Treasure of the Week: Old School Encounters Reference

Treasure of the Week is a new "feature" I'm hoping to do, appropriately enough, once a week, to highlight something I've found that's intended to be useful to DMs/GMs. We'll see how that works out! My focus is naturally on 4E, but I'm guessing the better part of what I find will be useful regardless of edition or even system.

The start things off, I wanted to call attention to B. Scot Hoover's Old School Encounters Reference, #4 in his Classic Dungeon Designer's Netbook series of PDFs. I saw this praised in the comments at some grognard blog, so I figured I'd check it out. I started looking through it and was about to write it off since it seemed to just be a collection of NPC and monster stat summaries for AD&D 1E and OSRIC. Great if you're playing those games, but of no value to me. But as I looked further (it's 160 pages), I found tables for fleshing out NPCs, ruins, mines, weather, wilderness journeys, encounters at sea, herbs, foraging, and much, much more. Tons and tons of meaty content that for the most part doesn't care about what edition or what game you're running (well, assuming it's fantasy). Some of the tables are directly useful, others not as much but can easily be used as springboards for ideas. This is something I really would have geeked over back when I was playing First Edition. The layout is spartan but utilitarian and clean; if it wasn't for direct references to D&D monsters, I think it could be published and would likely make a fair amount. The author has some other "old school" PDFs on the site as well, though they're much more specific to AD&D/OSRIC/etc.

The Old School Encounters Reference looks like it would be perfect for someone running a "sandbox" campaign, but I think it could be useful regardless of the style of game you're running.