May 31, 2025

Episode 19: Lamentation

22 minutes

Miria & Edryk return to Nar with the All-Knowing and another pile of treasure. The All-Knowing reveals a path forward, but will the people of Nar trust Miria enough to risk more lives to help her?

Apologies for the delay! This episode is coming out 1 week late due to extreme illness.

In this Episode, Miria & Edryk both return safely to the village of Nar with a pile of treasure, enough for them both to gain a level. I am borrowing the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons method of handling levelling up for Magic-users: PCs can pick one spell from the PHB they would like to know and roll their INT-based chance to learn a spell. If they do not learn that one, they cannot try it again until they gain a level.

We have a fairly substantial treasure hoard this level, and so I wanted to talk about my treasure generation method.

Swords & Wizardry does treasure generation by taking the total XP value of monsters that were guarding the treasure and multiplying it by a base 1d3+1. With 1gp = 1xp for character growth, this means that on average gold will make up 50-75% of your experience gains, which is about the same ratio as using the original treasure types system.

Once you have that base value, it directs you to a d4 table that will tell you how many coins, gems & jewels, & magic items you generate from a number of sub-tables.

To this I added my own tweaks:

For large numbers of coins I roll +1d100 and then -1d100 to give a number that doesn’t always end in a 0.

In alien treasure hoards, I roll 1d100 to determine what percentage of coins are an alien currency, and then roll an additional d100 to determine how much of that is federation credits, and how much is some kind of hard currency like pressed indium bars. Credits weigh nothing. Indium bars weigh 1/100th of a pund (rather than 1/10th for gold.)

For gems & jewellery, Swords & Wizardry does not give any guidance on how to determine what kind of jewel or gen you have discovered, only a gold piece value: it is up to the GM to decide its description. To make this easy on me I created a simple d4 table: 1: a gem; 2: a piece of jewelry or art object; 3: a piece of alien tech; 4. a piece of alien art.

The treasure hoard in the Fane of the All-Know ended up being:

5,209 gp

3,088 pressed indium bars (1gp ea.)

1,712 Federation Credits

gauntlets of swimming & climbing

7 +1 sling stones

a jewelled urim from the early days of the Order of Stars (350gp)

a trans-com array – alien ship part (123gp)

a large amethyst (480gp)

jade and turquoise necklace made by jungle halflings (540gp)

trance projector, an alien device that projects soothing psychedelic holograms (120gp)

a pair of jade and turquoise earrings made by jungle halflings (3gp)

Miria and Edryk could not carry it all out, and left behind over 2,009 gp

Special Announcement!

If you like Swords Against Madness, I have great news for you!

SvM is now part of the Solo Roleplayers Network, a collaboration between over a dozen solo semi-actual-play podcasts like Swords Against Madness, Tale of the Manticore, Legend of the Bones, Stories from the First Watch, Legends from the Fireside, Errant Adventures, Roll by Myself, A Wasteland Story, The Chronicles of Nephes, and many more!

Come check out our curated list of some of the finest, highest-quality solo roleplaying podcasts out there at soloroleplayersnetwork.com

...more

View all episodes

By Brian C. Rideout

44 ratings