REF: Old McHydra had a Farm

I'm trying to keep the posting momentum going. so now it's time for some randomized encounter hijinks! For this entry, I chose the wilderness tables and randomly picked the terrain type and got "Inhabited." For creature type, the dice sent me to the Dragon subtable (eek!) and we ended up with an eight-headed Hydra!

Now, the term inhabited can mean a lot of different things. As this is a "wilderness" encounter, I chose not to go with an actual village or town. I decided I liked the idea of open farmland. Still rural, but with a population around. Now, if we're basing things on a medieval style world, a lot of farming lands were surrounded by much denser wilderness. People worked fields that had been cleared from deep forests and the like. 

So in this scenario, rather than the hydra just roaming around open ground stomping farmhouses "Dunwich Horror" style, I'm imagining that it originated from a deeper, darker part of the adjacent forest. Perhaps it had hatched there some time ago and had been growing in size. At first, the young creature could find enough to eat on the smaller animals that lived in the woods with it: birds, rabbits, maybe even the occasional deer. Now, however, it has grown too large and its appetite too great for such fare. The scent of nearby livestock has drawn it out of concealment.

Maybe traveling PCs are sleeping in a farm's hayloft one night when it attacks the barn, seeking a fat cow for dinner. Or maybe the party is traveling on horseback when the hydra charges out of the trees after one of their mounts. This could lead to a fast one-and-done encounter with the creature, or it could lead the party to a more involved adventure. How did the hydra come to be in the woods when the locals had never seen one around those parts before? Maybe, somewhere deep in the trees there is the body of some adventurous type who had acquired the egg but died in the wilderness. The hydra has treasure type B, so perhaps the loot is on the body? Tracking it back to its lair could be profitable.