Miniatures, Maps, and Terrain
According to the 2016 Dungeon Master survey, more than 60 percent of fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters run battles using a gridded map and miniatures. If that’s your preferred style of play, a flip mat works great as a flexible, all-purpose tactical battle map. And there are many options for miniatures, from using candy, dice, tokens, or coins to represent monsters to collections of thousands of prepainted plastic figures. If you plan to run some of your battles using a gridded map and miniatures, you will surely want to include those in your Lazy Dungeon Master’s toolkit.
Miniatures representing the player characters can be helpful even outside of combat. You can use them to have the players show the characters’ general positioning, their marching order when exploring dungeons, or to indicate who’s awake and who’s asleep during rests.
Preprinted encounter maps and 3D terrain pieces can draw players even deeper into the game, and can help make a combat session more tactically interesting than a battle taking place completely in the theater of the mind. But tactical maps, 3D terrain, and miniatures aren’t a necessity. You can run fantastic, fun, and awe-inspiring games with nothing but loose sketches and evocative descriptions. Besides removing the added cost and complexity, leaving maps and minis aside gives your game the flexibility and freedom to go wherever the story takes you.
Get Rid of What Isn’t Useful
When you’re putting together your Lazy Dungeon Master’s toolkit, what you avoid putting into it matters as much as what you add. Many accessories that seem like a good idea at the time turn out become cumbersome when running the game. Every item you add to the kit makes it harder for you to find and use the other items you’ve assembled. You don’t want to have to shuffle through a huge box full of junk just to find your initiative cards or the specific miniatures you’re looking for.
Every time you run a game, you’ll get a better idea of which components you use regularly and which components offer little value. As you do, you can continually prune your Lazy Dungeon Master’s toolkit down to its essential components—those that, like the rest of the techniques of the Lazy Dungeon Master, have the best impact on your game.
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
Chapter 15: Reskinning
“The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it.”
—Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
Of all the tools in the Lazy Dungeon Master’s toolkit, few are as useful as reskinning. Reskinning lets us make use of four decades worth of published, playtested, and professionally produced materials, and then fit those materials into our own games in seconds.
In tabletop RPGs, reskinning is the technique of taking something that already exists and wrapping it up inside a different name, description, or flavor so that it appears completely new and unique.
Here’s an even shorter description of the process of reskinning:
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 Monsters
“If you use the statistics for a haan but describe fins and jets instead of claws and balloons, a cold spray instead of firespray, and a swim speed instead of a fly speed, congratulations—you’ve created a brand-new alien, and your players will never know the difference!”
—Starfinder Core Rulebook
At virtually every point in your games, you’ll run into situations where you want to create new monsters that fit the story you’re telling. Say a huge stone guardian protects the passage to an ancient temple. If you can’t quickly find a good stat block for a huge statue, your instincts might lead you to look up the rules for building a new monster, then create your own new giant statue stat block. But that takes time.
Instead, just find a monster with the rough power level you’re considering and whose general features meet that of the statue. In this example, the stat block for a powerful giant might fit the bill. Then simply use that stat block and call it the “Guardian of the Temple.” When you describe its attacks, you’ll describe them as the attacks of a titanic statue. No one is the wiser.
There are virtually no monsters that can’t be reskinned this way. White dragons can become avatars of dead gods. Mages can become undead viceroys. Hydras can become terrible gnome constructs run amok, or twisted horrors from realms of nightmare.
Sometimes you’ll have to change the attributes of a stat block to work with the flavor of a reskinned monster. You can usually just improvise this. You know the moldering viceroy is now undead rather than humanoid. You know the avatar of the dead god is no longer a dragon, but is instead a fiend whose breath weapon is a wave of necrotic energy instead of cold. These sorts of things are easy to change up at the table.
Reskinning monsters takes the hundreds of professionally designed and playtested monster stat blocks that are part of your game and turns them into an infinite variety of monsters to fit any situation your story needs. Reskinning monsters is a perfect example of the way of the Lazy Dungeon Master, making use of thousands of hours of work and letting you apply it to your game with hardly any effort at all.
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.
Just as with reskinning monsters, you’ll wrap these dungeons in your own flavor and twist their contents to fit your story. You can tie in the secrets and clues you’ve prepared to give your reskinned dungeons the flavor of the overarching adventure. You might wrap the dungeon in a larger change, such as taking a fire-themed dungeon and turning it into an icy one.
