Although I prefer the octopod, lizard-like Basilisk, some gaming tables lean hard into the serpentine. Mine prefer to petrify their victims to preserve them (much how a spider trusses up a fly) and have a substance in their saliva that slowly reverts Stone to Flesh so that they can dine at their leisure (harvesting this spittle can take the statuesque sting out of an unlucky encounter, but I’m an inveterate softie, and don’t really relish encounters that grind play to a halt). Feel free to adjust some entries if they don’t quite fit your mythological vision, but I tried to cover quite a few bases here.
Without further ado, I present the OSE Encounter Activities for the baleful Basilisk, bane of many a fortune-hunter:
Might split up the Bat entry into a triptych of d30 tables depending on how fertile I’m feeling.
Stand and Deliver! Here are one hundred lawless undertakings to embellish your Bandit encounters.
Bandits have been fairly frequent entries on Wilderness Encounter Tables since the very beginning (the typical Outdoor Survival board was practically crawling with Outlaws and ne’er do-wells) and they still seem to crop up regularly in later interpretations. There’s a world-building implication somewhere in there I’m sure.
I hope there are some DMs that get some mileage out of this list and that it leads to more interesting situations. As always, I love to hear about how these tables work out at your table!
Don’t forget the wealth of additional framing that can be added with Encounter Distance, Surprise, and by remembering to throw those crucial Reaction Roll dice! And always remember to check Morale so that they can flee and live to fight another day! Bandits can make for excellent recurring foils but can also be a useful faction to ally with in the Wilderness.
I believe our buddy the Basilisk is up next, which might be a little challenging!
What are those scaly and squamous folk up to? Old School Essential’s lovely and laconic layout tells us of only two preferences: one of armament and the other of appetite. So here’s a hundred digressions to dress up any lacertilian rendezvous:
Alphabetically, Bandits are next (and I figure they’ll be easy enough, as I’ve used them plenty in the past), but if you’d like to interrupt the running order with a request, drop it in the Comments and I’ll see what I can whip together.
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!
While leafing through Old School Essentials the other day, I was struck by another project idea: wouldn't it be wonderful to have at hand a few "Encounter Activity" tables for each of the Monsters in the Classic Fantasy Monsters tome in the same vein as my These Wood Elfs Are... and These Dwarfs Are... tables?
So I started with the first one:
Hopefully this will add a little additional flavoring to those randomly encountered or placed foes. I could also see some of the entries applying to the mysterious Drune of Dolemnwood fairly well. If there's enough interest, I might muddle my way through more as I get the chance. I welcome any suggestions for which Monster I should try to tackle next in the comments!
It’s a relatively common conundrum: You’ve placed your concealed or secret doors in a lovingly designed dungeon but may have not bothered to give much thought to how they’re opened/operated other than “oh there must be a lever/pressure plate/button somewhere.”
I’ve created this table to help provide some inspiration. It might also be useful for methods of disabling tricky traps or burnishing an evening with minor puzzle elements as well:
As a caveat: Clues are completely crucial when sprinkling in secrets, mysteries, and puzzles. I’ve underlined items that could be expanded through virtuosic descriptions to help draw in players attention to certain features, but feel free to incorporate another nudge or so. If they must open the door by kissing the carving of a crone (#47), it stands to reason that perhaps the lady’s lips are worn or stained, etc. This underlining typically indicates that these should be incorporated somehow into dressing/room descriptions as the players interrogate the fiction and should only adjust the character of a room in a minor way. If it flatly doesn’t fit with character of the room contents, then it might be simpler to choose another or adjust it slightly.
Some puzzles require pieces. For these, I’ve applied bolding. If the players don’t have these, or a means of acquiring them, then this could serve as a “hard stop” in play which isn’t ideal. They can always come back at a future point in time with the proper component, or as above, you can always adjust or incorporate additional necessary ingredients in nearby dungeon dressings if it’s frustrating any fun. Not all secret doors have to opened, and fully exploring a deviously drawn dungeon often triggers other in-game resource/real-life dependent limitations or exasperation (this isn’t Myst after all and pixel-bitching is about as un-fun as you can get for most).
Feel free to flex your imagination on how things are “actually working” with lovably “off-screen” byzantine mechanisms or gonzo Rube-Goldberg contraptions. Inexplicable magics from mad mages are another common scapegoat. Most of the time this is largely less important to the players than simply bypassing a mercifully brief obstacle. I also like to muse on how these doors might see use by other dungeon denizens, but I don’t get too caught up on it. Like many, I prefer the more Mythic Underworld approach which is blessedly less logical: The monsters play by their own rules down here. But naturally, a canny party, silently tracking or carefully observing the inhabitants should be rewarded with revelations on how some of these triggers work.
Let me know if you find this useful or how an entry works out if it makes its way into one of your dungeons!
Here’s another d100 table to provide a little environmental dungeon dressing and furbelow. One often finds themselves fixating on the visual elements in descriptions, but occasionally engaging some of the other senses (see: d100 Table - Three Hundred Smells & Scents by Type) can make for an exciting change of pace. I wanted to whip up a handy table to make this process more inspiring and less repetitive, inspired by the old AD&D DMG.