by Michael Shea
D&D designer Rodney Thompson describes the three Fs of locations: fantastic, familiar, and functional. Two of the three of these three Fs, familiar and functional, come from our frameworks. The third, the fantastic element, has to be something you throw in to show our players that they’re inhabiting a fantasy. Consider the talking paintings and shifting stairwells in Harry Potter for example. You might add a massive purple fire in a hearth that never goes out, or a glowing axe of the retired adventurer who now runs the bar. These small fantasy elements change the feel for a location you’ve built from a framework. With your framework in place and the fantasy variable set within it, you have an environment that feels real and draws the wonder of your players at the same time.
Theft and mashups
These frameworks can come from anywhere at any time. Keep your eyes open and you’ll get better and better at plucking them out of our world and jotting them down. Over time, you’ll get comfortable taking two or three potential elements and mashing them together into something brand new for your game. You’ll have just enough texture and depth to make something feel real with enough variations to make it unique for the game you want to run. These models can save you hundreds of hours trying to rebuild what has already been built, making them the perfect tool for the lazy dungeon master. Appendix A in this book contains many example frameworks you can use. There’s no end to the scope of mashups you can create. You can even mash up entire worlds.
Colliding Worlds
More than any other popular director these days, Quentin Tarantino has a knack for mashing up genres into movies that become far more than the sum of their parts. Kill Bill, for example, takes the best from 1970s grindhouse movies, kung-fu flicks, spaghetti westerns, and even Japanese anime and turns it into something that transcends genres.
These mashups shouldn’t work. He doesn’t even try to hide the mix of styles in his movies. In Inglourious Basterds, he didn’t like how history played out so he rewrote it to fit the story he wanted to tell and the world he wanted to build.
In the gaming community, a lot of attention gets paid to staying honest to canon in game worlds like the Forgotten Realms and Eberron. DMs who stray from these set worlds might be accosted as heretics by those who hold canon as law. Yet the very authors of these worlds often break their own rules.
Colliding your own worlds
You are hereby given full license to use your game materials, including all published game worlds, however best fits the vision you and your players have for your game. If you ever needed permission (and you didn’t), consider it granted. Collide worlds together and come up with something completely new. Run Dark Sun as the background setting for a Gamma World campaign mixed with Stephen King’s Dark Tower books. Stick Waterdeep in the middle of the Nentir Vale or Undermountain under the city of Greyhawk. Build a campaign where the knights of the round table must hunt down divine artifacts scattered among derelict space ship wrecks on the surface of Mars.
There are no limits and you need make no apologies. Steal from everywhere and use it to build something new and wonderful.
Deciding what mashes up well
Finding the right balance of stories and settings to mash up is tricky creative business. It’s the sort of thing DMs might avoid in order to build a monster they don’t really need.
Here’s a bit of Pressfield’s Resistance again. If it feels hard, it probably is hard. The Resistance is going to try to steer you away from that hard work to find something easier, comfortable, and most likely boring. If you find yourself avoiding the concept of mashing up these worlds, take note of it and ask yourself what you might be avoiding.
A new world on a 3x5 card
Let’s make this easy. Let’s go back to the initial five-minute adventure design exercise and drag in a bit more Stephen King as well. You don’t need a Microsoft Project chart on your wall with a ten thousand-year timeline to build a good world. You just need a single line and a few bullet points on a 3x5 card to get your world started. As before, begin with your elevator pitch. If it’s so good it makes you giggle, you’re onto something. If it feels boring and dry to you, tear it up.
Write a single sentence that describes your worldly mashup. Take out ten 3x5 cards and write out ten world mashups that might make for a good D&D game. Even if you never use them or simply throw them away, the exercise will show you that you CAN do this, and I bet one of them will be pretty good. Don’t bother to write fifty pages of history about it, just stick to the core concept and maybe jot a few points down that tie it to D&D.
Example: Ten world mashups
Here’s a list of ten world mashups as examples. Where does your mind take you?
In a desert stone-age world, hunters find a derelict space ship filled with incredible technology.
City hall politics with vampires.
Stone-age nomads and derelict alien space ships.
Undercover police work in a dark elf city.
Murder mysteries on a planet about to be enveloped by a nova.
Mind flayers as emperors in medieval Japan.
The Godfather meets Serenity.
Conan the Barbarian in a Cyberpunk setting.
A dead-end wild-west town just found the most valuable substance in the universe.
Vampire hunting in World War One.
A setting for a mini-campaign
These mashed up worlds make for great mini-campaigns. The ideas you come up with might not be cohesive enough to last for four years, but they might make for a great time for eight to twelve gaming sessions. The mini-campaign is just enough to get the full feel and flavor of a world focused around a single clear hook that will leave your group itching for more.
Six Traits About Your Game’s World
“A homebrew campaign setting is a great way to create a lot of work for yourself that your players will ignore and/or destroy.”
