In my article on lazy hexcrawl building, which I wrote a couple of months ago, I described my process for building out a world from your existing collection of adventures. Like that process, today I am going to share how I spice up random encounter tables beyond the normal X group of monsters doing Y activity.
Sucky/boring random encounters, it’s a trope, we all know it. I’m not here to debate that opinion; there are plenty of articles on that out there. Instead, I’m going to explain how, by looking at the criticism as a design restraint, I came up with a way to spice up overland travel in my current Shadowdark campaign.
My inspiration for better random encounter tables
We’ve officially reached the mid- to late-stages of the campaign I planned a year ago. At this point, the characters have heard at least a few rumors pointing them toward a massive walled city with a golden tower and an ancient ziggurat hidden deep within the deadly desert to the south (I had to use that Tyr map I drew 😉). So I was left with a challenge: how do I make this journey through the desert on a small map feel dangerous and ultimately deadly? So, I went back to my source. I’m a massive fan of Dark Sun, so I pored through my adventure modules and turned to the invaluable athas.org for ideas. And it was reading through an old adventure called “Grave Circumstances” in Dungeon issue #56, where it struck me.
So, without spoiling the whole adventure, this one, like many in the Dark Sun universe, has the characters traveling from one city-state to another, braving the dangers of Athas along the way. And like many of these adventures, the journey is a true railroad; one encounter leads to the next, and so on. But in reading the encounters, they are short, isolated events that could be run independently of one another, with a tiny bit of abstraction layered on top. In-game, they may take a handful of hours to complete, and are far more interesting than your typical random encounter. Take this night encounter as an example:
Encounter #3 from “Grave Consequences,” Dungeon issue #56
The encounter plays out with the characters stumbling upon a Fael, that attacks their camp intending to eat their food if they choose to ignore the sound. I took this boxed text, added it to my random encounter table for the region, and had it play out the following night if rolled. It’s a way deeper encounter that I would have normally made up on the fly from an encounter table, and it was arguably just as easy to gather.
This adventure had five other similar road encounters that I added to my table. With the encounter frequency turned up to 75%, the journey to the city in the desert felt much deeper than standard random encounters, across roughly three hexes. I even took it a step further and dug through some old 4e Dark Sun modules for random city encounters. I pulled 90% of the complexity out of them, keeping the situation and hooks. And so far, it has made my random city encounters more robust as well. My players have been wildly surprised at how deep the random encounters have been, and I get to use all this cool adventure material I have collected over the years—a win-win.
