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.
Monsters
24 hobgoblins
36 goblins
12 gnomes
6 cultists
4 wraiths
2 hell hounds
6 ogres
Volixus the hobgoblin half-dragon mercenary
Magic Items
Volixus carries Stonehewer, a greatsword of sharpness forged for High Lord Grandel Whitesparrow some four hundred years ago.
He also wears a pair of gauntlets of ogre power.
This outline is about as long as notes prepared from the Lazy Dungeon Master’s checklist are ever going to get, and can still fit easily onto a page or two of paper. Your own notes might be even shorter. This adventure might also end up running longer than four hours, so we can either run it over a couple of sessions or shorten it up. We can remove scenes like the Watchtower of Set, or give the characters clues earlier on that’ll get them into the castle faster.
Review Your Notes Before the Game
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.
Chapter 12: Reduce the Checklist
“The true goal of your session notes is to make you comfortable enough to run your session.”
— Phil Vecchione, Never Unprepared
Going through the eight items on our current Lazy Dungeon Master’s checklist for game preparation can take as little as half an hour. But sometimes we don’t have even that much time. On the flip side, we sometimes have a really good handle on our game, to the extent where we feel confident in our ability to stay flexible and improvise without having to go through every one of the checklist steps.
Whether time is short or your connection to your upcoming session is particularly strong, it’s possible to cut the Lazy Dungeon Master’s checklist down to just three things:
Create a strong start
Define secrets and clues
Develop fantastic locations
So Why These Three Steps?
First off, almost every game session can benefit from a strong start, with that need to leap into the story and get close to the action. You might have no idea where the rest of the game is going, but you know where that first scene will start.
After the strong start, secrets and clues can help pick up the slack for the steps you’re skipping. They might give you an idea of the adventure’s goal and what scenes could come up. They might mention likely monsters for those scenes. They might identify NPCs the characters will interact with or magic items they can acquire. They might even tie a character’s background to the story. The fact that secrets and clues can pick up so much of the weight from the other items on the checklist shows their strength and power.
As was discussed in that section, fantastic locations can be hard to improvise. But they’re also an important step in building a larger fantastic world that the characters can explore. In your abbreviated prep, you might prepare only three fantastic locations. And again, if you’re running a published adventure, you might not even have to do that.
What Gets Lost?
Clearly, reducing the checklist down to just these three activities means that something gets lost. But what, exactly? And what does that mean for your game?
First, you won’t be as well connected to the characters when you skip that important first step. So even though you don’t have to make it a full part of the process, you can still spend thirty seconds to recite the names of the characters, putting them in mind before you begin the rest of your prep.
After the strong start, the scene outline is mostly for your own feeling of security anyway. If you don’t feel like you need it, you probably don’t need it.
Even without prepping for it, you know you’ll have to improvise even your important NPCs. You already have to improvise a lot of the other NPCs anyway, so expanding that process isn’t too hard. Given how fickle players can be when choosing NPCs to bond with, it’s often the case that you’re better off improvising all the secondary characters and letting the players decide who they think is important.
Losing the step of choosing relevant monsters means you’ll have to improvise which monsters make sense for the session at the table. If you’re familiar with your monster books and the general relationship between monster difficulty and character level, choosing enemies for the characters on the fly isn’t too hard.
For magic item rewards, you can always roll randomly with no prep. Then just associate the results with the interesting secrets and clues you’ve prepared to connect magic items to the story.
Reducing Through Experience
The better you get at running RPGs, the more confident you become playing a game session with less preparation. You don’t want to get overconfident, though. So you want to avoid skipping the parts of your prep that have consistently brought a lot of fun to the game and the players.
Getting better at running games means continually reviewing your approach for preparing and running those games. It means asking for feedback from the players, then assessing their responses and their outlook during the game to see how specific things go over. All GMs need to work continually at balancing confidence with the drive to improve.
As you get better, you’ll be able to eliminate steps in your preparation, improvise more freely at the table, and still evoke a limitless world of high adventure.
Checklist for Reducing the Checklist
If you’re comfortable with doing so, you can reduce the Lazy Dungeon Master’s checklist to three items: Create the strong start, define secrets and clues, and develop fantastic locations.
