Random encounters have been part of RPGs ever since the beginning. Every dungeon had its carefully designed rooms, but the real threats were the rolls on the wandering monsters table that could disrupt a party’s rest or surprise players at a bad time.

Random encounters fell away from roleplaying for many years, but have surged back in popularity with the Old School Renaissance. At Gencon last year, at least 30 minutes of a fun Pirate Borg game was driven through fun and crazy tables as we pirates partied at a Caribbean tavern.

Despite my fondness for them, very few of my adventures on this site feature random encounters. So this month, I decided to change that, with the gonzo post-apocalyptic adventure, Railgun Road.

(Longtime readers may remember that Railgun Road was one of my great unfinished projects… well, I went back to it and got it out. Take that, Winds of Winter.)

Starting with the Structure

I always define the goal of an adventure first. The best adventures make it clear to players what their objective is in the first 15 minutes. Railgun Road gives it to the players immediately — their town was hit hard by the Rust Pact gang, three gang leaders took their most valuable stuff and then spread out across the desert. This is a vengeance quest. Track down the gang leaders, kill them, get their stuff back. Classic wasteland survival plot.

With three gang leaders spread out, I needed encounters that served different purposes. The players needed clues where to find the gang leaders. The players started with minimal equipment, so they needed better equipment. The wasteland is dangerous, so I also wanted players to encounter weird and deadly inhabitants that would make the adventure memorable.

I knew with such an open ended goal – “track down the baddies and kill ’em” – players would go about this very differently than I imagined. If I put in a strict order of events, well, it would likely get ruined by a bunch of survival-oriented players with motorcycles at their disposal. This problem is what jammed me up for so long writing this adventure.

But after running a bunch of Dungeon Crawl Classics adventures, I found my inner OSR soul and organized the entire adventure around random encounters. But there was a method behind my madness.

• Traveling on-the-road meant there were 6 random encounters to find. But they would always give players a clue to the whereabouts of the next gang leader. This way, players would never get stuck. I left it up to the GM as to which clues led where, as it really doesn’t matter the order in which players track down the bad guys.
• Traveling offroad meant there were 6 additional random encounters that really highlighted the crazy setting I wanted, and usually gave the players better equipment. Traveling offroad was necessary to find two of the three gang leaders too.
• Finally, I included some specific locations that the players would want to visit. Supply outposts, weird wasteland oracles, radiation zones, etc. Critically these set pieces would help the players feel like the adventure wasn’t entirely random, and that where they chose to go mattered. This solved the problem I observed in my otherwise-fun Pirate Borg adventure. Once the GM is rolling on random tables a lot, it starts to feel that way.

Random Encounters Change How You Write

I think building an adventure around random encounters not only adds unpredictability to the players, but writing it becomes a more freeform exercise. I could really pour a lot of creativity into each encounter, not really worrying how it connected the previous one. Each encounter is its own mini-adventure, and players and GMs alike will absolutely improvise the connective tissue.

For example, when I ran it with my group, they started building their own conspiracy theories on how weird mechanical donkeys wandering the wasteland connected their crazy theories that a frozen yogurt machine had become sentient. This wasn’t in the adventure as written, but crazy conspiracy theories really make a post-apocalyptic adventure!

Get Railgun Road for FREE here:

In Railgun Road, Vagrant Town has been attacked, and three ruthless gang leaders have escaped into the wasteland. These raiders fled with the town’s most precious possessions: a half-full gasoline truck, a crate of rocket launchers, and the governor’s beloved 33-year-old dog, Immortal Normal. The Bossduke of the town recruits a group of survivors to hunt them down. Across a hundred-mile range filled with sand squirmers, radioactive meteors, and bizarre mechanized relics, players must navigate an open-ended sandbox to reclaim their town’s stolen future.

Get it here for GURPS and Wasteland Degenerates, which is a fun Mad Max-themed RPG built off the bones of Mork Borg and CY_BORG!

• Railgun Road (GURPS After the End)
• Railgun Road (GURPS After the End) – Printer Friendly
• Railgun Road (Wasteland Degenerates / CY_BORG / OSR)
• Railgun Road (Wasteland Degenerates / CY_BORG / OSR) – Printer Friendly
• Railgun Road – VTT Tokens & Assets

Related: Hacking a Cyberpunk Structure

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