I started running Dungeons & Dragons (and roleplaying games in general) when I was ten years old. I didn’t have a game group to start, but my Dad was very much a Tactician (from Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering) and since he knew I had obsessively learned the rules of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1st Edition) he asked me to run Danger Room-style scenarios for his character from a World of Greyhawk campaign. While the battles and mini-adventures I threw at his multi-classed Valley Elf wouldn’t count toward the main campaign, it let him try battle tactics and spells so he could take his tested ideas to the grown-up game.

Most of the encounters I put together for Dad were cribbed from official adventure modules, which naturally progressed to me running published adventures and entire campaigns later on. Like many Dungeon Masters my early career was all about taking the framework of the published adventure and adapting it for my table and our game group. At first I was pretty much letter-of-the-law and tried to run things exactly as written, but as I became more experienced and comfortable, I began doing more and more tinkering.

Eventually I started writing material whole-cloth, and because I had an idea of how a D&D adventure is supposed to read, I wrote my homebrew material exactly as if it were a manuscript for publication—even going to great lengths to format the document in whatever the accepted style was at the time. This was, you can imagine, a lot of work and only some of that material got used each game session. When my childhood home burned down years ago, there were old binders with fully-written D&D adventures in the attic that went up in smoke.

Skip ahead several years and my experience with lots of different RPG systems led me to both play and run games that were well-suited to loose, improvisational styles. In fact, the games that I’ve created myself all lend themselves to relatively uncomplicated rules and allow a Game Master to focus on storytelling more than mechanics. When running such games, I would show up with a 3″ x 5″ index card’s worth of notes or just a vague idea in my head and from there I would wing it. But my old D&D habits died hard. I always over-wrote and over-prepared.

Let’s skip ahead even more years (ye gods, do I feel old) and a group of fundraising gamers known as the Warriors of Whimseydale pitched me an idea: I would livestream a once-a-month D&D campaign for them on Twitch, and we’d alternate between raising money for Extra Life and the family fundraiser I set up during my daughter’s cancer treatments—first session scheduled for January 2019. I had recently devoured Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master by Michael Shea (aka @SlyFlourish), a book that challenged my childhood assumptions about how one is supposed to prep for a game of Dungeons & Dragons. In brief, it reminds us that we only need to prepare for the session we’re about to play and that by having some basic questions answered and a few tools on-hand it’s possible to run a memorable, kick-ass game without turning it into a part-time job.

I made a challenge for myself: I would apply the “Lazy Dungeon Master” methods to this new campaign, with my own tweaks and variations. Then I could truly decide if it made for a better or worse game compared to the amount of workload I was accustomed to in my checkered gaming past. And now, dear reader, I’m going to pull back the curtain to let you see the funny little man and just how the magic got made.

One reason I decided to write this blog instead of just pointing you at Mike Shea’s book, website, and Twitter feed (even though if you run D&D you absolutely should) is that despite the book using a homebrew campaign for the examples, the videos on the SlyFlourish YouTube channel are almost exclusively about applying the Lazy Dungeon Master techniques to published adventures. (This observation isn’t a criticism, especially considering the huge audience of newer DMs looking for help when it comes to translating these big intimidating books into something you run in chunks at the table.) So this series will serve as an example of how I used these ideas to craft a wholly original campaign set in a world of my own creation. Each article, starting with this one, will pair with a game session (or two in this case) you can optionally watch if you’d like to see exactly how the concepts translated into actual play.

Worldbuilding

Confession: Unlike many of the incredible game designers I’ve called friends and peers over the years, I never once created my own fantasy setting for D&D. I started in the Known World (aka Mystara), then Dragonlance, the World of Greyhawk, and most of the other official published settings cranked out by TSR. (Allow me to give a shout-out to my under-appreciated personal favorite, the Birthright campaign setting, and co-creator Colin McComb for giving me a place for my incredibly epic college-years campaign.) And virtually all of my professional career in RPGs has been playing in the sandboxes built by others.

When I wrote my adventure A Delve In The Cave—a starter scenario for 5th edition—I wanted a setting generic enough to be easily inserted into existing campaigns but with enough depth and flavor that it would lend itself to certain story hooks. It started as a region that borrowed flavor and folklore from medieval Wales (something I talk about in a YouTube video if you’re interested), but once a creative domino gets knocked over it inevitably keeps going in my head. So by the time the Warriors of Whimseydale asked me to run game for them, I had a mental list of ideas for my very own fantasy setting.

