A Strong Start for “The Scourge of Volixus”
As the initial focal point for our “Scourge of Volixus” example adventure, we can use the following strong start:
During the last great trade-day before winter falls upon the village of Whitesparrow, an iron-armored caravan filled with hooded hobgoblins attacks the bazaar. Their goal is to steal weapons and armor—as well as an old book possessed by Paula Dustyfingers, the curio vendor.
That gets things started nicely, with a strong battle and lots of interesting hooks for the characters to investigate.
Checklist for Creating a Strong Start
What’s happening? What event will frame the start of this section of the adventure?
What’s the point? What seed or hook will lead the characters further into the adventure?
Where’s the action? Start as close to the action as you can.
When in doubt, start with combat.
Chapter 5: Outline Potential Scenes
“The true goal of your session notes is to make you comfortable enough to run your session.”
—Phil Vecchione, Never Unprepared
With our strong start written out, we might next write down the potential scenes that take place during the adventure. Sometimes we have one obvious path to take. Other times, there might be multiple options for the characters to follow. Either way, a short list of potential scenes can help us feel as though we have a handle on the adventure.
The truth is, no GM can ever really have a full idea of where the adventure will go once that starting scene unfolds. But we can guess. Because these potential scenes might never actually come into play, we want to keep our scene outline loose and brief, so that we’re not wasting a lot of time if we end up throwing them out. The outline itself doesn’t need to be much more than a few words per line, with one or two lines per hour of game play. This list should be just enough to remind us of what’s going on in the scene while we’re running the game. Anything more than that is too much.
Sometimes we’ll outline a list of sequential scenes expecting that the characters will go through one at a time. Other times, it’s a list of scenes the characters might explore in any order. Or the scene outline might represent different branches to the story, each of which can take the characters off on a different path. Any of these models can work to help us get a handle on what we might see unfold at the table.
A Primary Purpose of Peace of Mind
Like many of the techniques of the Lazy Dungeon Master, outlining potential scenes serves multiple purposes. First and most obviously, it helps you think about what might happen during the game. Even more importantly, it makes you feel confident that you have a handle on your game. You feel ready to play—and that’s often all you need to be ready.
Prepare to Throw It Away
“Be prepared to throw what you have away if something better happens at the table.”
—Chris Perkins
The strength of being a Lazy Dungeon Master comes from being prepared—and also being ready to throw all that preparation away when the game goes in an unexpected direction. If you overprepare your game, it’s easy to lose confidence. Nobody ever wants to throw away hours of work. You might fall in love with what you’ve prepared, so much so that you can’t bear to let it go. You might spend so much time outlining your expected adventure that you don’t have anything else ready when the players and the characters make choices you didn’t see coming.
The easiest fix for this is to make sure you keep your outline brief. You want only enough information to remind you what you had in mind for the scene—and no more than that. You keep the details of the scene purposefully brief. You expect that even within a scene, you’re going to have to improvise anyway. And you prepare for that improvisation.
Because in the end, none of the things you outline in your potential scenes become real until they actually take place at the table.
Example Scenes for “The Scourge of Volixus”
Using our “Scourge of Volixus” example adventure, we can outline the following scenes. We might already have a strong sense of all the locations and NPCs when we outline—or we might be making them up in the outline for the first time, based on our sense of what the adventure needs.
Investigate the armored caravan.
Talk to Paula Dustyfingers the curio seller about the book the hobgoblins wanted.
Talk to the archivist Aluvena the Keeper, the custodian of Whitesparrow history.
Find Littletoes, a goblin who escaped from the battle.
Follow the hobgoblins’ trail back to the Watchtower of Set.
Travel through the goblin warrens beneath the tower.
Sneak into the inner keep of Grayspire, the hobgoblins’ mountain fortress.
Face the hobgoblin leader Volixus in the throne room.
