I bought Oriental Adventures to continue my completely unnecessary nostalgia collection of AD&D volumes. I got a pretty nice copy off Ebay. Skimmed through it, thought briefly about what I would even attempt to rip out of it for one game or another. Then I did what I think most people who would get a copy of OA, but who don't actually play AD&D would do: said what the ever loving f is up with the martial arts dreamt about repurposing those cool-ass Events And Encounters for some game or another.
 |
| Maidens and kidnappings and Fires, small?! Oh man things happen in City/Town! And that's just the DAILY EVENTS. |
I guess that's just how some of us roll. On tables. In D&D-alikes. Cause I already have some regional tables that I used to slightly unboringfy the travel in a couple of my games. Granted the ones I've used haven't been keyed to the Calendar, but you better believe that I'll be thinking deeply about that and even possibly jotting down some notes on like receipt papers or something. And then giving myself an excuse to blog about my weird and slightly dumb Calendar.
But that's another post, another day. For this post, on this day, is for sharing! Sharing barely useful tables that I made for portions of the world I'm not even currently using (but can be used for others, and will be once again used I think, eventually).
At any rate, one of the first useful multi-tables I made based on the Overloaded Encounter Die. You know the one, so I'm not explaining it again. Just look it up. It's usable. But this moderately modifiable table was really a d66 table, because under each of the sub-categories I made a little bespoke d6 table specially for the scenario my players were on. It was basically a mountain-crawl. I made a sort of pointcrawl climb that could wind in and out of the mountain, but mainly followed the various most likely paths up to the goal: a Graeshen arsenal.
 |
| Lookit those scribbly things! |
(The last thing my biiiig 5e group was playing before the plague lockdowns. They made it about half-way up the solitary mountain out on the border, climbing it to get to the entrance to a Legendary Weapon Trove, sometimes known as White Plume Mountain. Or whatever I renamed it to in my campaign.)
This was such a useful tool, that when I finally started a new live game some time later, I used a very modified version of the whole thing as a resource for travel. The main General Encounter table would be differentiated dependent on if they were actively searching for something, or if there was a laired or interesting creature nearby.
The differentiation was expanded from an earlier iteration that I use for my Filios setting, where the daytime encounters are rolled on a 3d6, while the nighttime encounters are on a 2d6. That way, some things are never encountered at night, and others rarely during one time-frame or another. And one is only, rarely, found at night.
 |
| Another janky map. You remember this one right? FILIOS! Ah! Ah! |
Rolled a 2d6 for nighttime encounters, and 3d6 for day. It is probably pretty obvious that the creatures and peoples were either specific for the setting and homemade, or reskinned from some more or less standard critter.
2. The Fisher unique
3. Ooblef 1d2
4. Djinn 1
5. Lamia Tuceros 2d6
6. Scarlet Pool 1d6
7. Cultists 3d6
8. Wolfrat Pack 2d6+2
9. Patrol special
10.Noxen 1d20
11.Travelers 2d6
12.Vespoids 4d20
13.Caravan special
14.Kindmen 2d6
15.Avedilla 4d6
16.Heretic Cataphract 1
17.Noble Ghouls 3d3
18.Sphinx 1
Going to run into cultists a lot at night. And oodles of things that live out there during the day (goblins, people, or wasps effectively). Simple, but it worked well for me, giving a slightly different flavor depending on the time. And far less messy than the resource die thing up there, though without the environmental specificity, too.
But I do like a custom table. And I do like the weird sliding scale die roll to go with a particular situation (be it time or some other quantity). So on one of my next locales I cooked up, the small hexcrawl I call Confluence, an island full of portals upon a sort of Astral sea, I had some ideas to table out encounters and hazards. These would come up specifically while traveling, and would be modified depending on whether or not the players were actively searching for locations, creatures and monster encounters, or just passing through. I would also modify the roll slightly if they were near some big set-piece locations, or important lairs. Otherwise, I'd determine on the fly if traces were found, clues, hints, or ruins with writing and scripts, maybe rumors depending on where on the chart I rolled. A bit loose, yes, but that gave me some flexibility.
Rollin 2d6 for Location favored encounters, 2d6+6 for general travel, and 2d6+8 for more Creature-centric encounters. On my actual table I wrote a helpful bracket along the corresponding parts of the table, but I'll just reproduce the numbers here,
2. LEGENDARY LOCATION
3. Unique Location
4. GATE
5. Set-piece location
6. Settlement
7. Ruins
8. Settlers
9. Adventurers & Rivals (exploring)
10. Monster by terrain
11. Beasts
12. Monster by area/region
13. Adventurers & Rivals (engaged(?))
14. Elfkin
15. Trollkin
16. Endjinn
17. Dark Fire
18. Unchanging Fire
19. Unique Encounter
20. LEGENDARY BEING
The final thing that sort of brings everything together for me are the Regional Encounter Tables. These are just a slight expansion on the overloaded encounter die. I threw together the tables with results dependent on the 6 primary regions in Confluence so that there was a minor custom weighting to the results, and this worked very well for me. So well that I basically use these for similar environments in other games if the players are traveling for any length of time.
The Template:
1. Resource (use: typically food or water, though it could be other supplies)
2. Fatigue (save vs. whatever; exhaustion unless rations consumed)
3. Environment (weather, but also portents of nearby locations, aftermaths of conflicts)
4. Hazards (you know: appropriate to the area. Or not)
5. Traces (probably just roll on the encounter table, of course)
6. Encounter!
Hearth & Hills Flatlands & Forest Trackless Jungle
1. Resource + Resource + Resource+
2. Resource Resource Resource
3. Resource Fatigue Fatigue
4. Fatigue Environment Fatigue
5. Environment Environment Fatigue
6. Environment Environment Environment
7. Environment Hazard Hazard
8. Hazard Traces Hazard
9. Traces Traces Traces
10.Traces Encounter Traces
11.Encounter Encounter Encounter
12.Encounter+ Encounter Encounter
Broken Lands Bitter Wastes Desolate Plateau
1. Resource Resource Resource
2. Resource Resource Resource
3. Resource Resource Fatigue
4. Fatigue Resource Fatigue
5. Fatigue Fatigue Fatigue
6. Fatigue Environment Environment
7. Environment Environment Environment
8. Hazard Hazard Hazard
9. Hazard Hazard Traces
10.Hazard Traces Traces
11.Traces Encounter Encounter
12.Encounter Encounter Encounter
A "+" on the table means a helpful circumstance for the travelers; help or a replenishment of rations for example. I noticed there wasn't too many on there. Oh well.
Obviously, I could just use the 6-sided table, since the differences aren't so pronounced, but it skews the rolls just a teensy bit, and it's pleasing to me to roll on them. And, like I might have mentioned. Everyone likes tables! Right? Right?!
No comments:
Post a Comment