Random Encounters From Your Miniature Drawer

I've always had somewhat of an off-and-on passion when it comes to miniatures. I've never really used them for my games - collecting and painting miniatures is an awful lot of setup, especially when you factor terrain and scenery into the equation, and (to riff on my last post) I fear that visual representations on the gaming table can influence the imaginations of my players more than I would like. Couple that with the fact that my regular gaming group is spread over multiple states and I handle everything over Skype chats anyway, I find it easier and more streamlined to just go with the theater of the mind.

At the same time, I've always liked the little bastards. Just to have them, and paint them, and to look at them for their own sake. Maybe even play a skirmish wargame once in a while. They aren't (or at least shouldn't be) necessary, but minis are fun.

Since moving into my new house, I've been getting everything unpacked and reassessing what I have. That includes going through my old, mostly unpainted collection of minis I've had for years, always hoping to do something with but never really getting there. I've been looking more into games like Planet 28 lately, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to sort through my collection and see what I could make of them.

What immediately struck me was that, when I was at my peak of miniature collecting, I was very much the kind of person who collected things I thought were cool, rather than trying to build a certain army.

There's a lot of Reaper fantasy monsters, mixed in with some Warhammer Fantasy monstrous types, and even a few packs of the old Chainmail range from when Wizards of the Coast briefly wanted to get into the metal miniature business. An ogre, a dire boar, plenty of lizardmen (of various sizes), a bunch of orcs, quite a few skeletons and ghosts, a handful of Skaven, some barbarians...

Wait a minute. I'm sensing a pattern here. Maybe I can't make a cohesive army, but I do have a pretty decent random encounter table. Let's throw some of those things together, and see if I can write a dungeon around it.

1d20:

1. Dire boar

2. 1d8 orcs 

3. 1d8 kobolds

4. Ogre

5. 1d2 myconids

6. 1d2 Rat Men 

7. 1d8 goblins

8. 1d6 mummies

9. 2d8 spiders

10. 1d4-1 (minimum 1) lizardmen

11. 1d8 skeletons

12. 1d4 specters

13. Vampire

14. 1d4 wolves

15. Werewolf

16. 1d4 berserkers

17. Dragon (I haven't painted it yet. Let's say a red one)

18. 1d2 trolls

19. Death knight

20. Earth elemental 

I also think the reason I like the myconids in Dark Souls so much
is because they remind me of these old Reaper ones.

Yeah, it probably looks pretty funhouse-ish right now, doesn't it? And quite unbalanced, but remember: not all random encounters need to lead to immediate combat. But that's where we start thinking about how we could make everything fit. And as we do, the seed of an entire dungeon starts to emerge.

Right now, there's two big themes I'm starting to realize with the monsters we're using. There's a lot of undead, and a lot of reptilian creatures (with the dragon, lizardmen, and kobolds). These could easily be grouped into their own factions. The vampire and the dragon sound like natural leaders for the two groups (the death knight could be a second in command to the vampire, or vice versa), and that raises the question of what they're doing in the same dungeon.

Maybe the vampire has set up a lair for his necromantic experiments, and it just so happened to be in a cavern already inhabited by the dragon. Perhaps he's trying to manipulate the dragon and his lizardman servants to his own ends, and to serve as extra muscle to keep out those pesky intruders who are getting suspicious as to who's taking all the dead bodies. Maybe he has some magic artifact or other precious treasure that he's bribing the dragon with, knowing the creature's greed. This way, smart players could exploit the factions by pitting them against each other - maybe they'll need to steal the treasure from the vampire to sway the dragon to their side! After all, those lizardmen could be useful allies, to say nothing of the dragon himself!

There's some other entries we could group into smaller factions too. The orcs, goblins, and maybe the ogre all seem like they could be allies. Maybe it's an independent tribe of Trollkin, or maybe it's more hired muscle being used by the vampire (which could make them jealous of the lizardmen if they feel they're being replaced - something that the players could win their allegiance over if they don't side with the dragon, since they probably will have a harder time doing that with skeletons). The dire boar could be a pet of the orcs, or just an independent monster. The myconids, spiders, Rat Men, trolls, and earth elemental would all most likely be random denizens of the dungeon. As for the berserkers, wolves, and werewolf, they could be independent too - but what sounds more fun to me is the thought that maybe this is a clan of wolf-worshiping barbarians, led by a werewolf! Maybe they're visiting a shrine somewhere in the dungeon, or raiding it for its riches or as a sort of initation ritual!

