When you're playing in a sandbox, random encounters are just the GM's way of casting Summon Plot. I just rolled one up that's going to completely derail the adventure I'm running. I have no idea how the players are going to respond, or what they're supposed to do to get past this obstacle, and that's the point.
(Spoilers ahead, if you're in the expedition on the Blind River.)
The party is currently sailing their riverboat along the coast of the Bitterwood Bay, a place I randomly rolled up earlier. It's a cloudy day in the spring, and it's time for their morning encounter. The last few days have been easy going, so I was imagining more of the same.
My encounter tables are full of little aspects of the local countryside: rainstorms, marshy ground, biting ants, random travelers, etc. Sometimes an encounter leads to a fight, like when the party was ambushed by tree-goblins at a ford. Sometimes it turns out to be a resource, like when they had the chance to hunt capybaras on the riverbank.
Today, it's people in boats. The encounter entry suggests that they're fishing, trading, or headed to war.
I'm trying to roll randomly for as much of this campaign as I can, so instead of just picking who these people are, I come up with a few options -- 1: a giant who's out fishing, 2: giants from the local house heading out to trade, 3: human raiders come down from the north, 4: the party's competition, a colonial military expedition arriving a few days early. I roll a 3, so it's human raiders.
The humans north of here are the Tiginsi, coastal raiders who sail large dugout canoes, and I already know they acquired guns by knocking over a trading post up in their land. Now that we're about to have an encounter with them, I'd like to figure out who their friends are. Rolling on the human tribe tables, the Tiginsi are allies of a giantish house. I'm not sure who they are, so I think of a few options and roll again -- 1: the local house of Dead Spear, 2: the abandoned house of Flying Hand, 3: a house way up north that we don't care about today, 4: another house in this country that we don't already know. I rolled and got a 4, so there's another house around here, maybe on the island nearby.
Rolling some dice for a giantish house (called Circle Bar Skunk) I get some very interesting results:
- The house itself is very well fortified, up on a high hill.
- They have sentries and signal fires on nearby hills.
- Their current problems: strange travelers in these lands, and acquiring colonial guns.
- At this very moment, they're moving their livestock up to higher ground, and they're engaging in trade.
So what's going on? Putting together what we know so far makes for an interesting picture:
- The party spotted Tiginsi pirates three weeks ago further north as they sailed by.
- There's a second colonial ship only a day or two away, headed here with the competing military expedition.
It sounds like the Tiginsi pirates and the house of Circle Bar Skunk are working together to try to get guns from the two expeditions in this country: one is the adventuring party, and the other is their competition that's on a ship not far from here. The island with the giants is about twenty miles away, so the smoke from a signal fire on a high hill might just be visible from here.
- The giants are trading with the ship on the far side of the island, sizing up its defenses.
- The Tiginsi are setting up to ambush the ship when it arrives.
And now the party shows up from the opposite direction, short on gunpowder with a boat full of supplies. Sounds like an exciting day for everyone!
If you're used to running adventures with a well-defined plot, I encourage you to let go and see where the dice take you. Maybe you meant for the story to go a different way, but some of the best story emerges as a consequence of gameplay.
Roll the dice. Life's adventures come as a surprise to us all.
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