Anne is one of my favorite players, bar none, and she's a terrific thinker in terms of DM side stuff. In our exchange on MeWe (yuck, btw, still not a fan of the UI or ease of finding conversations)...
excuse me - in our exchange I pointed out that Moldvay has the DM determine the distance until the encounter happens with a 2d6 times 10', the direction as she or he might wish. That's what all those empty rooms are for in the Moldvay stocking process: to have free spots to put random encounters.
I also have a "Gang Names" generator that's pretty amusing |
I guess one part of the artistry of being a DM is knowing and conveying what those weirdos are up to. Luckily, I've done a miniscule part of that for you. I play with Tablesmith a great deal and I like to do this sort of thinking a couple of times and then not again... So I made a "What Those Folk Up To?" thing in Tablesmith that helps me stock nefarious weirdos and their strange and inscrutable motives. HOW you convey those things they are doing is up to you, I suggest with sounds and smells since (hopefully) the party won't see those creatures if they are more than 30' or so (so out of lantern light).
Here's a list. You could use a d100 and keep rolling until you got something. All this stuff might lead to combat, I guess, or probably (in my game, at least) more likely to get into a roleplay thing. I stick with gibberlings because of the swords, hair, and chicken feet lets me use my Greaser voice from The Outsiders or maybe Grease or some Jersey variant.
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# NMS_HumanoidMotives
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- searching for food
- eating food
- searching for mates
- mating
- gambling
- squabbling about betting
- in a war party
- in the midst of battle
- trading
- squabbling about trading gone wrong
- scavenging
- hiding food stores
- digging a hole
- painting glyphs
- painting historical scenes
- painting mythical scenes
- dancing around a fire
- engaged in a religious ritual
- burying their dead
- entombing their dead
- building a funeral pyre
- cremating their dead
- disposing of evidence
- caring for their young
- instructing their young
- building a shelter
- building a fire
- healing their wounded
- telling tales
- telling jokes
- on the lam
- recovering from a battle
- building a shrine
- building a temple
- capturing livestock
- hunting game
- in a courting ritual
- gathering supplies for a shelter
- preparing to hibernate
- escaping from persecution
- escaping from imprisonment
- capturing prisoners
- looking guilty
- looking unsettled
- looking anxious
- looking terrified
- fleeing a powerful enemy
- dismembering a large carcass
- cooking soup
- bickering
- wrestling
- carousing
- drinking liquor
- drinking hallucinogens
- consuming drugs
- passed out
- recovering from illness
- suffering from illness
- dying of some plague
- laughing uproariously
- tittering
- hiding
- hiding badly64. to 75 (roll twice - included for your ease and merriment)76-100 Getting ready to mess you up, interloper (this isn't in the original Tablesmith thing)
You know what just struck me. Torchlight goes out to 30', so the DM has to roll a 2 or 3 on 2d6 to have the monster start out within visible range. So there's a like 90% chance that the wandering monster is outside of sight range.
ReplyDelete90% of the time, when there's a wandering monster, it's too far away for anyone in the party to see it? This is one of those rules, like putting every property someone lands on but doesn't buy up for a bid in Monopoly, that makes you question whether anyone has ever really played the game the way it's written, and makes you wonder how different it would feel to do so.