As you can see, there's a ton of ways that this seemingly random collection of creatures and characters can be made into something more cohesive. And like many instances of working within constraints, it can get the creative juices flowing to be given a set of incoherent, mismatched elements and to be forced to make them work. Already, I have the start of a dungeon that could last me plenty of sessions to come. And if I was the kind of person to use minis, I wouldn't even need to buy anything new for it!

I'd love to see other people try this exercise out. It's a great way to come up with dungeons and other scenarios that you might never have considered otherwise. Do you have a bunch of random miniatures laying around? Try making a random encounter table out of them, and let me know what you come up with!

Visions of Tolkien's World

If you're active in the geekosphere, you may know about the upcoming Magic: the Gathering set based on The Lord of the Rings. What I take away from this is that the way Wizards of the Coast handles the lore of its two flagship properties is almost diametrically opposed, with D&D so locked down with the lore of just one setting out of the infinite potential of the creativity of DMs the world over, while the folks over at MTG embrace the opportunity to cross over with everything they can get their hands on, no matter how fitting - but that's not the subject of this post.

It do be like this though.

You may have heard the controversy over the set depicting Aragorn (and a few other characters, but he's
the most visible) as a black man. You can weigh in on whether or not it's fitting of the lore, or whether or not it's representative of tokenism, all you want. Actually, don't, I don't want my comments section to turn into a minefield. But that isn't what I'm here to talk about either. I don't have any strong feelings one way or the other about Aragorn being black. But it does excite me. What I do care about is how this represents a rare exploration into the potential for more diverse depictions of Middle-Earth and of Tolkien's stories than what we're used to.

I, of course, refer to the fact that they're not making everything look like the movies.

...what? What did you think I was talking about?

All jokes aside, I welcome the fact that the artists over at Wizards are putting their own spin on Tolkien's world. If you take a look at Tolkien art, you'll notice a very noticeable shift around the early 2000s, right when the Peter Jackson movies hit theaters and became smash hits. After this, everyone uses the movies as their template of what Middle-Earth is "supposed" to look like. Color palettes are drab and mostly shades of brown. Elves wear gold armor with elaborate, leaf-like designs. The Uruk-Hai use equipment with an industrial, almost brutalist feel. Hobbits have curly hair and dreamy boy-band looks. There's lots of open plains. Aragorn looks like Viggo Mortensen.

Which of these is concept art from the movies?
Trick question: none of them are.

Before this, though? There was no established "look" for Middle-Earth. Every artist was free to intepret the world in their own way, and we saw some really creative interpretations. Take a look:

There's of course the famous art of the Hildebrandt Brothers, which defined Tolkien in the eyes of many before the movies thanks to their popular series of calendars.

The genesis of pig-faced orcs?

Give Gimli his hat back.

Or how about the work of Ted Nasmith, whose lush, detailed landscapes paint the sort of vistas I can only hope to portray as a DM?

Famed Conan illustrator Frank Frazetta did a lesser-known series of Tolkien artwork that brings a pulp feel to the story.

Not sure how effective Eowyn's disguise is, though

The Rankin-Bass adaptation of The Hobbit probably comes the closest to my childhood mental image of Gollum.

And their depiction of the elves of Mirkwood can't be farther from Jackson's.

Foreign editions bring their own interpretations to the table, like this Finnish version of Gollum.

And this Russian Gandalf has a folksy, almost medieval-tapestry feel.

Would anyone today portray Boromir as a Viking, as seen in the Ralph Bakshi film?

What about a flippin' samurai? Because that's what the Finnish television series Hobbits did.

Hell, even the art straight from Tolkien himself seems refreshingly different to modern eyes.

I'm glad that Wizards is willing to experiment and go against the grain, not because I'm any fan of identity politics, but because a world where we only have one flavor of Middle-Earth is boring. Or one flavor of anything, really. As popular as the Jackson movies are, they're just one of a handful of adaptations, and one of even more personal interpretations of what was described in the text. And artists shouldn't be afraid, consciously or unconsciously, to share their visions because they're not the definitive look - they shouldn't even believe there is a definitive look to begin with. There should always be room for creativity, and the popularity of adaptations that came before shouldn't stifle that.

It's the same reason why, when running published modules, I never show my players any illustrations. The world and the characters is theirs and theirs alone to imagine, and I don't want to color that with any other interpretation. The players' mental image probably doesn't look anything like what's in my head. And that's a good thing.