And so far? The entire world hasn’t gotten fleshed out more than some rushed notes and me trying to record details I’ve improvised at the table. I’d really like to draw out a map and write out some more background material, but I’ve had no time for it thus far. Instead of making this article incredibly long, I’ll address the development of the setting in its own article and just make note of things specific to my world as we go. For now just know that it’s a fairly generic western-European-inspired fantasy setting that’s coming out of a dark age into a human-centric era.

Notes

Everything below is either using or is at least inspired by the techniques detailed in The Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. If you want to try something similar for your own game, I highly recommend you check out the book as I’m only talking about whatever creativity spilled out of using Mike Shea’s methods. Your own mileage may vary.

The pages of notes below are redacted, showing only what ends up being relevant to Chapters One & Two that I ran back in January and February. This way you see only the relevant information, and my sneaky players can’t stumble onto any significant spoilers.

Session Zero: The Heroes

My first decision for this more improvisational campaign? Don’t even think up a storyline until I “meet” the characters.

So instead of coming up with any ideas whatsoever for this game, I waited. We had decided to have a “Session Zero” as a kind of holiday party at the end of 2018. I went somewhat old-school, letting players roll 4d6 for the raw ability scores and then choosing which ability score to apply the total—dropping the lowest value die to generate a number between 3 and 18. I wanted above-average, heroic characters and let the players pick whatever they wanted. Of course, this immediately clashed with my campaign setting!

As noted above, my vague unnamed setting is very much in the Western European fantasy tradition with a human-centric culture—the other races not unknown but certainly more fringe or far away than found in something like the Forgotten Realms. So of course, here are the characters my players wanted:

Aleeriana – Tiefling Cleric – Karlee

Carver – Warforged Fighter – Michael

Farih – Tiefling Mystic – Lyz

Genevieve – Elf Ranger – Caity

Jingarn – Dragonborn Monk – Alex

Kal – Half-Elf Bard – Corey

Felix – Human Fighter – Victor (note his placeholder name “Jax” is on the original notes)

That’s exactly one human character in my human-centric setting! Tieflings and dragonborn are incredibly rare while warforged theoretically don’t exist at all. I had never even contemplated psionic characters for my setting since they aren’t part of the core D&D 5th Edition rules and are really more prevalent in science fiction than fantasy.

I was instantly faced with a choice. Either I shoot down some of my players’ preferences for their characters, or come up with ideas that let me say yes without heavily altering my ideas for the setting. Because I want my players to have fun and be the stars, I went with Option B. And as a writer, this path was more interesting.

When Joss Whedon was tasked with writing and directing the first Avengers movie, he was instantly struck with the notion that the heroes did not belong together in the same genre, much less the same story. In an interview he said, “My thought was these guys just don’t belong together. Then I was like, Wait a minute, that’s the movie. It’s The Dirty Dozen.” Similarly, I realized that if some of these characters don’t belong in my setting I need to make part of the story about why and how they are here in the first place. The entire story of the campaign and some of the chief villains sprung from there, and was probably far more interesting—especially to my players—than anything I would have come up with completely on my own.

Campaign Notes

Here are my redacted notes for the entire campaign. Two of the bad guys are hidden, as they have only been hinted at so far (as of July 2019). Click on the thumbnail to open it full size in a new tab.

Campaign Hook: This is the seed idea for the main plot, at least as I saw it in the beginning. I partially redacted it, but in brief there is a villain trying to accomplish a goal that is decidedly not nice. If the heroes do not stop the villain, bad things will happen to both the characters and the greater world.

Six Truths: These brief descriptors give you an idea of the theme and a bit about what’s going (in very general terms) about the game world. Some of it sprang from my original ideas for my fantasy setting, others introduced to help accommodate my unusual player characters. I’ll offer a deep dive in a worldbuilding-specific blog in the future.

Campaign Fronts: These are the bad guys, and I’ve redacted the two that haven’t been fully revealed yet (though they’ve been both hinted and foreshadowed during the first seven sessions). The first, the Church of Deadra, is not even a singular villain, but rather an entire religious movement. With such an unusual band of heroes, I liked the idea of having a social force working against them. There is no defeating the entire faith, though the heroes can act against its goals and interests. The church is xenophobic and intolerant of other faiths, which allows the religious characters (the cleric, the monk) to decide how much they’ll tolerate and when they want to push back.

