I’ve been thinking a lot about the early stages of adventure prep recently. Planning for Unconventional GMs one-shots often ends up with us agreeing on a system we want to showcase – but, then what? Sometimes I’ll scout around for a usable one-shot, but (1) running your own stuff is always smoother, and (2) our channel’s agreed parameters – <2 hour one-shots – sometimes makes this extra difficult.

Quite a few times I’ve been left staring into space at, for example, the Index Card RPG, or Star Trek Adventures 2nd edition. With a concept and an idea I can run with it to pull a structure together, but a blank slate is hard.

So I’ve been looking a lot at random generators. Whether it’s ones for specific systems, or generic “create an adventure” ones, I’ve started to use these much more. And, really, they work. I prepped Ghost Mountain for ICRPG entirely off a set of Plotlib’s random tables. Ironsworn was almost entirely procedurally generated from the book (a rare case where some zoomed in stuff was random, too, using their Delve supplement).

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I’m going to show you, over the next few posts, how I’ve been using them – and try to offer some sort of review of the best of them. Where possible, I’ll actually run the adventure I’ve prepped for them, as well as post it here.

Here’s a few things I’ve found useful.

1. Limit your scope if you can

Even just a rough idea of what you’re looking for – an adventure in a fetid swamp, an original series Trek adventure – really helps to focus your creativity. As you’re rolling the tables and noting them down, your mind should be pulling this together, and starting with a limited palette helps this.

2. Do pregens first

Similarly, having your PCs either reviewed (for an ongoing game) or fully prepped (for a one-shot) gives you some idea of focus. Your random generator won’t usually help with making the system bit of the game interesting, and here’s where you can adjust and make sure that it fits them – providing some additional creative constraint. You should be trying to have a bit of skill matching, too – which can be as simple as making sure there’s a car chase somewhere for your driver character to engage with – check out the three-skill trick here.

3. Roll, then delete

You won’t need it all. Really. So anything that feels a stretch to match to the rest of the randomly-rolled stuff can be ditched immediately. As you get better at writing your own adventures, you’ll have got better at spotting the difference between “interesting friction” and “unworkable mismatch,” and you can trust your gut on this.

4. Do it all in advance

YMMV with this, but I absolutely cannot abide rolling random encounters at the table. Do it in advance. I like being put on the spot to come up with interesting plot points and reactions that flow from the friction – I don’t like to determine randomly whether I need to know the rules for giant spiders or not. I prefer to have a list of 3-4 random encounters (that I’ve pre-linked to the actual plot, or given some relevance) in advance – no surprises here. If you absolutely must, I’ll just point out that Chris McDowall’s 1d6 random encounter method from Electric Bastionland is absolutely the best way to do it – and avoids the issues I have with it by only really having three things on it.

So that’s a few tips for random tables. I’m going to be showing how this works in practice in the future on here (and hopefully on UGMs as well) – so let me know your favourite random generators as well!