Thursday, July 2, 2020

Random Wandering Monster Table for Episode 8

In Episode 8, the party encounters giant rats, but it could have been one of several other discoveries/monsters. Here's the table I used.


1 Evidence of Raphinfel’s passage
2 5-9 Giant Rats
3 3-6 Kobolds
4 3-6 Giant Spiders
5 2 Sprites
6 5-9 Giant Centipedes
7 3-6 wolves
8 3-6 stirges
9 1-4 Gnolls
10 Abandoned Hut – small chance of treasure inside



In a very early episode, I complained that the wandering monster tables in Basic D&D made no sense. I now realize that they are for dungeon crawls only and that the Expert rules contains the outdoor encounter frequency chances. Not really well organized, is it? My ruling was to make one check a day. Expert rules stipulates one per day and one per night, so I got it wrong, but ... it's no biggie. Rulings, not rules, right? That's the OSR way. I might switch to the official ruling or keep my own in the future - time will tell.

5 comments:

  1. I did a quick scan of the blog but did not see it, so forgive me if you posted this somewhere.

    Do you have a consolidated house rule post?

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  2. Not yet, Matt. I have my own notes, but I haven't compiled everything into an easy-to-read document. I could see that happening in the future though - it's a 'Manticore Hack' in a way.

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  3. No chance to meet goblins in a Forrest infested with goblins, but kobolds and gnolls are random encounters?

    So what do you think about the old BECMI random encounter lists where there are multiple tables? I’m referring to ones where you roll and get “Humanoid”, then roll again on the humanoid table. Such a table could have kobolds and gnolls, but would presumably have perhaps 1/2 the results being some kind of goblin encounter.

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  4. A good observation, Holy Moley. Not sure how far into the story you are and I don't want to spoil it, but to answer the question, I might have to a bit: the forest isn't infested with goblins - actually there's a very specific number there and mostly all in one location. Yeah, they could have been on that table, to be sure, but the forest wasn't lousy with them. Thx for the comment! :)

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