Secondly we have Aqaba, the Hag of Mirrors as a more traditional D&D villain. I wanted there to be one bad guy based near the town where the whole story started, but still be a terrifying creature with broad reach and influence. Corey’s bard, Kal, had an interesting note generated by his character’s background. “I have a journal in which I write everything, but the words only last a day. I’m compelled to write in it daily, but where do the words go? Is someone else reading them?” I decided that someone was manipulating Kal against his will and without his knowledge, using him as a spy and agent out in the world. Flipping through the monster books I spotted the Mirror Hag in the Tome of Beasts by Kobold Press. I ended up using the name more than the creature writeup to come up with something unique and iconic—a mix between Bloody Mary of bathroom mirror fame and Baba Yaga as told in Russian folklore with a sprinkle of Littlefinger from Game of Thrones. When I started, she only existed as these sparse notes. I did not write up her statistics until it seemed likely that the heroes would confront her.

The redacted entries? For now I’ll just say they are villains with their own agendas and both tie in with the backstories of some of the characters. I look forward for the heroes to bump against their plans in the big city.

Session Notes – Chapters 1 & 2

The Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master strongly suggests going through the steps for each session. Some unused elements might carry over, but it’s always good to take a fresh look at things and consider what’s best for the game ahead of you. In my case, setting the stage and introducing the characters took a bit of time so there was a lot of stuff still on the page. I didn’t have a lot of spare time to work on the game anyway so I just went over the notes for session two and kept going with zero problems. None of this material is redacted as my players either dealt with everything or it’s become irrelevant to the ongoing plot halfway through the campaign. The following are some notes on how I applied the Lazy Dungeon Master questions to my game. (Click on the thumbnails if you’d like to pull up the pages at full size. And note how I used these pages to jot down notes that would become important to the future of the campaign.)

Who are the characters?

We want to review the characters as a first step, remembering that the campaign is their story. If this is the Lord of the Rings, they are the Fellowship. While sometimes the heroes stumble into problems in the greater world and decide to do their part (the hobbits), others have personal connections to the larger plot (Strider is actually the rightful king of Gondor, Gimli learns of his cousin’s death and the loss of Moria). Reviewing the characters is useful in terms of remembering what talents and abilities they have from a game mechanics perspective and also remembering their backstory and motivations so the story you tell will have stronger emotional hooks than simply “there is a dungeon with monsters and treasure inside.” Making the players understand their characters are connected to the world and the ongoing story is compelling and will keep them coming back for more. Here are a couple of things about each character.

Aleeriana – Tiefling Cleric. Karlee’s character was left as an infant with the priests of Bahamut, the Platinum Dragon. They are a once mighty order that has been pushed into seclusion and isolation over time. She does not know what demonic heritage runs through her blood, but the priests raised her to suppress her darker impulses. We learn early that there is a conflict between the life chosen for her and one she might choose for herself.

Carver – Warforged Fighter. I decided to intimately link the background of Michael’s character and Farih, played by Lyz. When she made her Mystic character, she rolled a quirk that reads “You often speak to an imaginary companion, and act only with its blessing.” I loved the idea that Carver was Farih’s imaginary friend come to life as a guardian and protector, even if his origins are still quite mysterious. Michael had to wait longer than any other player to join the action, but his big reveal was a fun moment in the first session.

Farih – Tiefling Mystic. Lyz’s character seemed like the most logical starting point, and the initial story revolved around her. A tiefling and a Mystic (a psionic character class that’s currently only available as a playtest document), we learn quickly that she may not have been born this way, but rather the subject of some kind of experimentation or alteration. Her Disney Princess-esque isolated upbringing comes crashing down when she learns her home is full of secrets.

Genevieve – Elf Ranger. I had fun with Caity’s unusual backstory, cribbed from The Last Unicorn. In this variation, she was once an immortal unicorn that guarded a large primeval forest to the west of where the campaign begins. But fascinated with the life of mortals, she took the shape of an elf maiden and ventured into the farms and towns for longer stretches, leaving her forest for longer periods of time. Then a devastating fire—think the wildfires of California on steroids—ripped through the region, a large-scale natural disaster that has created a crisis that ripples outward. But with her grove destroyed, “Nevvie” is trapped in her mortal body and her memories of that previous life have begun to slip away like a dream.

