“Minotaur Wonderland”: A modern day Neverwhere type story where, since there are no more Labyrinths, the Minotaur lives in the local Ikea or as I like to call it “the swedish maze”. Surviving on swedish meatballs, cinnamon rolls and the occasional lost child or senior citizen.
This has been todays – Silly Story Idea.
Wounded Civil War veteran Frank Castle is home visiting his family in New York when they’re caught in the crossfire between warring 5 points gangs use the draft riots to try to take one another out. Left for dead with his family, Frank is fished out of the river by a group of body snatchers who plan to sell him to a shady doctor type. The doctor sees hes alive and patches him up and becomes his Microchip…
Its not vengeance, its Punishment.
I have a semi formed idea bouncing around in my head for a story about a greek style hero named “Stabacles” he’s kinda like Hercules, except well, with more stabbing you see…
Yay, more of me babbling about sandbox game bits!
In the talk about overland travel and exploration I mentioned an Encounter chat, and this be that. I’ve broken the sections down into discrete parts that I took into consideration when building the different regional random encounter tables for my game.
As always none of this is me saying “do it this way because it’s right!!” It’s me saying “this is what I’ve done and how it’s working so far.” Once again I’m sure a lot of this has been said elsewhere on the net, but I enjoy jabbering about gaming stuff and the whole sandbox thing has been an interesting design exercise and change of DM style for me, as well as (hopefully) a good experience for my players. On top of that this is what I do for work, so design stuff is always bouncing around in my head, If I don’t get it out somewhere I’ll asplode.
Also I have noticed that a lot of gaming blogs just present solutions in the form of house rules or other things but very few explain the crunch and reasoning behind what they implemented.
We just finished up our 9th session and so far have only had one player death. I suspect that will change though, since due to some people moving out of town, the group will now be running without a cleric/healer of any kind for the foreseeable future. (Insert evil laugh here)
For the purposes of the information below let me define a few terms, partly for my sanity, partly for yours.
The first thing I wanted to tackle was the frequency of the random encounters. I had several discussions with friends back home about this and came to the conclusion that two main things should affect encounter probability, Location and Time. There are definitely more factors that can be applied, but I went with these two partly for simplicity’s sake and partly because they are fairly standard for what I was trying to do. No sense reinventing the wheel if you don’t have to.
I wanted the various regions of my world to actually feel different. Part of that meant increasing or decreasing the number of times per day I checked for an encounter based on the type of terrain the party was traveling through. Right now it’s simply changed by terrain type, but as my game goes on, I suspect I may modify the frequency charts on a more discrete level, eg: The area around The Old Wayhouse only has a chance of spawning encounters at night, or other such location and point of interest specific modifications, possibly even a whole new set of encounter tables. Right now, terrain type seems to be working fine. My players have noticed that they are seeing more encounters in the woods and are careful not to attract attention to themselves when traveling through (more on that later).
The table below shows when I am checking for an encounter based on terrain type. It is lifted pretty much straight out of the AD&D DMG. I may have made some minor changes, but I don’t rightly remember. I guess I could check, but I’m lazy right now.
| Terrain | Morning | Noon | Evening | Night | Midnight | Pre-Dawn |
| Plains |
x |
x |
x |
|||
| Scrubland |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||
| Forest |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
| Desert |
x |
x |
x |
|||
| Hills |
x |
x |
x |
|||
| Mountains |
x |
x |
||||
| Marsh |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
Once again, straight from the DMG for this roll. There are several levels of civilization listed from ‘Patrolled‘ which I believe is a 1 in 20 chance of an encounter at each interval to “Wilderness” (or whatever the term is) which is a 1 in 10 chance of an encounter per interval.
For my game I chose a very black and white solution. Anywhere within 1 day of travel of The Fort (home base) there is a 0 percent chance of an encounter, ever. I assume the powers that be at Fort Kilstead are able to project the force of their guards out from the Fort that far. Anywhere beyond that it’s a 1 in 10 chance before modifiers, so 10%. (see below for more on modifiers).
