Despite my affection for Mike Shea and the Lazy DM’s Companion, I’m a heavy hex-crawl prepper. I love world-building and map-making, but as I sketched out the locations and encounters for my campaign, I noticed that many (too many) had a melancholy or threatening tone to them, as if everything in the setting was a danger to the party, or else was an ancient ruin felled by tragedy. Part of that is just my personal preferences and thematic styling, but it also makes every encounters feel the same. And to murder a phrase, if everything is a foreboding ruin with an air of ancient grief, then nothing is. It’s just one downbeat after another, and it gets to a point where I fear my characters will say, “If this world is such a bleak hell-scape, why bother saving it?”

What I want is to enable my players to experience a wide-range of emotions as they explore and adventure, and to present them with places and people that they might feel a real affection for. Our real world is a crazy mix of encounters: scary, funny, frantic, calm; and I want that same variety and texture to exist in the world of the game.

So I’ve set out to mix up the tone and flavor of my encounters. Now, when I set about populating a location or encounter, I roll on the following table to determine the tone or the emotion that the situation “should” evoke:

Encounter Emotions (and examples):

1. Horror/Revulsion (the tentacle leaves something behind that writhes beneath your skin, a spider crawls out of the skeleton’s eye-socket)
2. Fear/Dread/Anticipation (a tapping on the glass of the high tower window, a mournful howl across the moors)
3. Sorrow/Loss (a mother weeping, a farmer staring at his burned fields)
4. Anger/Villains being villainous (a wanted poster of the party, a choice between saving the princess or saving the prince)
5. Affection/Kindness (a child offering to share their food with a character, a strong hug from an old friend)
6. Safety/Release (a blanket and a warm fire, a door that can be barred shut behind the party)
7. Laughter/Delight (a parrot trained to cuss, a natural waterslide)
8. Joy/Wonder (a field of flowers that fly when touched, the world as seen from dragon-back)

My hope is that by mixing up the emotional content of the encounters, that the scary moments hit harder, the villains seem more villainous, and the characters feel like there are areas and people who provide joy, laughter, and safety, and that are worth fighting for.

Having created the table, I also realized that much like creating random encounter tables to reflect different areas, I could tailor the emotional encounter table to different regions, helping me establish an emotional tone for a region without becoming repetitive and boring. Here are some examples:

In the Feywild:

1. Fear/dread/anticipation
2. Anger/villains being villainous
3. Affection/kindness
4. Safety/release
5. Laughter/Delight
6. Laughter/Delight
7. Laughter/Delight
8. Joy/Wonder

In the Shadowfell:

1. Fear/dread/anticipation
2. Sorrow/loss
3. Sorrow/loss
4. Sorrow/loss
5. Anger/villains being villainous
6. Affection/kindness
7. Safety
8. Wonder

In Ravenloft:

1. Horror/revulsion
2. Fear/dread/anticipation
3. Fear/dread/anticipation
4. Fear/dread/anticipation
5. Anger/villains being villainous
6. Wonder
7. Affection/kindness
8. Safety

Now, as characters travel from region to region or plane to plane, I can turn the dial so that there is more silliness or more foreboding as appropriate, and not worry that every encounter will feel the same.