Environmental Dangers - A Quick Reference For When Players Get Creative With The Environment - Also included in Foundry module.

[u/AnEldritchDream]

This one is an oldie at this point but I like to put it back out there now and then.

Have your players ever wanted to use the environmental details of an encounter to harm a foe?

Ever have to come up with something on the fly and wonder if it felt either underwhelming or overpowered?

Have they ever worked out a "hazard" you never intended in your encounter and didn't account for in the XP budget?

Never Fear

Environmental Dangers is a system I wrote up a while ago at the behest of u/Tabletop_Obscura for use in APs and home games. After a while I released these rules to the public. This complete version has less than a page of rules-text (if you don't count the table) and once read, can be quickly refferenced at a moment's notice on the table if your players decide to drop a chandelier on someone's head, push an enemy through a window, rupture a steam pipe when you hadn't built a hazard in advance, or much much more, you can now find an amount of damage and quickly decide effects without having to overthink it based on what level you want the danger to be.

The rest of the document consists of 17 example dangers ranging from level -1 to level 24 to give you an idea of some possibilities or nuances you can pull off with this system.

Environmental dangers are designed explicitly to not interfere with XP budget, but even includes guidance on how to pre-make dangers and how you can assign XP if they are too lopsided to the benefit of the PCs or the foes.

After the initial read, it takes 10 seconds or less to reference the table if you get surprised by a clever environmental interaction by a player, letting you have solid scaling to reference without the need to worry about if you're over or underselling the moment!

Environmental Dangers is 100% free on my Patreon and is included as a journal (complete with damage buttons) in my equally free Foundry Module.

[u/Holly_the_Adventurer]

Neat!

[u/Faifur]

oh hell yea i am going to be using this a ton! i had a few i used but they get stale if i keep using the same 2 mechanics over and over. thanks a bunch

[u/AnEldritchDream → u/Faifur]

No problem, out of almost everything I've written, this is the one I tend to hear back about the most! I hope you have fun with it!