Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master

by Michael E. Shea

Secrets Only Become Real When Revealed

players. You might have some crazy revelation written down as a secret—maybe something like how the king’s first retainer is actually a devil in disguise. That doesn’t make it part of the campaign story until the characters discover it. If the characters never come across that secret, it might turn out that the king’s first retainer is exactly who she said she was all along.

The hobgoblins are building a terrible city-destroying war machine in the western mountains. The war machine was forged in the fires of the Nine Hells centuries ago, and was lost in a great battle. The hobgoblins have gnome tinkerers and alchemists working on the war machine, but it isn’t clear whether those are prisoners or allies. A hobgoblin half-dragon veteran known as Volixus the Burning Rage leads the hobgoblins. In addition to his goblin and hobgoblin army, Volixus has hired a band of ogre mercenaries known as the Bonemashers. The hobgoblins have taken over a ruined mountain fortress known as Grayspire. Centuries past, Grayspire served as the fortress headquarters of High Lord Grandel Whitesparrow, but it fell into ruin long ago. A nearly limitless series of sewers and catacombs spreads out beneath Grayspire—including some caverns and ancient ruins said to predate the construction of the citadel. Wraiths haunt the old Watchtower of Set, which sits above tunnels connecting it to the lower levels of Grayspire.

The library of Lord Whitesparrow might hold old maps or clues to navigating the sewers and tunnels beneath Grayspire.

Write down ten secrets and clues that the characters might discover in the next game session. Secrets and clues are the connective tissue of a campaign. After the start of the adventure, they’re the second most important thing to prepare. Each secret or clue reveals a piece of the story or the history of the world and its inhabitants. Keep secrets and clues abstract from how they might be revealed. Improvise the discovery of secrets during the game. Throw away secrets that aren’t revealed during a session. Write a fresh list each time.

“Be brave and embrace the largest, wildest themes of your campaign.”

For each fantastic location, you need only two components: an evocative name and the location’s aspects.

Evocative names cover locations like the following: The Hill of the Great Skull The Bridge of Teeth The Path of Screams

Rather, the evocative name is meant to bookmark the image you had in your head

In general, you’ll want to have three aspects for a fantastic location, each of which describes an important, notable, or useful feature of the location.

Some of these aspects are descriptive. They’ll remind you of what’s going on at the location. All of them offer something to the players and the characters

play. You should prep only enough to help you run a location at the table—not so much that you feel invested in it.

focus on: scale. Big things, old things, vast things—these features can easily make any location fantastic.

The number of fantastic locations you need depends on the length of your game. Generally speaking, you want to shoot for one or two fantastic locations per hour of game play.

Emerald Waterfall: Mile-high waterfall; huge, razor-sharp emerald deposits; ancient primeval steps snaking underneath Crashed Planar Vessel: Huge planar vessel half-buried in ancient rock; blue fires burning eternally in molten rock pits; strange alien beings petrified in obsidian Fang of the First Wyrm: Thirty-foot-high fang thrust up out of the ground; draconic glyphs carved around the fang’s base; sacrificial pedestal stained with blood Floating Geode: Large opaque crystalline geode floating twenty feet off the ground; bolts of red lightning arcing from geode to the ground; deep hole in the earth below the geode like an infected wound Bones of the Behemoth: Huge ribcage and pelvic bone of an impossibly large creature; hanging carcasses of predators; totem of twisted skulls Pit of the Otherworldly Stone: Vast crater surrounded by eternally dead trees; noxious fumes perpetually flowing from the crater; rune-marked glowing stone still hot at the center of the pit Crucified Titan: Massive stone-and-wood structure crucifying a huge, half-shattered titan; black-green liquid dripping from the titan’s cracked chest; ancient stepped altar in front of the titan Ruined Tower: Shattered wizard’s tower somehow still standing; corpses of huge beasts at the tower’s base; twisted weave of arcane energy surrounding the tower Carapace of the World Walker: Huge spider corpse, decayed and hollow; splintered leg carapace, razor-sharp; huge unbroken egg sacks Exposed Tomb: Buried tomb expose...

mind, you might build a location of relevance to a specific character’s background.

you likely don’t need more than five to eight main chambers to keep your group entertained for up to four hours.

Watchtower of Set: Narrow goat-path leads to a ruined watchtower; shattered and crumbling stone covered in strange black oil; collapsed floor leads one hundred feet down into tunnels below the mountains Goblin Hovels: Network of caves beneath Grayspire; shrine to a goblin god of servitude called Irons; cascades of oily black water Courtyard of Bones: Ruined courtyard filled with the bones and rusted armor of the dead; bones of devils rumored to growl in anger; great spiked wheels from the remnants of shattered infernal war machines War Engine: Juggernaut set with black iron skull; huge spiked wheels in the front; vast burning engine of glowing green hellfire Molten Keep: Keep of granite half-melted by intense otherworldly heat; petrified bodies reaching out from the molten walls; throne of iron and steel flanked by huge black-armored statues

Write down an evocative name for the location. Write down three fantastic aspects of the location. Plan on using one or two locations per hour of play. Make locations fantastic using age and size. Tie some locations to the backgrounds of the characters. Draw stick-figure dungeon maps with names connected by lines.

