In the first episode of The Mandalorian, the titular character parks his ship and heads off on an adventure. In the second episode, he returns to find his ship being stripped for parts by opportunistic jawas. This prompts an incredible action/chase scene, followed by an adventure hook which results in some startling revelations.
While keeping in mind the Principle of Using Linear Mediums as RPG Examples, let’s assume that this isn’t just an example of the GM having a cool idea and making it happen. (Nothing wrong with that, obviously.) If we wanted stuff like this in our games, what could we do to make that happen?
Non-focal random encounters.
Random encounters, of course, can be used to achieve several different effects. But one of the ways they can be used is as a procedural content generator, providing a creative prompt to the GM for an interstitial event. Because the “camera” of our game session is virtually always focused on the PCs, we tend to think of the events generated by the random encounter tables as intersecting the path of the party; it’s something that happens randomly in the place where the PCs happen to be.
But it doesn’t have to be!
You can just as easily use procedural content generators to model events happening off-screen.
For example, if the PCs leave mounts and/or henchmen at the entrance of a dungeon while they go delving within, I’ll simply make random encounter checks for the group left behind. A notable example of this occurred when I ran The Sunless Citadel as part of my first D&D 3rd Edition campaign. The PCs left their mounts up on the surface while they went down into the citadel, I rolled regular random encounter checks, and when they returned they found the horses still there calmly munching grass… surrounded by a dozen scorched goblin corpses.
What the hell had happened?!
Ultimately, what I’m suggesting here is pretty simple:
Roll random encounters for locations/people that aren’t the PCs.
That’s it. That’s the tip.
You can probably usefully generalize this by identifying what the PCs care about and then rolling encounters for those things. This might include people, places, organizations, etc. The rate and nature of these encounters will depend on what and where these things are. The henchmen at the dungeon entrance are easy because you can just roll on the dungeon’s random encounter table (perhaps at a reduced rate if efforts have been made to conceal their camp). But what about the PCs’ favorite tavern? Or their emotionally troubled ward? Or their political patron?
In the most generic version of this, however, you can just create the list of Important Things in the Campaign and then roll encounter checks for everything on the list as part of your session prep. If an encounter is indicated, that simply means that this element of the campaign world has seen some sort of interesting development: What is it? And, importantly, how will the PCs learn of it?
This can be a really easy way to keep a big, complicated campaign world in motion without needing to constantly grapple with the almost impossible enormity of the whole thing. It can also just be a good way of reminding the players that the campaign world does, in fact, continue to exist even when they’re not looking at it.
Congratulations, you’ve discovered Fronts. LOL. Actually you done a nice job explaining their elegant use, along with some new implementations. Very helpful.
I usually run my main story arc this way, along with any side-stories and occasional adventures. Implementing this for general non-focal events provides more of that ‘world beyond the party” stuff that presents verisimilitude. Thinking I need to add encounter rolls to the current HQ village to see what happens there while the party is off slaying owlbears.
Wait, so what the hell DID happen?
This is genius.
I’ve been doing this with some NPCs travelling in my current hexcrawl. Definitely something I’ll have to keep in mind for other uses as well.
I might be able to replace my ad-hoc “faction strength” rolls with something like this too. Also once my PCs end up delving the larger dungeons it will give them good reason to guard their camp.
Well said.
I confess myself curious as well about the goblins… which is presumably the point. I once had a new player quietly run an NPC orc that was tracking the party – he would pass notes in between the party’s own actions. He tried to set a trap for them, fumbled and set it off on himself, the party caught him. The following encounters wouldn’t have happened without his input. They left him tied up in a local temple while they went off to fight a monster – by the time they returned he’d escaped, murdered a priest, set the village on fire and been killed by the villagers.
Good tip. I’ve done this more casually than procedurally for Important Things/Events/News happening in the background of the campaign (e.g., guards at the Keep on the Borderlands spotted a dragon in the distance. It is now the talk of the town/keep).
Curious, do you have a table of Important Things you could share?
BUT … BUT … THE GOBLINS???
It’s a really good tip. Sometimes I roll encounters to update an hex key. Something like Goblin& combined with non-focal encounters. Bullywugs in Wyvern lair? Now you have frog-like body pieces laying around, and it smells terribly.
Seems like this would synergize really well with node-based scenarios. Just go down the node list rolling encounters and the self-contained units should make it easy to change things up without necessarily having to restructure the whole scenario, although you can have non-local effects if you really want.
The horses drunk a potion of fire breathing, had a seismic bowl movement at the same time goblins were picking berries, (these goblins were pacifist vegetarians but were hoping to use horse manure as fertilizer).
@RW Kile:
general events happening in the world to NPCs and cities are quite the opposite of Fronts. These events could be caused by fronts, but a merchant getting attacked by yetis, because you rolled a random “non-focal” encounter for him doesn’t have to do with the plan and action of your campaign villain.
Just thought you might be interested to know that Mike Shea (Sly Flourish) did a video calling out this blog post:
https://youtu.be/I6NNchL-P5o
He’s actually a big fan of your work. Sometimes his methods are a bit too simplistic for me, but he’s got a lot of great ideas and he synthesizes ideas from many sources into an approach that is very easy to use and understand.
If you are interested in further exploring this idea, check out Kevin Crawford’s games SWN and WWN and his Factions rules or, as someone already mentioned, Fronts rules from Adam Koebel’s Dungeon World.
Both of these rule systems provide some additional structure when determining what is happening “outside” and how it might affect the party.
I hope you do a series of articles exploring the idea further yourself. Happy gaming! 🙂
It was interesting when one time in the 80’s to have the GM narrate a band of Su-Monsters battling our herd of mounts (lead by the Paladin’s warhorse) as we exited the dungeon. Of course then we charged in and helped turn the tide of battle against the monsters it was a good return on our investment of heavy Warhorses instead of lighter and faster mounts for the party.