Review: The Wilderness Alphabet

tl:dr; a useful set of wilderness spark tables, one of the gems of the OSR, system independent so useful for any edition or fantasy setting.

This one I picked up among a team of heroes back in early 2019, as part of a Lulu order together with the d30 Sandbox Companion and Yoon-Suin. It sits on most lists of Lulu recommendations and rightly so.

Cover art by Viktor Vasnetsov

First and foremost this is a DM's tool - from the contents page being a d100 table to generate a random site through to the half dozen blank back pages for campaign notes. This is spark lists throughout, high level ideas to fire your imagination then the rest is up to you. As the author says in the intro, they were once a 'build everything' DM and as with any of us like that, would be caught out by players going where he did not expect. This book is the fruit of his own random tables to be ready for whatever the table threw at him.

There is some public domain art, some GIMP'ed compositions for stranger things and overall it reflects the ~ 4e era OSR aesthetic of public domain air illustrated books. A nice, clean, easy to read zine.

The book as a whole is two bits - the main set of 26 tables, one for each letter of the alphabet and then 13 smaller bonus tables at the back for generating magic items, adventurers, labyrinths, etc.

The first 50 pages (once past the intros, contents, etc) are d10/d12 tables, in no particular order beyond being arranged by topic alphabetically. In the bonus tables at the back we get 13 more mini tables d8-d20 on things like magic item type, NPC adventurers encountered and so on.

At the bottom of a bunch of the tables are notes from the author of examples of this type of thing that appeared in their 10 year long home campaign which are nice examples to have.

Short and sweet, this is a good resource, a nice old-school set of Wilderness tables extracted out of a long running campaign; good to have as a pre-session reference, nice for when the players wander off into some as-yet-blank corner of the hex-map. Done back in 2010, still useful - not shocking given that we're getting mileage out of books from the 70s in this hobby - but the very system-less-ness of this era of supplements has future-proofed them nicely. Stands the test of time.

For other reviews see Gods & Monsters, THE LANDS OF ARA (together with Majestic Wilderlands), Dungeon Fantastic or A Paladin In Citadel