In my campaign, the PCs will often travel along roads in (mostly) civilized areas. The population is such that it’s easy enough to find a village, hamlet, camp or thorpe along the Class 1 (maintained) and Class 2 (not very maintained) roads. Here’s what I’ve started using to generate a road stop. If they encounter a road stop, I’ll make a note of it in the Hex Key for later use.
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| “Overlooking Bree” by Mentor Huebner and Johnny Vita |
Random Road Stop (roll 1d8 for type, 1d6 for Availability of Common Goods, 1d100 twice for Inn/Tavern)
Availability of Goods + Goods Base = %Chance that location has a common item available.
1-2 Poor (-10)
3-5 Average (+5%)
6 Comfortable (+15%)
So let’s say the PCs traveled all day and want to see if they can rest comfortably for the evening and perhaps find a tavern or inn for food, drink and rumors. There’s no established town/village on this hex, so I roll a d8, d6 and d100 (twice).
I got a: 5, 2, 37, 1 – The players find a hamlet beside the road. It’s a poor hamlet, so there is only a 5% chance that they would have common items that the PCs might want. There is no inn (37% roll vs 5% chance) but there is a tavern! (1% roll versus a 25% chance). For a name, I’m pretty good at pulling those out of my pocket, so we’ll call this Peditee’s Rest. I will jot these down in my notes to add to my hex key later on.
For each item the PCs might want to pick up, if it’s a common item (I’ll look at what they want and “gut check rule” if it’s common), I will roll a d100 and look for less than 5% to see if they can buy it.
If this road stop has a purpose or something extra/special, it will already be in my key. This is just for traveling and this is one of those “close your eyes and you’ll miss it” stops. The population sizes are based on my campaign, so your methodology/numbers might be a bit different. For me, this satisfies what most PCs want out of a road stop – a place to buy/sell their crap, a place to find out about getting more crap and a place to rest/recover before traveling on to where the crap it.
Give it a whirl, let me know what you think!
Very good idea! I've got PC's getting ready to travel in my AD&D campaign. It's rough terrain and sand, so I'll need some sort of modifier for that direction of travel.
I have caravansaries and road side hostels in the other direction. I would mod the base table to handle different regions' peculiarities.
This would be a good fit for a sea based campaign and landing on different islands in an archipelago.
I can see making an all the dice table for this, so one roll of the required dice to generate it.
I've made a ridiculously long list of names for people and places using online generators, so I just take one off the list when I need it.
All good stuff! I'm thinking about adding a bit more myself. As well, hosting this on my tools site.