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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Daztur" data-source="post: 5934931" data-attributes="member: 55680">To put my history geek hat on, the Shrouded Lands area is pretty small but there's a lot of different cultures packed in. In the real world you get a lot of cultures packed into a small area when travel is difficult. Think the Caucuses in which there's ten gazillion languages spoken in the area the size of England. The Shrouded Lands is the same way but instead of mountains that make travel difficult it's elves and monsters and crazy wizards that want to kill you. So even though an area like the Freeholds is tiny by real world standards most people (who aren't PCs) stay at home to avoid the killing and death and the burning so the other end of the Freeholds might is the same as a much longer distance in the real world in terms of cultural unity.--------------------------------OK, a while ago someone (Sanglorian?) said that we’d need some random content generators for random encounters as well as to cover what stuff that the PCs run into when they enter an empty hex. I’ve always thought that was necessary but was too lazy to write them but now that I have a game planned I’m actually going to get off my ass and get to work on it. Here’s my thoughts so far (some my ideas, some ripped off from some blog post that Monsters and Manuals linked to and some stuff from a forum post on therpgsite.com).The first thing that you do is roll to see if a random encounter happens. How many times per in-game day you roll and what the likelihood of having an encounter depends on where you are and if you’re moving around. Random encounters could be critters or various locations that are small and haven’t had their exact location within the hex nailed down (Shuttered, for example, is not a random location).There will be different random encounter tables for different regions. In some cases there would be one random encounter table for one of the regions in the compilation but for the bigger ones (like the Burning Lands) there would have to be tables for different sub-regions. In a lot of cases (especially the Kingswood) there would have to be separate day and night encounter tables. Each random encounter table would be numbered from 1 to 20. To see what you’ve encountered you roll 3d6 and add one or two if the party is really small and/or stealthy and subtract one or two if the party is really big and/or noisy (with possibility even bigger modifiers if the party is burning down the Kingswood or something but the results would cap out at 1 and 20). This could be converted to a d20 roll and use skill modifiers, but I’m trying to keep this edition neutral. Since the roll is 3d6 you get a bell curve so you can put the common stuff at around 10 with the rare stuff that is drawn to noisy PCs (usually nasty stuff) at the low numbers and stuff that can only be found by sneaky PCs (usually nice stuff) at the high numbers. So, for example, in the Kingswood daytime random encounter table Tehaar could be 1, which means that you’d almost never meet her but if you’re burning down the Kingswood while fighting a dragon in the middle of a rock concert then there’s a very good chance of her showing up.In addition to the generic stuff, a few numbers would say things like (“or use an encounter keyed to the hex you’re in,” “or use an encounter keyed to a nearby hex” and “roll in a neighboring region’s random encounter table”). DMs could either just use the generic result or go look up what (if any) random encounters they should use instead.So for example:…9. Deer or an encounter keyed to the hex that the party is in.10. A wolf pack or an encounter keyed to a hex adjacent to the one that the party’s in (roll d6).…Hex 34.05 Keyed Encounters:1-5: Flying cats.6: Cat treeThat sort of thing. If you’re not in hex 34.05 and you roll “cat tree” as your random encounter either just ignore it (as the cat tree is in hex 34.05, not the one you’re in) or make up something like the cat tree has been transplanted or there’s a cat tree sapling or whatever.Now that you’ve got your encounter you’re good to go. However, a lot of the time you want more information to work with so there would be additional optional charts that the DM could roll on if they just rolled up five orcs and can’t think of anything interesting to do with that.The first of these charts would be the verb chart. It would be a list of verbs (probably numbered 3-18 with a 3d6 roll since I can’t think of any good modifiers for this, maybe a weirdness modifier to skew things towards and away from the more WFT results?) such as “guarding,” “hiding from,” “eating” or whatever. Then you’d roll on the first table again so you’d have two things interacting in some way. Such as “flying cats hiding from a wolf pack.” If you get a result that doesn’t seem to make sense, try to brainstorm a way of making it fit even if it’s weird (as the Shrouded Lands is nothing if not weird) or just ignore it or reroll. Since the numbers are on a bell curve you can put some strange ones (like “worshipping” or “communing with the dead ancestors of”) on the upper and lower extremes without having them come up too often.If you STILL want more idea fodder there’d be two more optional tables. The first of these would be terrain features (the sort of little bits of terrain that are really helpful for spicing up D&D fights). These features could include things like small ruins, waterfalls, streams, bridges, etc. It’d again be a 3d6 roll with a negative modifier if the party is moving fast or has bad perception skill and a positive one if they have keen eyes and are moving slowly and carefully. So there would again be a list of twenty results and the low numbers would be the kind of things that careless parties could blunder into (“kobold snares”) while the higher number results would be things that only very observant people would notice like (“stream with a bit of gold dust at the bottom”). The final table would be a listing of “secrets” and would be unmodified unless your version of D&D has a luck modifier of some sort and would cover hidden aspects of the encounter such as “something is not what it appears to be” or even very specific things like “a door of the Holt is nearby.”Then after the session the DM would go and incorporate the stuff that came up randomly into the canon of the setting. For example if ghouls only attack when the dwarf is on watch (becaues the dice say so) then from now on Shrouded Land ghouls have a hankering for dwarf flesh.That ended up being longer than I thought explaining it would be. Obviously this will take some time to write up but a whole lot less time and words than all of the hex stocking we’re doing takes. I’ll write up one for the Kingswood for my first adventure and then add in other ones as they’re needed.</blockquote>

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