As we outline, we’re comfortable with the fact that some of these scenes might never happen. Some might be done out of order, even as others are clearly linear. Most importantly, each idea is short and to the point. And this makes it easy for us to toss all our starting ideas away if something better happens instead.
Checklist for Outlining Potential Scenes
Write down a short list of scenes that might occur in your game.
Remember that the goal of writing down scenes is primarily to help you feel prepared.
Scenes can occur in or out of sequence.
Write only as much as you need to remind yourself of what might happen.
Don’t fall in love with your scenes. Be prepared to throw them away.
Chapter 6: Define Secrets and Clues
I’ll share a secret with you. This chapter is the main reason I decided to write an entirely new book on the concept of the Lazy Dungeon Master. The idea behind secrets and clues feels so powerful that it drives a complete rewrite of the rest of the ideas underlying the Lazy Dungeon Master’s approach to game prep. Secrets and clues are the anchors of our games. They’re a simple way to build out an adventure, create meaning and story for the players, and connect people, places, and things. Secrets and clues are the connective tissue of an adventure—and, more often than not, a whole campaign.
They also conveniently fit on one side of a 3×5 index card.
Knowing where to start an adventure might be the most important thing we can prepare ahead of our games. Without that, we’re staring at a table full of narrow-eyed players who are about four seconds away from playing the latest clicker-game sensation on their phones. A strong start grabs the players by the ears and drags them through a planar rift into another world. Secrets are what bind the players to this new world.
Writing down a solid list of secrets and clues is the next most important part of our preparation after a strong start. Even if we have only five minutes to prepare a game, a strong start and a good list of secrets and clues might be all we need.
Anatomy of Secrets and Clues
A secret or clue is a single sentence that encapsulates a piece of your game world, its history, or the current story. It’s a piece of information the characters can discover as they explore the world and interact with its inhabitants. But secrets and clues are never trivial. They contain information that matters to the characters. They might be pieces of history that give the characters and the players a better view of why things are happening. They might be leads and hints that allow the characters to discover special locations or powerful items. They might be information about NPCs that the characters didn’t already know.
Here’s an example:
Aluvena the Keeper, archivist for the Whitesparrow family, is a secret cultist of Dusk.
Abstract from People, Places, and Things
During game preparation, you don’t tie secrets and clues to the people, places, or things where they might be discovered. You don’t worry about how the characters will uncover a secret or clue. This is a critical component to the idea of secrets and clues, and part of the whole idea of “preparing to improvise.”
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nbsp; A specific secret or clue should never need to come from one particular NPC’s mouth, or from a single strange glyph on the keen edge of an ancient blade. When you’re sitting down to write your secrets and clues, you don’t want to know how the characters might find them. That should always be dependent on what happens during the game, and that’s out of your control.
Secrets and clues might be things the characters learn while listening to gossip at the local eatery. They might be discoveries made on an old piece of parchment in a library. They might be something learned while interrogating a captured hobgoblin, or bits of history tied to a magic item found in a dragon’s hoard. And from all these possibilities, you’ll improvise the discovery of a secret or clue while you run your game.
Abstracting secrets and clues works particularly well with mysteries. You’ll have no idea how the characters might go about investigating a mystery. But as they do, you can drop in the right clues at the right time to help them solve it.
The abstract nature of secrets and clues sits perfectly between preparation and improvisation. You know the characters will learn something interesting—but you don’t know how they will learn it. You get to figure that out as it happens at the table.
Write Down Ten Secrets Per Session
When you’re writing down your secrets and clues during your Lazy Dungeon Master preparation, shoot for ten. Any fewer, and you might not have enough of them. Too many and it can become difficult for you to quickly reference and use your secrets and clues at the table.
Sometimes thinking up ten secrets is hard. But as you wrack your brain for those final few, you’ll often come up with the most interesting ones. It sometimes takes great mental effort to dig deep into one’s mind and find the diamonds buried within.