Scott Rehm, the Angry Dungeon Master
There are ways to build out worlds without writing a Tolstoy novel in the process. Your time might be best spent elsewhere and your players are unlikely to absorb that level of detail anyway. Consider a technique used in the latest Dungeons and Dragons campaign settings, the “eight characteristics about …” idea.
Instead of writing reams on geography, history, culture, and demographics, stick to a fixed number of traits of this world that your players will grasp and remember. Use it to define the boundaries of their characters and their roles in the world. Use it to guide your campaign as you move forward.
While recent Wizards of the Coast publications chose eight traits, you can work with as few as four or as many as ten. Six to eight is likely a good sweet spot.
Example: Four traits about Yellowtop
Using the example adventure in Yellowtop, let’s work with the following four traits:
Salt Miners: At its core, Yellowtop is a village of salt miners and has been so for generations. The original settlers hoped for mines of gold, silver, or even mithril; but salt is what they found and salt put food on their tables.
Mercenary Tyrany: For the past two years, mercenaries, claiming to protect the village of Yellowtop, have slowly taken over the town. The town’s lord now bends the knee to the mercenary commander, and the villagers know to give the soldiers their loyalty and their taxes. The mercenary taxes continue to grow, putting even the richest villagers on the edge of poverty and starvation. The loudest protestors of this tyranny have begun to disappear without a trace, though few have the stomach to investigate. It is only a matter of time before open bloodshed finds its way to the streets of Yellowtop.
Orc Tribes: On the outskirts of the town and farms surrounding the town of Yellowtop, the last ragged bands of orcs hunt the tundra. Since the mercenaries came into power, the orcs have left the town alone. The mercenaries have even enslaved some orcs to dig in the salt mines.
Haunted Caverns of an Ancient Power: Three years ago, salt miners discovered chambers buried beneath the mountain of Yellowtop. Some who
went to explore came back homicidal and raving mad, most never came back at all. Since then, the officials of Yellowtop barricaded and banned these chambers from exploration, though the mercenaries have brought in sages and historians to learn more of their origin.
These four points help tie together the potential story threads of the small town and the surrounding areas. They offer enough fuel for potential adventure locations, investigations, and interactions with the city. They do this without building too rigid a framework for the adventure, letting the players explore where they will.
Guidelines for your own traits
When designing your own world traits, consider the following guidelines:
Traits should differentiate this adventure or campaign from other D&D campaigns.
Traits should describe common knowledge known to the adventurers and NPCs of the world.
Traits should describe adventure locations, character interactions, and friction between factions.
Traits should build the boundaries of the sandbox in which the PCs define their own stories.
Used effectively, these traits will help you get a further idea what your campaign is about without building so rigid a boundary that the PCs have little choice in the fate of their actions. Like the other tools of the lazy dungeon master, it should help you feel prepared enough to make you comfortable without taking more time than it needs.
Tools of the Lazy Dungeon Master
Gathering and preparing the right tools might take a long time up front, but the end result will save you hundreds of hours in the long run. Acquiring the right tools and keeping them on hand can make a game with five minutes of preparation run like a well-scripted play. Having too many tools, however, can be just as bad as having too few, so choose your tools wisely.
The danger of tool focus
Getting too focused on tools can easily distract you from the creative aspects required for your game. Only spend the time you need on your tools. Once you have the right ones, go back to working on the creative bits like integrating the desires of your players into your game and building awesome NPCs.
With that warning in mind, let’s look at the tools that offer the best investment of time and money.
The 3x5 note card
We’ve already discussed the 3x5 card earlier but it’s worth talking about again. Creativity through limitation is a key concept for lazy dungeon mastering. Time and money are nice, forced limitations to endure, but there are other limits to embrace that ensure we only focus on the elements most required for the enjoyment of our game. The 3x5 note card is a perfect tool to enforce this limitation.
As described earlier, the 3x5 card has just enough room to write out the adventure introduction, three potential paths, and, on the back, the current actions of the adventure’s primary NPCs.
Beyond this, the 3x5 note card continues to show its use. Another card might contain the names, backgrounds, and motivations of the PCs. As you randomly determine loot or the names of NPCs, writing them down on a card and keeping it together in a small campaign folder helps you remember the important parts as they spontaneously occur.
You might write down quests and the accompanying NPC quest giver on a card to hand out to your players. This gives then a dynamic quest journal to keep track of the campaign on their end.
3x5 cards also force you not to be too committed to what you write down. If you wrote five pages of text on the background of an NPC, you’ll feel a great draw to use all of it. But a random NPC name on a 3x5 card with three scratchy bullets of background? You could throw that away and never worry about the time you invested.
WOTC freelance author and dungeon master, Matt James, recommends using colored 3x5 cards to help stay organized. For example, he uses red for combat encounters, yellow for notes on political intrigue, blue for long-term (or campaign-wide) plots, and green for side treks.