When you outline your NPCs during preparation, you’ll focus on the main NPCs who drive the session. That includes major points of contact for the player characters, primary quest

givers, notable villains, and other NPCs critical to the story.

The NPCs you take the time to prepare ahead of your game should usually have some key par...

That might be nothing more than the NPC’s name, their connection to the story, and a character archetype to help you roleplay. If you’re making notes for an NPC who interacts repeatedly with the characters—a feature of many NPCs from published adventures—you might also jot down the NPC’s current relationship to the player characters, just to remind you of where things stand.

But it’s easier and faster to create all that at once by tying the NPC to a character you pick out from popular fiction.

recently. Then lift the entire package of appearance and mannerisms from that character for your NPC.

Paula Dustyfingers: Seller of old curios and relics. Marcus Brody from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Volixus the Burning Rage: Leader of the hobgoblins. Bane from Batman. Littletoes: Goblin escapee from the hovels beneath Grayspire. Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. Aluvena the Keeper: Elven archivist of the Whitesparrow family. Sarah O’Brien from Downton Abbey.

Most of the time, though, you don’t know how many monsters the characters will encounter or where they might do so. You let the game decide that for you.

As to how the boss handles combat, a number of different techniques can help make boss fights memorable. You can use fantastic terrain like magical crystals that shield the boss, or a chamber that slowly fills up with poison gas to hinder the heroes. Or you can protect the boss with powerful guardians that absorb damage or powerful effects. And it’s worth remembering that no boss should ever fight alone. The challenge in any battle comes from the number of monsters the characters face—but in boss battles, this becomes even more important.

Add more monsters to the fight. Drain character resources before the fight. Use the environment. Focus on story-based challenges. Improve boss tactics. Understand the capabilities of the characters. Increase the boss’s hit points.

Checklist for Choosing Relevant Monsters Choose monsters that make sense for the story, situation, and location. Read monster books to prime your brain with new ideas and information for improvisation. Keep a loose gauge of monster difficulty and character levels in mind. Improvise encounters based on the story and situation during the game. Spend time building boss fights that account for character capabilities without negating those capabilities—or instead, let boss fights play out like other encounters.

When you give out magic items, the tangible benefits to the players’ side of the game are immediately obvious. Magic items make players happy. They make characters more powerful and more versatile. In fact, in many cases, the right magic item can come to define a character.

Magic items can fit into the story in two different ways. First and perhaps most commonly, a magic item might become the purpose of a quest.

Magic items can also act as vehicles for secrets and clues. When the characters find a new magic item—whether selected from a wish list or randomly generated— you can tie one of the campaign’s secrets and clues directly to the item.

Checklist for Selecting Magic Item Rewards Players love magic items. It’s worth your time to consider magic items during prep. At the beginning of a campaign and every six sessions thereafter, ask the players what sorts of items they’d like for their characters. Write down their answers, then review those answers when you’re reviewing the characters during step one on the Lazy Dungeon Master’s checklist. When it fits the story, select an interesting item for one of the characters and plan to drop it into the game. You might also randomly select magic items to drop into the game. Tie magic items to the story, either by using them as the focus of a quest, or as a connection to a secret or clue.

Roughly thirty minutes to an hour before your game, you should give your notes a solid review. You might think you’ll remember all the stuff you wrote down before the game. But it helps you jam all those ideas more securely into your short-term memory if you spend a few minutes before the game going over it all one last time.

Checklist for Other High-Value Preparation Activities Though the Lazy Dungeon Master’s checklist covers everything you need, some additional prep activities can make your games even better. Build handouts to give players a physical connection to the story. Use printed poster maps to pull players into the world. Find evocative artwork of people, places, and monsters to show to the players. Play soundtracks from video games and movies to add to the atmosphere of your game.

The GM’s Notebook Every GM has a preferred way to keep their notes. Some still love pen and paper, while others love digital tools. Whatever your preference, make sure it allows you to keep your notes on hand during the game. Your GM notebook should be easy to use and easy to reference. Ideally, the fewer notes you use at the table, the better.

