The Seventh GM Inspiration: Random Encounter Resources
I thought a bit about how to discuss this, because I have an opinion that sometimes a book or site full of randomized tables can end up being paralyzing to GM inspiration and design, and other times it can be a valuable tool to breaking GM writer's block. Often, whether a chart is useful in the design of a scenario or during actual play can be crucial to its overall value. To that end, I thought I'd group these together and point out a series of randomized table resources I have found to be the most useful. I will note their utility for random generation on the fly (at the game table) and second their utility for background design and inspiration between sessions.
First off...I already addressed this book specifically earlier in the Inspiration series for December, but I will point again to Runequest Cities as an invaluable resource for random encounters and city design. It is equally useful for generating encounters during play and also sculpting out material between sessions. I will not count this one in the following list, but if I had to, I'd rank it #1 of 7. It's only downside: long out of print.
#6. D20 Toolbox
This harkens back to the 3.0 D20 era of gaming, but the D20 Toolbox (once published by Alderac, now apparently available online through World's Largest RPGs on drivethrurpg.com) was an excellent quick idea generation resource and full of at-the-table encounter generation tables. It had equal utility in both situations and before I retired my copy I got a lot of use out of it in my 3.0 and 3.5 D&D days.
#5. Ultimate Toolbox
After D&D 3.5 came out Alderac released a successor to the D20 Toolbox that I also quite liked, and it contained useful entries for rolling up deep character backtrounds and NPCs, expanding on all ways on what its predecessor did. I found the book, which was written to be roughly system agnostic even though it was still mainly a D20/3.5 styled product, to be mostly useful in setting up scenarios and characters, and less useful for on-the-fly encounters, but it was a great book.
#4. The Book of Random Tables: Ancient World
This is a more recent acquisition, and a fun resource mainly for background development but you can readily roll for things like quick names, ingredients, items found in a market or a room and such on the fly. It's utility is restricted to archaic era gaming, which is to say, games set in a Romanesque or pre Roman era or something approximating such (so for my settings I used it in The River Kingdoms of Anansis and Oman'Hakat), so its utility is rather specific, but its well worth it within that subgenre.
#3. Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide
This is a copious tome full of good GM advice but the back of it contains some of the most useful monster encounter tables I have found in a GM Guide. Excellent resource for on-the-fly encounter generation, and could also be used to randomly plan out encounters. Specific to 5E style games, but within that scope it beats out all of the encounter tables I've ever seen WotC generate for regular 5E.
#2. Mork Borg
The entirety of Mork Borg is more or less a system designed to encourage out-of-the-box, on-the-fly gaming with a high degree of randomization, so the system deserves special mention. In particular, the core rules, plus supplements Cult Feretory and Cult Heretic encompass a trifecta of dark and macabre end-times gaming goodness in a world that resembles a flaming heavy metal record chucked on an 80's record burning bonfire. Of special note is the random dungeon generator in the back of Mork Borg, which so far is how I have done all my Mork Borg one shots. The system is geared for and works best in my opinion on the fly; if you take too much time to design a scenario in Mork Borg you are likely to overthink it, which often happens in some of the copious volume of third party resources out there that sometimes hit the mark and other times completely miss the point of this system.
#1. GM Gems
Published by Goodman Games, I believe this book has now been reinvented in a larger format for Dungeon Crawl Classics, but I have long used the original one which was allegedly system neutral but was clearly meant to be for D20 D&D/Pathfinder 3rd edition style sytems. This has long been my #2 go-to resource for quick idea and encounter generation in a pinch, and the book includes some pretty elaborate encounter tables for things such as inns and taverns, weird people you might meet and all sorts of oddities not often covered by other random table books. It's only failure is that over time there could be diminishing returns as you gradually use up all the neat stuff in this book from over-use. Equally useful for on-the-fly encounter generation and idea building between sessions, and when I go to a game I have GM Gems sandwiched in with my copy of Runequest Cities and "Random Ancient Tables" for quick use.
This column is a bit of a bonus before the holidays: I could easily have made GM Inspiration columns for each of the six resources I list above. But thematically I felt a discussion of these books as a collective works well together. Besides! I have some other more specific books I want to talk about for Inspirations 8 through 12 coming up.
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