Thursday, January 11, 2024

The Book of Jerks

Jennell Jaquays died. It sucked, she was always very kind to me.

I would go on about her but considering how shitty people are on here I don't want to invite people trolling about it.

If you don't know who Jennell was you can read this.

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Anyway back to the grind:

So a while back I was thinking about how I wanted random encounters to look and developed the "meat on the table" method, where the Random Encounter Table was one really long table and contained not just the creatures but a little bit of what they were doing when you ran into them.

After thinking and running a little more, I decided a few other things would be helpful, one of them being what I call the Book of Jerks.

It's basically a list of NPC villains that have just enough detail that when you random encounter them--or their cronies--they have a deeper adventure hook there if you need it. Like:


I wrote 100 of these entries plus 100 more to update how I handled dungeon random tables--they're hard to do because ever dungeon is different, but I settled on a system where pretty much each entry gives you a pair of results ("Giant bat or Thief") so that the results are flexible without being vague and then did 100 more for encounters on the water.

With the previous encounter tables that makes an even 1000 encounters in the brand new Broceliande Random Encounter pdf.

Avalable for 15$ in The Store. If you already have the old version let me know, I'll throw in another 5$ pdf for free. As always, these pdfs come with the current complete bestiary so have monster stats.

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8 comments:

weedkiller420 said...

What happened to Cube World #61?

Zak Sabbath said...

@weedkiller420

It's 50$ and its a mystery what you get

weedkiller420 said...

Ah so you can figure out who puts them online, got it.

Zak Sabbath said...

@weedkiller420

How would that even work?

coral wave said...

this seems very useful. obviousely not a 1000 entries, but how long does it uausally take to make for a single wilderness area, for instance?

Zak Sabbath said...

@coral Wave

a d100 table usually takes maybe 5 hours

Alister Fa said...

I never met Jennell but I always admired how she stood out at a time when the game was predominantly designed and written by men.

Mike Lee said...

I'm thankful that I got to meet Jennell a few times at NTTRPG Con. She was missed this year. James Raggi was there though, and I think he's coming back. Maybe we can get you out there too, Zak! No, really.