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I am currently working on fairly generic (Monster Manual only) but extensive random encounter tables (is that contradictory?).
One thing that I would like to see with this little project of mine is to include a fairly generic non-combative encounter table because I don't feel that every encounter a group faces need be a potentially lethal one.
What ideas do people have for fairly generic non-combative encounters? Looking for "good" and/or "neutral" (maybe "bad"?) encounters without the need to look up a whole lot of stats from the books.
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Hmm...
A handful of merchants with a broken wagon.
A shepherd with a large flock of sheep.
(In suitable environment) a stampede of herd animals.
A wandering bard suffering from snakebite (or other poison effect).
A band of gypsies that may try to rob/swindle the PC's.
A cranky treant.
A small band of soldiers on patrol.
A hermit gathering herbs.
A mischeivous fey.
Are those the sorts of things you're looking for?
Oh, one more... hippies.
There have been some really good campaign workbook articles in the last year with things like this.
Check out your dungeon back issues. Some of them are ideas for adventures in and of themselves.
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I recall that there are several Campaign Workshop: The Journey articles with ideas for this. Check out 116, 121, and 122 in particular.
Thanis Kartaleon has an index of the CW articles elsewhere on the boards.Edit: Dash- I see that evilturnip made the same point at the same time.
Thank you for the reminder of the articles (I will look at them again). And thank you Thanis for compiling the list. Very helpful.
The problem with the lists is that, while great, they don't have a lot of encounters. In order for this to truly be random, I will need at least 100 different encounters. Any less than that and it could be very possible for the group to come up to the same thing a number of times -- "Gypsies ?"
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Hmm...
A handful of merchants with a broken wagon.
A shepherd with a large flock of sheep.
(In suitable environment) a stampede of herd animals.
A wandering bard suffering from snakebite (or other poison effect).
A band of gypsies that may try to rob/swindle the PC's.
A cranky treant.
A small band of soldiers on patrol.
A hermit gathering herbs.
A mischeivous fey.Are those the sorts of things you're looking for?
Oh, one more... hippies.
This is exactly the kind of thing I am looking for.
Although I'm not sure about the hippies -- zombie hippies maybe...
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a big deer with a tremendous rack of antlers
a fire wood collecter, stooped under his load of wood
a line of flaggelant pilgrims
a dung collector, with a wagon full of dung
3 young nobles, out for a ride and a bit of sport
a goblin scout, disguised as a leper, with a bell on his staff
two swineherds; one is dressed as a jester
a charcoal maker, sitting by his fire
5 drunken mason journeymen wondering if they are on the right road to the town
1 bawdy goodwife with a wagon and a broken wheel
6 capering minstrels and their female companions
a shifty-eyed nervous man wearing a cape, the cowl pulled tightly to his mouth.
Aye, aye, this is bloody foon!
A unicorn passes before them on the path, followed by a dozen wolves in hot pursuit
A flock of bats crosses overhead, obscuring the moon
A feral cat struggles with a huge rat
A dryad sings stories of the forest
A cluster of Giant Stag Beetles is devouring crops at an abandoned farm
A gryphon contentedly munches on a recently slain deer
A small party of kobolds laden with goods offers to trade some traps for a few days rations
A widely swath with signs of regrowth indicating passage of a large beast a few months ago
A shield guardian paces defensively around a corpse (its former master, whose last command was "defend me")
A weasel and a snake struggle nearby
The thundering of a herd of wild horses in the distance
A wolf snarls, caught in a wolf trap
A cunning trader with a cape of scarlet travels in a fortified wagon
A half dozen halflings lie in the grass, passing a pipe and munching on a huge basket of food
A courier rides half dead from a blow to his side and an arrow stuck through him
A royal courier bearing sachels of mail thunders by, ordering everyone to make way and barreling down the center of the road
A young man sits on a stool in front of his tent and hails passerby, offering to read their palms
Seven silver coins lie in the path, alongside dried splatters of blood
A farmer travels to market with a large load of hay in his wagon
A petty nobleman stops the characters and asks for gossip from the last town in the direction they come from
A sturdy woman, dressed in a tattered cloak over an apron and kitchen gear, seeks out her missing husband
Far overhead, a pegasus and its rider pass swifly to the south
(You're right, this is fun.)