This means that in one day of travel from morning to night on the Plains/Grasslands the party has a flat 10% chance of encountering something twice, then one more 10% chance again at midnight.
You could easily expand this out to a percentile roll and make the modifiers much more granular. I chose not to because it’s just simpler and quicker for me to just roll a d10.
Take a look at the Forest and Marsh on the chart above, both of them have 6 different encounter times, making them potentially twice as encounter-ey (yes that’s a word) and thus deadly as say the Plains, or Hills. Something I noticed is that my players have picked up on this and thus far have tended to stay on the one road through the forest unless they absolutely have to leave it. They are not excited with the possibility of getting lost in the forest. This is good, the wilderness should be scary. The road doesn’t actually have a lower encounter percentage btw, they just seem to feel more comfortable knowing which direction to run.
As I mentioned before in the exploration blog, if the party is simply moving through the area generally they will only have a flat 10% (1 on a d10) chance of an encounter per interval from the chart above. There are several things that I have been using as cumulative modifiers based on what players do that will affect the chances of an encounter happening. Most of these I tried to keep to a very common sense level as I didn’t want players to worry about things like smoke from a fire on the open plains or group sneak rolls while in the forest and so on. If a situation arises that feels like it needs a modifier, I apply it. Some of the things that I have used regularly in my own game lately.
I have considered other situational modifiers like heavily wounded party members, party size, pack animals etc, but right now the simple method is working reasonably well. I’m sure there are tons and tons of things creative folks could come up with that are tailored to their specific games.
In my Sandbox each region has a number of areas in it. The areas then all have a difficulty level associated with them. I have gone with a straight Hit Dice value for encounters to scale the difficulty levels. I also assume that a party will always be 5 characters and use that as my baseline for the HD values for encounters. Most of the time the encounters will match up with the assumed HD of a 5 player party of the corresponding level.
So for example in a level 1 area, encounters will be between 1-5 HD worth of monsters to play with for any given encounter. Yes, this means that normally most encounters of “equal” level to the party level will be average to easy-ish difficulty. I did this because I wanted to make sure the parties weren’t getting curb stomped every single encounter. From the player perspective, occasionally it’s nice to be the one handing out the beating.
I used a range, capped with “equal” HD to the players because even fights all the time will kill characters, a lot. It seemed more reasonable to use the even fight as the high end for a level appropriate encounter. That said if the level 1 party manages to wander off into a level 6 hex… well, they better run.
Usually this value is a hard value, it won’t change based on player actions, level, henchmen, my mood etc… I’m sure there are some things that could change the difficulty level for an area but the vast majority of the time they don’t change.
| Difficulty |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
||||
| Enc. HD |
1-5 |
6-10 |
11-15 |
16-20 |
21-25 |
26-30 |
HD Ranges by Difficulty
As I’m sure some of you have noticed, once you get around difficulty 5 or 6 the HD pools for encounters start to become fairly absurd. Usually this can be resolved by simply adding monsters to the encounter or obviously bigger monsters. Then there is always the continued solution of “more bigger” monsters… I haven’t had any of my groups stray into an area with a difficulty higher than 2 or 3 yet, so I’m still working on theory with the higher end of the difficulty spectrum. Most encounters will hover around the max available HD for that difficulty level, sometimes going slightly over just due to the way the math works out.
Any Points of Interest in a given area will conform to this difficulty level. As a general rule each region also has an overall difficulty range, for example the Bloodstone Grasslands region doesn’t have any hexes in it higher than level 3. There will be exceptions to this but it’s a bit of a dick move to sneak in something that doesn’t scale properly without giving the players lots of in-game warning and context.