Secrets and clues can often contain elements from the missing five steps.
Consider tying one secret or clue to the background of a character.
Tie secrets and clues to randomly selected magic items during the game.
As your skills improve, you can reduce your checklist to the bare necessities.
Seek continual feedback and engage in regular self-evaluation to improve your skills as a GM.
Chapter 13: Other High-Value Preparation Activities
The Lazy Dungeon Master’s checklist helps us prepare all the things we need to run a fun, open-ended game. That said, for GMs who have the time, a handful of other activities can make the game even more fun. Though not as important as the fundamental eight steps of the checklist, these additional steps provide some extremely efficient ways to make our games better.
Handouts
Handouts create a physical connection to the story and the world. They help solidify clues for the players, and give them physical evidence they can refer to throughout a campaign. A nice piece of copper-colored, parchment-style resume paper containing text printed with a fancy font makes a note for the characters that feels authentic. If the local vampire lord wants to invite the party to dinner, an actual invitation that the players can hold in their hands ties them much more strongly to the fiction.
Building handouts also helps you refine the story. You can use handouts to introduce important NPCs. You can use them to reinforce quests. You can even put a secret or clue right onto a piece of paper for the players to sort out. Building a good handout can be its own sort of preparation, offering good value for both you and the players who’ll receive it.
Maps
Beautiful full-color fantasy maps can transport players and GMs alike to the lands they’re exploring. If you’re running a published campaign world, printing a large poster map of the world that can be placed on the game table can give everyone a sense of the scope and scale of the campaign.
Many fantasy poster map
s can be purchased online in digital format, then printed out for your own use at a local print shop. You can even get those maps laminated so you can write on them with a dry-erase marker, turning your beautiful fantasy world into a table-sized whiteboard.
Artwork
The Internet is full of evocative artwork you can use to fire up your own imagination and the imaginations of the players. When you’re killing time surfing the web, you can pore over piles of fantasy images, bookmarking the ones you like and that you want to show to the players. Emailing these images around between games or showing them off on a phone or tablet during the game is a great way to show a creature or location, rather than just describing it.
When you find fantasy artists whose work you really like, check to see if their images are available for sale, or if they have a Patreon. By supporting an artist, you can get great art more quickly, cutting down on your prep time and giving you more time to focus on other things.
Music
One great way to dial up the mood of your game is with the right selection of background music. This music shouldn’t overshadow the game itself, so keep the volume low. Video game and movie soundtracks provide a particularly good background to a fantasy RPG session.
The following list of popular soundtracks (plus two instrumental artists) are recommended by numerous GMs and players:
Conan the Barbarian
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and the rest of the Elder Scrolls series
Lord of the Rings
Pillars of Eternity
Dragon Age
Diablo
Stranger Things
Pirates of the Caribbean
Final Fantasy series
Darkest Dungeon
Midnight Syndicate
Two Steps From Hell
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.
Chapter 14: The Lazy Dungeon Master’s Toolkit
Along with the notes resulting from our Lazy Dungeon Master preparation, we also want to put together a toolkit of supplies and accessories that can help our games run more smoothly at the table. Each GM will have their own favorite tools, certainly. But we all likely have a few favorites in common. This chapter describes some of those most common elements.
This Lazy Dungeon Master’s toolkit is designed to be simple, portable, flexible, useful, and cheap. It gives us a high degree of flexibility, aids in improvised play, and lets us build worlds as vast as our collective imagination. This discussion assumes that the toolkit will automatically include the obvious tools that every GM needs, including dice, pencils, and dry-erase markers. Beyond that, the focus is on the tools that best define the way and methods of the Lazy Dungeon Master.
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. Chris Perkins, for example, once described outlining an entire adventure session on a single sheet of paper. Your Lazy Dungeon Master preparation notes should likewise ideally fit onto a single sheet of paper, three to four pages of a pocket notebook, or a small handful of 3×5 index cards.
Keeping a record of old notes is a good idea—both those you used to prepare for your game, and those you jot down during the game. Reviewing old notes can help you reference previous events and keep track of things from session to session. But there’s no need to overdo it. You don’t have to spend hours reviewing old notes in order to get ready for your next session. You’ll remember the important stuff when it’s time to sit down and prepare.
