In order to combat these impulses, I have been doing more preparation than I normally do for the next scheduled session. At some point the party will be trudging through the wilderness in order to find the main dwarven city in the region, which has some vital information for Dn. Goram and his quest to find the Two Swords. Knowing how my players love to hunt down lairs, I decided to pre-roll several wilderness encounters in order to have them at the ready.
One of the things that I have made sure I do when prepping something like this, is to re-read old monster descriptions. They are full of wonderful nuggets of information that I somehow either have forgotten over the years or never read in the first place. For example, I love the association of Cloud Giants with Spotted Lions as well as Hobgobins with Carnivorous Apes. So, when I rolled up a rather innocuous encounter with some Orcs, I re-read the MM1 entry and found this little tid-bit:
Known orc tribes include the following: Vile Rune, Bloody Head, Death Moon, Broken Bone, Evil Eye, Leprous Hand, Rotting Eye, Dripping Blade. If orcs from one of those tribes are encountered in an area, it is likely that all other orcs nearby will also be from this tribe.So, in order to keep me occupied for a short while (and to fight off more Gamer ADD), I came up with the following tables in order to generate random orc tribal names. Each name will have a Descriptor and a Noun:
Descriptor Table: Roll on the Following Sub-Table (d6)
1 Action
2 Color
3 Disease
4 Magical
5 Negative
6 Positive
Action Sub-Table (d6)
1 Crushing
2 Cutting
3 Dripping
4 Rotting
5 Slashing
6 Stabbing
Color Sub-Table (d6)
1 Black
2 Green
3 Orange
4 Purple
5 Red
6 Yellow
Disease Sub-Table (d6)
1 Blighted
2 Bloody
3 Leprous
4 Oozing
5 Scaly
6 Slimy
Magical Sub-Table (d6)
1 Dark
2 Demon
3 Devil
4 Dragon
5 Mutant
6 Wild
Negative Sub-Table (d6)
1 Bad
2 Broken
3 Death
4 Evil
5 Foul
6 Vile
Positive Sub-Table (d6)
1 Big
2 Bold
3 Brazen
4 Defiant
5 Striking
6 Strong
Noun Table: Roll on the Following Sub-Table (d6)
1-2 Body Part
3-4 Magic
5-6 Weapon
Body Part Sub-Table (d6)
1 Bone
2 Eye
3 Fist
4 Hand
5 Head
6 Horn
Magic Sub-Table (d6)
1 Earth
2 Fire
3 Flame
4 Moon
5 Rune
6 Sun
Weapon Sub-Table (d6)
1 ArrowAll that to come up with the name Blighted Fist for a random encounter...
2 Axe
3 Blade
4 Knife
5 Spear
6 Sword
Nice work. I can use something like that.
ReplyDelete@Matt
ReplyDeleteThanks for the kind words. I am glad someone can use it for something other than me trying to stay away from Gamer ADD...