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Tag: Game Material

Making Encounter Tables

Making an Encounter table is an interesting exercise. In some ways it is a statement of the tone of your game. Do you have a half dozen silly encounters? Do you have 8 generic wilderness encounters with beasts? Do you have combat encounters? Role playing? Chilling atmospheric encounters? Each says something about the style of game you are running.  

Whatever the case, you are generating a list of events you wouldn’t mind showing in your game. You are generating a list of things that fit enough that you don’t care which one shows up. Even having an enormous table says something.  

But some folks don’t know where to start.  So here is a quick guide on how to make one. 

Note: I used this technique to design an encounter table for my adventure, The Lost Library of Meldorin.

Setting Project: The world of Ballad

So, I have had a stressful life of late. I distracted myself by coming up with a new campaign world. Some people drink, I apparently come up with fictional worlds. 

Ballad is a high fantasy setting. It is leaning into a lot of mysterious magic rather than the notion of magic like technology that you find in Eberron or Ravnica for instance. I also started with the premise that humans were rare. The assumption in most settings is that humans are the “us” stand-in and not innately magical. They are the neutral default and all other races are alterations on the human base. This is problematic and should be discussed, but I will save that for a different post.

I started thinking about a world where that was not the case. Where all the sentient races were actually magical and the humans were the distrusted rare species. Sort of like how Tieflings and Drow are presented in several other settings.

Once I had that decided, I chose to go ahead and write some world rules. This would help me come up with a vision of what the world would look like. I had a vague notion but I need to define the edges of it.   

Removing Monks 2 The Paladin option

So, I am trying this again. Another part of my series of blog posts explaining how you might remove the Monk from D&D and keep some of the playstyle intact. The last post caused a good deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth from those who objected to even the suggestion that there might be a problem with Monks, on a cultural level. I will leave that aside for the moment. I can recognize there are issues with Monks and still love them. I have played them and I have written subclasses for them. I will do so again.

I will instead focus on the purpose of these blog posts. It is a mental exercise. “How do I do a thing?” is reason enough to take on a writing project. In this case, how do I make a version of D&D without Monks, but keeping some of the cooler aspects of monks?

As an additional benefit, all of the subclasses I am writing for this project and other things I am coming up with work just fine in ordinary 5e. Here is my latest entry. Enjoy!

Edit: I am updating the class based on som solid feedback I have received.

Warlock Patron: Animal Spirits

Warlocks are not evil. This is something that should be said up front. It is tempting to think of them, if not evil, as shady. They make deals. They have pacts which provide them with power. Their patrons are dangerous. Infernal beings are either dangerously chaotic or just trying to gain power at the cost of your soul. Elder horrors from time and space bring only destruction and madness when they enter the world. The Fairy lords are unpredictable and alien enough to think little of the discomfort of mortals. 

It is understandable to think that only evil comes from such deals, but recent additions have helped expand our definitions a bit. Are there some dark elements implied by the naming and themes? Yes.  But they are not required to be. 

I only write that as preamble because people may question the patron I am presenting today. The Animal Spirits are not friendly spirits, of course.  They are the spirits of wild things and care very little for people, but they have no implied moral qualities. When writing this up I was thinking about the stories where witches cut deals where they can become different animals. I was also thinking of Shamans in Shadowrun who often chanel animal spirits to define their magic. It was a soup of ideas that this was born from.  I hope you will find it useful. 

I should also put a John Maynard Keynes joke here…

Warlock Patron: Animal Spirits