Spelljammer – Random tables

An old Web DM video about Spelljammer got me thinking about random tables, not least because Pruitt has never published the random tables he created for random encounters (please, please, please?).

Basically, I sat down, watched the video a couple of times, had a go at finding Pruitt’s sources, and built some of my own random adventure seed tables. Based on the descriptions in the video, these are nothing like them!
These are just some random generation of encounters – there’s plenty of better ones out there really (see the links at the end) but a fun little brainstorming session.

Some of these nest, so… yeah, this could get confusing. I’ll be trying to pull these into a GMBinder document at some point soon.
I need to convert stuff to d100 (for a start) for a lot of these, but this is just the quick notes I sketched out.

Table A: Wildspace	Table B: Phlogiston
1 Ship	1 Ship
2 Phenomena	2 Phenomena
3 Planetoid	3 Unexpected Sphere
4 Spacebeast	4 Spacebeast

Table C: Ships	Table D: Phenomena, Wildspace	Table E: Phenomena, Phlogiston
1 Debris, no survivors	1 Lone asteroid, uninhabited	1 Lone asteroid, uninhabited
2 Debris, lone survivor	2 Lone asteroid, inhabited	2 Lone asteroid, inhabited
3 Debris, group of survivors	3 Asteroid cluster, uninhabited	3 Asteroid cluster, uninhabited
4 Ghostship, no survivors	4 Asteroid cluster, inhabited	4 Asteroid cluster, inhabited
5 Ghostship, lone survivor	5 Storm	5 Storm
6 Crewed, friendly	6 Nebula, uninhabited	6 Rogue planetoid
7 Crewed, hostile	7 Nebula, inhabited	7 Comet
8 Mid-battle, both crews friendly	8 Comet	8 Fleet of ships, friendly
9 Mid-battle, one crew friendly, one hostile	9 Fleet of ships, friendly	9 Fleet of ships, hostile
10 Mid-battle, both crews hostile	10 Fleet of ships, hostile	10 Fire!

Table F: Planetoid	Table G: Unexpected Sphere
1 No atmosphere, no ruins	1 Explored sphere, mysteriously moved
2 No atmosphere, ruins	2 Unexplored, unknown sphere
3 Floating island, uninhabited	3 Broken sphere, uninhabited
4 Floating island, ruins	4 Broken sphere, inhabited
5 Floating island, inhabited, friendly	5 Empty sphere
6 Floating island, inhabited, hostile	6 Impossible to enter
7 Planetoid, uninhabited
8 Planetoid, uninhabited
9 Planetoid, inhabited, friendly
10 Planetoid, inhabited, hostile

Table H: Inhabitants, friendly	Table I: Inhabitants, hostile
1 Humans	1 Humans
2 Dwarves	2 Dwarves
3 Elves	3 Elves
4 Pirates	4 Pirates
5 Minor race	5 Mindflayers
6 Grand alliance!	6 Beholders
	7 Neogi
	8 Unholy alliance!

To add to the above, I’ll be looking back at the encounter tables on Spelljammer.org and this Reddit post for more story-based events (and thanks to this post also on Reddit, I’ll be reading through Dragon 39 ‘s Flowfire article too).
That’s for the next post though!