The Explanation of the Hospitality Procedure

I hate camping procedures. They fundamentally don’t make any sense. Camping in the woods is not conducive to healing, you can be assumed to be doing it every single night, and having a procedure for it means that you end up mired down in weird minutae about whether or not a tent is wet or if the hooting of owls wakes the PCs in the middle of the night or whatever.

Not only is that stuff incredibly fiddly, it’s also totally irrelevant to everything I care about in a campaign - which, mostly, is factions, factions, and factions.

However, there’s a totally genre-appropriate replacement for healing-through-camping for the overland travel portion of the game: recieving hospitality from a wealthy local. Keep in mind, modern industrial and post-industrial cultures are basically the only ones in human history NOT to have a tradition of sacred hospitality for strangers – for 99% of human history, in 99% of human cultures, it was standard and expected that you could simply rock up to a (preferably wealthy) stranger’s house, knock on the door, and they’d let you spend the night there if you were a traveler. While this may seem very strange to us now, keep in mind the following:

• pre-modern life is boring, and this traveler has stories of places that you’ve either never even heard of OR have heard of only as a half-legend. They’ll be socially expected to entertain you
• getting to host the traveler is a flex, and all your neighbors will be jealous of your wealth and entertainment. They might actually come over to your house to hear the traveler tell stories
• if you don’t give them a place to sleep, they often straight-up won’t have one. Medieval inns were only a thing in major cities.
• you don’t have a newspaper. The thing that this person heard a week ago in a town a week’s travel away can genuinely be useful information
• you don’t have a mail service. You can give this person a letter, and if they’re going that way they’ll often deliver it. This worked better than you’d think, but still did have exactly the failure modes you’d expect (i.e., you can just... not deliver the letter)

So from a narrative perspective, travelers getting hospitality sometimes makes WAY more sense than travelers camping literally every night; though, probably, there’s a bunch of camping in the background that gets glossed over.

From a game perspective, it’s even better. Rather than having to run a fiddly, big-picture-non-contributing camping procedure over and over again, you can run one or two hospitality procedures per journey (my players don’t stop that often, but will do it now that they know there’s rules for it so it’s predictable-ish, and that there’s a direct mechanical reward) and use them as ways to get PCs to introduce themselves to local wealthy and powerful individuals.

Because I’m sandbox/play-fair/etc to the core, I don’t feel comfortable making up what the happens at the hospitality from whole cloth, so I’ve made a system of 4 tables of d12 event-prompts that, when combined, produce a more or less infinite variety of outcomes. This has seen playtesting, and it works like a charm.

I have my own Wilderness Events Table that I use in my game, and it is referenced below in a few places. I’ll be supplying that in a later post, but I’m sure that you have your own.

I stole some of these from d4 Caltrops. Where I did that, you’ll find a link to their blog.

This post was written for “Feasts and Festivals in Your TTRPG Campaign – RPG Blog Carnival”.

The Hospitality Procedure

The only way you can heal in the wilderness is by sleeping in someone’s house.

If you can get someone to give you hospitality, roll 2d6+Cha Mod (everyone, separately) and consult the following

5 or Less	Roll on “They Hate You”
6 to 8	Roll on “They’re neutral or split on you”
9 or more	Roll on “Your hosts like you”

If you make it past the feast, roll your HD and take that as your new HP if it is higher

If you make it to the morning, in a bed, roll your HD again and (again) take that as your new HP if it is higher.

The player doesn’t roll on these tables. The GM rolls on these tables, in secret.

Your hosts like you (d12)

1. Marriage proposal from the most desirable person in the house, causing a cascade of rivals, obligations, and/or potential blood feuds.
2. A grotesque, insane, or otherwise undesirable household member becomes obsessed with a PC. They propose marriage. Refusal is reacted to with violence on AT LEAST their part.
3. Even if they already have heirs, the host offers to name you as their successor. Incredible opportunity... bound to alienate their ambitious relatives.
4. Forced to arbitrate a petty but venomous dispute between household factions. No solution pleases everyone.
5. They have information you dearly need, and share it with you freely.
6. They tell you gossip – which is (d6: 1-3, completely true; 4-5, half-true; 6, completely false) – roll on the Wilderness Events Table for the gossip
7. Caught up in the Needlessly Elaborate Courtship Rituals of two Youths
8. Scuttlebutt Speaks of a very Generous Bounty being offered on an Outlaw
9. Offered a Reward to Orchestrate a Kidnapping in the most Delicate Fashion
10. Made Reckless by Drink, Host gives you a Tour of their Treasury
11. The most powerful person in the house decides that you are now friends, and they’ll do anything within their power to advance your aims, simply because they like you.
12. Roll on the Weird Table