When creating the encounter tables I generally tried to keep a running theme throughout, my forest region for example starts off very humanoid heavy, with goblins, bandits and “wildlife” type creatures, progressing on to an insect theme with giant wasps, the various beetles and moving into Wild Elves and all of their various and sundry minions and pets.
As a guideline for this I went through the Castles and Crusades Monsters and Treasure as well as Gods and Monsters. In addition to these I used the AD&D Monster Manuals 1 and 2 and the Fiend Folio to generate my master list of monsters.
From there I sorted the list by HD, Rarity (based on the AD&D books) and environment. Now whenever I need to populate the difficulty levels in a region I can simply sort the master critter table (in Excel) by whichever fields I want then start filling out the actual encounter table. In practice it’s a bit more fiddly then it sounds, as some monsters have weird HD values or environments that don’t translate well. I think it took me 2-3 hours of steady work to populate my standard forest area for encounter levels 1-6.
Using the old AD&D frequencies for monsters I generated my tables for each area. The frequencies available are Common, Uncommon, Rare, Very Rare, and Unique; I dropped the ‘Unique’ from my tables because logic would seem to dictate something that is “Unique” probably shouldn’t appear on a RANDOM encounter table. If I use those creatures at all they either get moved to the Very Rare category and the number appearing is dropped to 1 or I simply use them in Points of Interest as I see fit.
Monsters across a region will sometimes appear across multiple encounter tables, usually decreasing in rarity and becoming more numerous as the difficulty and encounter HD pool increases. For example in my forest region, wolves start at level 1 (encounter, not player level) as a rare spawn, but by level 3 they are common with the number appearing increasing from 1d3 to 1d6+2.
Using the old AD&D dice model of [1d8+1d12] for a table you get a reasonably even curve to play with. You get 19 entries instead of 20, but that’s fine since it allows for different percentage chances and thus rarity depending on how you populate the encounter table.
I use this website as a resource for the die roll on the encounter tables. As I look at it now I might modify the roll a bit to get a smaller group and thus steeper curve, but for now what I have seems to work ok.
This is pretty straightforward to be honest. Anything I think should be truly unique or one of a kind will get placed into one of the Point of Interest encounters. The word “Unique” pretty much precludes it from being included in a “random” encounter table!.
Points of interest will generally override the encounter table for a given area. If the players camp at The Haunted Wayhouse, the encounters there will be driven by the setup for that POI. Nearly all of my unique locations have their own rules regarding camping, random encounters and such. That said there really isn’t any reason aside from narrative that a unique location couldn’t just abide by the encounter tables already set up.
So, there you have it. My long winded way of explaining how I torture my players with random encounters. Your mileage may vary but hopefully someone comes away from reading that post with something useful. I think the next thing I’ll jabber on about is some of the Point of Interest encounters I’ve worked up. Mostly because the Sandbox game has mostly stalled and I’d like the stuff I’ve written to see the light of day at some point. There’s a thread over at the Troll Lord Games site for posting encounters so that will likely go up there as well.
Thanks for reading, and remember. Heroes aren’t born, they’re cornered.
That’s a bit of a lie actually. I played a fair bit of Basic D&D and AD&D before the “Grey Box ” came out. I had all the boxed sets and probably most of the hardbacks before I got the FR campaign setting, but these books were really what defined D&D for me for a long long time. Dragonlance was cool and all, but it’s story had been told in the Chronicles. The Realms just felt like it belonged to us. I remember driving with my mom from Grants Pass (I think at the time anyhow) to Kirby or Cave Junction to spend the weekends with friends and just play D&D, also run around the woods and throw rocks at each other.
I remember packing the books with me back to South Carolina when I went to spend the summer and gaming with my cousins. So much of my pre-teen, post drooling childhood memory has gaming, almost exclusively D&D and the FR books at its core.
Finding these books at the local used book store makes my nerd bits all kinds of tingly. I can safely say, I probably wouldn’t be making games for a living now, or have the friends I do without these books and others like them.