The dry-erase poster map
Of all mapping tools, the Paizo dry-erase poster map is the best money you can spend. For $11 you get a re-usable game aid that opens up the possibilities of endless adventures. The fold-up design of the flip map makes it perfect for a portable DM kit as well. It’s an excellent useful aid worth ten times its cost.
Pre-printed poster maps
Sometimes a hand-drawn map just won’t grab the attention of your players like a pre-printed poster map. Both Paizo and Wizards of the Coast publish excellent high-quality and reasonably priced pre-printed poster maps. It takes a number of maps before your collection contains enough to fit most situations, however, so budget appropriately. You want useful re-usable maps for encounter locations you most often see. Examples include maps of large dungeon halls, town squares, forest trails, roadways, temples, bars, inns, and stables. The wider your collection, the more useful it will be. Having these maps handy means your players are free to go where they choose and you already have a beautiful map ready to place on the table when they get there.
D&D freelancer and Critical Hits editor, Dave “The Game” Chalker, recommends using these maps to generate ideas for your encounters and adventures, ensuring the map gets full use when its time comes.
As you build a portfolio of poster maps, consider building a poster map visual index to keep track of which maps you have on hand. This can be as simple as taking pictures of each of your maps and putting them on your cellphone, so you can quickly see which maps you have on hand.
Pre-printed poster maps have a few advantages over other encounter terrain products. They already have details included, they’re very easy to set up, and they pack well. You’ll invest little time in them, which means you won’t force them into your game if they don’t make sense. For the cost, aesthetics, and convenience, poster maps are a great aid to the lazy dungeon master.
Monster books
Well-designed monster books give you everything you need to fill out your battles. Most often they contain quality professionally designed monsters you can re-skin to fit into your game. Keeping a monster book handy at the table means a lot less planning up front. When you prepare, consider the monsters your group might run into, but don’t bother to plan it all out. Instead, let your group go where they will and pull out the monsters they are likely to face when they face them.
Both Dave Chalker and Jeff Greiner, host of the Tome Show, recommend using the monster book as a source of story seeds and inspiration. The background and ecology of the monsters themselves can become the core seed of an entire adventure or mini-campaign.
A cheat sheet
There’s a lot of math tied to each version of D&D; a lot of mechanics we should have on hand if we hope to improvise scenes, scenarios, encounters, and events. A cheat sheet of the most useful mechanics goes a long way to help you with these improvised events. For 4th edition D&D, I recommend my own 4e DM Cheat Sheet which contains nearly all the mechanics you’d need to run a 4e game at any level. The DM screens of other versions of D&D and Pathfinder contain most of the rules you need to run improvised adventures. Review them early and keep them handy during your game to run the right mechanics for an improvised scene.
Random names
Random names are a key tool of the lazy dungeon master. There are many good random name generators. Yafnag (Yet Another Fantasy Name Generator) does an excellent job. When you’re preparing a mini-campaign, run the generator and jot down twenty random names onto another trusty 3x5 note card.
As you choose names from the random list, pick ones with different beginning letters whenever possible. You don’t want a random list of names that includes Andeth, Alaham, Averen, and Alexa. People will quickly get them mixed up. It’s much easier for both you and your players to remember names with different beginning letters. Also choose names that are easy to spell and easy to pronounce. Random name generators often generate names difficult to spell and pronounce, so only record the ones that work well.
If you’re looking for a bit more help with your NPCs, the product Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Ga
me has a thousand NPCs from which to choose. Printing off a few pages of these will give you enough NPCs to fill out the details of your adventure or mini-campaign.
Appendix A contains a list of twenty random names ready for use.
Right tool for the right job
Like the rest of your preparation, the tools you buy and prepare should help you think and act on your feet during a game. They should save you time, not take it away, and give you and your players the freedom to take the game wherever you wish.
Reskinning
Of all the tools and techniques vital to the life of a lazy dungeon master, few have the power and impact of reskinning.
Reskinning defines the act of replacing the flavor, story, and description of a set of roleplaying mechanics such as a monster, an encounter, a trap, terrain, or an environmental effect. In its simplest form, you might take all of the mechanics of a skeleton but replace it with the flavor of an animated scarecrow.
Example: Eladrin battledancer into half-orc, half-elf assassin
Shade is a half-elf, half-orc freelance mercenary who currently works as a spy and assassin for the local orc chief. She’s as beautiful as an elf, but possesses the strength and ferocity (as well as the dental work) of an orc. There is no such published creature in D&D 4th edition, but you need not despair when the party engages her in combat. Simply pull out your resident Monster Vault sourcebook and look for something similar. As the group is level 7, and you want Shade to be someone quite powerful, relatively speaking, we will go with the level 9 Eladrin Battle Dancer.
