Friday 18 June 2010

Wilderness encounter tables

Another thing I've got planned, with this work on collating monster lists, is to create some classic D&D style random wilderness encounter tables for Savage Worlds. There are encounter tables in Advanced Dungeons & Savages, but they only include the creatures from Savage Beasts, nothing from the Fantasy Companion, so I thought it'd be a useful and fun project to make some encounter tables using the combined monster list!

I had vague memories of there being a kind of "standard method" for making wilderness encounter tables, which I thought was in the D&D Expert set. It turns out that what I was thinking of was actually in the AD&D 2nd edition DMG. The 2-20 table. Creatures are assigned a place on the table based on their frequency in the terrain type.

2 - Very rare
3 - Very rare
4 - Rare to very rare
5 - Rare
6 - Uncommon
7 - Uncommon
8 - Uncommon
9 - Common
10 - Common
11 - Common
12 - Common
13 - Common
14 - Uncommon
15 - Uncommon
16 - Uncommon
17 - Rare
18 - Rare to very rare
19 - Very rare
20 - Very rare or unique

I also just came across some very nice ideas about including other types of encounters, which would be more campaign specific, but sounds marvellous. It ties in nicely with the classic 1d6 "dungeon room contents" table from D&D Basic, which goes something like:

1 - 2 - Monster
3 - 4 - Empty
5 - Trap
6 - Special

I love that table, and I also love the idea of a wilderness equivalent of it!

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