Secrets Aren’t Always Revealed
It’s unlikely that you’ll reveal all of the secrets and clues you write down during your preparation. That’s fine. You’re not wasting a lot of effort if you don’t use them all, because you kept your thoughts short. And that’s much better than writing a thousand words about the history of an ancient watchtower that the characters never actually visit.
Sometimes your unrevealed secrets will make their way to your next session’s list. Other times, they simply fade away. You might be tempted to keep a huge list of past secrets, but that can end up being unwieldy. The world is a dynamic place, and it’s fine if you throw away old secrets. Just make sure you come up with a fresh list of ten new secrets and clues for every session.
Secrets Only Become Real When Revealed
Secrets and clues don’t become a real part of the game until they’re revealed to the characters and the 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.
Unrefined Quests
Secrets and clues are often the ethereal goo that solidifies into quests. “The hobgoblins are building a terrible city-destroying war machine” is a secret. And when the characters discover it and the players discuss it, that secret almost automatically becomes a quest to “destroy the hobgoblins’ terrible city-destroying war machine.” You don’t have to think of secrets and clues as quests or story hooks. But they’ll often transform into those hooks if they catch the interest of the players.
Ten Example Secrets
Here are ten example secrets for our “Scourge of Volixus” adventure:
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.
It’s easy to see how these sample secrets tie monsters, NPCs, and locations together. Some of these secrets and clues stand alone, while others lead to deeper secrets and more complex clues. All of them describe a single fact the characters and players can learn as they adventure.
Checklist for Defining Secrets and Clues
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.
Chapter 7: Develop Fantastic Locations
“Be brave and embrace the largest, wildest themes of your campaign.”
—Wolfgang Baur, publisher at Kobold Press
The way of the Lazy Dungeon Master helps us separate those things that are easily improvised from those things worth preparing. Building fantastic locations, for example, isn’t easily done at the table. When we try to improvise locations, we’re likely to fall back on stereotypical castles, familiar dungeons, and the same old pair of huge statues with their hands out flanking the river. We need unique locations that inspire characters to explore and that players will remember. Thus, during our preparation, it’s worth taking the time to develop a handful of fantastic locations that might come up during the game.
What is a Fantastic Location?
A fantastic location can be anything. Some are as small as a single large room or chamber. Some are as large as an entire building. A city, a castle, or an entire dungeon is likely too large to be identified as a single location. It’s better to split up the areas of such large sites into a series of fantastic locations.
You can think of a fantastic location as the set or backdrop for a single scene. As such, the size of the location should match the scope of the scene. In a scene focused on combat, the location might be just a room or chamber. In a larger exploration scene, it might be a series of interconnected rooms. When you’re building a dungeon, each main room or area of related chambers can serve as a fantastic location.
Start with an Evocative Name
For each fantastic location, you need only two components: an evocative name and the location’s aspects. The name of the location should fire up the imaginations of you and the players alike. It should capture the attention of the players when you describe it. You don’t need to write paragraphs of descriptive text for a location, though. You just need enough of a reminder to help you describe it to the players during the game.
Evocative names cover locations like the following:
The Hill of the Great Skull
The Bridge of Teeth
The Path of Screams
Obviously, different people reading the names of those locations might have different images immediately pop into their heads. But you aren’t writing down your fant
astic locations for anyone else. Rather, the evocative name is meant to bookmark the image you had in your head, creating a note that will remind you of that location when you need it during the game.
Location Aspects
With an evocative name in place, it’s time to add some useful details to your fantastic location. We’ll call these aspects—a term borrowed from the Fate Core roleplaying game. These aspects act as short descriptive tags for your location.
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. Aspects are features that the characters can interact with, and that will matter to them. They also help you add detail to the location beyond the evocative name, by forcing you to build more of the location in your head while you prepare. With these aspects, a location becomes more than just an abstract vision.
The three locations above suggest any number of possible location aspects.
The Hill of the Great Skull: Huge saber-toothed bestial skull bursting out of the ground; sharp bone shards thrust up out of the earth; circle of glyphs on the skull’s forehead
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