A clock with discrete faces

June 18, 2026

This post is written for Prismatic Wasteland’s Random Blogwagon. I rolled an 18 on the first table (post on June 18th), a 4 on the second (one plain paragraph with no bolding, bullets, or similar nonsense), and pulled a Jack of Diamonds for the third (must reference Luke Gearing’s blog). So let’s get going.

Clocks have been a staple of indie TTRPGs for the past what, maybe 10 years or so? I’ve gotten kind of bored with them as-is for a number of reasons, but that’s only partially their fault. One thing that got me more interested in them again is the prospect rolling under them: for example, if it’s a 6-segment clock, for instance, roll a d6 every time it increments; if it rolls under (equal/under if ya nasty) then the promised outcome happens. This way there’s always a little immediacy to it. What really gets me going nowadays, though, is making each “face” of that clock its own distinct thing. Luke Gearing’s Reputation Tables is a great example of this. I’ve used this in both Corpslayers and NULL_SPACE for bad things: whenever something bad has a chance of happening but isn’t quite there yet, add it to a segment of (or multiple segments of) the “clock”. Periodically you roll against it: if it rolls the number associated with that bad thing’s segment, that particular bad thing is the one that rears up. It gives you both a target number for anything happening and a specific outcome when it does happen, and I love compressing multiple data points in one roll to death so this is like catnip for me. Give it a go! (PS: I’m sure someone’s written about this before and I’m fine with that, there’s nothing new under the sun and so on.)

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