A-to-Z d30: Forest Encounters

Welcome to entry 6 in my A-to-Z blogging challenge,
wherein I attempt to do 26 d30 charts during the month of April.
Today... forest encounters!

This chart feels pretty balanced to me (as far as creating a good variety of what should be forest encounters, and how common or rare those encounters are). The chart is by no means exhaustive, but it's fairly comprehensive (culling from the 1eMM, as well as the monster sections of the BX books). I think these kind of charts do a particularly good job of putting the common/uncommon/rare/very rare monsters into perspective. For example, most of us probably think of skeletons being fairly common, especially compared to something like vampires. But in the 1eMM, skeletons and vampires are both officially "rare." Hmm.

I did not attempt to convert the number appearing details into a strict d30 variant rolls. I think doing that really jacks with the way the numbers are generated, and levels out bell curves that shouldn't be leveled out. If you insist on rolling the number appearing with a d30, then I suggest checking out the Monster Encounters: Overview, Number Appearing Determination Chart on p. 14 of the d30 DM Companion.

I should also let you know, these kinds of charts are pretty involved and time-consuming. In fact, the wandering monster tables in the d30 DM Companion were some of the most time-consuming of the entire book. So don't think you'll see too many more of these kinds of charts between now and the end of this year's A-to-Z challenge. You're more likely to see the charts like the bandit, dwarf, and elf encounter tables. (In fact, tomorrow's chart will be a d30 Goblin Encounters chart, very similar to those.) While I do find tables like this Forest Encounters page handy, I prefer the storytelling aspects of the other type anyway.



Click here to download a free PDF of this
d30 Forest Encounters page from MediaFire.