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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9066970" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 143: August 2000part 3/5A funny thing happened on the way to the dungeon: Random encounters have been on a long slow decline over the years and that’s one thing the edition change will only accelerate, as the faster XP advancement gives you less leeway before you have to recalculate everything. So this list of 50 encounter ideas is somewhat of an oddity in here at this point. The specific entries also feel like a throwback, with many of them whimsical or railroady in assuming the player’s reaction to them. That makes this a more interesting read than just another list of wandering monsters, as it also includes environmental effects, combinations of creatures and other odd happenings, but it’s not one where you can just roll it and use whatever comes up as is without considering if it’ll work with your current campaign & party. There have definitely been better examples of the type.A Hunting we will go: If you’ve been travelling in the wilderness for any length of time, you will inevitably have had to do some hunting to eat. But along with random encounters, that kind of logistics has become increasingly downplayed in favour of starting you out straight at the dungeon or other main event. Plus the real world history of hunting is focussed on avoiding “fair” CR appropriate challenges in favour of catching as much good meat as efficiently as possible. Outnumbering the quarry, using dogs, guns, traps and other technology to further stack the odds, the methods of reducing human risk have only become more elaborate over the years. Greg Detwiler gives us a surprisingly detailed 6 page article covering hunting practices around the world, including some of the most massive and genocidal organised ones. Funnel them into a confined space and you can wipe out literally millions of herd animals in one go. But although it doesn’t fit the traditional adventurer party format, there’s still plenty of adventure potential in here, between the politics of organising hunters, various nobles restricting hunting on their lands (apart from them) things going wrong (and intentional “accidents” ) on the hunts, encountering something rather more dangerous that you weren’t looking for and bleeding-heart environmentalists trying to stop hunting altogether when any druid could tell you that would mess up the ecosystem just as much as the opposite extreme. So this is a system-free bit of advice heavily informed by real world practices that manages to tell me stuff I haven’t seen before and create ideas for adventures they haven’t done yet. It’s always nice when they manage to find some of those, particularly when they include the bibliography of full-length books at the end where you can get even more detail. I definitely approve of this one.</blockquote>

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