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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hriston" data-source="post: 6900108" data-attributes="member: 6787503">On page 173 of the DMG, Appendix B: Random Wilderness Terrain, Gary Gygax wrote, "In any event, the DM must draw in rivers, large lakes, seas, oceans, and islands as these features cannot easily be generated by a random method."I would add roads to the list of features his random method does not account for and challenge Gygax's conclusion that such features are difficult to generate randomly. Moreover, I am working on a method to generate such features to supplement Gygax's tables and am eager to find out if other DMs know of any such methods or have come up with any themselves.As a starting point, I've calculated the likelihood of encountering the coast during an overland journey as roughly 0.6% per square mile traversed. This is arrived at by dividing the total number of miles of coastline on Earth by the total number of square miles of the Earth's land surface. A chance of about 0.3% per square mile traveled of encountering the coast when travelling across the ocean is arrived at by dividing miles of coastline by the total surface area of Earth's oceans.A similar figure for the chance of encountering a river could be found by totaling the length of all rivers on Earth and dividing by land surface area. For some reason this information isn't readily available online.Dividing the length of all Roman roads by the area of the empire in the 4th century gives a road-encounter chance of 2%.I'm modeling these distributions from the real world in an effort to produce a geography that is somewhat familiar and, in the case of roads, mirrors something close to a medieval level of infrastructure.So for overland travel, I'm proposing an additional d100 roll for each space entered with the following tentative results:1 coastline2-3 river4-5 roadOnce encountered, these features can be explored along their lengths if the party so wishes. The initial course of each feature will lie perpendicular to the path of travel that the party was taking. With the exception of roads (which will generally run straight), their courses can be determined by a roll on the following table as each new space is entered:d61-2 turns clockwise3-4 continues straight5-6 turns counterclockwiseWhen roads encounter settlements (and perhaps rivers where there will be bridges, no doubt), a check for number of branches should occur, determined by rolling a d4, perhaps.Thoughts?</blockquote>

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