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A few more, then...
A corpulent brewer driving a cart laden with barrels and shouting drunkenly.
A lost child staring at passers-by.
A formation of geese flying overhead.
Two young noblemen about to commence a duel over an insult.
A young adventurer supporting a wounded comrade.
A cleric of Farlanghn (or similar travel deity) walking briskly along the road willing to aid distressed travelers.
A red fox chasing a rabbit.
A way post that has fallen over.
A young princess and a commoner running away on horseback to elope.
An old woman and a young boy driving a cart laden with cloth.
A handful of mourners escorting a cart carrying a coffin to a distant burial site.
A dead horse along the road, picked over by scavengers, that appears to have been there 3 or 4 days.
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A guy selling geese. The geese goose one of the pc's.
A legless beggar.
A pack of dogs.
An escaped cow with a bell on its neck.
A criminal in an iron cage begs the players for a bit of food and drink.
Two huntsmen on foot with crossbows, carrying a boar on a pole.
A hysterical madwoman.
A flamboyantly robed man rides by in a chariot covered in garish sculpted metal. His driver looks...somehow not right.
RPG Superstar 2013 Top 32
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A pair of adventurers on the side of the road, burying their recently slain companion.
A mushroom circle near a forest guarded by fey.
A bard with a broken leg who has been robbed and beaten by highwaymen.
Someone in the middle of the road afflicted by a temporal stasis spell.
A single orc with a campfire and tent by the side of the road who waves at people and smiles as they pass.
A pair of weeping children who look like they have been running for a long time ask the PCs for help.
Two surly dwarves challenge the PCs to a drinking contest.
A drow turns out to be a normal elf afflicted with a strange curse that made his skin darken.
Petrified people with terrfied looks on their faces near a crossroads turn out to just be a gnomish sculpter's idea of a practical joke.
Every time the PC's set up campfire pelicans with mouthfulls of water swarm to put it out. (a gnome druid's idea to prevent forest fires)
Hordes of ants follow one of the PCs and harmlessly circle him/her if she stays still long enough.
The PC's wake up to find their facial hair has grown into full waist length beards.
The Pc's meet a vagabond whos memory gets erased every 5 hours
A dryad has a woodpecker that she can't get out of her tree
and it has driven her batty enough to ask non fey for help
The PC's find a very drunk wyrmling brass dragon that needs help finding its' way back to its nest. (On top of being a brass dragon it's a talkative drunk)
An albino raccoon stalks the party for several days picking a specific player to torment and sneaking into camp to pee on his bedroll while they stand watch
This one may be a little over the top. An Ettin's heads have fallen in love and are looking for a cleric to marry them.
They'd better be in Massachusetts...
I think what Bill (and I; I'm hesitant to call it a collaboration, since all I did was propose the idea and do some e-mail correspondance with him) is looking for are fairly "insignificant" encounters. Most of these fall into that category, but some are a little more out there. Good ideas, nonetheless!
I mentioned to him that I thought it was stupid that the RAW suggested that everytime a party meets an NPC, it should be of the appropriate level to them, or present appropriate information or some such.
Things I've done in the past included a list with 4d10 bison as an entry. If I rolled it, I planned on just describing it as part of the scenery as the party traveled.
In another incident, the party was in a jungle, and everyone was getting exciting encounters while on watch, except Sexi's character. He was feeling a little left out, so when I finally told him something was coming through the woods while everyone else was asleep, he was really psyched. He prepared himself to face his fearsome foe, eager to alert the party and inform them of the danger presented by... a dozen monkeys swinging through the trees overhead. In a few seconds, they were gone and their calls retreated into the night once more. Ah, the dangerous life of a brave adventurer.
