“The City is a maze. A labyrinth of alleyways, plazas, shortcuts and hidden thoroughfares, it isn’t any less treacherous to navigate than a dungeon. At least during the day, the worst one can expect is a greedy patrol of guards eager for a shakedown, or a thief in the crowd, ready to make a grab and run for it. At night, the sensible and the timid hurry home and bolt their doors. Ecstatic revellers, madmen, assassins, religious fanatics, thrill-seekers, enigmatic apparitions and tiger-headed opium nightmares prowl the streets. And the guards are still not helping. The Nocturnal Table is a supplement intended to bring you this city by way of an encounter system, random inspiration tables, NPC and monster statistics, as well as a giant nighttime random encounter table, whose three hundred entries can serve as interludes as well as springboards for complicated investigative scenarios and fantastic conspiracies.”

The Nocturnal Table is a 60-page game aid dedicated to city-based adventures, lavishly illustrated by Matthew Ray (cover), Peter Mullen, Stefan Poag and Denis McCarthy. This is a game aid designed for regular table use, and formatted to be comfortable and accessible, offering a handy guide to design and run adventure scenarios in a large, sinful city filled with action and intrigue.

At the core of The Nocturnal Table is a 300-entry table of random encounters and odd events you can run into at night in a busy fantasy metropolis. From a patrol of guards carrying a slain comrade, to a sinister beggar-catcher soliciting the aid of dishonest adventurers, or a skeleton covered in grey ooze, its eyes glittering gemstones shambling towards the party, all the wonder and menace of a city-crawl are at hand. But that is not all. With The Nocturnal Table, you can…

• create general encounters with the aid of a comprehensive encounter system…
• generate merchants selling strange and fantastic goods (as seen in Echoes From Fomalhaut #01)…
• find out what’s in their pockets…
• generate local colour on the fly…
• stock warehouses with exotic goods to plunder…
• and set up secret meetings and investigation sites!

Guidelines are also offered to re-use the encounters and chart contents for the construction of bizarre plotlines and sinister conspiracies which rule from the shadows… while the City sleeps. All that, and more are at your disposal in… The Nocturnal Table!

This electronic edition is provided free of charge to people who have purchased the print version.

Other publishers and products with content by First Edition Society authors on DriveThruRPG include:

First Edition Society, publishers of OSRIC and Monsters of Myth.

Axe Mental Presents, publishing Hoard of Delusion and further fine first edition modules.

Storm Fetish Productions, publishing the excellent OSRIC expansion book, The Heroic Legendarium.

Saving Throw Fanzine, a zine for the benefit of the late James D. Kramer.