using the compendium to make roll tables in foundry for pathfinder 2e

One thing about Pathfinder that might annoy you (as it did me) coming from other games is that there are no built-in tables for generating encounters and loot. Fine, if you're running an adventure path, someone else will have done that already, but I don't run APs, and frequently I have no idea what to put somewhere.

Thankfully, if you're using the Foundry VTT, there is a really quick way to generate useful roll tables for content that you want, of all sorts of types, using the Compendium Browser. If you run PF2 in Foundry you will have noticed that there is... a lot of stuff. I mean this is Pathfinder right? "A lot of stuff" is what you expect. The Compendium Browser is a super useful tool for finding individual stuff in this huge list of stuff.

Prerequisites

You will need to be running Foundry here obviously and also be using the Pathfinder 2e system. I will try to avoid any reference to any other module unless I specifically signpost that.

Getting to the Compendium Browser in the first place

There are several ways to launch the Compendium Browser - for instance, the magnifying glass icon on character sheets will launch it.

It says "inventory browser" but it's launching the standard Compendium Browser. You can also open it from the bottom of the "Items" tab:

or there's even a macro for it, if you go to the "Compendium Packs" tab, find "Macros > PF2e Macros", called "Toggle Compendium Browser":

Basic Compendium Browser view

However you access it you'll see some form of the Compendium Browser basic window. It has tabs across the top to narrow down what it is you want to find. Here we see the "Equipment" tab:

By default that will give you a list of literally every single item in the module and that's a lot of items. If you just want to find one specific thing and you know what it's called, you can just type the name into the "search text" box and it will find anything with that text in the name.

Similarly you can add other filters like inventory type and level. You can then drag and drop those results onto character sheets, for players or NPCs. That's very useful but it's not the focus of this post.

Creating an item roll table from search results

Say for instance we want to make a list of potions that might be found on a low level NPC or in a small potion shop. Nothing too unusual, and only low level items. We set a required trait of "Potion", we set the rarity filter to "Common", and we set the levels filter to 0 to 3, and we get the following:

That in itself is useful as we can just drag those potions into someone's inventory, but they're not randomised, we still have to pick what to drag. Do we want to do this every time we want to generate a potion in this category? No we do not, and we don't have to. There's a button at the bottom called "Create Roll Table", and clicking it lets you create a roll table from the search results.

Give the table a name and click "Yes" and bam, you now have a roll table with all those results on it, which appears in the "Rollable Tables" tab. By clicking "Roll" at the bottom of the table window, or right-clicking and selecting "Roll", we can generate a new random potion, which appears in the chat, and we can drag the potion to any inventory tab on anyone's character sheet. (Here I have turned the "Display Roll Formula to Chat" option off, as I don't care about the number involved.)

Creating an NPC roll table

The above is useful for adding random loot but it can also be used for creating tables of NPCs themselves. For this you want the "Bestiaries" tab in the Compendium Browser.

Say I know that in a particular area there are goblins, kobolds, and orcs, and I want a table to see who might be somewhere or when there is a random encounter. Goblins, kobolds, and orcs all have specific traits, so we can add those to the "Trait" filter. We also only want results from Monster Core¹ - I hid that filter because it takes up a lot of space, but it's just ticking "Monster Core" in the "Source" filter and having nothing else ticked. The results are:

Now if we click "Create Roll Table" we'll have a table we can use for random encounters in that area. You can roll on that, check the chat window, and drag the results directly onto a battlemap.

When you can't reasonably search and need to manually curate a table

Sometimes there are no good search criteria for what you want, but that's fine - you can manually add things to a roll table from the Compendium Browser too. From the "Rollable Tables" tab, click "Create Rollable Table" to make a new blank one, then you can drag and drop items from Compendium Browser results to the roll table itself.

Here, I have a roll table for who might be encountered in a forest environment. There is no trait or useful search term for this, one just has to go by the description of the monster. I've done a search for everything from Monster Core (which produces a lot of results) and then dragged and dropped items from the Compendium Browser results into my table as I think appropriate.

Once you've done this it's important to then click the scales icon, aka "Normalise Weight Results", because this will set the appropriate die roll for the number of items you have.

Conclusion

Do I have to do another conclusion? okay so roll tables in Foundry are a great tool for generating content in game prep or even during the session, and the Compendium Browser is a very powerful tool for finding existing things that you want, and the fact that you can go straight from the Compendium Browser to a roll table is something that could save you a lot of time when improvising or creating your own scenarios.

If you mostly run APs? You probably don't need this so much, that's what you pay Paizo for, to do all this beforehand. But you might still find some uses for it along the way, they can't think of everything, and just being aware of the Compendium Browser could help you out as and when you need to find anything.