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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kzach" data-source="post: 4932703" data-attributes="member: 56189">Ok... go with me on this as it's a half-formed idea that I'm trying to coalesce into a solid concept so I might not convey the entire picture in the first post.Basically, have you ever wondered where all the monsters come from?I know, I know, it's one of 'those' questions; don't ask, don't tell.One thing I really loved about AD&D was all the random encounter charts. Man, you had encounter charts for freakin' everything! Particularly in 2e with the Monster Compendium sets. They had jungle, mountain, plains, steppes, you name it, there was a random encounter chart for it.It wasn't so much that I liked random encounters, in fact, I kinda hated them, especially after getting TPK'd by a great wyrm red dragon just before the climactic final battle of (IIRC) Rary the Traitor.No, what I liked was that it gave a sense of verisimilitude to the generic milieu in which the characters adventured. You weren't going to face a white dragon in the desert, or a were rats at the bottom of the sea.Now I realise that any DM worth their salt isn't about to populate areas with ill-suited monsters, but after a recent discussion I had about dinosaurs and the eras in which they lived, it got me to thinking about restricting monsters to settings, and even further to specific geographical areas.But that's not far enough. To make a setting really unique, you could excise a bunch of monsters and then explain why it is this small set of monsters dominate and exist in the setting whereas others do not.In essence, I guess I'm trying to come up with a way of explaining a method by which to eliminate the 'mixed bag' feeling I get with D&D these days. It'd be nice to play in a game where if I was travelling to a certain area, I would generally know that I could hunt for giant elks but should watch out for the terror birds of the plains, or that I could search the Mountains of Mist for a Roc mount but would have to appease the local aarakocra.So, anyway, I thought I'd throw it out there to see if others could better define the concept.</blockquote>

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