I’m very proud of the work I’ve done to improve my own micro-sandbox design philosophy over the last 40 years. For some time I’ve been working on a document entitled Random Wilderness Encounters, refining and expanding (where needed) and when an update is finished, post it to the blog. One of the areas that I’ve been keenly focusing on is a deeper more vibrant appendix that includes plenty of inspiration when the players discover a unique feature in my world.
Typically when it’s time for a random wilderness encounter a player rolls 4D6. If an encounter is rolled (a number is predetermined for that session in advance) I then have a player roll 4D100 and using my tables, piece together an encounter/place of interest based on those results. Scattered throughout the random terrain tables are results like:
Cave, Narrow*
Cave, Shallow*
Cave, Sea*
Den*
Rock Shelter*
Grotto
*50% this feature houses a lair.
The appendix doesn’t include enough information so I decided to create a set of tables to give a quick visual method to identify what exactly these results might look like. In play testing, each is a simple drawing that gives the basic layout of a cave. Some include stairs (shown in grey), while others include stalagmites/stalactites, outcroppings, ledges, ponds and streams. Other than including a 10’ grid for size, explicit details like ledge height and depth of water have been avoided. Imagination, feed the fire.
The document contains six (6) tables with 20 random cave layouts. A sample follows:
A link is now in the Downloads Archive:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/i7znb3mzccmcqun/1E%20Random%20Wilderness%20Caves.pdf?dl=0
Cheers,
B.B.
