Take the tour ×  I'm once again turning to the good folks at
Stack Exchange for help regarding my non-magical campaign. I've
written several encounters in which the PCs fight the main bad
guys and their followers (mostly men, elves and dwarves), but
I'd like to have some side-encounters here and there throughout
the campaign, just to break up parts of the main story line when
there isn't a lot of combat.  The problem is, I've created a
country where it's really hard to do that. The "creatures" of
the world are basically the five races and plain old Earth
animals. There aren't were-anythings, kobolds, goblins, etc. I
can only do "a group of bandits has overtaken a small village"
so many times. I can have the PCs fight a group of bears or
wolves, but there's a good chance they won't want to.  Does
anyone have any ideas for interesting one-off encounters that
don't involve magical or "fantastical" creatures?  Update: The
crux of my problem is that I'm short on ideas for creating
interesting side-encounters, spec