Terrain for Random Wilderness Encounters

Roll as many times as you like on Natural, Manmade and Magical Terrain tables.  Roll the d8 on the play mat and wherever it lands, that is where that terrain feature is. Also, roll once to determine a random quest elsewhere in Denethix, this encounter is connected to that quest somehow.

Natural 

1. Beehive on Tree
2. Bear Den
3. Thorn Bushes
4. Thick Vines
5. River with Piranhas
6. Dead Tree (falls in random direction 2 rounds in)
7. Rocks with deadly snakes sunning themselves
8. Flock of crows

Hunting Platform

Manmade

1. Elevated Hunting Platform
2. Deer Blind
3. Bear Traps with bait (for actually catching bears)
4. Wolf Pit
5. Famine Wall 
6. Encounter takes place adjacent to farmland (fence, livestock, angry farmer, etc)
7. Crumbling, ruined tower
8. Ancient Auditorium

Magic

1. Hate -Murder occurred here, auto crits if hit
2. Fey Circle - Get inside the circle
3. Eclipse - Halfway through battle, the sun starts to fade
4. Earthmotes
5. Broken Down War Machine
6. Un-detonated  Artillery
7. Ancient Flag from long ago battle still rallies ghosts
8. Straight up Ghost

Terrain that doesn't suck

One thing I really liked about 4th edition was its focus on terrain.  The combination of a high magic default setting and the intense focus on tactical combat was a very fertile ground for terrain.  I mostly map out combats with just a few lines these days, but every so often I'll create a huge setpiece in roll20.  My favorite types of terrain are actually live creatures, either humans or animals.

Crowds: The best terrain isn't rocks, it's people.  I don't put a person in each square and keep track of them, I just list a huge block as "CROWD," and it all moves together. Crowds are hard to push through (2x movement required), can run away from threats and trample folks, and have opportunities for social encounters mid combat.  If you want to hack folks to death or take hostages you can just snatch them out of the crowd. You can intimidate the crowd to form a path through, or to send them trampling over your enemies.  You can get them on your side and have them throw rocks and bottles.

What happens to all the people when initiative is rolled?  

Animals:  A classic example that I use all the time is your horses in a camp.  A 5 foot aura around the horses where if you enter, you're getting kicked. Consider a bear baiting pit with bear inside, or maybe the rocks over yonder have poisonous snakes within.

Dungeons and Dinosaurs

The dinosaur clerics up north have hollowed out their mountain and filled it with a complex series of oil wells, with pumps, pipes and control structures that are mostly scavenged from ancient ruins.  They use fracking to harvest vast supplies of oil needed to power their time machine.  Oil is a perfect fuel, as it can supply the mechanical and psychic power needed.

Oil, ancient compressed ferns, dinosaurs, trilobites and trees, remembers what it once was, and yearns to return to itself.  That vast longing is a source of fuel as surely as the complex hydrocarbons are. If not properly managed, that longing can also be an explosive, dangerous force.

There is a T-Rex ghost inside the mountain. It staggers between the ghostly world and our own, confused, betrayed and ravenous.  After months of rumors and attacks, the complex has been shut down, and requires adventures to put the T-Rex ghost to rest.

Pastor Ian asks the adventurers to delve into the mountain, slay the T-Rex and minimize damage to the archaic machinery. The dungeon is dirt simple in layout, but the description of the rooms should be a confusing haze of anachronisms.  The awakening of the oil means that ghosts of half remembered ferns, giant dragonflies, and trilobites flitter about anachronistic metal machined pipes and simple steam driven computers.

Pastor Ian gives them directions, so the party can go on a direct line through the three encounters and find the T-Rex den quickly.  They can also wander down unlighted corridors, roll on wandering monsters if they do.  The idea is that the actual dungeon layout is insanely complex and could be a megadungeon, but the party is there for a surgical strike.

First Room simply contains a weird piece of machinery that produces a high pitched noise that knocks humans (and demihumans) unconscious when within 30 feet (no save).  The first person in marching order sees the machinery first, then falls unconscious presumably.  They have to get past this machine or else take a long detour, remember Ian told them not to damage machinery.  

Second Room contains velociraptors, which emerge from caves holes in the wall and leap down on the party. Inside the bellies of the ghostly velociraptors is a ghost of a miner who was devoured before they shut it down. He asks the party to take the money off his corpse (nearby) and use it to pay his debt to the Bowery Boys, or else they will come after his family.  He also says the afterlife is horrible.

This thing is awesome

Third room has the T-rex, which, similar to the oil all mixed together, is more properly described as an amalgam of thousands of different creatures, with contrarily shifting skin boundaries and appendages.



Wandering Monsters
1) Minotaur
2) Ghostly Giant Insects  
3) Ghostly Triceratops
4) Ghostly Trilobites
5) Mind Flayer gone insane by psychic reverberations
6) Lost miners



 

A Different Country

The first quest tied to the interior of the ASE, this quest is meant to allow the party to become familiar with Denethix the Capital City and to see that their choices have repercussions.

"The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country." -J. Robert Oppenheimer

As the party is exploring the dungeon, they find some scientific papers.  The papers themselves are inscrutable, but they look Very Scientific.  It's well known that the Cult of Science will purchase authentic Science looted from ruins.  Usually the Science is filed away, never to be seen again.  The party finishes up their exploration of the dungeon and surrounding environs, but knows that there is a
Cult of Science church in the capital that they can bring the material to and receive a reward.

Players don't read past this part

The Elves Below

In Denethix, there are no "drow" to speak of, but there are subterranean elves.  Cut off from the surface, these elves have multiple adaptations to their home, including shrunken eyes, total loss of skin pigment and darkvision (all elves started as subterranean elves but have lost the first two traits).  Underelves have their own weird societies separate from the wizard dominated surface, and their society and rituals are subject to much speculation by social scientists and archaeologists from the Academy of Elevated Thought.  It's commonly thought that their societies were the only ones to retain artifacts and rituals from before the time of cleansing.

Quest: Investigate a passageway into the earth and document underelven society, preferably with a wide variety of artifacts that can be hauled back to the Academy for study.  (The Academy is in the Indiana Jones/Early British style, of smash grab and steal)

Players don't read past this part