Fantasy Friday: Sandbox Encounters From A To Z...

Good Afternoon, All:

For today's installment of Fantasy Friday, I wanted to discuss my plans for next month's A-Z Challenge. The goal for the A-Z Challenge is to write 26 posts in the month of April, one a day except for a given day per week (usually Sunday). The topic of each post starts with a different letter of the alphabet, creating a series of hopefully related posts that your readers will find entertaining or at least useful.

While I know that I'm moving most of this blog toward Traveller, the month of April is going to be all about fantasy, because it is admittedly easier to write for. In my case, I'm going to focus on Sandbox Encounters. I intend to write up 26 different encounter types I can use in my Madlands Campaign, to help when I need a random encounter in my game. Of course, these can be used by fantasy GMs with minimal changes, particularly if you're running a sandbox campaign or a game set in the Hammersong's Legacy campaign setting. With a little creativity, many of these encounters can be used in other genres as well. (Well, maybe not the supernatural encounters, but the rest should be good.)

The basics of Sandbox Encounters can be found in my post entitled Inspired by Red Tide: The Shadow Syndicate Encounters, although I'm changing it up just a little bit. In essence, I'm looking at the following write-up format, which is a simplified version of the Red Tide write-up, but suitable for my own purposes. Note that I'm not including stat blocks in my version, although I may, if I have the time and motivation to do so.

Sandbox Encounter Format:

1. Brief Description. This will be a paragraph describing the encountered creature or type in general.
2. Encounter Groups. This section provides three different encounters of escalating power levels: Novice (levels 1-3), Seasoned (levels 4-6) and Veteran (levels 7-10), to borrow terms from Savage Worlds. Each simply lists the members of such a group, and provides some basic treasure for the encounter.
3. Encounter Ideas. This d6 table will contain six different scenarios that the GM can either choose directly, randomly select, or use as inspiration for a given encounter.

I am currently looking at detailing the following Sandbox Encounters:

1. Adventurers' Expedition
2. Banth
3. Canker Hound
4. Dinosaur
5. Earth Drake
6. Fyrcat
7. Giant
8. Horror From Beyond
9. Iron Golem
10. Jackal Lord
11. Kelshani
12. Lupiscupine
13. Mantid
14. Night Hag Cult
15. Ogre
16. Pyrolisk
17. Quickling
18. Revenant
19. Serpentfolk
20. Troll
21. Unicorn
22. Vulturan
23. White Ape
24. Xenophobic Patrol
25. Yakshini
26. Zegoth

If you have any other suggestions than the ones above. please feel free to make them. I'm pretty open, and I'm sure my players would enjoy a few surprises, so long as they fit the flavor of the setting.

With Regards,
Flynn