Example Felltower Rumors

I've been asked a few times about the rumors in Felltower. Here is a sampling of them - these are the ones, word for word, that the PCs heard last session.

They're listed in the order I have them in my file - so the higher ones were lower numbers on the list. When I re-do rumors I tend to leave things more-or-less where they were on the chart. Sometimes I'll just move them around fairly randomly, too. There isn't any purpose to the order of rumors or value depending on their roll.

Rumors Heard 6/4/2017

If you eat a monster’s heart, you can gain its powers.

There are supposedly a few levels of worked dungeons, then it’s all caverns and tunnels below that.[*]

Evil giants are resistant to magic, good giants can use magic.

There are these rust-monster like things with six legs that rust your stuff if you just come close to them.

Some monsters eat corpses and gain the knowledge and powers of the things they eat.

A bunch of goblins got kidnapped in town last week – the watch said they got dragged off the slums, maybe to Felltower.

I heard some guy from Falcon’s Keep is in town trying to hire mercs – some kind of local problem with hobgoblins.[**]

There was a big stir in town that people have been stealing those weird green gemstones some delvers found in Felltower. They’re disappearing without a trace – stolen right off of rings, out of safes, etc.

Remember that old guy, Gort? He used to say, if a door is closed, spike it open. If it’s still open when you get back, close it and spike it shut.[***]

When bugs swarm, they get smarter – some say they’re as smart as men or even smarter, especially if you get enough of them together.

The six-fingered guys could shoot magical lightning, fire, cold and so on from their hands.[****]

There is a level shrouded in eternal darkness – even magical light can’t penetrate it.

The group that used to run the dungeon before Sterick’s day was a bunch of evil wizard-clerics.


Notes:

[*] - This is where "taverns and caves" and thus "the pub level" came into being from.

[**] - Falcon's Keep is the Keep on the Borderlands, named after a low-level adventure in Dungeon Magazine that I liked and used.

[***] - See, Gort's a dungeoneering expert. A good example of a rumor that's mostly there for laughs, but which might remind people of a "valuable" lesson about how adventurers act in dungeons sometimes.

[****] - the PCs have confirmed that, at least for lightning, this is true - they do it with some weird charged gloves.

You can see how these would help build a base of knowledge about the megadungeon. They also reveal things that will occur that seem to violate the written GURPS rules (impenetrable magical darkness directly contradicts the text of, say, the Blackout spell). And they also keep people aware that the world around them isn't static - it keeps generating and re-generating adventure possibilities.

And finally, as always, none of these are marked true or false. I don't decide that ahead of time. Sometimes things I just make up for the rumors turn out to be true. Sometimes the players pervert the wording into something false out of truth and a truth about their delving out of a falsehood. And if something keeps coming up, and the players really latch onto it as something awesome, well, it becomes true and gets added in. So putting (F) after a rumor like a D&D module serves no purpose here.