Checklist for the Lazy Dungeon Master’s Toolkit Here’s a list of the components you might consider for your Lazy Dungeon Master’s toolkit: Dice, pencils, and dry-erase markers GM’s notebook Campaign worksheet Curated random name list 3×5 index cards Numbered initiative cards GM screen or cheat sheet Dry-erase flip mat Published books and adventures Miniatures, maps, and terrain as needed

Take something that already exists and describe it as something new. Let’s say we want a powerful barbarian bodyguard for the evil baron, but don’t have a great bodyguard stat block handy. So instead of building a new monster stat block, we can use the stat block for an ogre and describe it as the baron’s bodyguard. One memorable encounter setup, done! Reskinning monsters is likely the most popular use of this technique in tabletop RPGs. But the same technique works for dungeons, towns, cities—even entire campaign worlds.

Reskinning Dungeons You don’t have to stop with monsters. You can reskin entire dungeons to suit the requirements and needs of your own game. Fantasy RPGs have literally thousands of dungeons developed over the past four decades that you can pull apart and drop into your games. You can reverse a map. Or cut it in half. Or you can make use of just a few rooms in a dungeon, reskinning those rooms to make them feel unique.

Your License to Be Inspired For many GMs, reskinning is already second nature. We’re used to lifting what we need from many different sources, and we have enough experience to know how much value published material can bring to our games when reskinned. But other GMs might avoid using this technique. For some, reskinning suffers from “not invented here” syndrome, which can push us

toward wanting to use only material that we’ve come up with ourselves. For others, reskinning can feel like cheating, or even stealing.

Remind yourself honestly that you simply can’t put in the time, money, and creative energy that have gone into the best published game products. But you can absorb that energy so easily when you reskin game elements from those published products, and you can channel it into your own games with so little effort. Reskinning might be the single most valuable tip in this book. Hold it close and use it well.

Checklist for Reskinning Take something that already exists and describe it as something new. Reskin monsters, dungeons, towns, cities, adventures, and entire campaign worlds from published RPG books. To reskin a monster, wrap an existing stat block with new flavor that fits your campaign story. Take ideas from multiple sources and mash them together into a single new thing. Borrow liberally from published fantasy RPG sourcebooks, adventures, and monster books. Fight back against any sense that borrowing ideas from published sources is cheating, or that it’s

somehow less creative because you’re not building things from scratch. Reskinning is one of the most powerful t...

This approach is called “spiral campaign development,” and it’s a common method of world building. Using the campaign spiral, you build your campaign from the characters’ starting location, filling in the details of immediate interest to the characters and the players, or those that might come up in the next session. You don’t worry about the details of the larger world because you have no idea where in that world the story is going to head. Instead, you focus your attention on the characters, the locations closest to them, and whatever local concerns connect to their direct interest.

When you sit down to develop a campaign, whether it’s just a handful of adventures or part of a large multiyear epic, it helps if you have a simple description—just a single sentence—that defines the campaign.

Campaign hooks should be simple, straightforward, and direct. Here are ten examples: Defeat the sorcerer queen. Stop the rise of the demon prince. Destroy the lich’s dark empire. Kill the vampire lord and end her reign of darkness. Recover the six elven blades of power. Restore the displaced king to his throne. Defeat the five dark titans who hold sway over the world. End the war waged by the orc emperor. Slay the betrayer who murdered you fifty years ago. Prevent the resurrection of the dark lord.

State the Six Truths of Your World When you’re building a campaign that focuses on the characters, you’ll need more than three words to give the players enough information to build those characters around the campaign. To help everyone understand the bounds of the campaign, you can build the campaign’s six truths. These truths are the facts that separate this campaign from all the other possible campaigns the players might have previously been involved in or might be expecting. Six truths is an ideal number because they’re easy to write down, easy to digest, and they keep your world from getting too complicated. Here’s an example of six truths for the world of our “Scourge of Volixus” adventure. A terrible power lurks beneath the village of Whitesparrow. The lands surrounding Whitesparrow grow ever wilder. Machines of a hellish war lay buried in endless caverns beneath those lands. A powerful devil has its eye fixed on Whitesparrow, the surrounding valley, and the mysteries held there. The ruins of elven guardians from a thousand years ago litter the valley. The borders to the outer planes in the valley are stretched thin. When your running the first session of your adventure (called “session zero,” which we’ll talk about in the next chapter), you can give this list of campaign truths to the players. They’ll then use these truths to build characters that fit the theme of the campaign.

Fronts (named after weather fronts) represent the big movers of the campaign. Most often, the primary villains of a campaign act as the campaign’s fronts, but looming cataclysmic events might also fill this role. Smaller campaigns might have only one or two fronts, and larger campaigns might have as many as six. But for the way of the Lazy Dungeon Master, three fronts is a good number for most campaigns. The following components make up each front: The Front: Who or what is this actual front? The Goal: What is this front trying to accomplish? Where is it headed? If one or more creatures make up the front, do they think they’re justified in their actions? Are they? The Three Grim Portents: What three visible steps show the progress of this front?