But, I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. The Ultimate Random Encounters Book was written by Travis "Wheels" Wheeler, Logan Jenkins, Lee Terrill and Greg Leatherman and is designed to provide the Dungeon Master or Game Master (DM/GM) in you with a variety of prompts to incorporate into your game. There are three sections in the book, with the first being the largest, weighing in at nearly three-quarters of the book. This first part of the book, "Encounters" contains one-hundred entries for each of its nine covered settings: City, Village, Forest/Swamp, Underground/Cave, Mountains, On the Road, Dungeon, Sea and Desert. That's 900 different creative ideas to spark something new and interesting in your campaign. The authors recommend that you use the book how you best see fit, but they suggest that you can roll a d100 in whatever manner you like and then read that entry in the setting that works with your current adventure and see if you like the idea and if it inspires you to work it into your game. If not, throw it out and roll again... or just read a few and choose whichever one strikes your fancy.
The second section of the book, "Game Master Tools" has four parts, each having one-hundred options to select from. The first two give unique flavor to your NPCs, by providing interesting Locations/Scenarios of how the party first encounters an NPC and Motivations that help to flesh out why the NPC takes the actions they do. The other two parts, "Magic Effects" and "Wild Cards" are a bit madcap and random. I've seen random magic effects covered elsewhere and the idea can be amusing, but I expect to get less use out of the Magic Effects section than anything else in the first two sections of the book. Wild Cards, on the other hand, is almost a Miscellaneous section, with ideas that can range from generically raising the stakes of the current encounter to shaking up the ongoing story completely or even simply calling for a snack break.
The last section, "Downtime" contains only one set of one-hundred ideas, entitled "Real Stories" and is, essentially, a list of improvisational discussion hooks to inspire more role-playing between players and deeper development of the party's characters. Which is great, I guess. However, when I play tabletop RPGs, I tend to be more into the role-playing aspects than the others at the table, yet these sorts of scenes are too "sideline" for even me. I'm excited about the idea of working a character's proficiency into the action... such as having a character who is a cook be called upon to cater an event for a prince's wedding... but when there's some plot afoot. I'm not excited about improvising a discussion between all of the party members about whether they've ever been truly in love or what they hope to do when they settle down and stop adventuring.
Personally, I randomly rolled up a few to see what that was like, then I read the whole book straight through, cover to cover. Actually, I found reading it straight through to be a bit difficult to do. Since the ideas don't go into a lot of detail, but just present a kernel of an idea... or a "hook"... and then it's on to another spark, I found myself being inspired with ideas that built on entries in the book or thinking how a couple of the ideas could be worked into interrelated and, perhaps, not-so-random encounters and wanting to dwell on that, rather than reading the next idea. That's not a bad thing. That is absolutely this book doing exactly what it should.
I would be remiss if I didn't add that, in the absence of stats and details, while this book will inspire ideas for your campaign, depending on how rules-driven or fast-and-loose your game is, you could require quite a bit of additional research, from writing up and fleshing out NPC characters to looking up stats on monsters included and, in some cases, quite possibly making up stats for monsters that could have been taken from anywhere (and, hence, not defined for the game you might be wanting to use them in) or quite possibly made up altogether and simply mentioned in passing. For this reason, each GM's mileage may vary, but you'll want to use the book during your prep time before the game; very few of the ideas can simply be randomly grabbed during a game session and thrown in. There are a few, mind you, but you'll probably need to reroll a few times to find one that can be slipped in that easily.
Throughout the book there are some terrain maps intended to be used with certain ideas, which are clearly identified, but even though the artwork is nice, they seem like they would be of limited use and seem to be trying a bit hard to work with multiple ideas that may each have a unique visual element. Basically, when all of these individual visual elements are included on the same terrain map, it muddies things up a bit and can be confusing. I can see using these maps as a GM reference and drawing sketches from them on an erasable map board, but it seems a shame to do that, since the artwork itself is so pretty.
While this book wasn't exactly what I thought it was going to be, it is full of great ideas to get you thinking. If you typically run a stat-heavy game, then you'll have a lot of work to do to incorporate these ideas into your game, but you probably already are doing a lot of set up work. If your players are a bit more cooperative and are willing to let the story flow without seeing if they can "attack the darkness" or randomly casting lightning bolt at any NPCs who might approach them, then working The Ultimate Random Encounters Book into your games might be much easier. Either way, it's a great tool for any GM looking for a bit of inspiration to get their campaigns going or to help add realism and interest to their NPCs. Highly Recommended.
