Work continues, slowly but surely, on the Hex Gazetteer. I thought I’d share some encounter tables for two districts, Mooncross and Suckletown – the first is a waterfront neighbourhood filled with cafes and artisan’s workshops and little bars, built around primordial monoliths that have covens of independent witches devoted to them. The latter is a rusted-out industrial district fallen into abandonment and poverty after the Elder Tree at its heart died, petrifying to become the Withered Tree. Most districts in Hex will receive similar tables, along with a table of adventure hooks, and of course the street-by-street descriptions.

Mooncross Encounters

Roll (1d20)Encounter
1A magically awakened mural depicts a fully functional farming village, a bucolic idyll quite at odds with the greasy metropolis surrounding it. The cheerful painted residents greet passersby with folksy idioms and local gossip.  
2The Fair Folk performers known as the Headless Troupe are doing their bizarre juggling act at a street corner. At the end of the performance, their severed heads hold out their tongues for coins. Especially generous donors may receive something in return – a Fairy secret, a glowing bauble, a tattered map to some treasure in Elfhame, or similar marvels.  
3A trash-can mimic lurks here, a tempting jeweled pocket-watch worth 100 gp atop the heap of garbage inside it as bait.  
4A tiny cult has sprung up worshipping stray cats. Dozens of saucers of milk and several hundred dead rats (both cooked and raw) have been set out in a strange shrine adorned with images of the cats in chalk, paint, and blood. The cult believe that these strays are the secret rulers of Hex, kin to the magical Cat Princes of New Ulthar. The cats do seem unusually alert. In fact, the high priest is dosing their milk with an intelligence-enhancing potion…
5A nest of miniature raven-winged pegasi (no larger than crows) can be spotted in the eaves of a nearby building; they are delighted by oats, carrots, and shiny objects, and are frightened by waspkin.  
6A murder of jinxcrows, heads swollen with spells, cast Firebolts and Magic Missiles at a trio of cheeky seagulls attempting to feast on the spoils of a maggot-ridden cat.  
7Marion Bracewind sells fish and frogs caught in the Radula. These being Hexian animals, many are magically deformed, with extra fins, the heads of human babies, strange proboscises, tiny bat-wings, and similar mutations – the result of alchemical by-products regularly dumped in the river.  
8A side-street leads into a maze whose dimensions should be spatially impossible given the surrounding layout. Randomly generate a maze (online generators are helpful here!). The only way to exit the alleyway is to navigate the maze to its other exit – the way in appears as a blank brick wall, and climbing or flying is impossible, as the walls grow ever higher. A minotaur, Atta, lives here, but he is generally friendly and eager for the company – he cannot leave the maze, but is acquainted with many of the locals, and his lair is occasionally used by thieves as a dead drop. He cannot advise the party on an exit, as the maze changes regularly.  
9A mysterious bank of mist swallows anyone who steps into it and deposits them in Gloomway.
10A philosophical debate over whether the true nature of the world-in-itself can be rationally deduced a priori or whether we can only ever receive phenomenological knowledge via the senses has snowballed into a full-blown brawl, with one thinker threatening to show another “the true face of the Absolute” with a broken bottle.
11A dozen broken dolls are heaped in a grubby pile nearby. The insides of their hollow bodies bear residues of Ghostdust. An Investigation check reveals that one is still full of the stuff – the drug is worth 100 gp, and if sniffed, allows the user to peer into the Ethereal plane.
12Psychic graffiti. Ask the players to write down or draw what their characters are thinking as they enter; this graffiti appears on the walls for all to see.
13A spellshower has caused thousands of mouths to grow on the buildings here. Their jabbering fills the air with mindless chatter and halitosis. If one of the mouths is fed, it may temporarily speak enough sense to offer the party advice, divulge a secret of the city, or cast a minor, beneficial cantrip.
14Two rival witches’ covens, the Frogsfeet and the Stardaughters, bicker over which coven filled out the paperwork to book a Sabbath at a nearby monolith. If no one intervenes, curses might be exchanged.
