A directory of all MM, FF, and MMII monsters and where they are found by frequency, based on terrain as listed in the back of MMII.

Note that this is substantially different from the charts in the back of the DMG, not just because of the different monsters, but because there is a smaller list of terrains (i.e., MMII does not list scrub or rough; marsh is renamed swamp).

In addition, there are several Conditions missing: artic and sub-artic are combined into “cold”, Faerie and Sylvan is missing, as are “Pleistocene” and “Age of Dinosaurs” both of which seem to have been rolled into parts of “tropical”.

One other difference in the MMII tables is that fortress, patrols and character encounters are rolled into the main tables. In DMG, a flat 10% of “men” encounters are with character types and patrols are a full 25% of encounters in inhabited areas and fortresses are 5% of all uninhabited area encounters.

The core is a database file of monsters (MMIIlandmonsters.txt) which is fed into a program (parse.pl) along with a type for the database (this can be anything but the current data file only contains land encounters so I usually call it “land”). For example:

./parse.pl <MMIIlandmonsters.txt land

Parse.pl then produces a database in the form of a directory structure such that the monsters which are common in tropical civilized forests are found in

land/tropical_civilized_forest/common

Parse.pl deletes the contents of existing frequency files when it runs.

To, for example, find where trolls live and their frequency in each terrain:

grep -rHi "^troll$" */*

Which returns a list like this:

land/cold_civilized_desert/rare:Troll
land/cold_civilized_forest/uncommon:Troll
land/cold_civilized_hills/rare:Troll
land/cold_civilized_mountains/rare:Troll
land/cold_civilized_plains/rare:Troll
land/cold_civilized_swamp/uncommon:Troll
land/cold_wilderness_desert/rare:Troll
land/cold_wilderness_forest/uncommon:Troll
land/cold_wilderness_hills/rare:Troll
land/cold_wilderness_mountains/rare:Troll
land/cold_wilderness_plains/rare:Troll
land/cold_wilderness_swamps/uncommon:Troll
land/temperate_civilized_desert/rare:Troll
land/temperate_civilized_forest/uncommon:Troll
land/temperate_civilized_hills/rare:Troll
land/temperate_civilized_mountains/rare:Troll
land/temperate_civilized_plains/rare:Troll
land/temperate_civilized_swamp/uncommon:Troll
land/temperate_wilderness_desert/rare:Troll
land/temperate_wilderness_forest/uncommon:Troll
land/temperate_wilderness_hills/rare:Troll
land/temperate_wilderness_plains/rare:Troll
land/temperate_wildernes_swamp/uncommon:Troll
land/tropical_civilized_desert/rare:Troll
land/tropical_civilized_forest/uncommon:Troll
land/tropical_civilized_hills/rare:Troll
land/tropical_civilized_mountains/rare:Troll
land/tropical_civilized_plains/rare:Troll
land/tropical_civilized_swamp/uncommon:Troll
land/tropical_wilderness_desert/rare:Troll
land/tropical_wilderness_forest/uncommon:Troll
land/tropical_wilderness_hills/rare:Troll
land/tropical_wilderness_mountains/rare:Troll
land/tropical_wilderness_plains/rare:Troll
land/tropical_wilderness_swamp/uncommon:Troll

If you cd into a specific terrain then you should be able to do:

sort -R common |head -1

and get something like:

Dinosaur, Triceratops

or, for that matter

sort -R common |head -10

to get:

Skunk
Rat, Giant
Jackal
Dinosaur, Monoclonius
Dinosaur, Styracosaur
Dinosaur, lguanadon
Wolf
Toad, Giant
Rhinoceros
Falcon, Small

The program encounter.pl takes a terrain and returns an encounter using the weightings from the MMII (e.g., very rare is 3%, not the 4% of the MM)

./encounter.pl land/temperate_wilderness_forest/

Dog, Wild

If you want the encounter program to generate patrols and fortresses as per DMG p182, then tag any non-zero item onto the command line:

./encounter.pl land/tropical_wilderness_mountains/ 1

Stronghold:     Small walled castle with keep (medium)

You can also do

cat temperate*/*|sort|uniq -c|sort -n|less

to, in this case, get an ordered list with counts for how often each monster appears in a subset of terrains (except it doesn’t list those that don’t appear at all).

We all have monsters we really can’t stand, as well as our own invented ones or ones found in weird JG material or magazines.

Adding a monster is as simple as adding it to the master list for the correct climates and frequencies and re-running parse.pl

Removing a monster is harder as it has to be removed from all the occurances, which is much more of a pain.

I’ve added a program “filter.pl” which takes a master list of “acceptable” monsters and a raw data file such as MMIIlandmonsters.txt and spits out, on STDOUT, a new version of that monster list which only includes the acceptable ones.

The best way to proceed, I think, is to create a list of all monsters using

sort MMIIlandmonsters.txt |uniq >likes.txt

and then edit that list, simply deleting monsters you don’t like, then run filter.pl:

./filter.pl likes.txt MMIIlandmonsters.txt >myland.txt 

and finally, rerun parse.pl on myland.txt to produce a new version of the land encounters database:

./parse.pl <myland.txt land

My suggestion for replacing the missing terrains would simply to cut and paste an existing terrain and then edit it to fit the missing ones.

Scrub and rough in the DMG seems quite similar to plains, but rough should contain more dungeon-y type monsters as it includes ruins, and scrub is mostly modified to reflect creatures that prefer a bit of cover, but it’s not a huge difference.