The Bridge of Teeth: Narrow bridge of bone spanning a gorge; bones tied together with cracked and splitting leather and sinew; howling wind sounds like moaning
The Path of Screams: Icy path winding around sheer mountainous drop; faces frozen screaming in the icy walls; continuous small avalanches
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. They’re something to investigate, something to interact with. Some of those interactions might be really bad, like a sheer mountainous drop. Others might offer secrets or undiscovered power, like the glyphs on a huge skull’s forehead. These aspects bring a tiny piece of each of these fantastic locations to life. They’re often the things that make a location fantastic.
You might be tempted to write down more details than just the evocative name and aspects of a location—but you’re best off ignoring this temptation. If you put too much energy into a location, you’ll want to use it, even if the path of the story steers away from it. As with secrets and clues, you could end up throwing away even the most fantastic location if it never comes into play. You should prep only enough to help you run a location at the table—not so much that you feel invested in it.
What Makes a Location Fantastic?
Making something truly fantastic is a complicated process. But we don’t like complicated processes when it comes to game prep, so here’s a single trick to focus on: scale. Big things, old things, vast things—these features can easily make any location fantastic. Size alone often does it. When people see something really big, it takes our collective breath away. It makes us feel small and insignificant. So when the characters turn to the other side of a vast cliff wall only to realize that the wall is part of an enormous stone hand breaking out of the ground? That’s fantastic.
The scale of age also makes things fantastic. When you’re thinking about your locations, always ask yourself, “What was this before?” Thousand-year-old statues of heroes lost in time. Ancient crypts buried under mountains. Derelict planar ships floating dead in the depths of the Astral Plane. Ancient structures such as these always inspire the imagination.
There are lots of ways to make something fantastic, but when in doubt, go for scale.
How Many Locations?
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. You might get away with three locations for a two-hour game, five locations for a three-hour game, or as many as seven locations for a four-hour game. For longer sessions, you might need even more. Just remember that each fantastic location is the backdrop for a single scene—not the city or dungeon that’s the setting for the entire adventure.
As with all the other aspects of your prep, you might not use all the locations you outline. The longer your game, the more likely that it’ll veer off from any of the paths you expected it to take, often leaving locations unused. That’s perfectly fine. Unlike with secrets and clues, you can often keep fantastic locations handy in case the adventure veers back toward a path where you can use them. Or you might just modify an unused location and drop it into another part of the adventure. Still, given that you want to put minimal effort into creating your fantastic locations, they’re usually easy to toss aside.
Ten Fantastic Locations
The following are examples of ten fantastic locations, in the form of evocative names and aspects.
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 exposed by recent erosion; hooded statues with open, beckoning hands; skeletal hands reaching out of the unhallowed earth
Building Fantastic Locations from the Characters’ Backgrounds
The initial step of the Lazy Dungeon Master’s checklist is to review the characters. With that review in mind, you might build a location of relevance to a specific character’s background. A shrine holding a statue of a character’s deity, perhaps, or a lost crypt to a hero the character knows. It doesn’t have to be a tight connection, but even a loose connection can help draw the players into the game’s fiction. Such connections help you remember the important part the characters are meant to play in the world.
Building Fantastic Dungeons
Many GMs think of dungeons as vast, ancient complexes with dozens or even hundreds of rooms. For a single session, though, you likely don’t need more than five to eight main chambers to keep your group entertained for up to four hours. Instead of graphing everything out by hand, you can write down the names of your fantastic chambers on a piece of paper, then draw lines to represent the hallways or connectors between these locations. You might even make the connectors into fantastic locations in their own right, featuring interesting scenery, challenging environmental hazards, and deadly traps.
Instead of building your own stick-figure dungeon layouts, you can also make use of dungeon maps from published adventures. Then just update the rooms on the map with your own fantastic locations.
Fantastic Locations for “The Scourge of Volixus”
Building on the quick development we’ve already done, here are five fantastic locations we can use in our “Scourge of Volixus” adventure.
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
Checklist for Developing Fantastic Locations
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.
Chapter 8: Outline Impor
tant NPCs
Interaction with NPCs is one of the three core components of all our fantasy roleplaying games. According to a poll conducted on Facebook with more than one hundred and fifty respondents, roughly 60 percent of players prefer NPC interaction and roleplaying to combat and exploration.
In the 2016 D&D Dungeon Master survey, 52 percent of 6,600 surveyed respondents said that they spend between fifteen and thirty minutes developing NPCs as part of their game preparation, and 90 percent spend at least some amount of time preparing NPCs before the game. In another Facebook survey, about 80 percent of 121 respondents indicated that they improvise half or more of their NPCs—but nearly all of those DMs said that they prepare at least some of their NPCs ahead of time. This gives us a solid idea that most GMs both prepare NPCs ahead of time and improvise NPCs during the game.
Later in this book, we’ll talk about ways to improvise NPCs at the table. During our preparation step, though, we’ll focus on preparing important NPCs. The techniques we use to improvise can be just as valuable during preparation. But the reasons we want to prepare these particular NPCs ahead of time warrant some discussion.
Focus on Primary NPCs
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 part to play in the adventure. If they don’t, you can probably skip them, choosing to just improvise those less-important characters during the game.
Keep NPC Outlines Brief
When outlining your NPCs, keep their descriptions brief. It’s always tempting to write out lengthy descriptions of an NPC’s background, motivations, goals, negotiation styles, and physical characteristics—but you usually don’t need all that stuff. Instead, you can focus on just the notes you need to run a particular NPC at the table. 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.
