For our play of the Castle Greyhawk campaign, I’ve been developing my own Wandering Monster tables. For the most part, these are aimed at providing danger – thus foes – for the players. Especially when – on the Labyrinth level – this was the main thing that would challenge the party.

Let me say: Using only wandering monsters? Not good. You want areas of interest to engage the players. My party finally found the entrance to the Crypts, and there are a LOT more things to engage with: creepy talking clown faces, strange inscriptions, locked chests, and so on.

This is a party of five level 7-10 characters, and this was the table I tried at first:

This was a pretty good table for generating very dangerous foes, but it was killing the pacing a lot – because combats took quite a bit of time to resolve. It also led to a short session, as after only three combats, the party were badly hurt and needed to rest. This particular campaign has most sessions being a single dungeon expedition, so we often call them. (It’s also Monday night, so early to bed isn’t that bad).

For my most recent session, I created a new table, lowering the difficulty a bit:

The target encounter difficulty here is 7-8, as opposed to the first tables 9-10. My feeling is that I’ve put it down a bit too low, but the two encounters I rolled during the session didn’t disrupt play that much, so that was a win.

As I’ve noted recently, large groups of monsters are difficult to gauge their threat level. Turn undead and fireball can end combats very quickly – but if the party lacks those options, encountering 10 ghouls could go very poorly if there are some good rolls from the ghouls and poor rolls from the party.

I am going to keep working on these tables and see how they work in play. Wandering monsters exist partly to provide life to the dungeon, and partly to provide time pressure – if the party think that taking short rests and casting rituals have no cost, then they’ll keep using them. I want them to use them, but know that it does raise the danger level.

A couple of notes:

The pyrohydra is a flame-breathing hydra. I use the stats for a hydra, but make a few changes:

• Each head can breathe fire in a 15-foot cone, inflicting 3d8 fire damage, a successful DC 17 Dex save halves the amount. Each head can do so as part of a multiattack, so that could be 15d8 in one round! (I mostly run it as each head can use this 1/combat, but if the combat runs long, they recharge).
• Heads don’t regenerate – if you cut one off, two don’t grow back in its place.
• Immune to fire
• The CR is bumped up one level. Probably.

The NPC party are a group of adventurers in the dungeon. I need to work out the exact specifics of their stat blocks. They have a random alignment – could be good, could be evil – and so can act as foes or allies of the party.

These tables are made for a megadungeon in which a lot of different monsters live. I’d go with more targeted tables for a smaller dungeon – based on what lives therein!