After dealing with the goblin ambush, the adventurers abandon further pursuit. The day was getting long, the heat was brutal, and they were all parched with thirst, so they return to Irongate Keep. In a bold move, the party decides to start their second foray into the Badlands at night, when the heat would not impede them.
They depart the Keep the following evening, just as the gates shut for the night. As they head out, the guards on the wall stare in disbelief. The Captain-of-the-Gate gives them a stern warning: "The drawbridge will not be lowered again until dawn, so whatever happens to you is on your heads. May the gods have mercy on you this night..."
Setting out down the canyon under the darkening sky, they soon become surrounded by a deep gloom. Their torches seem feeble and pathetic under the night's ebon pall, and the ridgelines now loom over them like walls of utter blackness. The air quickly grows cooler, then cold, and the howls of coyotes begin to echo through the canyons.
The going is slow and difficult, and the party has virtually no visibility to potential threats or obstacles. Thero, the elf ranger, leads the way just outside the ring of torchlight, but even his night vision is limited to just a few dozen yards, eliminating much of the range advantage of his longbow. Ban the bard second-guesses their decision, but Smitty the fighter is determined to mitigate the sun's relentless effect on their travels.
Without warning, the party is beset by a half-dozen skeletons dressed in the remnants of archaic wicker armor and wielding corroded bronze scimitars. The skeletons scramble toward them from a nearby rock terrace, scrabbling down the scree slope like rattling avatars of death. Quickly gaining their composure, the party reacts to the surprise attack and manages to defeat the skeletons without serious injury to themselves. Still, it was an important lesson that random threats can emerge suddenly in the Badlands—especially in the darkness.
I'm a big fan of wandering encounters.
Interestingly, B2 Keep on the Borderlands doesn't include a wandering encounters table for the Wilderness Area, nor does it give any guidance for using the tables in the rules booklet (which are explicitly for dungeon levels "below ground"). In the module's text, Gary Gygax created a curious sub-system for possible encounters if the party camps overnight within a specified number of squares from a numbered area on the map—a system which isn't used in any other adventure module, as far as I'm aware—but that's it. There aren't wandering encounters in the Caves of Chaos, either.
The omission can be easily explained by B2's relatively limited wilderness region and the Caves' layout of segregated lairs; or, perhaps, by Gary's desire to simplify the novice DM's transition into the role of managing an adventure (although there are wandering monster tables in B2's predecessor—B1 In Search of the Unknown—which is much more of a "training" module).
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| B2's iconic cover image by Jim Roslof. After David Sutherland's blue-tinted red dragon on the box cover, this was the second D&D image my 13-yo brain ever saw. It still holds tremendous power over me. |
Nevertheless, I almost always include wandering encounters in my adventures unless the scenario renders them unnecessary. As DM, I have so much control over the proceedings (other than the dice rolls) that I find it thrilling to surrender control over "what happens next" by rolling random encounter checks. (I feel the same about rolling magic items randomly.)
In fact, the skeleton encounter above led the party to explore the ridgeline from which these ancient skeletons attacked, and that exploration in turn created a whole series of unplanned adventures that transformed a lowly Lurid Lair (L1) into a Major Encounter area I later dubbed "The Dead Pines." (I'll include all this material in future posts, because it ended up having a major impact on the campaign.)
I created the following wandering encounter table and descriptions for the Badlands.
