quick journey encounter table

crones +  wraeca king

I have a strange and rarely-useful fascination with procedural generation at the table, so here's a quick GM-facing idea for a shifting encounter table made from one list. I think this could be used along a route transitioning from one area to another - a road, pass or river. Because I am a creeper we will use Patrick's Perse River as an example.

The main idea is the have a list that one could roll particular dice combinations on for particular areas, with some overlap. A d100 list would obviously work just fine for this (roll a d10, then a d20, then d10+10 etc) but I find doing the math for <100 entries tedious and if I'm prepping a game I don't want to write 100 entries. For this we'll use 13 entries:
First third of the journey: roll 1d6
Middle portion: 2d6
Final third: 1d6+7

Number things based on their normal proximity to the start, so 1 might be a homeboy from the starting town, 13 would be someone native to the destination, 7 is something that lives in the middle.

From the post:

1 jukai trader
2 township mercenary
3 orcas
4 freshwater penguins
5 crone
6 stone men
7 castoroides
8 eoten
9 fell metal men
10 wraeca
11 amazons
12 yakmen
13 orcneas

So the Jukai trader will only show up near the city, the castoroides will only appear once you are a fair ways along (and indeed are technically most likely) and an orcneas might be encountered at the tail end.

This schema can be tweaked for larger die sizes or for more stages - 5 stages would be d6, 2d6, 1d6+7, 2d6+7, 1d6+13.