Additionally, understanding the loose relationship between monster challenge rating and character level can help you understand how a battle might go. Most of the time, you can just list a number of monsters and improvise encounters based on what’s happening in the adventure. For boss battles, you might have to do more work.
Select Magic Item Rewards
Players love magic items, and it’s worthwhile to spend time preparing items they’ll find interesting. This step also helps to directly impact the characters—by dropping an interesting part of the story literally into their hands. You can use a mixture of techniques to reward magic items, from selecting items randomly to selecting specific items based on the themes of the characters and the desires of the players. Magic items are also a great mechanism for delivering secrets and clues.
A Loose Outline to Get Comfortable
Your actual use of this checklist might change from game to game. But reviewing the checklist each time you begin to prepare for your game can help you feel comfortable that you’re focusing your energy on the activities that provide the most value. The more comfortable you become improvising your games, the more you might start skipping certain steps on the list. All that’s important is that you don’t want your confidence to lead you away from important steps that your players enjoy.
The Lazy Dungeon Master’s Checklist with Published Adventures
Our Lazy Dungeon Master’s checklist works whether we’re running a published adventure or our own home-brewed adventures. But published adventures offer tremendous value to the Lazy Dungeon Master, whether you play them mostly as written or use them to inspire your own ideas—giving you published and playtested material you can drop into your own adventures.
To get the most out of a published adventure, it’s important to first read the adventure, absorbing it and letting it inspire you. You then need to make the adventure your own by customizing it for your group. Adventure writers both expect and hope that GMs will run their adventures in whatever way best suits our games.
When running a published adventure and going over the Lazy Dungeon Master’s checklist, you might find that some of the steps are done for you. You might not need to put as much energy into steps like building fantastic locations, identifying NPCs, choosing monsters, or selecting magic items. Still, because you always want to customize the adventure, it’s worth reviewing the checklist when running a published adventure, to help you sort through and focus all the material that the adventure is providing.
The Lazy Dungeon Master and Online Play
Running RPGs online has grown significantly in the past few years. In the 2016 Dungeon Master survey at slyflourish.com, roughly 20 percent of surveyed DMs said they primarily run their D&D games online.
Although Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master doesn’t specifically address online play, the steps and processes discussed in the book work just as well whether you interact with your players online or around the table. Running online games might require additional steps or tactics—particularly in learning how to use the tools of your favorite virtual tabletop. In other ways, though, a virtual tabletop can make life as a GM even easier. However you play, the Lazy Dungeon Master’s checklist still works.
An Ongoing Example: “The Scourge of Volixus”
Throughout this book, we’re going to talk about a single example adventure called “The Scourge of Volixus.” You’ll see how to approach and make use of each step of the Lazy Dungeon Master’s checklist as it’s applied to the adventure—culminating by the end of the book in an adventure outline suitable for play.
Chapter 3: Review the Characters
“Nothing’s more important to a campaign than the stories of the player characters.”
—Chris Perkins, story designer and editor for Dungeons & Dragons
As much as we GMs like the deep story of our game, the other players care most about their characters. The story of our campaign will interest players only as much as they embrace how their characters fit within it. For the most part, players want to watch their characters do awesome things. They want to nail the negotiations with the king’s viceroy. They want to discover the single clue leading to the lost temple of the White Lotus assassins in the deepest jungles. They want to cleave through a small army of bugbears single-handedly. Players want their characters to do stuff, and GMs need to remember this as we prepare our games.
When you review the characters as the first stage in your game preparation, you’re priming yourself to build the rest of the elements of your prep around those characters. All the other steps you go through in the Lazy Dungeon Master’s checklist can tie to one or more characters if you wire the backgrounds and desires of the characters into your mind before you begin.
By reviewing the characters, you might decide to start your game when an NPC from a character’s past approaches them with new information the character is interested in. You can think about fantastic locations that touch on a character’s background, such as an ancient, shattered statue of a goddess worshipped by the party’s paladin. The foes you choose might be monsters that the characters are particularly good at fighting—perhaps an army of zombies that the cleric is eager to turn.
Secrets and clues can be tied to the backgrounds and desires of the characters as well. Such secrets might include things such as, “Ryld’s mother isn’t dead like he thought,” or “Sif’s longtime companion didn’t die during the cave-in, but is encased in amber in the sorcerer-queen’s inner sanctum.”
Choosing treasure always ties directly to the characters, of course. Maybe it’s time the ranger found a bow forged from living wood by the druids of the lost ages of Valorne. Or perhaps Trubella the monk finally faces off against the dark monk Shadewinter, possessor of the Staff of the Four Winds.
