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Sunday, May 3, 2020

2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary - Day One Hundred and Twenty-Four

Celebrating 2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary of Blackmoor and of Role-Playing!

Today is Part 67 of my series on OD&D, with The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures Vol. 3.

**For those coming in, in the middle of this series I am giving you my take on OD&D during my first exposure starting in Sept of 1975. For this first part it is just the first three books of the original woodgrain box set and prior to obtaining the Greyhawk, Blackmoor and later Supplements.**

So let us get right into looking at Wilderness Monsters and Wandering Wilderness Monsters:


Once you get out of the dungeon, the scale of everything changes now you can have an encounter that starts up to 720 feet away. Now depending on where you are at and visibility AND how alert you are, the encounter can begin much further away, although at those greater distances it is much easier to avoid them if you wish. Airborne creatures such as dragons, etc. May see you from miles away and way before you can see them. They can come at such speed, that avoiding them is not an option, unless they are not that interested in you.


Note that with surprise and three or more monsters, they will circle you before attacking by surprise. Now this does assume that there is adequate cover for them to do so. How often have you been attacked by monsters that have surrounded you before you know they are there? Is this being used in the campaign that you play in?


That chance versus Terrain Type appears further down the page, but immediately below is the direction chart from Outdoor Survival. In the campaign that you play in, has your adventuring party ever gotten lost? Does that still come up in the D&D you play? Did you know that in real life when people get lost they travel in circles?


As you can see it would be really easy to add more arrows and make this a d12 roll instead of a d6.


Interesting that you roll for one daily encounter, but if you are on water (note the exception) or in the air you have a chance of two encounters per day.  We did this a little differently, well a lot differently. In Wilderness I rolled for encounters every four hours around the clock. (Yeah, tracking time was important.) In the city if you were out and about, I rolled every hour for an encounter. That is a longer story that I will go into at another time. For both of these cases, I went far beyond the tables below.


In a large city, there could be areas that you could get lost in. I had not cities that large, but you could design one.


In line with some comments above about checking every four hours for an encounter in the Wilderness I changed the above table to require a d20 roll instead of a d8 or d6 or  a d4. Although there were other revisions based on a living city  or a ruined city. Out of 20 chances 12 were animals.


You can find information about the stats and descriptions for the Barsoomian Types here and here. There is also a pdf compilation that someone put together that includes these, but unfortunately I do not have a link, if you do, please put it in the comments.


These stats for Balrogs and Ents are in an earlier post in this series.Whenever possible on these tables I increased the choices to 20 and made a d20 roll.  


Virtually all of these tables were revised to give more options, many of my own making.


The first column of basic animals was eventually (with the help of all my players) increased to a full hundred choices.


I changed this to 2-40 men with any...


It was always fun to see them encounter opponents equipped as well or better than they were. I also added a 20% chance that two or more of these could be encountered together.


The party once bedded down and were awaken by little tiny biting ants. You should have seen the look on their faces. The power of suggestion in running your game should not be underestimated.

Tomorrow we will look at Evading.

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