DnD 5e Encounter Tables — City

Fifteen places where people live, and on every spread all twenty-eight lines were written for that one place.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

📦 WHAT YOU GET

▪ 56 d100 tables across 15 places

▪ 1120 encounters in total, drawing on 198 different creatures

▪ 420 lines of flavour — 28 for every place, none repeated anywhere else in the book

▪ 4 PDFs, 33 pages each

🏛️ The fifteen places: Crossroads and Gallows · Inns and Taverns · Market and Fairground · Docks and Harbour · The Company Town · City Rooftops · Castles and Keeps · Towers and Arcane Sites · Temples and Sacred Ground · Monasteries and Retreats · Libraries and Archives · The Arena · Graveyards and Necropolis · Prisons and Oubliettes · Under Siege.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

🧭 WHY A SETTLEMENT NEEDS ITS OWN BOOK

Most of the work in an encounter table is not the monster.

It is the sentence that tells you what it was doing before you arrived, what gave it away, and what it costs you to fight it there.

A market is loud and a library is not. A rooftop has nowhere to retreat to. Those lines are usually shared across a whole book. Here they are not.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

⚖️ THE LAST COLUMN IS THE POINT

Every row says how it lands for four characters in the middle of that tier: easy, fair, hard or deadly.

Those are not estimates. Each was computed from the creature and the number rolled.

🛡️ And no roll on any table in this book can produce a fight a competent party cannot walk away from — not even the highest roll of the biggest die. That was checked on all 1120 rows at their worst possible result.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

🎯 FOUR ROLLS MAKE A SCENE

▪ d100 — who is there, and how many

▪ d12 — what they were doing before you arrived

▪ d8 — what the party notices first

▪ d8 — what makes this awkward

All four sit on the spread for that place, so nothing is looked up in two places.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

📊 THE TIERS

11 of the 15 carry all four tiers of play: levels 1-4, 5-10, 11-16 and 17-20.

⚠️ Inns and Taverns, Market and Fairground, Docks and Harbour, and City Rooftops carry three rather than four. A twentieth-level party does not have a random encounter in a common room, and a table for a place nobody goes is padding.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

✨ THIS IS FOR YOU IF

▪ Your campaign spends most of its time in towns, not dungeons

▪ You want dnd random tables that tell you how hard the fight actually is

▪ Your party went into the archive, the arena or the gaol and you had nothing prepared

▪ You are tired of flavour text that clearly was not written for where you are standing

▪ You already own the earlier books and want the ground they do not cover

▪ You are buying dungeon master gifts and want something used every session

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

📄 THE FILES

4 PDFs, 33 pages each.

▪ A4 — colour and printer-friendly

▪ US Letter — colour and printer-friendly

The printer-friendly build is the same document in pure white, nothing removed. Print the two pages for where you are tonight and leave the rest.

⬇️ Instant digital download. Nothing is posted to you.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

📜 THE SMALL PRINT

Compatible with Fifth Edition.

Made with AI assistance: the layout and supporting text of these tables were designed with AI assistance, then edited, checked and laid out by hand. The creature statistics behind the ratings are licensed SRD 5.1 content, reproduced under CC-BY-4.0 with the attribution included in every file.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

🕯️ ONE GOOD EVENING

Games for a table, and for a chair by the fire.