It may or may not have occurred to you but Peril is a bit of an outlier attribute in that it doesn’t directly affect anything.
Peril is a flexible measure of danger
Instead, it is a measure of overall danger that can be used in a multitude of ways, depending upon your needs. One way it might prove useful is in determining wandering creatures.
A perilous example
Let’s say that, for The Scorching Dunelands (HD4, T4 R4 A1 P7 S4) area, we want to leverage a very simple, generic wandering creature table. Our table looks like this:
| 1d6 | Creature |
|---|---|
| 1 | Merchant |
| 2 | Nomad |
| 3 | Manticore |
| 4 | Giant |
| 5 | Roc |
| 6 | Dragon |
We would normally roll 1d6, giving us an equal chance of any of the individual encounters. Using the area’s Peril rating, we can, in this case, roll seven d6 and take the highest result. This gives us vanishingly small odds of rolling less than a 4 (but it’s still possible) and very high odds (just over 72%) for rolling the dragon. This is just one example of how you might use Peril at your table.