Jingarn – Dragonborn Monk. Dragonborn are not a natural race in my campaign setting, but rather created through a dangerous religious rite. In other words, he was once a human who had to earn the mantle of dragonborn as part of his religious order. This doesn’t come up at first in the campaign but is revealed a few sessions in, but in the beginning a lot of the drama came from his pairing with his real-life sister Karlee (Aleeriana) as “siblings in faith,” both followers of the Platinum Dragon.

Kal – Half-Elf Bard. Corey’s character was described to me as an opportunist and Loki-esque agent of chaos. So naturally I couldn’t resist messing with him by having someone pulling his strings (see the notes about Aqaba, the Hag of Mirrors, above). I also used him to create the inciting incident that kicked off all the action of the story, appropriate for someone who just naturally stirs the pot wherever he goes.

Felix – Human Fighter. Called “Jax” initially as a placeholder name, Victor’s character is ex-military and a sellsword looking for a fight worthy of his talents. He discovers he was used and lied to and is actually in the employ of some bad guys when the story begins. While he doesn’t have as many easy story hooks as some of the other characters, he has the advantage of being able to blend in and his military service means he has the most chance of running into former soldiers and others who took note of his abilities.

What is the strong start?

A valuable piece of advice from The Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master is to come up with a strong start for each session. RPG sessions really benefit from momentum, and with limited time on our hands it’s best to give the ball a hard shove at the beginning. If you just have everyone sitting around a tavern the players are groping around in the dark figuring out their next move. But if you come up with an interesting scene to kick things off, especially with some action that offers some obvious motivations things feel like they have more dramatic urgency.

The first session was introducing the entire world, a new campaign, and the characters. So I started with exposition and focused on Lyz’s character Farih, learning the broad-strokes of the setting’s history from her imaginary friend “Mister E” and hinting at her mysterious origins and strange life growing up as a foster daughter to a mysterious man. Then I jumped to the present with Corey’s character Kal coming to fetch Farih to receive a mysterious delivery near the docks.

Because I was running the second session without any additional prep I just started the second where the first left off, with the characters trying to figure out what the hell is going on after dropping off a crippled prisoner taken after the party’s first battle. I feel like it may have been a mistake to not go for a stronger opening, since it allowed the group to immediately get bogged down in arguing instead of providing some obvious threat or course of action.

What scenes might occur?

The idea is simple enough. Think about the situation and the most obvious choices in front of the characters and make some notes on what kinds of scenes could unfold. It could be exploration of a place, conversations or questions conducted, chance meetings, or just about anything else. There only needs to be enough of a framework to help improvise the rest. You’ll see the big battle in the first session was set up as the very first note, as that was perhaps the only fully scripted moment in the entire campaign, bringing the heroes together and shoving a few of the big questions right under their noses. As they are trying to solve a complicated mystery, I thought of the most obvious questions they might ask and places they might explore to find answers. I decided to throw in an optional side-quest if they decided to befriend an NPC rather than battle him (which didn’t work out), and also throw in hints related to other characters and their backstories—including refugees from that big fire to the west, the racist-religious fanaticism of Deadra, and a chance to hint at Kal the Bard’s secret relationship with the hag in the northern swamp and her bog goblin minions.

Not every scene will be used. In fact, with two sessions springing from the same notes I still had a few that didn’t come up. You’ll see I scribbled an asterisk next to the scenes that got used in the session. Unused scenes can sometimes be ported over into future sessions if they still make sense, which worked out since the party stuck around in the starting town longer than I expected.

What secrets and clues might they uncover?

Of all the tricks in the Lazy Dungeon Master toolkit, this one might be the most valuable. In adventure writing before, I always pre-scripted where and who and how important information could be dropped to the heroes. This inevitably leads to important information that helps the story move forward being passed by. In this case, you just come up with a list of things that advance the plot and drive the heroes in useful directions, but without deciding where and how they find that information. By paying attention and keeping them in mind, you can find the right moment to logically deliver the information. I only used half the secrets and clues in two sessions, but all of them advanced the story and I had no problem figuring the right NPC or journal entry or situational clues that let me drop the hints in an organic way.

