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Table Keeper · Long Island Dungeon Master
What the forest is doing while the party walks through it. Animals, insects, small finds, foraging, and water.
At a glance: any party · any level · no stat blocks · nothing here attacks · roll whichever table answers the question you have.
Use them whenever the party is in woodland and you want the place to feel lived in. Nothing here attacks. Nothing here is a quest. Roll whichever table answers the question you have, ignore the rest, and read the row out as a plain thing that is happening. Every row works in any temperate forest, needs no stat block, and runs on rules you already have.
Open DM Tools. All five tables roll from the table roller, so the answer is one tap away.
| d20 | What is there |
|---|---|
| 1 | A doe is standing in the trail and does not move off, because her fawn is lying flat and folded in the leaves twenty feet away. |
| 2 | A pileated woodpecker is working a dead pine, and the chips coming off it are the size of a hand. |
| 3 | Six crows are mobbing a great horned owl, taking turns, and the owl has its eyes shut. |
| 4 | A red fox is hunting voles under the leaf litter, going up on its hind legs and coming down nose-first. |
| 5 | A porcupine is asleep in the crotch of a hemlock and will not be hurried. |
| 6 | Two bucks have locked antlers and one of them has been dead long enough that the other is dragging it. |
| 7 | A pine marten runs the length of a fallen trunk without once touching ground. |
| 8 | A barred owl calls in full daylight, twice, and something small stops moving in the brush. |
| 9 | A black bear has been at a rotten stump and torn it open lengthwise for the grubs. |
| 10 | A flock of turkeys crosses the trail in single file, eleven of them, and the last one waits. |
| 11 | A young buck is rubbing velvet off his antlers on a sapling and has stripped it to white wood. |
| 12 | A raven is flying with something bright in its beak and takes a route that avoids the open. |
| 13 | A bobcat's tracks run beside the trail for a quarter mile and then stop at a boulder. |
| 14 | An owl pellet lies under a roost tree, dry and grey, packed with mouse skulls. |
| 15 | A woodcock goes up underfoot with a noise like a wet whistle and drops again twenty yards on. |
| 16 | Deer have yarded up here for the winter and the ground is beaten flat for half an acre. |
| 17 | A weasel in half-changed coat, brown over white, watches from a stone wall. |
| 18 | A beaver-felled aspen is down across the trail with the cut end chewed to a point. |
| 19 | A hawk has plucked a pigeon on a stump, and the feathers are in a ring, and the ring is fresh. |
| 20 | Something large moved off through the laurel before anyone saw it, and the branches are still swinging. |
| d12 | What is there |
|---|---|
| 1 | A column of ants has overtaken a beetle many times their size and is carrying it home in pieces. |
| 2 | Fireflies are rising out of the wet ground at dusk, and along one stretch of the treeline they are flashing in time. |
| 3 | The bugs at dusk have brought the bats, and they are swooping the clearing at head height. |
| 4 | A hatch has come off the water and the air above the stream is solid with mayflies that will all be dead by morning. |
| 5 | Two butterflies are spiralling upward around each other and keep climbing until they are out of sight. |
| 6 | Cicadas are so loud in this stand of oak that anyone speaking has to raise their voice. |
| 7 | A paper wasp nest the size of a lantern hangs at head height, still and busy. |
| 8 | Dew has caught every spider web in the hollow, and there are hundreds, and nobody noticed them yesterday. |
| 9 | A dung beetle is rolling a ball backwards up a slope and losing ground. |
| 10 | Caddisfly larvae in the shallows have built their cases out of sand grains, and one has used flecks of gold. |
| 11 | A dragonfly has just come out of its old skin on a reed stem and is hanging beside it, still soft, wings not yet hard. |
| 12 | Something has laid eggs in a neat row along the underside of every leaf on one branch. |
| d12 | What is there |
|---|---|
| 1 | A nestling has come down and is alive in the leaves, mouth open, and the parents are close and shouting. |
| 2 | A hollow log has a family living in it, and there are three sets of eyes at the far end. |
| 3 | A turtle is crossing the trail, going somewhere, and going there slowly. |
| 4 | A shed snakeskin is hooked on a briar, whole, including the eyecaps. |
