Friday, November 17, 2017

Kovakistani Mountains Die Drop Table

In a guerrilla warfare campaign with a foreign occupying force, the local terrain is going to become the resistance’s greatest weapon. The earliest historical anecdotes I’ve read examples of that statement in were rebellions against Roman Imperial rule, but I’m sure it goes back further than that.

At the end of the first session of my KLA campaign, the PC cell fled the capital city to head into the mountains. Which meant that my prep for episode two basically consisted of making another one of these:




sized to fit in the bottom of a 12 pack of ramen (as all die drop tables should be)

This one’s a little bit different from the two previous ones I posted, partly because of the more realistic genre, but also to account for less extreme weather conditions, variable alertness levels for local units of the occupying force, and human-made infrastructure. The other key difference is that (unless they REALLY fuck up) the PCs will be sticking to the roads, which means that smaller wilderness features won't generally even be noticed, at least not as readily as if the party cell was hiking through the woods. 
The random alertness (bottom edge) in particular makes traveling more of a hassle by increasing the number of encounters per journey from the standard 1 in 6. It's also helpful when figuring out how any soldiers encountered should behave by default.

Here’s a more legible version:
click here to download pdf

I'd like to say I'll clean this up at some point but that's what I said about the jungle one like a year ago so let's assume I care more about pure functionality with these.

It may just be that my players were really on it, but this worked really well in practice. The random terrain and constantly shifting fog added an element of tactical variety that gave the PCs room to deal with pretty repetitive encounters differently in different situations.