After a very successful run on Kickstarter, Ramen Sandwich Press is rolling out The Book of Chance Meetings, my deep dive into random wilderness encounters in D&D 5E. Some early rave reviews are already in from our backers, and you can check them out here!
It’s now available in PDF through DriveThru RPG and the Ramen Sandwich Press website, and in softcover through Amazon and other online booksellers. Our website and our eBay proxy store will carry the softcover version soon.
It has been forty years since I first discovered Dungeons & Dragons, and random encounters have always fascinated me. But I have always found something a bit lacking in how they are treated in the core books, regardless of the edition. I remember poring through that big appendix in the AD&D DMG with all of the random encounter tables. As impressive as it was, I found myself wanting more information to shape the encounter.
Let’s say, I rolled my percentiles and turned up, “Orc.” But how many orcs are there? What are they doing there? Which in turn helps determine how they react to running into the party. But there was no further guidance. Instead, I imagined Gary Gygax glaring at me: “Whaddyou mean? It’s orcs. Deal with it.”
After all these years, I finally wrote a book that answers most (if not all) of those questions that I asked when I was a teenager and first learning about roleplaying games. If random encounters factor into your 5E campaign, check out The Book of Chance Meetings and take a deep dive with me. Each chapter covers a different terrain type — caverns, desert, forest, grasslands, hills, littoral, mountains, ocean, tundra and wetlands. The book includes most of the creatures in the 5E Standard Reference Document, and offers guidance on scaling encounters according to party level. Even if you don’t use random encounters, you can use it to add a little random chance to mapping out your planned encounters.
I’m also working on a similar book for Pathfinder. So if PF2 is your thing, stay tuned!
It’s now available in PDF through DriveThru RPG and the Ramen Sandwich Press website, and in softcover through Amazon and other online booksellers. Our website and our eBay proxy store will carry the softcover version soon.
It has been forty years since I first discovered Dungeons & Dragons, and random encounters have always fascinated me. But I have always found something a bit lacking in how they are treated in the core books, regardless of the edition. I remember poring through that big appendix in the AD&D DMG with all of the random encounter tables. As impressive as it was, I found myself wanting more information to shape the encounter.
Let’s say, I rolled my percentiles and turned up, “Orc.” But how many orcs are there? What are they doing there? Which in turn helps determine how they react to running into the party. But there was no further guidance. Instead, I imagined Gary Gygax glaring at me: “Whaddyou mean? It’s orcs. Deal with it.”
After all these years, I finally wrote a book that answers most (if not all) of those questions that I asked when I was a teenager and first learning about roleplaying games. If random encounters factor into your 5E campaign, check out The Book of Chance Meetings and take a deep dive with me. Each chapter covers a different terrain type — caverns, desert, forest, grasslands, hills, littoral, mountains, ocean, tundra and wetlands. The book includes most of the creatures in the 5E Standard Reference Document, and offers guidance on scaling encounters according to party level. Even if you don’t use random encounters, you can use it to add a little random chance to mapping out your planned encounters.
I’m also working on a similar book for Pathfinder. So if PF2 is your thing, stay tuned!
