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.
| Type | Count |
|---|---|
| Empty | 12 |
| Monster | 4 |
| Treasure | 3 |
| Monster & Treasure | 10 |
| Total | 29 |
If we translate this to a handy 1d6 roll, we get the following table.
| 1d6 | Result |
|---|---|
| 1-2 | Empty |
| 3 | Monster |
| 4 | Treasure |
| 5-6 | Monster & Treasure |
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.