| 5 | A spring seep has frozen and thawed so many times the moss around it is armoured in ice lace. |
| 6 | A tree has grown around an iron ring and closed over it, and the ring is a foot off the ground. |
| 7 | An egg is lying whole in the middle of the path with nothing above it. |
| 8 | A deer skeleton is scattered across thirty feet and every bone has been gnawed at the ends. |
| 9 | A chestnut stump six feet across has sent up a ring of living shoots from its own roots. |
| 10 | Somebody's axe is sunk in a stump, rusted in, and the stump has grown up around the head. |
| 11 | A cluster of bright mushrooms has come up overnight in the shape of a rough circle. |
| 12 | A bird's nest built this spring has a length of red wool worked through it. |
| d20 | What is growing |
|---|---|
| 1 | Fiddleheads, tight and green, a patch of them along the wet edge. |
| 2 | Ramps, a whole hillside, and you smell them before you see them. |
| 3 | Morels, five of them, under a dying elm, and there are probably more. |
| 4 | Chanterelles coming up along a mossy bank, the colour of egg yolk. |
| 5 | Chicken-of-the-woods, bright orange, shelved up the side of a standing oak. |
| 6 | Hickory nuts under the tree by the hundred, and half of them already hollow. |
| 7 | Wild grapes high in a tree, sour, and worth the climb only just. |
| 8 | Blackberries in a thicket that will take skin off anyone reaching for the good ones. |
| 9 | A pawpaw, soft and heavy, that has already dropped. |
| 10 | Watercress in a cold spring run, peppery, and thick enough to fill a pack. |
| 11 | Cattails at the pond edge, the roots of which are worth more than the heads. |
| 12 | Acorns, many, and every one of them useless until somebody leaches them. |
| 13 | Hazelnuts, and the squirrels have been through here first and left the light ones. |
| 14 | Rose hips on a bramble by the old wall, still on after frost and better for it. |
| 15 | Wintergreen under the snow, one leaf of which changes a mouthful of water. |
| 16 | A birch that will run sap if it is tapped, and it is the right week for it. |
| 17 | Sumac heads, dark red, that make a sour drink and are easy to mistake for the white kind that does not. |
| 18 | Groundnut tubers strung along a root like beads, in wet ground, and hard work to get up. |
| 19 | A bee tree, humming, and the honey is forty feet up inside a hollow trunk. |
| 20 | Nothing worth eating for an hour in any direction, and the ground here has been picked over already. |
| d20 | What the water is doing |
|---|---|
| 1 | A beaver dam has backed the stream into a pond and drowned an acre of standing trees. |
| 2 | The water is tea-coloured from bog peat and stains everything it touches. |
| 3 | A plunge pool under a six-foot fall, deep, cold, and loud enough to cover conversation. |
| 4 | The stream goes into a crack in the rock and does not come out anywhere anyone can see. |
| 5 | A gravel bar has built up on the inside of the bend and the crossing is easy for once. |
| 6 | The bank is undercut and the whole edge is a lip of sod over open water. |
| 7 | A spring comes out of the hillside at the same temperature all year, and nothing freezes near it. |
| 8 | The pond has a mat of floating weed across it thick enough to hide the water. |
| 9 | Fish are stacked in the shade of one boulder and will not move for anything. |
| 10 | An old millpond, the dam breached long ago, and the stream now runs through the gap. |
| 11 | The riffle is shallow and fast and loud, and the pool below it is neither. |
| 12 | A dead tree has come down across the stream and everything floating has piled against it. |
| 13 | The water is so clear the bottom looks a foot down and is four. |
| 14 | Otters have worn a slide down the mud bank and used it recently. |
| 15 | A stream runs milky with rock flour and nothing lives in it. |
| 16 | Frogs are so loud at this pond after dark that nobody sleeps. |
| 17 | Heron tracks in the mud, and a lot of them, and the fish here know it. |
| 18 | The oxbow has been cut off from the river and is going green and still. |
| 19 | An iron spring runs orange over the stones and tastes of metal. |
| 20 | The ford is marked by two posts and the water between them is higher than the posts say it should be. |
30+ years of real tables. Every row in this piece is original text released under CC BY 4.0.
Auto-built from every data-dc, data-hp, stat block, preset clock and pre-loaded combatant in this file. Prints on its own sheet.
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