Out of the eight monsters listed on the Wilderness Encounters table (Chapter 3: The Spider’s Web), the ogre is one of my favorites. There’s already an ogre by the name of Gog in Lost Mine of Phandelver. Gog aligns himself with Brughor Axe Biter and his company of orcs at Wyvern Tor. However, if the party encounters an ogre out in the wild, I’ll pull Gog from the Wyvern Tor encounter and plop him into the random daytime encounter.

I like this encounter so much that I included it in one of my DM’s Guild products, Between the High Road & the Long Road.

From a wooded hillock off in the distance, a roar echoes
through the air, sending an eruption of birds scattering from
the knoll’s trembling treetops. Moments later, an enormous
ogre pushes through a dense cluster of young pine trees atop
the hillock, uprooting several of them before charging toward
your position on the trail with terrifying speed.

As the Patron Saint of Seldom-Used Rules, I enjoy working unloved mechanics into opportunities wherever they present themselves. In this instance, l use the significant gap between Gog and the party at the start of the encounter to illustrate how normal range and long range numbers work for something like a shortbow works – demystifying that “80/320” players see next to the shortbow on their character sheet.

Gog is 280 feet away when he spots the party and starts bellowing at them. Using the dash action for three rounds as he charges toward them, Gog won’t get a swing at the party until round 4, when he’s finally within range of the characters with his maul. This gives the party plenty of time to figure out how they want to deal with the situation.

As you may have guessed, anyone with a ranged weapon usually wants to shoot at the rampaging ogre, so they get to experience the limitations of their ranged weapon, often for the first time. A situation like this nicely illustrates the difference between a shortbow and longbow is more than just damage output. A character using a longbow will find the ogre in normal range a round earlier than the character using a shortbow, who spends three rounds rolling ranged attacks with disadvantage vs. the longbow’s two rounds dealing with the penalty.

Ogres are slack-witted brutes, so they’ll charge into a hail of arrows. Sometimes the party drops Gog with ranged weapons just as he’s arriving to the fight. Other times, he arrives to the fight significantly weakened.

In addition to nerding out with seldom-used rules, it’s fun to build some color into this encounter:

• At 200 feet away, the party realizes how large the Gog is as they feel the earth start to tremble beneath them with each step of the ogre’s charge.
• At 120 feet away, the characters can see the jewellery Gog made for himself (a ring with the skin of a human face stretched over it) bouncing around his neck.
• At 40 feet, Gog’s ripe stench precedes him. Bits of blood, bones, and brains from his most recent victim can be seen clinging to the huge maul he has raised above his head as he prepares to pulp someone.

Let’s be mutuals over on Bluesky! If you’re interested, I’m @ticklecorn.bsky.social. I always follow back.

If you’d like to support my work, please consider checking out my supplements for Lost Mine of Phandelver and Dragon of Icespire Peak over on Dungeon Master’s Guild! All of my titles are Free/PWYW offerings.