls while they were copying their info onto new character sheets.

  10. I’m a big proponent of “simulationist” play for Freebooters, which for me means interpreting the dice as honestly as possible within the context of the campaign. In our current game, the party scout elected to “make a Discovery” on his Scout Ahead roll, and their Discovery generation rolls led to the unearthing of a temple to an ancient God of Balance. They rolled a large dungeon with 4 themes: rolled “Rot and Decay” and “Unspeakable Horror” x3. I took multiple rolls of “Unspeakable Horror” to mean the horrors were extremely powerful (and the PCs are still 1st level).

    The session ended shortly after discovering the temple, so I had a few hours to prep before the next session. I rolled up the horrors (starfish demons of chaos), decided that the God of Balance had imprisoned them long ago, and that the temple had been built on top of their prison to keep them contained. The upper level of the temple is mostly harmless with various clues to discover, but things get harsh fast as soon as they figure out how to go deeper.

    There are a few minor critters to face, but the real threats are the 12 demons themselves and the undead sentinel charged with guarding the sealed door to the prison that contains them. Part of my prep was writing these up and rolling treasure using the treasure table. I made the conscious decision to place some of the treasure on the upper level of the temple, where it would be unprotected and easy to plunder. So they found a 18″-diameter silver “moon” disc (1 weight, 320sp) and a similarly-sized gold “sun” disc (2 weight, 1600sp). I first pictured the objects, then estimated their value, then subtracted that from the total coin value I had rolled for the monsters. Not something easy to do on the fly, but the treasure rolls are a great guideline for my prep. The rest of the treasure manifested as the 4 swords carried by the 4-armed sentinel and the 4 elemental orbs acting as “locks” for the seal that is holding the demons back.

    They found the discs fairly easily (and broke the gold one in an act of clumsiness, reducing its market value), and could have just headed back to town at that point, but their appetites had been whetted, and in true treasure hunter fashion they decided to push on.

    One crushing wall trap and a horde of acid-spraying giant ants later, 3 of them are on their way back to town with the broken gold disc and 3 of them are trapped below, having found their way to the center of the labyrinth that surrounds the demon-prison.

    The 3 trapped PCs are spying on the undead sentinel from a distance, trying to figure out what’s up with that stone thing it’s standing on. Is it a way out? I am so looking forward to seeing what happens when they disturb the elemental orbs and break the seal.

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