Old School Encounters

I'm still working on unique wilderness encounter tables. I'm currently working with Judges Guild Wilderlands of High Fantasy, Map One. I "cut" it into 4 pieces and blew each up to an 8.5 x 11 sheet. I've been coloring them with colored pencils. I'm almost done, and when I am, I'll post them all. I love the old school look of the maps combined with the DIY vibe that colored pencils bring.

Anyway, I was snooping around for something to help make creating the unique encounter tables easier. If you remember, my plan was to "throw all the dice" to generate not only the occurrence of an encounter, but the specifics as well. I'm not sure that will hold up in development, but it is still a design goal.

My research led me to Old School Encounter Reference. I haven't spent very much time with it, but it is already evident that, even if it doesn't ultimately help with my one-roll encounters, it will prove exceedingly useful. It is written with AD&D/OSRIC in mind, so it takes some result-tweaking to work for OD&D, but that's no big deal. Honestly, it does for encounters what the Ready Ref Sheets do for the game in general. There is a lot of encounter related random goodness in here. One of my early favorites from my brief skimming was the tables to randomly generate spellbooks, by Magic-User level. Awesome.

Oh, did I mention it is a free 160-page pdf? Well, it is. So, what are you waiting for?