Choose a Character Archetype from Popular Fiction
When you want to fill out the details of an NPC, it’s easy to build out their appearance, mannerisms, and the ways in which they interact with other characters from scratch. 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.
Think of a good movie, book, or TV show you’ve watched recently. Then lift the entire package of appearance and mannerisms from that character for your NPC. The further from the fantasy genre you can go, the harder it will be for the players to figure out the character archetype you’ve borrowed.
When you have a character in your mind who you already know well, it becomes easy to describe an NPC’s appearance and actions—and in many cases, even their motivations.
Here are ten great NPC archetypes that can be borrowed from popular fiction:
Belloq (Raiders of the Lost Ark)
Sam Merlotte (True Blood)
Gemma Morrow (Sons of Anarchy)
Carson (Downton Abbey)
Professor McGonagall (Harry Potter)
Sheriff Jim Hopper (Stranger Things)
Father Chains (The Lies of Locke Lamora)
Jyn Erso (Rogue One)
Ford Prefect (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
Olenna Tyrell (Game of Thrones)
This is just an example list from popular books, movies, and TV shows. The best examples will come from the popular fiction you’ve enjoyed the most, and the characters you know best.
Switch Genders
If you’re worried about an NPC feeling too close to the character you’re basing them on, one way to easily shake up an archetype and make a character unique is to switch its gender. What if Belloq from Raiders of the Lost Ark were a woman? Other than describing her new gender, you don’t have to change anything else. Suddenly, your character feels unique and the players will have a harder time detecting the underlying archetype.
Avoid Stereotypes
When building NPCs, it’s easy to fall back on overused and potentially insulting stereotypes. If you find yourself leaning toward well-trodden ground with a particular character, you can try reversing some aspect of it. Obvious reversals are easy—the hard-drinking elf, perhaps, or the dwarf who loves nature and poetry. Still better is probably to throw the character out and try again. The more you expose yourself to cool character archetypes from popular fiction—especially from fiction outside fantasy—the easier it is to avoid the stereotypes of the genre.
Be Prepared to Throw NPCs Away
In a discussion about NPCs at Gen Con in 2015, Chris Perkins described a game in which the characters kicked the primary quest-giving NPC off a cliff before he could open his mouth. Now, this is obviously an extreme turn of events, but it’s good to always be prepared for the relationships between the player characters and the NPCs to go in unexpected directions.
Making sure that secrets and clues are always kept abstract from any particular source makes it easy to move a critical piece of information from one NPC to another. And that makes for less worry if an NPC falls out of the picture—figuratively or literally—during the game. No matter which NPCs you prepare ahead of time, you should likewise always be prepared to throw them away.
Skip This Step
It’s entirely possible that in the other parts of your preparation—the strong start, the outline of potential scenes, and your secrets and clues—you might have already been thinking about and jotted down notes for NPCs. If this is the case, you might be able to rely on those notes to improvise all your NPCs right at the table. Never feel as though you have to fill out every step of the Lazy Dungeon Master’s checklist if you don’t need to.
NPCs for “The Scourge of Volixus”
Our “Scourge of Volixus” adventure will make use of the following NPCs, each of which is paired with a ready-to-use character archetype from popular fiction:
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.
Other NPCs will no doubt come to mind. For now, these NPCs offer enough connections to draw the party into the game. Yes, the characters might fill Littletoes full of arrows before asking him how they might sneak into Grayspire. Even if they do, you can reveal that information through Alekra, a hobgoblin they catch and interrogate, or another NPC as needed.
Checklist for Outlining Important NPCs
You’re likely to prepare some NPCs ahead of time and improvise others during the game.
NPCs you prepare will primarily be those that drive the game session and the adventure.
Keep your NPC outline brief: a name, a connection to the adventure, and a character archetype from popular fiction is often enough.
As with all the other parts of your preparation, you need to be ready to throw your NPCs away if the story moves in an unexpected direction.
Switch genders and avoid stereotypes to make your NPCs unique and interesting.
You might be able to skip this step if NPCs have already been covered in your strong start, the outline of potential scenes, or your secrets and clues.
Chapter 9: Choose Relevant Monsters
“I don’t use the encounter-building rules. Fights are as tough as is appropriate to the location and situation.”
—Mike Mearls, lead designer
for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons
We could fill an entire book with a discussion of choosing monsters and building combat encounters. Each game system offers its own methods for balancing encounters and selecting monsters—including many that are both complex and time consuming.
Instead, we’re going to look at a different path—one better suited for our desire to reduce the time and complexity of game preparation. This is a path that both simplifies the overall approach to encounter design and ties it better to the story evolving at the table. Here’s the paradigm for building encounters in the style of the Lazy Dungeon Master:
Choose monsters that make sense for the scene, the situation, and the location.
Instead of basing our selection of monsters on complicated rules for building balanced encounters, we simply look at the story and select the monsters that best fit that story.
When you sit down to prepare your game, make a list of relevant monsters for the session you plan to run. And you’re done.
Read Up on Your Monsters
No matter how familiar you already are with the monsters in your RPG of choice, it’s always useful to read through the books in which those monsters are presented. Reading a monster book isn’t exactly lazy. But it’s an activity that pays dividends when you’re running games. Reading through a monster book or bestiary can inspire you with new ideas, help you understand the ecology of monsters, and prime your mind with information you’ll use to improvise when you need to.
Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master Page 4
