DnD Random Encounter Tables 5e

That is the whole difference. Encounter tables are usually written by feel, which is why half of them drop something on a 3rd-level party that kills it outright and the other half bore a 15th-level one. Here the number on each row was chosen so the fight lands where the row says it lands.

WHAT YOU GET

51 tables covering 13 kinds of ground - Arctic, Coast, Desert, Forest, Grassland, Hills, Mountains, Swamp, Underdark, Underwater, Settlement, Ruins and Tombs, and the Lower Planes. Twelve of them carry all four tiers of play: levels 1-4, 5-10, 11-16 and 17-20.

1020 encounters in total, drawing on 291 different creatures.

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 1020 rows at their worst possible result.

Nasty things are rare, the way they should be. A deadly row is a 2 percent chance, so when one lands it is frightening rather than routine.

THREE ROLLS MAKE A SCENE

Roll d100 for who is there and how many. Roll d12 for what they were doing before you arrived - and it is usually not waiting to be fought. Then roll d8 twice on the pages for that terrain: once for what the party notices first, once for what makes this awkward.

208 signs and complications, 16 for each terrain, plus 12 activities that work anywhere. A sign turns an ambush into a decision, which is nearly always the better scene.

WHERE THE CREATURES CAME FROM

Every placement was made here, by hand, and every one of them can say why. 97 of the creatures are ordinary animals placed by real natural history - a polar bear lives in the arctic, a camel lives in the desert. The rest were placed by us, one at a time, and dragons sit where the damage their breath deals puts them.

THE FILES

4 PDFs, 27 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 tonight terrain and leave the rest.

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.