This article originally appeared in d20 Weekly
Wilderness & Wasteland: Scarred Land Encounters
Produced by Sword and Sorcery Studio
Written by Ed Bourelle, Christopher Simmons, Jeff Tabrum, and Wil Upchurch
64 b&w pgs; $12.95
Wilderness & Wasteland's purpose is to provide advice and game mechanics that will enable greater simulation of the perils of wilderness adventuring. Similar to the treatment received by the "dungeon" setting in the DMG, this book offers guidelines for designing random encounter charts, challenge ratings (CR) for a variety of terrain and animal hazards, and suggestions for implementing environmental hardships to these diverse terrains, which include badlands, deserts, forests, mountains, and swamps. By employing the ideas of this book, the lands through which the adventurers travel are not simply backdrops, but may themselves provide dramatic challenges to the party.
The introduction offers advice on building random encounter charts. Each chart is structured around an area's base CR, as the DMG does with dungeon levels. Then creatures are assigned to it as determined by encounter level (EL) and suitability to the terrain. These instructions are simple and concise, resulting in a single, logical chart. This is a major improvement over the example from the DMG, with its clunky multi-chart system and clumsy multiplication/division method of balancing the EL to the average party level (APL).
Nevertheless, DMs take note: the style of encounter table recommended has the potential for encounters that have an EL greatly . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: August 7, 2002
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