About to start building a lot of random tables for my West Marches game and I’m curious:
Anyone have any good resources on how to create good random encounter tables?
Also, what are your favorite examples of random tables? Mine are Hot Springs Island and Dungeon Dozen (of course!) but I’m excited to read yours.
Also open to folks sharing their tips and tricks here in the thread!
Tod Foley did a tool for this :
" Tabloo - Table Formatting Tool
ANNOUNCER:
Hello, friends in RPG space…
Do you make a lot of tables when designing games or adventures?
Do you find it a pain?
Do you wish it could be somehow… automated?"
It is on Fictioneers
Also, do you know about Hex flowers ? They have various uses, and they’re at Goblin henchman’s.
Rivers and oaks from lincoln green are mainly an aesthetic treatment applied on on random tables, but they can give ideas.
Cool! Will check it out. I’ve seen a little about Hex Flowers but is there a specific article or product I should be looking at?
Goblin hebchman’s site really sums up all about them.
And there are many long threads on using random tables on Storygames (deceased)
The approach I use in Freebooters, which will eventually be formalized into the rules, is to create four d6 tables per region: one table each for Creatures, Discoveries, Obstacles, and Hazards. Here are some examples.
When the PCs roll up a given entry, I mark it off and then refill that slot between sessions. If they roll a number that’s already marked, I use the next one down the list.
To generate the entries themselves, I use the Creature, Discovery, and Details tables to get ideas, and then consider them in context and look for connections and patterns.
I wrote a Hex Flower Guide (Hex Flower Cookbook) which might be useful?
I use Last Gasp Grimoire to make generators which I can use on my tablet as a GM.
I agree that The Dungeon Dozen is great. Some stuff is a bit wacky, so I usually roll two or three times, but going with the flow can be nice challenge.
I also use homemade monster templates which confer extra powers and the monster’s basic tactical approach (geek the magician first, go for the toughest looking enemy etc.) because I run a very lethal game and don’t want to decide who gets eaten next.
I also like the AD&D encounter tables (by climate, terrain) to run a living, breathing world. For my sandbox campaign, I have no use for encounter tables sorted by challenge rating etc.
IMO the best random encounter tables tend to be local inhabitants who can be found wandering. Now I guess you can reverse that if you want to roll and random encounter and then figure out ‘why are they here and what are they doing?’ But, for my part making them ‘wanderers’ with a reason to be there makes them more than just a random encounter.
Griffin Mountain was the first published hexcrawl for RQ, back in the early 80s that had this that I encountered.