15A stack of newspapers moulders on a street-corner. The newspapers are from two weeks’ hence, each issue prophesying some strange disaster – a flood of sentient marmalade, an invasion of trees, a raid from distant Pellucid with its evil machines, an outbreak of Wraithwaste that leaves whole districts of people permanently invisible. Are these some elaborate hoax? Artefacts left by time travelers?  
16Pulsating greyish-pink moss coats the walls of buildings and cobblestones. It is parasitic, draining spellcasters of their spell-slots beginning with the highest – one per turn unless a DC 15 Wisdom saving throw is passed. With each spell absorbed, the moss grows another foot.  
17A one-armed fairy knight, Sir Jonquil, offers his services on a street-corner, boasting that he is a stronger swordsman one-handed than any two-handed mortal. He charges an exorbitant 1000 gp per day but is indeed skilled beyond any mortal measure with a blade.
18A gaggle of geese wander the street. Made semi-sentient from arcane runoff, they harass passersby with lewd jokes, peck at young children, terrify the elderly, and molest everyone else. Their shit is instantly everywhere. Shopkeepers will pay a small fee for the geese’s slaughter or removal.  
19Dense foliage chokes an alley off the street, alive with birdsong and the buzz of insects. Some spell-gone-wrong has turned the gap between buildings into a fetid jungle, complete with exotic birds and other animals. Venturing within may alert the two-headed tiger (as a standard tiger but with two bite attacks) that slumbers lazily within the deepest parts of the miniature rainforest.  
20A fractured mirror leans against one dingy wall of a nearby building. Anyone peering into it catches a glimpse of one possible death in their own future.  

Suckletown Encounters


Roll (1d20)		Encounter
1Two miasmentals inhabiting the bodies of members of the Beggars’ Guild have a gleeful fight with broken bottles in an alleyway, joyfully slashing at one another to experience the novelties of pain and mutilation.  
2A parade of worshippers from the Cultists’ Quarter winds ill-advisedly through Suckletown, the papier-mâché length of the Hundred-Headed God held up by two dozen cultists.  
3A broken-down clockwork automaton languishes in a puddle, its limbs rusting, its ornate mechanical brain slowly winding down; for all the world it resembles an abandoned toy discarded by a cruel and careless child. It can be repaired with a DC 15 Dexterity check using tinker’s tools, or with five castings of Mending. Its owner, Seraphina Opalfire, has been dead for some time; the automaton was sent out for alchemical reagents, but was waylaid by anti-automaton protestors and hobbled. If repaired, it becomes the servant of its saviour.  
4Amidst the ruinous husks of industry in Suckletown, a mysterious factory seems to have started up again, its windows filled with light. Sounds of machines churning echo from within. Locals look on the place with fear, claiming that those who enter do not emerge, but become recruited to work for all eternity by a shadowy figure known as the Foreman who can be glimpsed from a high window late at night. What the factory produces and where its goods are sent remains unknown.  
5Two Roofsguard, Mina Quench and Josephus Stonesky, were hired by rival gangs; they duel over a block of buildings, chasing one another from roof to roof and sending arrows flying. If one of them is assisted in defeating the other, they will give anyone who helped a cut of their profits from the job (50 gp).  
6A building has gotten so decrepit and rotten that is falling down, requiring a DC 15 Dexterity saving throw to avoid 2d6 bludgeoning damage from debris. Within the wreckage can be scavenged 1d100 gp and a Potion of Climbing, leftover from a dead thief’s cache.
7Rogue hunting trash is rapidly gobbling up street-detritus and people into its pastiche body of wood, bones, glass shards, quivering sinews, nails, and rotting garbage. Snared amidst its variegated form is  a bone amulet carved into the shape of a fish; its wearer loses the ability to speak all languages, save those of water-breathing creatures, including fish, cephalopods, crabs, and the like.  Once worn it cannot be removed. save by severing the head of its wearer.
