On Game Prep

I'm back! Master of Dungeons is back again, with hopefully pseudo regular updates to help you to achieve the respectable title of Master of Dungeons. This week we discuss how you don't really need to prep for your game sessions. This has been discussed previously on the blog, most recently in this Quick Tip about DMing and Improv.

I'm a big advocate of improv as a DM. I see far too many Dungeon Masters spend hours and hours prepping a weekly game of DnD. This is fine, if you enjoy preparation, but it is completely unnecessary. I cringe every time I see a DM burn out from session prep, and cause his campaign to fizzle out, because it is completely unnecessary. Not only will overly prepping your games cause you to start dreading your favourite hobby, but it doesn't improve the game. If anything it limits it by causing you to railroad your players, else your preparation be for nothing.

I'm not saying you shouldn't have a basic idea of what you want to accomplish in a session, or in a campaign, but that is the sort of high-level preparation you can do while commuting or waiting in line at McDonalds. Complex maps and encounter preparation, and just generally planning out everything that will be done in a session is completely unnecessary.

In the blog's first ever Online Tools post I wrote about Kobold Fight Club. This website is the single greatest tool in a DMs toolbox. Before each session I muck about in this tool, writing down a few enemies that are a good level for my players level and numbers. I write down about how many of that enemy would make a good medium or hard encounter, and the page number. You can filter based on type or keywords, so it is effortless to create a handful of easy encounters in minutes. 

Kobold Fight Club is the easiest way to create encounters for your games

Sunday morning I had a session to run for my secondary group on Roll20, we hadn't met in three weeks and the group was just travelling without much planned. I was able to create a nice four hour session using only Kobold Fight Club, the Dungeon Master's Guide, and my own improv ability.

I hadn't run a dungeon yet with this group, so fifteen minutes before the session I thought this would be a good time for one. I searched the easy to use Roll20 site for a small dungeon map, although you could find one anywhere online. I decided that this dungeon looked like it might be occupied by undead, so I needed a reason for the players to enter the dungeon. 

I flipped through a couple NPC ideas I had rolling around in my head and landed on Professor Cogsworth, a gnomish professor who studies engineering and the manufacture of extravagant artifacts. I decided that he might have a brother, who is also a professor of sorts, but studies magic instead of the physical. Perhaps Cogsworth had come across some sort of magical question and needed to talk to his brother about it. His brother of course had a sort of magic laboratory in an underground dungeon because it had the proper combination of ancient arcane runes and triangulation of ley lines. 

The party would encounter a strange cart, it would stop in front of them and attempt to hire the party to investigate his brother's laboratory. Cogsworth had seem some sort of skeletons and gotten spooked and he needed the party to clear the place out and help his brother, who he assumed had been gnome-napped. For good measure I threw in a weird nerdy professor mixed with a stuttering yoda speech pattern, and he felt like a full-fledged NPC.

In the dungeon, I used the highly useful Random Dungeon tables near the end of the Dungeon Master's Guide. I tweaked each roll as I saw fit to better match the visuals and style of the dungeon and my group. Kobold fight club help me quickly populate it with Ogre Zombies, Gargoyles and Spooky Skeletons, and the party found a pair of true-sight glasses before nearly dying to Yellow Mold.

I actually lied to you at the beginning of this session, I said it took me only 15 minutes to plan a 4 hour session. In actuality the dungeon was only half-finished, so it only took 15 minutes to plan 2 sessions. Try out this kind of planning at your table, and I guarantee your game will be just as fun, if not more, and you'll save yourself the headache of planning a long session. Don't be afraid to tweak any results from a random table, and if you have any spur of the moment ideas, throw them in. Improvise, and have fun.

Thursday Quick Adventure Idea #2 - Professional Cartography

This week's Thursday Adventure Idea is quite small. Inspiration for any DM's looking for a fun campaign hook, or a quick adventure. Let me know in the comments if you end up running something like this, or if it inspires anything in you, I'd be excited to hear it.

Some DMs love making incredibly detailed maps for their players. Some hate it. Many in both groups don't know when to provide players with maps, and what sort of geographic information should be fed to the players, and when. This quest is an interesting take on how to deal with that.

Your players, during downtime at some established port or trade city, are approached by an entrepreneur named Kurnwell Sixpenny. It has been discovered that current maps aren't very accurate, and it's time for an update. Magic calamities, new towns, raiding monsters, geological shifting, and wars could all have contributed to the maps falling out of date.

