Mostly Harmless Meetings, by Dan Sumption

Mostly Harmless Meetings is a playful collection of 100 fantasy vignettes inspired by English folklore, flora, and fauna.

These non-violent encounters with birds, beasts, trees, plants, and landscapes, can be used as encounters in roleplaying games, or just read for fun.

"Borgesian" - James Burt

There are no orcs, no gold-stuffed chests, no combat fodder in these random encounter tables, only gossiping fleas, portentous magpies, and the world's longest stoat.

This is a world where…

🦉 A lovelorn owl hunts her feather-caped soulmate.
🐸 Frog aristocrats squabble over who has the best singing voice.
🩲 a flea in your underwear whispers scandalous tales of royalty.
🦟 Giant mosquitoes leave permanent bloodstains.
🌳 An oak-ringed glade houses mischievous fairies.
🐟 A pike buried head-first in the ground raises more questions than it answers.

Each entry is a story fragment, a puzzle, or a moment of peculiar wonder – inviting players and GMs to improvise, build, and explore rather than just fight and loot.

Mostly Harmless Meetings is a guide to a countryside that never quite existed, but always felt like it might – one where talking spiders tip their hats, miners emerge from sparrow-sized tunnels, and the wind carries both the scent of moss, and the echoes of a thousand-year-old raven king’s lament.

Playful, Poetic, and Occasionally Unsettling

The encounters in Mostly Harmless Meetings swing between the cosy, the comedic, and the uncanny.

Some are simple delights
🌸 a patch of forget-me-nots that improve your memory.
🦋 a psychedelic butterfly-filled hollow.
🪱 a hidden trove of fiery glow-worms.

Others are folk-horror riddles:
🐇 a hare that bleeds more than it should.
🪙 a hawthorn tree studded with ancient coins and curses.
🐦 a nightingale with a siren's song.

This is a book that encourages interaction over combat, curiosity over conquest, where rewards are more likely to be a talking pet mouse than a +1 sword.

GMs can use these encounters as written, as inspiration, or simply as flavour, dropping them into existing worlds, expanding them into full adventures, or letting them drift into the background like half-heard folklore.

Key features

🪨 System-agnostic – no stats, just rich storytelling prompts adaptable to any RPG system.
🐭 Inspired by nature & folklore – full of talking animals, odd superstitions, and creatures with hidden stories.
🍄 Invites curiosity over combat – a chance for players to interact, befriend, or get tangled in something unexpected.
🎲 Designed for improvisation – use as written, tweak to fit your game, or roll again if it doesn’t suit the moment.

Who Is This For?

If you’re the kind of person who:
🔹 Prefers encounters that lead to stories rather than swordfights.
🔹 Wants a tabletop world that feels lived-in, peculiar, and ever so slightly enchanted.
🔹 Finds magic in the small, the overlooked, and the absurd.
🔹 Enjoys the eerie beauty of folklore, but also isn’t above a joke about fart-making parsnips.

Then Mostly Harmless Meetings is your kind of book.

Book format

Mostly Harmless Meetings is 48 pages long, A5-sized, printed in full colour throughout, featuring 100 encounters, plus art by dead artists.