The Ultimate Random Encounters Book: Hundreds of Original Encounters to Help Bring Your Next RPG Adventure to Life (Ultimate Role Playing Game Series)

Total not worth it. True it carries sub plot and plots for adventures and gives rough layout of adventure areas. However, they are not full maps and you cant just make copies and place under a fixed map board. You will have to enlarge to correct size and the plots are worse then any that I come up with.

This book is fantastic! The Very Random Encounters podcast, from which the authors and the ideas behind this book come from, is an amazing show involving narrative-driven tabletop RPG campaigns in which most elements are randomly rolled at the start of the campaign as well as throughout each episode. The cast of the show are all very funny, intelligent, and charming storytellers, and their love of the game and mastery of this unorthodox playing style are reflected perfectly in this book. However, you don't need to have listened to the show to enjoy the book! It's very well written with a lot of heart and thought put into each page, with tons of variety and ways to spice up your tabletop RPG games.

I would not recommend this. I was expecting something more cohesive or special, but this is just a list of random tables. Such tables are freely available all over the internet. I had expected more of a storyline or gameplay built into the book or some cohesive nature of the tables that led to fun gameplay, but the choice of tables is even random, so there is no clear reason or order to any of them.Big disappointment.

I am not really sure how this type of book should be rated but I decided to rate it on the basis of how useful the book is for me as a dungeon master who has a family and a full time job and needs help reducing the prep time needed for my D&D game. This book has a lot of ideas, some of which do not really need a lot of prep time to include in your game on the fly during a session. The encounters are divided up by the type of environment that they are in, such as forest, ocean, urban, etc. They are numbered so you could roll a die to pick one. The real issue is that they are a sentence or two long and many of them would require the DM to prepare statistics for whatever game system you use, or possibly a battle map (some are provided but being bound into the book, not very useful), or most importantly and most often the ideas presented are a set up for a whole side quest adventure that the DM would need to flesh out and write themselves. It is like if you were given the inside book cover teaser of a novel and you were left coming up with the actual novel. But if you have a lot of time and just need some adventure starters this will be very useful.

Yes, you can find some of these things online, it's nice to have the book handy.

This was a treat for new and veteran RPG players to dig in and spice up scenarios on the fly. It’s a very random book with super easy to follow assortments of environments, encounters, and entourages. I absolutely adore having this in my toolkit as someone who plays games to unwind and doesn’t exactly have all the brain space to completely create everything all at once. It’s a good asset for games, doesn’t matter if they’re serious or chill.

These "Ultimate" random encounters are sloppily created, you can get better random encounter tables googling for them or on Reddit's D&D subreddits.It has this unprofessional and sloppy writing feel to it; there's a part that's missing for the NPC creation section, instead of having the correct NPC creation table, they instead have Location tables (and the NPC creation table is nowhere to be found), likely they didn't even proof read it before publishing this book

Lots of helpful charts! I thought I wasn’t prepared for my session, but this book helped me out!

well-written. A great addition to any campaign.