I’ve been working through a new type of encounter chart.

The old one has the GM rolling 3D6, and consulting the following chart:

We have an inner area, and outer (more dangerous) area, so the two tie together a certain amount, which creates a central theme and ecology for that region. Unfortunately, the weather encounters (harsh snow, hungry wolves, storms, et c.) were shunted in poorly. The deep forest might have more chance of challenging the party with hungry wolves, but there’s really no need to have snowstorms being more likely just because lots of trees are about.

The new encounter tables will have two axes - one for the season, and another for the place:

On the X-axis, the GM rolls 1D6, and adds +1 when approaching the Edge (where villages lie close to the untamed forest which populates almost all of Fenestra), and 1D6+2 when actually inside the forest.

On the Y-axis, the GM rolls 1D6 for the mild seasons (see Appendix A for the seasons), or 1D6-1 for Winter, 1D6+1 for Summer, and 1D6+2 for the Storm season.

The new format means that hurricanes can be kept in a ‘probability space’ where PCs in the Villages, the Edge, and the Forest all have an equal chance of ‘encountering’ that hurricane, but it’s also possible to put ‘starving wolves’, and ‘hibernating chitincrawlers’ into the Winter encounters which are in the forest.

The new encounter tables also have a 100% chance of getting an encounter, so my broad plan relies on rolling 1D6 to see how many days between encounters. This stops the old problem of rolling 3D6 for day 1 (no encounter), 3D6 for day 2 (also no encounter)…and so on, ad nauseum. Rolling dice alone just isn’t fun, and the take-away from 5 dice rolls might just be ‘4 days no encounter, and then…’, which the system could produce without so much effort.

The encounters, being 36 in all for each roll, allow more possible results. Multiple encounters with a ‘basilisk’ should still take place, but rarer encounters with a ‘lost trader’, or ‘rufugees from a destroyed village’ can easily slot in without any danger that they might become common-place.

Difficult Areas

Some areas don’t work like that. The Pebbles islands can’t have such a smooth overlap between encounters at sea and encounters on land. The Shale, populated by many dwarves, also cannot have the same kinds of encounters - its areas are forest, plains, underground, and deep underground. I can’t make the underground just a +1 on the roll, as there isn’t much overlap between above-ground encounters, and below-ground. Eventually, I had to make each point on the chart cover 2 places, so the X-axis covers ‘1 or 2’ on the dice, and the underground areas must add +6 and +8 respectively to get their results.

Further complications ensued when I read that underground areas do not suffer from all types of earthquakes which affect the surface (but they do suffer from some earthquakes).

Final Word

All in all, the GM will still roll 3D6 a few times to prepare a session’s encounters, but this can more easily be done on the fly, and every roll will yeild new information.

It’s been surprisingly difficult to write, and taken a lot longer than I expected, but I think the extra quality in the game is worth the extra days.