Wilderness Notes I: Encounters with Humanoids
I have been looking for some decent generative random encounter tables for a wilderness exploration project. The end goal of these tables is to use random rolls to create an almanac of an area or biome. For example, if your party has encountered the Broken Spear clan, giant spiders, elves, the ruins of Castle Iron Forge, and wolves in the Mossy Wood, then that is what the area is about. However, everything I find is either hopelessly outdated or feels obtuse. So I have been building my own. I started reverse-engineering the 1st edition charts in the DMG, they felt the most complete, but it has been a slog.
One of the pain points is the “encounters with men, demi-humans, and humanoids” sections of the charts. First off, I want to remove the “race as bad people”. I don’t want “orc” to be shorthand for “look at those slightly different creatures, that have their own customs, and are thus up to no good, we should kill them”. In my world, orcs, goblins, and gnolls can be just as dynamic in morality as humans.
Second, I want the random encounter chart to help tell a story, provide plot hooks, or at least some logical consistency. Fighting a giant spider or animal is one type of encounter, but fighting humanoids means each encounter needs an explanation, people don’t just act on instinct.
So I want to break it out into two sections:
What the humanoids are doing? Are they raiding? Patrolling?
Who are these creatures? Are they humans, orcs, kobolds, or a mix of all the above?
What does “Orc” really mean?
Let me give you an example. Let’s say you pull out whatever random encounter charts you have and you roll an encounter of 2d4 Orcs. Instead of using Orcs, let’s use what they represent which is a group of raiders. So instead of using a group of people as a monolith, let’s roll the creatures in the group. Right now, I am using a 2d4 to generate the heritage of the raiders. I like the probability curve it generates.
Ugh. I forgot Gnolls on this list.
I am in a plains area, and I rolled a 5 and 7, which means our delightful group of raiders is a mix of hobgoblins and humans. This is different and it feels like the prompt for a story, which is what I am looking for.
Building a deeper story
Raiders also imply that they are from a place and that they have goals of their own. If you break out the 1st edition monster manual, you find that, in the wilderness, 3d10x10 orcs are the number encountered. This represents their camp. Simple enough, I get a 2, 4, and a 2 on my 3d10 roll and that tells me that the initial encounter of 2d4 hobgoblin and human raiders are a detachment from an 80 person strong clan somewhere in the area.
Here you could break out your Problem or Threat tables to develop the why. Here is a quick and dirty example:
Problems in the raider camp include roll a d6:
Lack of food and water
Overcrowding, lack of building material, lack of able-bodied people
Disease, they are looking for a cure
Threat (1d6, 1 civilization; 2 Magical Animals; 3-4 Insects, 5 Other, 6 Humanoids )
Morale, unrest, or internal conflict.
Missing members
Depending on the circumstances, our raiders may offer quests to intrepid adventures, or just take our heroes’ loot. If rolled a 5 on the list above and, it looks like their issue is morale, unrest, or internal conflict. To mean that means is a leadership struggle in the camp. Maybe the squad leader of the encounter will ask for the character’s help in removing a rival in the camp.
Now we have an interesting group of people, who have motivations and goals of their own, and are now a going concern in the area. Also, there are obvious threads to other entities. Local towns would be willing to pay adventurers to (ahem) settle any issues with the new clan. What our heroes decide to do, well, that’s up to them.
This combined story hook and motivation, create random encounters that are visceral. This in turn creates a more dynamic world and lends more dramatic weight to your random rolls. While this is just an example, this could be applied to all random encounters. Ran into a giant spider? There is totally a nest somewhere. Are the spiders being pushed toward civilization by ecological destruction from beyond? Smells like an adventure to me.
Do you have any examples of well-done, generative random tables? Would you find something like this useful? Let me know in the comments.
