Recently I decided to try my hand at running a campaign as completely randomly generated as I could make it. This short diversion has a few goals, but the biggest one is to satisfy my curiosity.
Referees Should Never Generate Anything At Random!
One of the things that I have always heard is to never use random tables to generate your adventures. They may be good for inspiration, but DMs/GMs/Referees should never use them as-is for generating anything. Always be more deliberate and craft your world or adventures more carefully and with full intent.
Yeah, yeah, yeah… but what if you do? Just as an exercise, what if you tried to generate everything you could from random tables? I’m curious how that would turn out–especially for solo roleplaying.
There are plenty of random generators out there that can come up with everything from hex contents, to terrain, to encounters, to quests and yes, treasures. Most of them are, well, less than stellar, but the ones by Atelier Clandestine seem pretty good. They are clean and functional, and have some procedures for point and hexcrawl generations–and those are really needed to be able to run a campaign in any sense.
But If You Do…
And that is where I got the idea to run a campaign based on a pointcrawl generated by the Atelier products. I wondered just how far you could push the whole random thing… and now I’m going see how far I can.
Going through the supplements I have (and a few more I picked up) I think I have just about everything I need to generate a completely random campaign. This includes the surrounding terrain, the realms themselves, points of interest, settlements, NPCs and even quests.
The only real thing that is missing from their supplements is one for monster encounters. The Atelier supplements just say use your favorite monster encounter tables, but that leaves a hole that I need to fill.
There are a number of monster encounter tables from various games, and most of them are pretty good. What I am looking for, though is something more simple… I don’t need a big table with a lot of the fantasy races–I want something that can have individual monsters that can be named monsters, one of a kind. That means I will have to create my own.
Where Am I Going With This?
Good question. I want to see if I can generate a random setting and use it with a pointcrawl, and craft a story that matches my desired theme. I want to have a good old-fashioned swords & sandals campaign, with a mix of desert, plains and mountains, with only a small number of wondrous monsters. The trick will be keeping that mood in the campaign story while using generators that may point me to results that support other themes. We’ll see.
I also want to try out the encounter table methodology I come up with here and use it with my other campaigns. I have really come to the conclusion that monsters need to be more unique and tailored to particular settings and situations. That means that the encounter tables should have humans and natural beasts, but drive monster encounters to subtables with individual monsters. I want to work out those details to see how I can use that everywhere.
The same goes for the magic rules I’ve been playing with. The esteemed Jeff Vandine and I have been working these out, and I am at a point where I need to start playtesting them. A simpler setting and campaign can let me do that without worrying about the larger setting and other details.
Finally, I want to flesh out the solo roleplaying rules I have drafted. I keep promising to do that, but this may help me get that done while keeping me from going down the world building rabbit hole. The rules are a grab bag of situational procedures, and not a one size fits all kind of thing. I need to play with them more and see if they work or not.
Anyway, I plan on doing this for the next few weeks. I had planned to switch to my sci-fi campaign after the first of the year, but this may slide that until spring. I also want to finish more on my Vales campaign We’ll see. But regardless, I will be writing up what I do and posting it here. So stay tuned!
Marko ∞
It’s going to be fascinating to see how this works out! And I really do like the idea of very carefully crafted and tailored one-of-a-kind monsters. I really got sold on the idea by the giants in Lee Reynoldson’s “Raedwald” supplement for CR Brandon’s “Heroes and Other Worlds.” Each giant in the game (there are only four) is specifically tailored and once dead, is simply gone. That started me thinking about how creatures like Giants and Dragons and “boss monsters” in general should really be much more carefully crafted than just some generic, cookie-cutter creature thrown at the party for XP or gold. All the greatest fantasy fiction always has monsters that really come alive as their own creatures for the big fights, so I’m really loving that you decided to go this way.