Ed Greenwood gets a gold star for the day.
I kinda want to start a charity petition to leave the end of ME3 the fuck alone. Cause obviously pitching a fit gets things done, right?
So I’m looking at this .PDF of a Rogue Trader book right?
Whoever made the .PDF messed up. There’s a chapter titled “Chaos Reavers” and the ToC link is mispelled “Chaos Ravers.”
In thinking about it I think I’d actually be more afraid of Chaos Ravers, cause I mean… you gotta think folks who worship the Ruinous Powers throw some seriously fucked up parties.
Two words for you. Slaaneshi Rave.
Yeah, just let that sink in.
So, I’ve been playing a fair bit of the 40kRPG’s here lately. While the system is possibly one of the most convoluted percentile based games I have ever seen, it’s sum ends up being much greater than it’s parts in my opinion. Mostly cause its 40k and I’m a huge nerd for that universe. So, I thought I’d share the backstory for my Rogue Trader’s Dynasty.
I present to you. House Drax.
House Drax is what long established Rogue Traders refer to as “New Money”. A mere four generations ago a successful but rather nondescript inter-system Grox Baron by the name of Percival Sigismund Drax was informed to great fanfare that his family was the beneficiary of an ancient Trade Administratum Mandate. Apparently sometime in the hallowed past, when the Drax ancestors accepted certain contracts of trade with the Administratum there were goals and requirements to be met, upon which time a newly minted Warrant of Trade would be issued and a new Dynasty founded. In addition to this the Mandate also stated that the Administratum would provide a vessel but beyond that the new Dynasty was responsible for crewing and funding any endeavours as it reached for the stars in the name of the God Emperor.
Percival Drax was quite a wealthy man already, but the promise of extending his lineage to the stars was irresistible. Unfortunately despite his vast wealth, he was in the grand scope of the Imperium not much more than a well to do ranch hand. From his home world of Epso Prime in the Satex segmentum he began to call in favors and debts to crew and arm his new Firestorm Class Frigate. One of the debts owed to his merchant clan was from the Adeptus Mechanicus themselves. The Magos local to the system had always highly prized the rendered Grox fat from his herds as a supplement for the standard Mechanicus approved lubricants for their machines you see and had gone to great lengths to secure a steady flow of the viscous goo in perpetuity. Drax knew he would need a proper Engineseer to maintain his new prize and was quick to call in his markers. At first the Mechanicus were… less than willing to commit an experienced Magos to a newly minted Dynasty, however once they learned of the origin of the ship provided by the Administratum; an ancient and revered support vessel that had once served in the Explorator fleet of Magos Thule, the Adeptus Mechanicus decided that they could not allow such an ancient and venerated vessel be led into the void without a proper representative of the Omnissiah on board, purely to watch after the best interests of the surely troubled Machine Spirits of course. Some short months after his request was made Percival Drax welcomed his new Engineser Prime, designation: Octavius Orca aboard ship.
Sadly for Percival and his budding Dynasty, even after liquidating all of his assets and calling in his favors he was still short on funds. He had a fearsome vessel, a proper Magos to maintain it, Astropaths from the local systems but he lacked the finances to secure a proper Navigator. To remedy this he turned to some of the shady folks he had encountered during his time in the Grox Trade. At this point, the only thing left to offer as collateral was the ship itself; which Percival, madly lusting for the inky beyond did so gladly. With his ship outfitted and crewed he set off for the Koronus Expanse.
Tales of daring and trophies of conquest from the time when Percival, now known as “Mad Uncle Percy” led the Dynasty are boundless. For a Grox Trader he turned out to be a quite competent if drunken explorer. The tale of his demise at the hands of Xeno raiders is legend among his home system. The little known true story of him passing out in a gutter on Footfall and drowning in a pool of his own vomit is a very VERY well kept family secret.
