Sometimes magic does not work the way it's supposed to. Sometimes
magic is unstable and unreliable. An example of this in the Forgotten
Realms was during the Times of Troubles. In the Year of Shadows (1358
DR), Between 15th Kythorn and the 15th
Marpenoth the walked the lands and did violent battle against each
other in a bid for world domination. During this time, without a god of
magic, magic destabilised. Spells more often than not went awry, often
with terrible and often fatal consequences.
TSR published a trilogy of adventures for this time, called Shadowdale,
Tantras and Waterdeep. They included magic chaos tables to be used each
time a spell or spell effect is cast. I recently ran a couple of
adventures set in these turbulent times. For this, I expanded the
tables by the addition of 14 new magic chaos tables and a random planar
creature table. These are available below.
The above zip file contains 19 tables. These are the three original
tables (tables 1a, 1b and 1c), with slight modifications, 14 new tables
and a random planar creature summoning table. The roll modifications
indicated in table 1 are to be used in all the other magic chaos
tables. The way I used them was to print out all the tables, shuffled
the magic chaos tables and then each time a spell or spell effect was
cast, roll on the top one and then put that table to the bottom of the
pile. For the random planar creature table, ignore the numbers on the
right. Although they were created with the Times of Troubles in mind,
they can equally be used anytime magic becomes unstable. They were
written for AD&D 2nd edition, but can easily be adapted
for 3rd edition D&D.