Kurnwell will pay handsomely for the adventurers to explore the area, in the company of his cartographer assistant. Basic census records are to be taken from any inhabitants, monsters are to be spotted (or their heads returned for a small reward, to be placed in the local academy along with the new maps). This task can take any amount of time, or cover any size of area, that fits your campaign.

You can either handwave the map making, or you can have one of your players actually record what they encounter, and attempt to draw it into a map. If you are playing in an existing campaign setting, feel free to make it your own in this way, maps are drawn by hand and many of them may be hundreds of years old, and incredibly out of date. Forest sizes may have changed, new caves and lakes may have appeared. This is a magical world, and the geography may change must faster than the real world. Mad wizards may create or destroy mountains, entire villages may have been wiped out by barbarians. 

Cartography is a fun idea for a campaign. It can cover a very large area and take years if necessary. Ocean travel can be added to spice things up. Local villages might ask for help with a small monster or raider problem before handing over census information.

Kurnwell Sixpenny will pay the adventurers what he promised. What they don't know is that he will take full credit, making himself the protagonist of all of their adventures. Along with the maps he will attempt to release a best-selling book chronicling his heroic adventures.  The money he stands to make from the map, any monster trophies, census information, and book sales is many times that of which the adventurers were paid, not to speak of the immense fame, and opportunities for public speaking engagements that he will have for the rest of his life. Sixpenny hid in his small apartment, reading cheap adventure novels, while the players made his maps.

Saturday Grab Bag - Torm's Holy Arena

On Saturdays, or maybe weekends in general, I plan to have a grab bag of posts that don't fit the constraints of the other series. This post will hopefully mark the first post of the Saturday Grab Bag.

Sometimes when I am running my table, the players have traveled faster than I intended, while the destination isn't fully prepped as much as I would like. Sometimes, I've even had to postpone a session because of this, but I really don't like doing that, getting a group of six people with full time jobs together can be a real struggle, so if we're all free I like to have at least something happen at the table.

The last time this happened I came up with the idea for Torm's Holy Arena. Back then we were running a weird improv version of Hoard of the Dragon Queen that I plan to go over at a later date.

On a side note, I really love buying premade campaigns and adventures, but I never run them very close to the intended story line. I improv around the story. I like them because they create a good context for what could be happening around the world during the campaign. I usually start the way the book intends, but then I give the players absolute freedom to go off in whatever direction they want. My players right now are on the run because they slaughtered a group of dragon cultists when they weren't supposed to, and the witnesses saw them as cold-blooded murderers. I also enjoy buying the books because I like to read the story, get ideas for encounters, and just feel immersed in someone else's lore for once.

Torm's Holy Arena 

Invented to fill a session in that campaign. The party had entered Elturel, a town filled with many paladins and worshipers of Torm. It had been a slow previous session, so I wanted to include some fun combat for them, but without going on too big of a tangent from their current path.


A very hedonistic paladin who mentored one of the players introduced them to the arena. He had had it built years before as an attempt to turn adventuring into a sort of spectator sport. Many before him had attempted to create a coliseum-style arena for the common folk to watch adventurers hack and slash at each other, but it had never quite worked out. The problem was these adventurers were too unwilling to fight each other in such a high-risk, low-reward scenario. Why would an adventurer fight to the death against other highly-skilled adventurers to get fame and wealth, when he can achieve those goals fighting badly organized goblins, or saving a farmer's daughter from a cluster of Owlbears?

Attempts were made to create a non-lethal arena, using dull swords and  flat-tipped arrows. But this prevented the magic-users from participating. It is difficult to remove the lethality from a lightning bolt, or fireball.

The paladin, despite his hedonism, was a very pious man. He knew of many resurrection spells, granted to him from his god Torm. Many paladins and clerics from across the region came together to imbue an arena with intrinsic resurrection abilities, and Torm's Holy Arena was born.

When an adventurer dies in the arena, right before their living essence were to leave their body, the holy power of Torm returns the spirit to the body, mends and issues, and transports the adventurer to just outside of the field. Such a feat is very expensive and difficult, and adventurers need to be blessed before hand by local clerics, and fight without anger or hate in their hearts. Elturel is proud to proclaim that the arena has a nearly perfect success rate.

The arena sometimes releases monsters for the adventurers to fight, but the most popular style of event is large Battle Royales, featuring anywhere from 5 to 20 skilled adventurers. People flock from all over the country to witness the event, and the last man standing is usually given some gold, gems, and even a magic item (like the Chalk of the Demiplane Retreat)