Tuesday, 4 November 2025

Aid to DMing Laziness

 

There aren't any random encounter tables in the AD&D2e core books, as there once were in, for example, the AD&D1e Monster Manual II.

However somebody, and I don't know who that somebody is, put together a whole bunch of tables from a whole bunch of AD&D2e sources:

  • Monstrous Manual
  • Forgotten Realms Appendix
  • Fiend Folio Appendix
  • Monstrous Compendiums, volumes 1-4

I think, though I don't remember for sure, that I grabbed the PDF via Dragonsfoot*. But maybe somewhere else; I don't know.


 The main issue with this excellent piece of work is that it included no Table of Contents, or page numbers, so a bit of page-flipping was necessary to find anything.

I laboriously copied and pasted the whole thing, column by column, from the PDF into LibreOffice, and applied styles to everything so that a ToC could be generated. 

Then I printed it in 16-page signatures, stitched it together, and gave it a simple wraparound card cover, itself covered in my home-made book-cloth. In the process, I gave it a classy ribbon bookmark and a cover graphic I whipped up in CorelDraw, printed and laminated, and glued to the front.

'Tis a small thing, but mine own. Sort of. 

 


* I did get it from Dragonsfoot. From here, in fact: https://www.dragonsfoot.org/php4/archive.php?sectioninit=SE&fileid=400

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2 comments:

  1. Looks like a fun project. Never have too many tables.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Looks lovely and useful, so the best kind of book.

    ReplyDelete