Keeping Track of the Characters
In order to review the characters before you prepare your game, it helps to actually keep track of them on paper. Some GMs will keep a list of characters in the same notebook used to write out the rest of their preparation, with a few words on each character’s background and motivations. Others might keep a stack of 3×5 index cards, with each card noting the name, background, motivations, and desired types of magical items for each character.
However you choose to do it, write down the names, backgrounds, motivations, and desires of the characters. Then review them before you begin to prepare the rest of your game.
Can You Remember Their Names?
There’s a simple test every GM can conduct to see if we really are keeping the characters firmly in mind: Can we remember each of their names? Usually, a name is enough to remind you about the rest of the character when you call it up. If you don’t remember the characters’ names instinctively, spend some time doing so—and you’ll find that remembering their backgrounds and motivations easily follows.
Checklist for Reviewing the Characters
Write down the names, backgrounds, and motivations of all the characters.
Review these character notes to prime your mind before the rest of your preparation.
Use this character review to help you tie the characters to the rest of your game.
Test yourself to see if you can remember the names of the characters.
Chapter 4: Create a Strong Start
“Getting over that first hump, going from just a bunch of people sitting around a table to playing D&D, is, for me, the hardest thing to do.”
—Matthew Colville, writer, designer, and video blogger
With the characters firmly in mind, we can now look at the most important question for preparing our next game session. How will it begin?
This is the only point in the game where a Gamemaster has nearly complete control. No one has acted yet. No character has cut the throat of the primary quest-giving NPC. No one has robbed the baron’s messenger before the party could be hired to find his idiot son in the forgotten cellars beneath the castle.
To understand where your game starts, you nee
d only to write down a single sentence that clarifies how your session will begin. That said, specificity is better than generality. “The baron talks to the characters about saving his idiot son” isn’t all that evocative. So instead, go with something like: “During the autumn festival of the running of the pigs, the baron’s foppish messenger, Louis Van Dorf, approaches the characters commanding them to an audience with Baron Winthrone—just before being run over by the dire boar Bloodtusk.”
Okay, maybe that’s a bit much, but you get the idea. With the sentence describing how your game begins, you want to paint a picture for the players—one that lives and breathes and gets the session moving. Your first general idea probably isn’t specific enough to cut it. You want to take a little bit of time to think it through, and you can use a few questions to aim in the right direction:
What’s happening?
What’s the point?
Where’s the action?
What’s Happening?
The world of your game lives and breathes. Things happen outside the view of the characters—or at least that’s what you want the players to believe. You can reinforce this belief by framing the start of your game session with an event of some sort—but one that doesn’t necessarily connect to the characters or their actions. Perhaps a huge storm is hammering the ship the characters are traveling aboard. Maybe they stumble across a group of moon-worshipers on the night of a lunar eclipse. Or maybe they’ve wandered into town on the day of the prince’s wedding to a rival baron’s daughter.
Not every session needs to start with a big external event of this sort. But such an event can bring life and texture to the otherwise static world surrounding the local quest-giver at the tavern.
Here are ten example events that can start a game session off in a memorable way:
Local townsfolk are celebrating the annual running of the pigs.
It’s the day of a wedding between two members of rival hostile families.
The local lending house has just been robbed.
A rough mercenary army unexpectedly rolls into town.
A clearly unnatural storm of swirling violet clouds tears across the local landscape.
Everyone is preparing for the annual “feeding of the roc.”
It’s Boxing Day, and the lords of the area are all serving drinks to the local farmers.
The city magistrate has just outlawed alcohol.
The king is dead.
It’s been raining for a solid month, and the bad weather has no end in sight.
What’s the Point?
The start of your game session should be the kick that sends the characters off to do something. You should have a clear point and purpose for the start of your session. Most often, this is the main seed or hook that sends the characters off on the next stage of their adventures.
Characters might find the bloody sigil of an assassins’ guild marking the hair-covered palms of their wererat assailants. They might witness thugs harassing a local apothecary, demanding that she give them all the sulfur she has. Six suits of animated armor could wander into the town square, demanding to do battle with a queen long dead—and promising that an army of their kind will slaughter every living thing within one hundred miles if they are denied. Each starting scene contains the hook required to pull the characters into that stage of the adventure. Then the players decide how the characters will respond to that hook.
Where’s the Action?
There’s a term for a style of writing stories called “in medias res”—Latin for “into the middle of things.” This technique brings the viewer into the story in the most immediate way, avoiding setup and jumping in as close as possible to dramatic action. Think of the opening sequences of the many James Bond movies—car chases, ski chases, foot chases, lots of shooting, and things blowing up. There’s a reason that action movies in particular use this technique: it works. Those movies get you as close to the action as they can right away.
