I am a fan of wandering monsters and random encounters. The concept, in case you were not aware, is that every so often while the party are exploring a dungeon or travelling through the wilderness you make a check to determine whether they have an encounter. The encounter is not necessarily combat, although it often in the sort of combat-heavy games I tend to run.

Some adventures come with encounter tables already. There are times when the check also determines the encounter. Another method is to roll once to see if there is an encounter, and then roll again on a table listing all the encounters. In my own games, I tend towards the latter.

Designing a random encounter table is a fascinating exercise. It is an aspect of world-building: What encounters might happen in the environment? How rare would these occurences be? A dragon appearing 1 in 3 encounters implies a different world from one appearing 1 in 100 encounters!

The most fascinating encounter tables I have seen of late are those of Lost in the Wilderness by Zzarchov Kowolski. These encounters require three dice to generate, but include a creature type, the location of the encounter, plus various modifiers to the environment or motivations of those encountered. It’s a seriously interesting work, well worth investigating. There’s one thing about the tables that is unusual: it has only six slots for creature types – although occasionally they’re split so one slot may have two different creatures in it.

Wandering Monsters and the Environment

When you go into an orc lair, do you expect an elf to suddenly turn up? When you wander down a road in the cold north, how much do you expect a sandworm to attack?

My general take is “not at all”. I seek though my games to provide a world with some aspect of verisimilitude, where the players can plan for an expedition and have some idea of what to expect.

Thus, by selecting the monsters that appear on a random chart, I am also providing a snapshot of what the population of the local area is. Some DMs may do it in reverse: they design the local area, locate monster populations, and then develop the tables based on that. I am currently doing the reverse – selecting monsters I consider fun, and only then thinking about where they might live on the map.

Road encounters are particularly interesting to design. While, in the wilderness, the likelihood of hostile monsters is quite high, on the road you expect that there must be some safety (or they wouldn’t be maintained). So, what groups are travelling along the road? Pilgrims, merchants, soldiers, or farmers? Of a certainty there should be patrols from the various towns and nations, otherwise the safety of the road is not assured. The frequency of other encounters – bandits, raiders, or truly inhuman – then tell you something about the friendly encounters. If orc bandits are causing trouble, then the merchants and pilgrims are likely to hire many guards!

Dungeon Encounters

I prefer for dungeons to have wandering monsters. I was very surprised to discover that The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth did not have them!

Wandering monsters, apart from anything, provide time pressure for the players. They can’t just rest at will – there is always the possibility of discovery.

However, designing encounter tables requires a little thought. The default for me was always the funhouse dungeon, where any sort of monster could turn up, dependent only on the level of the dungeon, and you would select monsters to make the encounters fun. However, this is not appropriate in most circumstances. If you are in the aforementioned orc lair, why would an elf wander down a corridor?

In single-population group dungeons, such as an orc lair, then random encounters could be with named individuals in the lair. The chieftain or her second-in-command comes down the corridor at the wrong moment. The witch doctor is going for a stroll. That sort of thing. They may have attendants or be on their own. You can also have encounters with regular orcs, although it may make sense to note from which area they’ve come. These d4 orcs are from the communal living area. These d6 orcs are from the guard barracks.

Some dungeons have two or more competing groups living in them – consider those in The Sunless Citadel, where the top level has goblins and kobolds raiding each other. In this case, you might want two separate encounter tables, one for the goblin area and one for the kobold area.

Also consider the dungeon layout. If corridors allow easy access throughout the complex, with few areas as chokepoints, then monsters from lower levels might roam at will anywhere they wanted. This brings us back to the funhouse type of dungeon encounter. However, if inhabitants of areas strictly guard those areas, then more themed encounter tables are needed.

Of course, any monster on the tables needs to come from somewhere in the dungeon! Although many of my dungeons have further links to the Underdark, which allows me more variety without needing much of an explanation!

To Table or Not To Table?

Not all dungeons use encounter tables, but they still use wandering monsters. I don’t particularly like this practice myself, but it is there. Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage is a case in point. It makes suggestions for a few encounters, but does not use explicit tables.

Why do I prefer tables? Is is mostly because I enjoy creating something from random elements. Just like I enjoy the unexpected nature of a random encounter in the first place.

There are players and DMs who prefer to plan everything. And they have great games.

However, I prefer to have random elements spark my creativity. Choose the method that works for you!