the purple worm looks perplexed for a moment

Dave Hargrave's Arduin Grimoire remains one of my top three favorite sourcebooks from back in the day. Usually I pillage it for crazy-ass monsters, spells and magic items, but every once in a while I re-read the combat and magic rules. Some of these rules are idiosyncratic and weird but others look solid. In the latter category I'd place Hargrave's shield wall, shield bash, and Holmes Basic style initiative-by-Dex rules. And I may swipe his house rule for Gandalf types, whereby magic-users may wield enchanted swords starting at level five. Today I wanted to share an Arduinish dice chart with everyone. This chart is explained in the text, but not given in full table format.

Unintelligent Monster Rampage Chart (d12)

1 - Monster loses interest in party, leaves/retreats

2-4 - Monster is confused, no action this turn

5-8 - Monster targets random foe, roll d8 for direction of travel

9-12 - Monster attacks same target as last round, even if target already dead

Obviously these results won't work in every situation (like pretty much every random table), but I like the intent. Sometimes really dumb monsters decide they're not hungry enough to bother fighting a well-armed party, sometimes they lash out randomly, sometimes they stop to chew on the dead guy and sometimes they just don't know what to do.