Here’s another entry in the OSE Encounter Activities project: the dreaded White Ape!
Sufficiently variable animal activities and behaviors might prove difficult to fill up an entire 1d100 table for some of the other entries, so in the future I might do smaller tables (d20, d30) for entries like this (it’s often more fun to remix more pedestrian animal encounters with another encounter: Bear menacing a Troll, Bats harassing a Gelatinous Cube, etc.). It’s the Monsters that generally get the imagination firing on all cylinders after all, and I doubt any DMs have had to contend with a party of primatologists, but should this come up, this might be a handy table to have!
Working on a request for Lizard Men next, but let me know if there's an OSE Monster you'd like to see sooner than the alphabet allows!
In my experience a mad libs format works better. Well perhaps not better but it is far less work than a 100 results table.
ReplyDeleteFor White Ape you could have a verb table (playing, howling, preparing, attacking, etc) and a who/what table to determine the subject of that verb. Make table each a different type of die so they can be rolled at the same time as the encounter roll and you generate an amazing number of results.
Those are definitely easier/quicker to put together (and how I usually do my Wilderness Hexes, or how things work in the tables I've made for Hex Describe), but I wanted to get a little more granular with these in the hopes of leading to some interesting situations/adventures. After seeing how some of the other ones worked out in play (like These Wood-Elfs Are... and especially These Village-Folk Are...) and how some entries seemed capable of generating what amounted to little adventures in themselves, I wanted to see how it could drive play with Monsters :). I'm definitely of the opinion that one never have enough brainfood to riff off of at the table for prep or on-the-fly ideas. I don't think I ever really gave White Apes this much thought before, and so as an exercise it was definitely fun! :)
DeleteWow, these are awesome. May I turn these into generators for users of my Campaign Logger app? I'll be sure to link to and call out the source!
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