I'm prepping right now to start the campaign and was wondering how other GMs have been handling the wandering monsters on the Shiv.
James Jacobs writes in the Bestiary that many of the wandering monsters are in limited supply. This makes sense since the island is only 30 square feet and a self-contained ecosystem. Has anyone actually quantified the number of monsters on the island?
The text of the adventure lists 22 Thrunefang cannibals, so we got that number. The winged chupacabra is also a special one of a kind opponent, so that's okay. We could also add up all of the predator dens on the island and get the figures for those creatures. Have you fellow GMs gone this route or just winged it?
Thanks...
I thought about that too, but this is how I'm going to do it.
As you said, we have numbers on cannibals and chupa, so when they are gone, scratch them off the chart and now that's a none encounter
Then for if they clear all the dens of one type of creature, then those get marked off as well.
For all undead, once the curse is broken, then I'll scratch off the undead from the chart.
For me, that's good enough but only because I know my players and I don't think any of them will plan on staying on the island to hunt and kill every remaining creature. (: If they do then yeah I'll need some numbers too!
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Careful: lairs don't just have one monster each. It varies by type, but most lairs have 1d3 of that type of monster. So for every "group" the party killed, I crossed off the nearest lair.
Furthermore, if I ever rolled for a monster that had all of its "nearby" lairs emptied, then I treated that as a "no encounter" (ie "as if already extinct") roll. I figured that most monsters more-or-less only hunt on the same side of the island as their lair. (Exceptions like the chupacabra notwithstanding.)
I made it explicit OOG with my PCs how the rules for extinction worked. This really got them fired up about how the land was going to respond to them. I would encourage being transparent on that issue.
Slightly off topic: I waited until I rolled "no monster encounter" at night before I would introduce any of the "flavor-only" encounters listed at the start of the chapter (glowing seawater, nightmares, chupacabra, NPC doing mischief etc). That way there was always something going on at night: and that made the island feel very alive & hostile to the PCs. (in a way they enjoyed!)
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I waited until I rolled "no monster encounter" at night before I would introduce any of the "flavor-only" encounters listed at the start of the chapter (glowing seawater, nightmares, chupacabra, NPC doing mischief etc). That way there was always something going on at night: and that made the island feel very alive & hostile to the PCs. (in a way they enjoyed!)
Great idea!!! I am totally stealing this....."yoink"
Yeah I like that idea a lot too! Now to make a separate flavor list!
Excellent idea about the flavor encounters! That'll be a nice way to expand the wandering monster table after the players have eliminated some of the threats.
For all undead, once the curse is broken, then I'll scratch off the undead from the chart.
Good thinking about the undead! Are you using an open-ended supply of undead or having the skeletons/zombies wander off some of the shipwrecks? I guess the same would go for the nonlair creatures such as giant centipedes, swarms, vipers, etc. I could come up with exact numbers or just use whatever the rolls dictate. I'll probably go the latter route with these monsters since a lot of the encounters will be noncombat in nature (i.e. monkeys, jungle goats, etc.)