There is an addendum that provides a clarification to this blog post.

For the new year I thought I’d start off with a new series. Reviews of RPG rulebooks and to a lesser extent adventure modules are a dime a dozen. But what about the random tables? There is a strain of thought in the RPG scene (not one I personally share fwiw) that the value of any RPG material are the random tables it provides the GM. There are plenty of blog posts with random tables about all manner of things that can be imagined. What this series dares to ask is how do we feel about these tables?

Methodology: Roll on the table 3 times. Do any subrolls if necessary. Write out thoughts on if I’d use this/how I would use it.

To start off the series I thought I would start with one of the workhorses of the RPG: an overland random encounter table. I have selected the random encounter table for the Ruislip area for Luke Gearing’s Wolves Upon the Coast hexcrawl. I chose this particular table because I’ve always admired Luke’s work, but from a distance. On one hand I really like his overall approach to writing for settings and running RPGs, but his work is typically in the service of settings with grotesque displays of violence (think Blood Meridian, also a work I admire but don’t love) that goes beyond what I’d want to run with. So this gives me a chance to evaluate something I probably won’t actually use. You can see the information about the Ruislip setting here.

The Random Encounter Table

This is the procedure, from the previously cited link:

Encounters

Every 12 hours, an Encounter roll should be made. Use the location to determine goals as needed - most do not wander aimlessly. If an entry does not appear in Volume 2: Monsters &, use statistics for Bandits.

Do not roll encounters for Island hexes.

d100 Encounter
1-2 2d20 Bandits.
3-4 1 Druid and 1d6 Fanatics.
5-6 1 Priest and 1d6 Faithful.
7-8 Merchant carriage and 2d6 guards.
9-10 Herd of deer, 2-in-6 stalked by 3d6 hungry wolves.
11 1d100 heads of cattle, 1 herdsman per 20.
12 Conflict - roll 2d20, one for each side.
13 Corpse - roll 1d20.
14 [If Adjacent to 03.07] The Ogre from 03.07.
15 [If Adjacent to 01.09] The Manticore from 01.09.
16 [If in Northern Ruislip] The Griffon from 05.05.
18 [If Night] 3d6 Orcs from 03.11.
19+ No Encounter.

I roll 3d100 and get the following results: 45, 100, 55. Looks like the party will have had an uneventful day and a half of overland travel! This is, of course, not particularly unusual for a random encounter table, which is typically a 1-in-6 chance of an encounter happening, e.g. ~ 16.5% chance of an encounter. This roughly corresponds to that, with only 1-13 definitely being encounters, and 14-18 being conditional on if encounters happen or not.

As is typical for works from Luke Gearing, it expects a certain amount of buy-in from the GM, e.g. you should have read the book beforehand, this isn’t something you can simply run without having consulted it beforehand. You are to “use the location to determine goals”. So, as a GM you may want to be making mental or written notes about these encounters as you read the hex entries. I think this is nice. If your job as a GM is to engage your players with the material, its nice to have material that engages the GM.

This table also combines the roll for if there is an encounter with the encounter result in the interest of reducing the amount of dice rolling, a practice I greatly approve of! However look at how the corpse and conflict entries are handled: You roll d20s to elucidate the results. But certain rolls will require more rolls. If I am rolling up a conflict and I roll up a druid and some fanatics, and then corpse well… I don’t really have a conflict at this point. Or what if I roll up a conditional where the condition isn’t met, or no encounter? Or if I roll up a corpse and roll conflict? All these results either require that I as the GM make some arbitrary decision in the moment, or else I reroll. Making an arbitrary decision could be okay, but you might feel when you do this that you are putting your thumb on the scale in some way, so depending on your playstyle preferences this might not be desirable. And our goal was to have less dice rolling, so having to reroll until we get sensible results is annoying too.

What I would do to fine-tune this table:

  • Possibly include some sub-table for corpses
  • Change the roll for corpses/conflicts from d20 to d12, and move the conflict out of the 12 slot to somewhere else. It reduces the range of possibilities, but in exchange we guarantee immediate, usable results.

That does it for this entry. If you have a random table you’d like me to write about, feel free to message me on Bluesky @semitext.xyz

Addendum: I just looked at the PDF for the Ruislip section of Wolves Upon the Coast, and noticed the random encounter entry is structured significantly differently from the one in the blog post. The modifications make the criticisms I had of the table completely moot, conflict and corpse rolls are higher than 20, so there is no ambigutity about those rolls anymore. It also makes encounters more likely than the one in the blog post. Instead of a 19+ being no encounter, it is now a 91+ that is no encounter. The odds for conflict or corpse encounters are increased, and the conditional encounters are greatly increased. All these changes make a lot of sense to me. There’s cool stuff that can happen in these encounters, so upping the odds of them occurring makes sense. In the blog post version, the odds of the conditional encounters was basically non-existent since you have a 1% chance of rolling it, and the condition has to be valid.