As written, the Dwimmermount Wandering Monster tables seem to mostly reflect monsters wandering within a level. With all the different factions and flavors of level, I’d like to have wandering monsters sometimes reflect wandering up and down levels.
How would you recommend adapting ACKS’ Dungeon Wandering Monster Level table (ACKS p. 243) to Dwimmermount’s existing tables for that occasional wandering between levels feel?
Not sure if those table use 1dX or 2dX or what, but generally: increase the die size by one step, move the existing results into the middle, and the new top and bottom results are “use table for upper level” and “use table for lower level.” This would give you fairly remote chances of meeting e.g. level 8 monsters on level 1 and vice versa.
If the tables use e.g. 2d6, you can increase that to 2d8, center the existing results, and just have 2-3 and 15-16 be the upper/lower level results (which works out fine, since 2-3 adn 15-16 are less likely than 4-5, etc.).
For those that may not have both ACKS and the Dwimmermount drafts:
o ACKS page 243 has a Dungeon Wandering Monster Level table which works with a Random Monsters by Level table to randomly generate an encounter for Dungeon Levels 1-6. For example, a Dungeon Level 3 encounter has a 1 in 12 chance of coming from the Monster Level 1 table, a 2 in 12 chance of coming from the Monster Level 2 table, a 6 in 12 chance of coming from the Monster Level 3 table, a 2 in 12 chance of coming from the Monster Level 4 table and a 1 in 12 chance of coming from the Monster Level 5 table.
o Dwimmermount has a Wandering Monster table for each of levels 0, 1, 2A, 2B, 3A, 3B, 4, 5, 6A, 6B, 7, 8 and 9. Level 0’s difficulty is “… comparable to … Levels 5, 6A, or 6B.”
A direct combining of the two approaches is not obvious to me, since Dwimmermount’s levels are not sequentially ordered or necessarily reachable. For example, 2B might have visitors from 3B, but probably not 3A?
Or, one could ignore what connects where and simply let a random encounter be a really random encounter. In which case, maybe I could generically adapt ACKS Dungeon Level 3 possibilities to all of Dwimmermount as:
1 in 12: Two levels shallower wandering monster table
2 in 12: Adjacent or shallower level’s wandering monster table
6 in 12: Current level’s wandering monster table
2 in 12: Adjacent or deeper level’s wandering monster table
1 in 12: Two levels deeper wandering monster table
Use the current level’s wandering monster table when no shallower or deeper level exists.
… which is not too different from Rhynn’s suggestion 