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Methods Workbench: Determining the Presence of Monsters and Treasure in Wilderness Hex-Crawl Ruins

My current campaign, Planet Karus, includes a wilderness for players to explore. I have a keyed map going, but I continue to tinker with the method for constructing it. One thing I was left dissatisfied with was that I had no way to determine if there should be monsters or treasure in a ruin. (For generating ruins themselves, I am partial to the Ravaged Ruins section in Ready Ref Sheets, and Ash Adler’s Random Landmark Generator.)

With no method ready to hand, I decided to look at Thasan, a hex-crawl by Melan, whose hex-crawl guide is also the basis for how I populate a map’s hexes with ruins and lairs in the first place. So I looked at all the ruins on the map and key and counted the presence of monsters, treasure or both. The following table below shows the numbers.

TypeCount
Empty12
Monster4
Treasure3
Monster & Treasure10
Total29
Number of Thasan hex-crawl ruins with a monster, treasure, or both

If we translate this to a handy 1d6 roll, we get the following table.

1d6Result
1-2Empty
3Monster
4Treasure
5-6Monster & Treasure
Table to determine presence of monster or treasure in hex-crawl ruin

Nice and simple. Now I can be confident I will at least get the ratios “right”. The remaining question is what tables to go to for determining the amount of treasure, and monsters. But that’s a matter for another time.