Okay, it’s been a stupid month. I haven’t posted anything because I’ve been sick as hell with this gnarly respiratory virus. I’m finally starting to feel a bit better, but while I’ve been sick, I’ve been playing a ton of modded Terraria, and it’s got me thinking about how you can unlock new content in your TTRPG world in a progressive way.
I’m gonna preface this by saying that I’ve been doped up on cold meds for weeks, so these thoughts are probably scattered and not entirely coherent and maybe not even useful, but it’s on my brain, so let’s talk about it and see what TTRPG worldbuilders and game masters can learn from Terraria.
Here’s what I mean: in Terraria, as you defeat bosses, changes begin happening to the world. New NPCS enter the world. New events happen.
- Defeat the Eater of Worlds for the first time? Meteors start falling across the world.
- Wreck the Wall of Flesh? The world shifts into Hardmode, generating new ore, an entirely new biome, and new enemies.
- Many mods just add more to this, with new elements of the world opening up as you defeat vanilla and modded bosses or events.
Okay, but what does this have to do with TTRPGs?
When it comes to TTRPG worldbuilding, we often feel like we have to create everything all at once — and then once it’s built, it remains static forever. Kinglandia and Sultanatia are always at war. The Spooky Scary Rift has always been open and spewing monsters. Werewolves have always plagued the sleepy village of Notwerewolf Brook.
But it doesn’t have to be this way — you can reserve content until the players complete key encounters.
Maybe when your players destroy the powerful demon infesting the Tomb of the Cloistered Saint, the demon’s scattered cultists spread out into the surrounding area. Some are dedicated to reviving their destroyed demon lord, some are scrambling to devote themselves to another powerful entity, some are trying to atone and shake off their demonic taint.
I primarily run sandbox worlds, so the way I see this happening is something like this: after this key encounter is completed, about 10-15% of the “empty,” unkeyed hexes in the region activate.
This has a couple of benefits:
- It makes the world feel more dynamic. Events and new adventure paths open up as the players engage the world. The living world responds to the player’s actions.
- Previously explored area is worth revisiting, because new elements have generated there.
- It spreads out prep time — I don’t have to worry about those cultists and their keyed hexes until the players get close to wrecking the demon in the Tomb of the Cloistered Saint.
Terraria-Style Random Encounters for TTRPGs
One of the things I like about the way Terraria handles progression is that some enemies don’t appear in the world until you unlock them.
In Terraria, for example, Possessed Armors and Wraiths only begin spawning after you defeat the Wall of Flesh.
How can we adapt this to TTRPGs? Something I’m thinking about is encounter tables that grow over time. I typically use a d6 encounter table for a given area, which is made more dynamic by adding in a reaction table and usually a table that determines what the encounter is doing at the time they’re encountered.
But we can add to this after certain key encounters — let’s say our heroes wrecked the demon in the Tomb of the Cloistered Saint, so now we expand the local encounter table to a d8 adding two encounters with former cultists. As players move around the world, new elements present themselves.
This also has an interesting effect on encounter difficulty distribution. Personally, I enjoy unleveled worlds where powerful monsters are scattered across the world, forcing players to make decisions about whether to fight or flee — but what if we gated some of those powerful encounters behind major milestones?
Shadows notoriously punch above their weight class in Dungeons and Dragons 5e. What if they only start appearing in the world after the players break the Urn Containing All Shadows?
Is This Useful?
Truth is, I think some of this is stuff that TTRPG game masters already do often — if I’ve got a basilisk on my random encounter table and my players destroy it, I’m removing it from my random encounter table and replacing it with something else, simply because there’s probably only one basilisk in the area.
In more narrative-focused campaigns instead of sandboxes, DMs routinely have major events occur after key encounters are completed.
But I think the idea of framing it as an “unlock” is an interesting mental frame of reference that can help you shape your world — what content do I want to be accessible to the players from the very beginning, and what content do I want them to only access after they’ve completed key milestones?
