When prepping for Lost Mine of Phandelver’s Chapter 3: The Spider’s Web, I would recommend Dungeon Masters put some forethought into how they would deploy each of the monsters found on the Wilderness Encounters table before it actually comes to a dice roll in game play.

You’re the Dungeon Master, and you’re keeping enough in your head as it is. Your mind palace is starting to look like Tresendar Manor. Don’t burden yourself with figuring out how to run an encounter with something like an owlbear on the spot. You’ve got enough to do – even when the players are behaving.

I thought it might be fun to work my way through the list of these encounters one by one this week, and share some tips for how I go about prepping for random encounters in my game. We’ll cover stirges, ghouls, ogres, goblins, hobgoblins, orcs, wolves, and owlbears – each of which are listed on the Wilderness Encounters table.

But first, some general tips.

Tip: Even though there are 8 monsters on the Wilderness Encounters table, nobody is holding a gun to your head to use all of them. In fact, when the d20 calls for a random encounter, I don’t roll the d12 to determine which monster jumps out of the bushes at the party. I simply choose the monster I’m most interested in, or that I understand the most. It’s my view that the more interested a Dungeon Master is in the monster, the more interesting the encounter will be for the players.

Tip: Use daytime encounters to set up nighttime encounters. What I mean by this: use daytime encounters to allow characters to discover signs that something like an owlbear might be a possible encounter at some point – rather than diving straight into a daytime combat encounter with an owlbear. This will help to add tension to your game. Perhaps the fighter steps in a steaming pile of bear dookie, only for a character proficient in Intelligence (Nature) to notice some large feathers caught on the bark of a nearby tree, allowing them to suss out that there’s an owlbear in the area. Then, if there’s a nighttime encounter, the owlbear who has been stalking the party jumps out of the bushes at the poor soul who drew the second watch that night.

Tip: Building on the previous tip – don’t do the monsters dirty. A monster that can see in in low light and darkness through its darkvision trait is most-likely to attack at night. A hawk wouldn’t walk up to a squirrel to grab it. It’s got wings to reign death from above. Of the eight monsters on the Wilderness Encounters table, seven of them have darkvision. The one that does not is the wolf, whose disadvantage imposed on perception checks made in the dark has the potential to be nullified by its keen hearing and smell trait.

In a nutshell – where combat is concerned – the Wilderness Encounters table is built for nighttime encounters. Even better reason for using daytime encounters to set up nighttime encounters.

Tomorrow, we’ll apply these tips to a daytime encounter with a stirge.

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