In this inaugural post to Omega Dungeon, I decided to start with what is probably one of the more infamous random tables in D&D history: The Harlot Encounter Table. This beauty originally appeared in the 1st Edition AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide. In my mind, it’s a classic of Gygaxian vocabulary, and something that is instantly recognizable as “old-school”.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the table was re-imagined in OSRIC 2 as the “Red Light Professions” table. It actually featured more options there than in the original table, and some new adjectives and nouns were thrown in as well as having some removed. Also, the order of the table was rearranged as well.

I figured this would be a good test of what I wanted to do with this site, so I decided to a bit of a “mashup” of the two tables. If you want to read more about how I did it, there’s more below the generator.

In the meantime, enjoy your random harlot!

The javascript that does all this borrows liberally from the random OD&D dungeon generator found at hackslash.net. I made a couple of modifications under the hood to generate individual outputs for each roll, and modified the usage code so it could re-roll each element individually. (I think this feature will be really cool for dungeon generators later on.)

Here’s how I combined the two tables into a single generator.

First, I split the adjectives and nouns into two separate rolls just to make it a little nutty. For the adjective, I roll a d100, then flip a coin to decide which table’s to lookup that roll on. Then I that process for the noun as well.

I’m pretty pleased with the way it’s working on the blog here, particularly the bit with being able to re-roll each element separately. That’s enough boring background info for now, I’m sure.

I’m not sure what table I’ll be posting next, but I’m excited to get started.

Tags: 1st Edition AD&D, dungeon generator, dungeon master, osric