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To piggy-back with Saern --
While I absolutely LOVE the ideas that have been generated, I/we are looking for things that will help DMs quickly come up with ideas that will give the traveling party things like "that's cool" without too much more than that.
Things like "hordes of ants follow one of the PCs..." are just begging the players to pursue the source/reason for the event making it much more complicated on the DM on the fly.
That being said -- Don't stop those ideas coming. I might compile a list of mini mini mini adventure ideas from a lot of these one liner ideas that I don't use for my initial idea.
Keep the creative juices flowing -- this is great stuff.
Very true; I have always been dissappointed the the Monster Manual is mostly evil creatures; my home generated encounter tables always have some good creatures on them be they a character party; a foo dog; some good fairies like brownies or whatnot; there just isnt a lot of non outsider choices.
Dont forget to put things like extreme weather changes on your encounter table and wierd relics like a giant arm stickin up from the sand about a mile off; just wierd stuff left from other cultures that may or may not be significant of anything.
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While some of these things are entirely appropriate for repeated encounters, unique encounters are a bit different. You might consider an entry in your table like, "unique". Then build a deck of cards each with some sort of unique weirdness: a dust devil made of cold fire, a god slumming as a beggar, a fairy ring with feasting fey, whatever.
Then, when you roll your "unique" entry, pick (randomly or otherwise) something from the deck. When the encounter is over, remove the encounter from the deck.
Of course, rather than building a table at all, you could put all encounters on such cards and recycle or remove as seems reasonable after each encounter. This would allow pre-made encounters with the sort of individual detail that is harder to create on the fly.
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A wandering bard suffering from snakebite (or other poison effect)
A bard with a broken leg who has been robbed and beaten by highwaymen
Heh heh everyone hates bards. Here's some more for your list Moff, handily arranged for use with a D6:
1: A naked and hogtied bard on the side of the road.
2: A bard tied to a tree by children, being assaulted by bees.
3: A halfling bard jammed in a barrel.
4: A bard buried up to his neck in the dirt while kobolds throw stones at him.
5: A bard sitting despondently on a treestump because some bullies took his horse and snapped the neck off his lute.
6: A bard being comically divebombed by nesting birds.
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A wandering bard suffering from snakebite (or other poison effect)A bard with a broken leg who has been robbed and beaten by highwaymenHeh heh everyone hates bards. Here's some more for your list Moff, handily arranged for use with a D6:
1: A naked and hogtied bard on the side of the road.
2: A bard tied to a tree by children, being assaulted by bees.
3: A halfling bard jammed in a barrel.
4: A bard buried up to his neck in the dirt while kobolds throw stones at him.
5: A bard sitting despondently on a treestump because some bullies took his horse and snapped the neck off his lute.
6: A bard being comically divebombed by nesting birds.
I just about fell out of my chair I was laughing so hard. Bravo.
Director of Narrative
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Half a dozen deer erupt from the woods carelessly crossing the road. Moments later a small orcish hunting party cautiously peers from the foliage then crosses the road.
Two children standing near the road beg for food and money while standing in front of a half-burned farmstead.
The PC's find themselves in the middle of a Medival Tournament, yet after inspection the young Dukes find there'd be no ransom gained in taking them.
Calls for help come from a deep hole in a clearing near the road. The area smells of recently dug soil.
Near a river, the party sees a dog swimming the width of the fast current with a large stick in its jowls.
A man follows a pig while it sniffs around tree stumps looking for truffles to sell to a nearby eatery.
A young boy perilously hangs from a thin tree branch. Straw and twigs fall from a nest slowly breaking apart while four bright blue eggs lay splattered on the road below.
A cart lies on its side on the slope off the road. The driver stares lifelessly to the sky as one of his horses whinnies and tries to get up from under the yoke. The other lies dead.
