Untold Encounters

I saw the Untold Encounters of the Random Kind book on Amazon a while back, and having liked the Loke Battlemats 2-book sets, I added it to my RPG Stuff list. It's a very long list. Today, I found it at one of my local hobby shops, just sitting on the shelf tucked away among a whole lot of other things I wasn't particularly interested in. I picked it up to give it a look-see and my immediate thought was, damn this is a heavy book. It feels disproportionally heavy for it's size. My second thought was, why do they have to wrap all these books in plastic? I'd really like to give it a flip through. It was $10 less than on Amazon, so I bought it. Having taken the plastic wrap off and given it a flip-through, I can now give you my initial thoughts on the thing.

It's a heavy, 339 page book of random tables and idea prompts. There's not a bunch of highly detailed ideas and tiny adventures, this is a book of generalities. Which is how I like my ideas. The back cover breaks it down like this. 

Within these pages lie adventure, danger, and reward in equal measure. From the deepest dungeons to the highest mountain tops, from the guild's front door to the wildest coast, this book has a random encounter for any and every fantasy roleplaying adventure!

Run Amazing Adventures
This book is for tabletop Game Masters to generate ideas, encounters and even entire adventures for their games.
This book is not a roleplay game in itself, it is designed to work with your existing and preferred system. We provide a 5E compatible translation in addition to our system agnostic mechanics which are fully adaptable.

Ready to Roll!
We know that your adventure can take any turn, and with this book you will be able to quickly adapt to any and every scenario at a moments notice.
Of course this book can also be used to pre-plan adventures and populate your planned session with relevant random encounters.
You can roll up an adventure in these pages, use our pre-populated and ready to roll 5E adventures or simply choose your favourite encounters.

Fully 5E Compatible
Over 1000 encounters
Six 5E mini adventures
Works with any Tabletop RPG
FREE DIGITAL COPY Code Inside

There is a pretty obvious comparison to be made with the more popular "The Game Master's Book of ..." series of random table books. And I own all of those, but you can't have too many idea generators. But I didn't get a free PDF copy of those books and I do with this one, so there is that. I haven't looked at the included adventures, but that's not why I buy a book like this. I have plenty of adventures. The book starts off with a section on the mechanics they're using throughout to make things both 5E compatible and generic enough to use with whatever game you're playing. Which is fine. But I bought this thing for what comes next: Town Encounters, Wilderness Encounters, and Dungeon Encounters. A section on each broken into more specific environments like the guild quarter, slums, mountains, swamps, doors, and intrigue. I was impressed by this book and feel like it's a better value than I was expecting.

I've mentioned the heft of this book a few times, but its also a quality product with nice sturdy binding, nice paper, and good art. I don't have any worries that this book will be coming apart on me anytime soon. Is this the end-all-be-all of random encounter books, probably not, but I haven't gotten to use it much. I might yet be wrong about that. It does have a clean, well-organized layout and legible text that will make it a handy reference at the table or during prep. I'm impressed.

An Amazon reviewer summed it up pretty succinctly wit this review:

What this book isn't: it is not a collection of fully fleshed out random encounters.
What this book is: it is a collection of encounter hooks which can spark the creation of encounters as well as a way of connecting several into a short adventure. The encounter hooks are also categorized and subcategorized in a helpful manner. In the back are helpful tables for generating things like random tavern names or locations of hidden entrances.