They’re neutral or split on you(d12)

1. Someone in the house demands to travel with you, because you’re going the direction that they need to go.
2. Someone in the house asks you to carry a message or package to a place they’re connected to.
3. They demand a gift exchange, now that you’re inside. They demand your best item, and give you something they have of roughly equal value. You don’t get to choose what, and refusal means that you either get kicked out OR – if they really really want whatever it is that you have – challenged to a fight over the insult. They will then claim the item off of your corpse.
4. Offered vital knowledge you seek... in exchange for performing an immediate, morally dubious task within the household.
5. You overhear gossip – which is (d6: 1-2, completely true; 3-4, half-true; 5-6, completely false) – roll on the Wilderness Events Table for the gossip
6. Carelessly Overhear an Assassination Plot, due to take place Next Week
7. Interrupt the Host’s Spouse in a Passionate Embrace with Not Their Spouse
8. Roll on the Weird Table

9-12. One of the people in the house tries to use you as a catspaw against another person in the house.

Your hosts hate you (d12)

1. It’s a trap; poison, ambush, whatever – on the GM to work out why, exactly, they want to detain you. If they’re in some way evil, this is easy to work out why. Other possibilities exist. If all else fails, they’ve mistaken you for their enemies or an agent of their enemies.
2. You wake to horns; they hunt you through the grounds for sport (“proving your mettle”).
3. You’re framed for a crime (theft, murder, blasphemy) committed within the castle during your stay. They demand an arbitrary fine, or you face imprisonment.
4. “Gifted” something hideously offensive: armor made of your fallen comrades’ gear, a portrait depicting your disgrace, a diseased animal. If you don’t act grateful enough, they throw you in the dungeon.
5. Expelled at dawn, but the most dangerous household champion waits outside the gates to challenge you “now that hospitality has ended.”
6. Each hour, the space you’re allowed to occupy shrinks, physically forcing you out or crushing you, disguised as “renovations.”
7. Held accountable for a fictional or vastly inflated debt incurred during your stay. Payment demanded immediately in blood, service, or soul. Failure to pay means, you guessed it, a fight or dungeon.
8. They tell you gossip – which is (d6: 1, completely true; 2-3, missing important details, in a way meant to fuck you over; 4-5, half-false in a way meant to lead you astray, even if you know that it’s half-false; 6, completely false) – roll on the Wilderness Events Table for the gossip
9. Got too drunk and told the entire house something that you really really shouldn’t have
10. They arrest you in the night. Roll-under-Wisdom to wake up BEFORE you’re already clapped in irons.
11. Someone at in the house decides that they FUCKING HATE YOU and will do anything in their power to see you done in and all your aims frustrated… as soon as you’re no longer protected by guest-right.
12. Roll on the Weird Table

Weird or Non-Social (d12)

1. Your portrait is painted; later its subject steps from the canvas with murderous intent.

2. The house’s true patron arrives; any slight is punished by confiscation, brands, or oaths of servitude.

3. A perfect duplicate of you appears, accusing you of being the impostor and sowing chaos. The GM is free to decide that the entire castle is dopplegangers, and the real castle is actually another different one nearby.

4. Required participation in a dark ritual. Refusal breaks guest-right; participation has consequences.

5. The lavish meal includes sentient creatures, former guests, or a PC’s ally. Refusing to eat insults the host.

6. Sleeping within the castle allows spirits/nightmares to steal memories or sanity (Roll under Wisdom, or lose 1d6 Wisdom permanently).

7. Two Suitors, vying for the same member of the household, decide to Settle things via Swordplay

8. Celebrations Rudely interrupted by Angry, Underpaid Peasants

9. In a Shocking Turn of Events, you are instrumental in a Doppelgänger Discovery

10. Interminably Boring Poetry Recitals enlivened by a Sudden and Serious Fire

11. Your host dies very suddenly, mid meal. Poison suspected. 50/50 that it actually is. Everyone is kept in the castle until a murderer can be determined.

12. Guest from a random (roll d4)

13. nearby destination also present.

14. urban faction in a city in this region also present.

15. wilderness faction in this region also present.

16. wilderness faction in an adjacent region also present.