8A sewer nymph, Greasy Georgina, has been left stranded in the street and is slowly “drowning” in the open air. Anyone brave enough to approach the putrid creature and help her back to the sewers will be rewarded with her affection and any boon she can bestow.  
9Demonic symbols drawn in blood cover the bricks of a nearby alleyway. Here and there, a brick is missing; placed in the hole is a humanoid body part such as a finger, eyeball, kidney, tooth, tongue, ear, toe, or nose. A wizard who makes a successful DC 20 Intelligence (Arcana) check can extrapolate the symbols into spell form as Conjure Lesser Demon.  
10Two members of the Beggars’ Guild, Skully and the Whistler, are intimidating a freelance pauper with knives, wooden planks, and a giant attack-rat on a leather leash.  
11A group of vagrants, street children, and other locals bet on a fight between a three-headed pit bull and a swarm of rats in the middle of the street. Among the gambled objects is the skull of a child, which sings what might be lullabies or mysterious hymns in a forgotten language.  
12The sewers have flooded this entire area, filling it with filth and murky alchemical sludge with similar effects to a spellshower. Rats who were caught in the arcane effluent are sloughing off their skins and starting to set up a symposium on the nature of eudaimonia, while a sodden newspaper saturated in the slime is rearranging its letters into what appears to be a religious tract revering a machine-god from the future instructing its followers in how it might be created.  
13A thrum addict has overdosed, spasming in and out of physical reality too rapidly to track, a flailing mass of phantasmal limbs and juddering abreal flesh. This poor wretch – Dexter Scruple – can be treated using a DC 10 Wisdom (Medicine) check or spells such as Dispel Magic or Protection from Poison. If untreated, he stumbles into the wall and materializes in a hideous spectacle of broken bones, blood, and brick-dust.
14A grim band of twelve cutthroats bedecked with holy symbols sell phials of vampire blood and undead organs harvested from their victims. They call themselves the Garlic-Eaters and are trying to establish themselves as mercenaries and local toughs; they are led by Abra Blackblossom, an exiled Erubescent revolutionary. A phial of blood functions as a potion of Common Healing (2d4+2 hit points) and sells for only 10 gp per dose.  
15A Broken Glass Golem half-drags, half-rolls itself down the street, smashing windows to add to its body. It is not aggressive towards living creatures unless attacked and speaks with a voice like shards of glass scraping together in crudely fragmented Common, beseeching passersby for glass trinkets to add to its body. Medium construct, AC 14 HP 50 Spd 10’ Atk +6 (2 slam attacks) Dmg 1d8+4. 700 XP.  
16A band of 2d6 pallid, scarified Brickwoses led by the sewer princess Sludgepearl scavenge for food and detritus down a side-street. They will happily attack groups they outnumber, but rapidly flee if outmatched; if approached peaceably they may barter for scrap, food, and weapons.  
17Half a dozen Graveyard Girls have cornered three of the Filthy Fingers after a nasty little turf-skirmish. The Girls, triumphant, are cutting off the pinkies of the Fingers as gruesome trophies of their victory. They are led by a lieutenant of the gang, Christabel Rottenclock, whose burn-scarred face is always illuminated by a lurid grin, and who wields a serrated hand-axe with ferocity and fervour.  
18A pair of heimgeists battle for territory, the two ramshackle monstrosities scuttling back and forth and ramming one another, their zombie inhabitants scrambling over the stamping, charging knots of wild architecture.  
19An outbreak of Crownpox is spreading along this street – the Monarch’s Malady. Its sufferers all possess ornate crowns growing from their scalps, and have been seized by the delirious belief that they are kings, queens, and emperors. They loudly issue orders to all within hearing, demanding taxes, and are attempting to organize wars and marriage alliances with their neighbours to establish dynasties and borders.  
20A shrine to the Polypous Princess is evident in a carved niche. The icon in the shrine is a twisted congeries simultaneously arousing and terrifying. Sacrifices of coins, nail-trimmings, and the organs of stray animals are heaped before it. Sufficient sacrifices will Bless a supplicant for 30 minutes.  
Me-me-ow-ow