Campaign Worksheet
Setting a goal of using a single sheet of paper for your campaign helps you focus your attention on the right areas. A single page of character and campaign notes will let you keep the most important elements of your game right in front of you. As new elements pop up as a result of what the players and characters do, you can jot them down on the sheet. Focusing on the characters also helps you remember the characters’ names, so that you can address the characters instead of the players during the game.
Curated Random Name List
Nearly every article written about the importance of improvisation at the game table talks about the importance of “preparing to improvise.” And each time these articles discuss this notion in detail, they bring up the importance of a good list of names.
A good list of curated names might be your most important improvisational tool.
You’ll use names for all sorts of things in your games—but their primary use will always be for the NPCs you improvise during the game. The Internet is full of excellent random name generators. You can pick any one you prefer and use it to generate a list of hundreds of names. When you’re building your Lazy Dungeon Master’s toolkit, it helps to read over this random list ahead of time and prune it down to names that sound right and work well. Once you’ve curated your list of random names, you can print it out and stick it in the kit.
During play, it is critical that you write down NPC names as they come up. It’s easy to assign a random name to an improvised NPC—and even easier to forget it ten seconds later. Your campaign worksheet or GM notebook is a great place to write down the names and descriptions of improvised NPCs so you don’t forget them.
3×5 Index Cards
Many GMs have long declared their undying love for the simple 3×5 index card. The roleplaying game Fate Core makes such cards a fundamental piece of gaming material. In all games, the flexibility of cheap 3×5 cards knows no bounds. You can use them to draw quick sketches. You can use them to solidify quests once the characters have discovered them. You can write out the names and powers of magic items, then hand a magic item’s card to the player whose character receives it.
Few tools in your Lazy Dungeon Master’s toolkit are as flexible as 3×5 cards.
Initiative Cards
In addition to note taking, 3×5 cards also work well as initiative trackers. Fold nine cards in half so they stand up on the table. Number the cards 1 through 9, writing the number on both sides. Then before your session begins, ask one of the players to handle initiative, and hand them the stack of cards.
When it comes time for a battle and everyone rolls for initiative, the player with the cards can hand them out. The “1” card goes to the highest initiative, the “2” card goes to the next highest, and so on from there. As the GM, you’ll get a number of cards depending on how many monsters with different initiatives are in the encounter. With these index cards in front of you and all the players, it’s easy for everyone to see the order of the battle, and for players to know who’s up next when someone else is taking a turn.
GM Screens or Cheat Sheets
RPGs with a healthy amount of mechanics often have GM screens or cheat sheets available that can help you improvise some of those mechanics during your game. For example, your cheat sheet might tell you the appropriate attack score and damage for an improvised trap of a particular level. It might give you a range of difficulties for various tasks, or it might tell you what the results are for conditions and status effects. GMs have used these cheat sheets and screens for as long as people have been playing RPGs, and with good reason. They help make it easier to improvise as you run your game. Find the cheat sheets or GM screens you prefer and keep them on hand during your game.
&
nbsp; Dry-Erase Flip Mat
A blank dry-erase flip mat lets you keep a flexible whiteboard on the table in front of you when you run your games. Though most often used for gridded combat maps, a dry-erase flip mat is an extremely versatile tool with all sorts of potential uses. You can draw sketches of locations and room layouts on the fly. You can render diagrams showing the vast scale of fantastic locations, or document weird symbols the characters might discover. You can use a flip mat to track the damage monsters take during combat, as well as the interesting physical characteristics that might help the players identify those monsters.
A flip mat like this usually runs $10 to $20, and is well worth the money. It’s lightweight and folds up to the size of a sheet of paper. Like 3×5 index cards, its flexibility knows no bounds.
Published Books and Adventures
Many GMs find themselves setting the game books aside once the game gets going—but these books provide excellent resources for the process of running the game. You can use your monster books to look up monster stat blocks at the table. You can use the random charts and tables in your Gamemaster guides to help shake up boring situations or inspire an interesting turn of events. Likewise, if you’re running a published adventure, you should keep that adventure on hand. It’s worth your time to read through these books and mark the sections you think you’ll find most useful at the table.
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