What fantastic locations might they discover?

As a fantasy setting you want to have memorable places that reveal things about the world even if they don’t specifically advance the plot. In Lord of the Rings the adventurers visit mystical elven strongholds, a crumbled ancient watchtower, a dwarven kingdom destroyed by a demonic force. Some of the locations might be adventuring spots, where others may just be sights along the way that hint at the grand history of the setting.

In our case, the group discovered that Lyz’s character Farih grew up with a hidden basement in her home accessed by a door that she never knew was there (an idea I shamelessly stole from Matt Smith’s very first episode of Doctor Who) in which her foster father kept many of his secrets. They found an old shrine to the dragon gods of good and evil—of particular interest to the two characters who worship Bahamut—desecrated by the followers of Deadra. A cavern used as a roadside warehouse by a large trading company was ripe for looting, but the party decided to skip it since it was more of a side-quest and profit opportunity and they have been quite focused on the main story goals thus far. Other locations did not come up until later in the campaign, others remain unused entirely. If I had spent a lot of time on them it would have been frustrating, but in the end I was only out a few minutes work and a few lines of description.

What NPCs might they meet?

By having a short list of nonplayer characters for the party to interact with I went into the first two sessions with both who these individuals are and an idea of how to portray them at the table. Only a couple were of use at the beginning of the campaign, and the poor chieftain of the bog goblins ultimately ended up on the cutting room floor despite him being my favorite. Farih’s foster father is seen only in flashbacks and in what he left behind, but his importance to the story is such that he comes up in conversation at least a little every session since the beginning.

What monsters might they fight?

Combat encounters! Dungeons & Dragons has its roots as a wargame fought with miniature figures, and even though it’s possible to have entire sessions without combat it’s really one of the pillars of the game (the others being exploration and roleplaying). This list was easy to populate based on the previous entries, figuring out just who or what the party might get in a scrape with in the scenes or locations above.

While I believe the encounter design guidelines from the Dungeon Master’s Guide are more of a crutch for people getting used to running the game, they aren’t a bad starting point. I really love the free online tool called Kobold Fight Club. Let the tool know which game books you have to reference and plug in the number of characters and their levels, and from there you can look up specific monsters or browse entries using a variety of filters (creature type, terrain, etc.). With it you can build an encounter that should be roughly within the level of challenge you’re looking for within moments. From there I went to my D&D Beyond account and looked up the monsters and printed them out so I’d have easy-to-reference stat blocks handy that doubled as scratch paper for hit points and condition effects—easily recycled when no longer needed.

What treasure might they acquire?

Even though the group was starting at 1st level, I still wanted there to be some tasty rewards. By skimming the above lists it wasn’t hard to think of locations, NPCs, or monsters that might have some decent loot. There are tools on how to come up with unique magical treasure even for lower-levels, when magical reward tends to be more subtle or situational. And these ideas, like all the others, can be revisited if not used for the upcoming session. Two pieces of treasure on this first list didn’t come into play until session seven!

Game Preparation In Action

If you’d like to see how a few pages of notes translates into hours of Dungeons & Dragons at a game table, check out the video links below. I’m not at all declaring that this is the way to prep an RPG session, and in fact I’m still playing with these tools myself, but I’ve found it’s allowed me to run a campaign my players really enjoy with a much smaller investment of my time.

You’ll note that while I am no stranger to drawing things out on a battle mat by hand, I really enjoy using pre-printed posters and tiles that are scaled for use with miniatures. I also have a huge collection of figures that go back to the 1980s. It makes things visually interesting and attractive at the table while also making it a lot easier to adjudicate action and combat. But you can skip all that and just play Theater of the Mind, or use simple counters to track locations of characters and monsters.

Find out what works for you. Experiment. Try different things, be they dream sequences or flashbacks. Remember that NPCs and monsters don’t exist in the game “until they walk on the stage,” so you can adapt what you have in mind for the needs of the moment. If things bog down, shake things up with action, combat, or some other surprise. Keep everyone guessing, and if you can end on a cliffhanger you’ll have your players begging to schedule the next session right away.

Above all, relax and have fun. It’s a game after all. If everyone’s smiling when you call it for the day, you’ve won.

Chapter 1: What’s In The Box?

Chapter 2: Dog Day Afternoon

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