You can also create a library of published dungeon maps to refer to when you need something more complicated than the small number of fantastic locations you’ve prepared. You might replace one or two of the rooms of a reskinned dungeon map with your own fantastic locations, and then improvise the descriptions of the other rooms and chambers as you need them during the game. A good collection of maps makes a great addition to your Lazy Dungeon Master’s toolkit.
Reskinning Worlds
You can expand the idea of reskinning to every other aspect of your game’s world—up to and including the world itself. Taverns, inns, castles, temples, cities, planes of existence, gods, whole pantheons—whatever you need, you can most likely borrow from other resources built using far more time, money, and creative energy than most GMs have access to. Published adventures and published campaign sourcebooks give you tremendous value as reusable material. Even if you don’t use those books directly, you can still make great use of them when you reskin them and drop them into your own world.
Mash-Ups
Along with reskinning monsters, dungeons, towns, cities, or entire campaign
worlds, you can take any two or more of those things and mash them together into something new. Take the baseline stat block for a giant, then add in the magical elements of the stat block for a mage. You’ve just created a new rune-giant wizard. Take a floating city in a high-magic realm and mash it up with the seedy, shadowy metropolis of a dark fantasy world. You’ve created a sinister floating prison colony that’s completely unique. Although reskinning a single published element into something new is easiest, it’s not that much harder to take parts from two published elements and mix them together. A lot of the most memorable ideas—from gaming to fiction—make use of this concept.
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.
If you’re one of those GMs, it’s important to push past those feelings. So much wonderful material exists for your games. Making use of ideas from gaming products and books you own isn’t about stealing or devaluing the work of the writers, designers, and artists who created those books. Rather, it’s about being inspired by that work in different ways. So don’t throw that material away just because it somehow seems less creative to reskin monsters, settings, and other game elements than to come up with everything yourself.
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 tools of the Lazy Dungeon Master.
Chapter 16: Building a Lazy Campaign
“I made a lot of mistakes. I overprepared. I made huge campaign worlds, not realizing that the players wouldn’t see one one-hundredth of them.”
—Chris Perkins
“An adventure is about the here and now.”
—Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition Dungeon Master’s Guide
Based on the survey of 6,600 D&D Dungeon Masters conducted at slyflourish.com, roughly 55 percent of respondents run games in their own campaign setting. Often, these Gamemasters spend significant time building out pantheons, major NPCs, landmasses, political structures—everything that fills a campaign world.
We Lazy Dungeon Masters can take a different approach. This way of working isn’t incompatible with the methods of building out a large campaign world. But it starts with a focus on the characters, the goals driving them, and their immediate surroundings. Then the game and the world both spiral out from there.
Develop the Spiral Campaign
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.
As the characters explore the world, your focus on that world spirals outward. Only when they reach the nearby city do you take the time to fill out that city. And even then, you focus only on the locations within the city that the characters are most interested in or most likely to see.
The campaign spiral uses the familiar Lazy Dungeon Master’s checklist. You focus on what will hit the table when you play your next session. The rest of the game, the story, and the world are all flexible and fluid. You might enjoy building out huge parts of your campaign world, but you shouldn’t be fooled into thinking the players will care until specific parts of that campaign world matter to their characters.
Besides the existing checklist, you have a few other tools to help you build out a campaign world for a new game. Many books and RPG sourcebooks describe the complex details of world building. Instead, we’re going to focus on three small techniques that let you quickly build out a campaign that matters to the characters and the players: the campaign hook, the six truths, and defining fronts.
Build the Campaign Hook
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. This description makes it easy for the players to know what they’re supposed to do, and makes it easy for you to keep a clear focus on what to prepare as the campaign moves forward.
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.
Obviously, the generalities in the hooks above would be replaced with specific details from your own campaign. For our “Scourge of Volixus” adventure, we’ll expand the theme of the adventure into a larger campaign focusing on the rise of a devil lord name Thuron, who wishes to take over the valley surrounding the village of Whitesparrow. Here’s our campaign hook:
Stop Thuron’s rise.
It’s hard to beat three words that can define the conflicts and arc of an entire campaign.
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.
Define Fronts
“Dungeon World’s concept of fronts improved my D&D games immeasurably.”
—Mike Mearls
One final act of campaign preparation can help you focus on the prime motivators within your campaign. Fronts are a creation from the game Apocalypse World by D. Vincent Baker, and popularized in Dungeon World by Adam Koebel and Sage LaTorra, but we’re going to simplify the concept here.
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?
Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master Page 7
