SPOILER ALERT TO MY ADVENTURERS! The following post contains spoilers for the up and coming campaign. You may want to avoid this post and join me in a future one.

With our session 1 of the In the Wake Of Pytheas campaign imminent. Apart from some final prep such as printing stuff out, and a minor hiccup getting my hands on the GF9 Of Ships and Sea DM Screen (Amazon delivery guy delivered it to wrong place). I’m ready as I can be.

In the meantime thoughts are now turning towards session 2 and session 3. Well to be more accurate they have been for a little while now.

The latest thing I’ve been mulling over is what creatures/monsters inhabit the islands. Particularly the 9 islands that make up the Mintarn archipelago.

The reason this is an “issue” is because the adventurers will be wandering over these islands. Naturally there will be random encounters as they explore whichever island they happen to be on. But what creatures will they stumble upon?

The Ghosts of Salt Marsh appendix A has a useful encounter table for Wild Island encounters. It’s a good starting point. And truth be told may be used as is. Along side my own creation. I’ll be lazy and use the encounter tables as is from the book for random encounters at sea.

Why would I want to use my own encounter table? If we look at the list of reasons in the DM’s Guide for using random encounters the relevant ones for me are to “reinforce campaign themes“, “establish atmosphere” and “add interest“.

I also want to create unique encounter tables for each of the archipelagos. Naturally they will have variance and some over lap. I think this will aid in establishing atmosphere, make the archipelagos feel unique and reinforce any theme for the archipelago.

So between the Ghosts of Saltmarsh tables I mentioned above, I’ll also use the appropriate random encounter table for the coastal, forest, hills and mountains encounter tables from Xanathar’s Guide to Everything. Plus the appropriate monsters by environment lists from the DM’s Guide. I’ve not compared the tables and lists to see what over lap exists. There is bound to be some. Probably a lot. But from those tables and lists I’ll come up with my custom encounter table for each island.

I’ve also based on sources like the Sword Coast source book divided the islands into areas and the cultural influences on them.

As you can see the Mintarn Archipelago is a melting pot, where the different cultural influences mingle.

Racially and ecologically the Moonshae Isles have already been populated and gone into with the source material that I have. Such as the official Sword Coast book and the Rising Shadows book from the Adventurers League.

Which means Mintarn hasn’t been populated. Assumptions can be made based on a variety of sources and throw away paragraphs. Such as humans are the dominant species and most prevalent. Especially when we are talking about the capital Mintarn. But based on the adventure hook about the Ironstar Dwarves I came across for the main island. We can also assume there have been and possibly still Dwarves on the island.

Naturally the capital Mintarn will have enclaves of various races. So adventurers will bump into elves, halflings etc. But when they come across remote communities the racial diversity will be a lot less diverse, almost single race.

Pirates will be made up from humans, elves, orcs, minotaurs and dwarves mainly. And we know that other races will from time to time be found amongst them. Like for example Vraska who is a medusa/gorgan.

I like how the world is fleshing out. Without even getting to the Moonshae Isles there are so many options and things to do. This is such a rich area of Faerûn to explore.