Adding Randomness to Your RPG

The controlled chaos of randomly rolled characters or randomly created events within tabletop roleplaying games appeals to many gamers. Even the fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide contains a nice chunk of random tables and charts to create NPCs, treasure or campaign events. But sometimes you crave even more RPG randomness. Allow me to present some system agnostic books to add some randomness to your RPG game.

Random tables are an RPG Game Master’s friend

Author Matt Davids creates content to help Game Masters and roleplaying game enthusiasts level up their sessions and campaigns. (He was also a recent Live Chat Revivified guest.) Some of the titles he’s authored include the Book of Random Tables: Quests and the Book of Random Tables: Fantasy Role-Playing Game Aids for Game Masters (1-4). The book of quests is a series of tables featuring d100 rolls for a variety of results. The sections are dungeon hooks, royal quests, forest quests, doorways to another world, town quests, sea quests, quest beasts, quest items, lost cities and meta quests for a total of ten random tables to use for any RPG. This amounts to 1000 quest ideas! Book of Random Tables: Quests is a fun read you can use as inspiration for what you might want to plan out ahead of time or when players take a turn you were not expecting simply grab the books and be ready in just a moment.

Book of Random Tables: Quests is just one of the books in the fantasy section. You can see from Matt Davids’ author page there’s more than just fantasy. You can also choose modern, science fiction, post apocalyptic and other random charts to enhance your roleplaying game experiences. If you are looking to live dangerously feel free to add a quest or random table from a genre outside your comfort zone or of the style you are currently playing.

The books of random tables are designed with tables and charts full of awesome goodies for any Game Master. These books are brimming with fun things like NPC traits or even jobs they seek adventurers to fulfill, maps, items in a room and even insults to level at characters. Names, encounters, locations, items, people, dungeons, towns and so much more fill the tables and charts in these books. No matter what sort of RPG you’re planning to run these make a great resource. And if all that still isn’t enough Matt Davids’ website dicegeeks provides more resources for free.

I have been enjoying using these products for quite some time and I am sure these will become great resources for your games too. If you are looking to make your game more random or allow more randomness into your games or simply want a resource to aid you in making your material more varied I highly recommend you check out these books.

Thanks for reading. Until next time, stay nerdy!