Upon Uncle Percy’s heroic demise, the Writ of trade passed to his nephew, one Barnabus Drax who being a less adventurous sort did little to expand the Dynastys holdings or fame, he did however discover a previously unknown strain of Grox feed during his limited travels that increased the reproductive rate of the family herds by 37.268%. It is widely held, especially among competing mercantile families that the new Grox feed contains Xenos taint and that the Drax family is guilty of Xeno-Heresy, however slander of that sort is commonplace among the traders of the Satex systems and no one paid much mind.
Barnabus passed the Writ to his son Augustus upon his death and then things got interesting… During his time as Lord Captain, Augustus Drax was known to deal in all sorts of shady business. To most outsiders it appeared that he was simply taking the easy route seeing as at the end of the day the Drax family was nothing but a bunch of smelly Grox herders.
The truth of the matter, also a well kept family secret is quite different. While Uncle Percy was out exploring the expanse, the debt he had accrued in order to launch his Dynasty had been acquired by some rather unscrupulous fellows. These fellows approached Augustus early after his ascendency to Lord Captain and informed him in no uncertain terms that they were owed a massive sum of Throne Gelt and that in order to pay it off the Dynasty was expected to undertake certain tasks and transport contracts of a less than legal nature for them.
The group in question was a Cold Guild whose preferred means of income was as suppliers for the Beast House. Naturally a Rogue Trader with experience handling animals made sense and fit their needs perfectly and thus they spent no small effort to secure the writs to the loans that gave them leverage on the house. Over the course of his tenure as Lord Captain Augustus fulfilled the contracts given to him by the representative of the Cold Guild known only as “Father”. Thousands of feral and dangerous Xeno Beasts were delivered to the Beast House, bribes were paid, profit was acquired. The decades of exploration and excess of Augustus Drax ended abruptly when he over reached. A death world the Trader chanced upon had several rare and valuable species of Xeno predator, the captain struck on the plan of filling his barracks with the things and leaving his regiment of Dynasty troops on planet to establish a colony/beast wrangling beachhead with the logic that with only a few trips from the world to the Beast House the writ could be out of hock to the Cold Guild and free to pursue its own interests.
On the trip back the barrack pens were compromised and the beasts released, flooding the ship with feral Xenos, overrunning the crew and leaving the Deliverance adrift in the warp. Ship records indicate that the failure of the pens may not have been due to mechanical error…
Several hundred years later the ship was recovered by the Imperial Navy adrift and lifeless, the Xeno forms dead from starvation the crew long since dead. The Deliverance laid silent for decades being refitted and repaired while both the Administratum as well as the Dynasty’s shady “investors” searched for the heir to the Writ of Trade. In fairly short order to the pleasure of the Administratum and consternation of the Cold Guild they tracked down one Horatio Aloysius Drax.
Horatio is a well known and respected independent lawman (bounty hunter) and notorious gunfighter in the Satex Sector, he has ties to the sector Arbites as well as managing his family’s vast Grox trade. Needless to say his first meeting with representatives of the Cold Guild did not go well. Unfortunately for Drax all of the Writs of Debt against his house are completely legitimate so for the time being and to re-outfit The Deliverance and get her space worthy, he has agreed to the same terms as his anscestor Augustus. Horatio however is not waiting for the criminal association to tarnish his sterling reputation and is putting plans in motion to free himself and his house from the debt and God Emperor willing make himself a system tug full of thrones in the process and if all goes well maybe do some justice unto the criminals as well…
So, in the nWoD game I’m playing in. My character has decided that it’s a good idea to run around on rooftops with a hoodie, paintball mask and a fire axe hunting vampires. I predict only awesome things in his future.
It isn’t helping that last session he crashed through a skylight and fireaxed the everliving crap out of a vampire, and survived cause the GM botched the vampires attack roll. As far as my character is concerned, he’s freakin BATMAN!!! He’s in for a rude awakening.
I’ve never really understood the appeal of dice towers.
*shrug*
