Table Factory

For those taking part in #dungeon24 this year, I’m always going to be a little jealous that my #dungeon23 February area only has 28 rooms. I guess I have four years to think about it. 

But let’s not dwell on what was, and talk about what is! The Factory is now available in my mega-dungeon, The Electric Triptych of the Tetric Necromancer. 

I’m continuing to really enjoy writing the 1D20 random encounter tables for each area in the dungeon. Developing a large number of things that could happen really brings some character to the environment, even if not all of them do happen.

The Factory table ended up being quite lethal, about a quarter of the random encounters throw enemies at the players. I’ve also started structuring the table so that rolling low is “bad”, guard encounters and other combat encounters will show up in the 1-5 range of the table. I’ve re-jigged most other encounter tables in the adventure in a similar way.

Then I started thinking about reference encounters, like, tables-in-tables? Ie: When similar encounters are grouped together on a table, you can make an encounter that instructs the use of a specific segment from your table, so the results can be more focused. 

I thought I’d play with the idea and decided to treat this as a sort of “alarm” or “trap” within the table, something that may appear anywhere, but could be noticed and avoided. If it isn’t avoided, and the alarm is tripped, it would guarantee trouble for the players. I also like that this saves page space by re-using the same table in a different way.

In the case of the 1D20 Factory encounter table, there’s an encounter that introduces a laser tripwire alarm. If tripped, the alarm goes off. It asks the GM to roll 1D3 on the same encounter table, where the first three encounters (out of 20) are guaranteed to generate one of the enemy NPC types for the players to deal with. 

It basically looks like this…

1D20 Random Encounters: 
1. Guards!
2. Roving Robo-Dogs.
3. Combat Drones.
4. Laser Tripwire - Roll 1D3 on this table.
5-20. Other less lethal encounters.

Simple, convenient, danger on demand. Nice.

Until next time!