A stretch of road dotted with exposed limestone is littered with broken cartwheels.
A wounded manticore growls from off the road a every passerby.
A barge flows downriver with no crew, but still loaded with supplies.
A porcupine visits camp at night, chewing packstraps and living a few quills in someone's breeches (based on a true story . . .)
Three grigs hide among the willow trees lining a ford, using their ventriloquism to make the trees seem to have a conversation with each other.
The PCs see a hippogriff swoop down and carry off a lamb from a shepherd's herd. The hippogriff is just out of bowshot, but the sheep scatter everywhere, making a difficult job for the shepherd and his dog.
A child calls to a dog in the road, "here doggy!" The dog is foaming at the mouth.
The haystack by the side of the road is moving rhythmically and making noises. After a few moments of observation, a peasant lad and his girlfriend poke their heads out, blushing furiously when they realize that their privacy has been intruded upon.
A trail of grain down the middle of the road continues for a quarter of a mile.
A large caravan of merchant wagons passes, covering everything with dust. Anyone who doesn't get off the road in time feels the lash of the drivers' whips.
A procession of gaily dressed peasants parades an idol or holy relic around the boundary of the village lands.
In the village square outside the local temple, an opera troupe is about to take the stage. If the PCs stick around, they find that their most recent heroic exploits are the subject of the day's dramatic production.
Small purple newts are migrating across the road.
The PCs pass a pond, from which a deafening volume of noise is coming. Close observation reveals the frogs are mating.
A freak gust of wind hits and knocks over a tree just in front of the PCs.
The PCs spot a pair of stone giant youths playing catch on a nearby mountainside.
One thing I do with random encounter tables is to mark off encounters that have already happened and reroll if I get that number again. Alternatively, just proceed down through the list--especially if each one is unique--skipping over ones that aren't appropriate to the PCs' current surroundings. (E.g. the haystack encounter above doesn't work if the PCs are in the middle of a desert).
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Director of Narrative
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Gladly.....
The rumble of hooves, feet and wheels precedes the movement of an army unit on its way home.
When traveling in tropical lands, the party is accosted by a pack of monkeys attempting to grab at anything exposed on the character's person, especially targeting bags and waterskins.
Four gnomes argue over schematics while standing around a large wagon sized contraption with steam rising from a tall cylindrical pipe.
A haughty troupe of elves dressed in brocaded silks turn their noses up at the dirty travelling adventuring party.
A slick rumble alerts the group of a mudslide.
On a cold deserted road a man-sized bundle of cloth reveals two skeletons clinging to each other.
Out of the corner of your eye, you notice a giant dragging three bears tied to a stripped tree into a copse of trees in the distance.
Four sweating slaves carry a veiled litter in the summer heat.
Your boat begins taking on water.
A wagon wheel has broken.
One of the party's horses loses a shoe.
A strap on your backpack rips from its stitching.
Two young elk nudge their fallen mother bellowing intermittently.
Alarmed peeps issue from a grounded nest. Curious characters are dive bombed by a fiesty blue jay.
The sun is blotted out by a huge shadow. A quick and observant character spots a tail disappearing into a low cloud near the edge of the canyon.
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This is the first I've seen of this thread, but I like it.
Old D&D modules used to be full of these, and they were one of my favorite sections to peruse. I remember one from, maybe, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks that involved an encounter with a gnome aboard a flat-bottomed barge being rolled through the desert on a bunch of logs by the gnome's crew. If the party asks, the gnome tells them he had a dream that inspired him to build the boat but, since his desert home was lacking a body of water large enough for sailing, he and his loyal crew were searching for the sea.
From my own experience, I find my players tend to turn every encounter into a combat encounter regardless of how benign the circumstances. I remember one encounter with three children harassing a beggar ending with one kid crippled and another face down in a canal, so I'm a little hesitant to describe things like squirrels storing nuts in trees or even flies buzzing around a pile of horse poop.