The opening scenes of your game sessions can do the same thing. Instead of starting with heavy narrative and description, plodding along as the characters wander about looking for something to do, you can start as close to the action as possible. A thief tries to steal the coin purse of one of the party members. An eclipse begins to darken the sun, and a dozen normally well-adjusted villagers draw knives and begin to attack one another. Something explodes.
It’s always tempting to start a game session with setting, locations, and a discussion of large events. All GMs love to paint the big picture. But by skipping all that, you can get right into the heart of the adventure. So how do you go about starting close to the action?
Start with Combat
No matter what your favorite fantasy RPG, its key components are invariably exploration, social interaction, and combat. Of these components, combat embodies action. Combat is so ferocious that the game needs to focus time down to six-second rounds. So if you ever want to get the attention of the players, there’s no easier way than to throw the characters into a fight.
Starting an adventure session with combat has many advantages. It gets the players rolling dice right away. It brings everyone’s attention to the table. It forces all of us as GMs to break past our desire to spew twenty minutes of deep narrative. And best of all, a battle almost always comes with its own built-in story hooks.
Who are these strange blood-faced ratfolk, and why are they so brash as to attack by daylight? Why are the townsfolk murdering each other during the solar eclipse? Where the hell did that wyvern come from, and how did it know to attack that one specific noble? In the process of the characters seeking answers to these questions during and after the first combat, the hooks for the session are set up.
This technique can be easily overused, of course. It’s an easy trick that won’t work every single time. You can always think of other ways to get the characters close to the action without throwing them into a fight. It’s only really important that something happens at the start of your session.
Still, twenty-five James Bond movies have used the same opening pattern since 1962. That might make it good enough for you to use too.
When in doubt, start with combat.
Ten Examples of a Strong Start
Now that you have a relatively simple formula for building a starting scene, you can write down the start of a session in a single sentence or short paragraph, building a rich opener to your game. So what do these strong starts really look like? Let’s check out ten examples.
During the ceremony marking the marriage of the prince to the daughter of an ambitious baron, a wyvern wearing a glyph-marked collar sweeps down from the mountains and attacks the father of the bride.
During the annual festival of flowers, the floor of the old Dudley barn-turned-dancehall collapses—revealing ancient vaults filled with angry skeletons wearing armor from the age of Three Suns.
During the running of the pigs, a huge dire boar suddenly appears, roaring through the village and shredding local folk with steel-coated tusks.
A band of blood-faced wererats launches an attack on the opening day of the autumn market. Their leader clutches a note with sketches of the player characters and a cryptic message: “Their lives or yours…”
During a once-in-a-lifetime solar eclipse, just as the moon crosses the sun, dozens of villagers draw blades and begin to attack their unsuspecting neighbors.
Ten suits of animated armor of a style not seen for a thousand years interrupt the local lord’s address—and issue a challenge to a queen long dead.
Goblins riding dire wolves attack a group of over a hundred refugees from the neighboring town of Gladeswallow.
On the opening day of the fishing season in the lakeside town of Windshire, the frost giant Godrum Icerift smashes down the walled town’s guard towers. He demands a tribute of one hundred barrels of fish per month—or he will destroy the entire settlement.
On the day of her husband’s death, Queen Vanrys is revealed to be the red dragon Vanrys Wh
itefire, then declares herself the thousand-year queen of the realm. Her hobgoblin army marches through the open gates of the capital and promptly takes over as the city’s new guard.
On the coldest day of the year, the innkeeper of the Blackhorn Inn shakily declares that he has long been the pawn of a terrible being lurking in the ancient cellars below the inn. Before anyone can respond, his left eye fills with blood and he drops dead. Then four longtime patrons of the inn rise up, reveal their true twisted forms, and begin to slaughter all those around them.
You’ll notice that each of these examples follows the same basic formula. Each is framed by some event, each has a clear hook to a larger story, and each gets the characters into the action—and often directly into combat.
Strong Starts in the Middle of Adventures
The examples above show how you can start an adventure as the story begins. But much of the time, you’ll be starting off a gaming session in the middle of an adventure. A clean break between sessions might happen occasionally, but it’s much more common to start a session in the middle of a story. As such, it might seem that you don’t need to worry about where the game will start if you already know where it ended.
The need for a strong start for the session still stands. Even when you’re in the middle of a story, you can spend some time figuring out how to get the next session started strong. You can inject a new event—a change in the weather, perhaps, or an alarm suddenly raised that hadn’t been heard before. Even when you’re in the middle of the adventure, a strong start gets a game session off on the right foot.
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