DnD 5e Encounter Tables — City

That is the difference. 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 deal with it there. Those lines are usually shared across a whole book. Here they are not. A market is loud and a crypt is not, and a line that reads well in one reads like filler in the other.

WHAT YOU GET

56 d100 tables across 15 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 and Under Siege.

1120 encounters in total, drawing on 198 different creatures.

420 lines of flavour, 28 for every place: 12 for what they were doing, 8 for what the party notices first, 8 for what makes it awkward. None of them is repeated anywhere else in the book.

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.

Nasty things stay rare, the way they should be, so when one lands it is frightening rather than routine.

FOUR ROLLS MAKE A SCENE

Roll d100 for who is there and how many. Roll d12 for what they were doing before you arrived. Then roll d8 twice: once for what the party notices first, once for 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, at a market stall, on a quay or across a roof, and a table for a place nobody at that level goes is padding.

WHERE THE CREATURES CAME FROM

Every placement can say why it is there. Nothing appears in ground it could not physically be in - no bird in the lake and no shark in the sky - and that was checked against the stat block rather than by eye.

THE FILES

4 PDFs, 31 pages each. A4 and US Letter, and each of those in colour and in a printer-friendly build for saving ink. The printer-friendly version is the same document in pure white, nothing removed. Print the two pages for the place you are in tonight and leave the rest.

This volume stands alone. It shares no table and no line with the others.

Compatible with Fifth Edition. Instant digital download - nothing is posted.

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.