This is the third in a series of articles on running Waterdeep Dragon Heist. The other articles include:

• Session Zero of Waterdeep Dragon Heist
• Running Waterdeep Dragon Heist Chapter 1: A Friend In Need

A Different Sort of Chapter in a Different Sort of Adventure

Waterdeep Dragon Heist is already a different sort of adventure than we're used to but, at least in chapter 1, it still feels like a typical adventure. A quest is given, the characters conduct an investigation, they crawl a dungeon, and face a boss. That's the outline of thousands of D&D adventures and it works really well.

Chapter 2 in Waterdeep Dragon Heist is nothing like this. Chapter 2 is mostly a toolkit for two major activities: restoring Trollskull Manor and getting connected with factions. There's no central storyline in this chapter and it's possible the activities in this chapter will take many tendays, months, or even longer depending on how you run it.

Running this chapter is not easy. If you find yourself having trouble running this chapter, hopefully this article will help.

Repairing the Manor

Much of this chapter will also revolve around repairing and funding the manor. It's up to you and your group to determine how much detail you want to expose in this venture. This event might be as simple as acquiring the funds to build up the inn once again. Maybe they hire an intermediary to do act as their agent in such matters, for a fee of course. Maybe your group really enjoys the detail of building out the inn. Some groups will love these details and some what to go off on adventures like they expect to. You'll have to gauge this yourself.

Choosing Factions and Quests

The rest of this chapter brings in seven factions that can potentially recruit the characters and send them off on a variety of missions. There are 28 such missions, none of which have anything to do with Raenar Neverember or the missing dragons.

I have two recommendations for these faction quests:

1. Choose one to three factions you want to introduce and ignore the rest. You might choose the Zhentarim, Bregan D'aerthe, and the Gray Hands as three interesting ones to drop into the game. You might choose three others. You likely don't want to introduce all seven of these factions. Pick the ones that fit the characters and the game and dump the rest.

2. Choose the faction missions which sound the most fun. There are tons of these faction missions and introducing them all can send the characters off on wild goose chases for weeks. Instead, pick a few that fit the current story of the characters and improvise any others you want to bring in.

Choose Your Own Adventures

This chapter is the perfect time to bring in your own small adventure seeds if you want. You can build these seeds from the backgrounds of your characters, inserting personal quests or group quests that focus on one particular character or another while they are busy fixing up the inn and dealing with the other issues going on. You can expand upon the rivalry between the new owners of Trollskull Manor and Emmek Frewn. Maybe it's your own little version of Patrick Swayze's Roadhouse. If you ever wanted to run some low level city adventures, this is a great time.

The Haunting of Trollskull Manor

For a more direct introduction to the chapter we can haunt Trollskull Manor, not just with Lief the poltergeist, but maybe with the hag mentioned in the manor's background. Back in Trollskull Manor's history, it was once owned by a hag who pretended to run it as an orphanage before she was routed by paladins of Helm.

What if that hag is still around?

This is our chance to add in some of our own mini-adventure. The two times I've run this chapter I added in a green hag named Auntie Potiti who had been routed from Trollskull Manor long ago but isn't fully gone. She still haunts the manor and adds all sorts of terrible discoveries including:

• A giant closet that eats people.
• Dead children that stomp around on upper floors or talk to the party.
• A crazy big hag hand that comes out of a painting.
• An illusion of a woman bathing in childrens' blood.
• Paintings that depict the characters as young children hand in hand with the hag herself.
• A glimpse of the hag's outdoor lair complete with catoblepas herds.

We can channel our best interpretations from It, Poltergeist, and The Shining to build out this our haunted manor. You might even replace it with your own version of Death House if you haven't run it before.

The hag might have a pet Banderhobb lurking in the cellar and the cellar itself might have a secret entrance into the Waterdeep sewers or even to Undermountain.

The goal of the party in this sequence is to survive the hauntings for one night and to route the hag. She will leave the manor but is still out there and may haunt the characters from time to time. Hags are fun.

The Mystery of Leif's Murder

Another interesting storyline to investigate in this chapter is Leif's murder. Perhaps the murderer was Leif's assistant, a young man at the time but old man now. Perhaps this assistant did so only after being fed lies by the rival innkeeper Emmek Frewn. Now the assistant is down at the dock wards, continually down on his luck. He has never forgiven himself for killing the only man who ever showed him kindness. It's up to the characters to find this killer and bring him to Leif, not so the ghost can kill the poor old man, but forgive him. In my game, one of the characters found out his name and used one of the paper bird messengers to summon him to the manor for a mysterious treasure. Smart!

Blue Alley

If your group needs more structure and you want to throw a dungeon in the middle of this chapter, consider running Blue Alley by MT Black. This deathtrap alleyway is a fun way for the characters to engage with some wild traps and earn some valuable treasure to help them fund the reconstruction of Trollskull Manor. The dungeon can be unforgiving in some places so add in some valuable relics so the characters can earn more coin or acquire one or two nice powerful single-use magic items for their adventures to come.

Fireball!

Whenever you feel like the pacing of this chapter is getting to be too slow, it's time to drop in the fireball. Chapter 3 of Waterdeep Dragon Heist focuses on the aftermath of an explosion that rocks the alley. It's a strong start to the rest of the story of this adventure. You can drop in this event at any point while running chapter 2 so it's a great way to help you tune the pacing of the adventure. If you ever feel like things are getting stale or boring, drop in the fireball.

An Open but Challenging Chapter

Chapter 2 of Waterdeep Dragon Heist gives DMs a lot of freedom to bring in new elements to the story. It also gives players a new style of game. Instead of chasing leads, fighting bad guys, and delving into dungeons; they get to build up their own home base, meet interesting factions, and go off on small quests. It's a way for them to feel the living and breathing city of Waterdeep.

This wide open narrative can be equally challenging to run. Take some time, shrink the aperture, and build it into the chapter you want it to be.

Chapter 12 of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master describes ways to reduce the eight steps of RPG preparation down to the ones that matter the most for your game. This list changes depending on the type of game a DM runs and available material a DM has to run it.

Today we're going to look at which steps best fit common scenarios in which DMs often find themselves.

If you are not familiar with the eight steps from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master you can read this PDF preview of the book or watch these videos including this 8-step summary video to better understand the eight steps. For a quick summary, the steps include:

• Review the characters
• Create a strong start
• Outline potential scenes
• Define secrets and clues
• Develop fantastic locations
• Outline important NPCs
• Choose relevant monsters
• Select magic item rewards

This list of steps is all-inclusive but we can often skip steps depending on what sort of game we're preparing. You can watch me do this all the time in my Lazy DM prep video series in which I use the eight steps to prepare for my own weekend D&D games but often cut steps out depending on the type of game I'm about to run.

Let's look at some common scenarios and see which steps best fit.

The Continuous Homebrew Campaign

Based on the results of the 2016 Dungeon Master Survey, this scenario is likely the most common. Most DMs run their own campaign worlds and their own adventures. It's also likely most DMs run continuing campaigns and not a series of single-session adventures.

Of all of the potential ways to play D&D, this one likely needs most, if not all the steps, each session. Since you don't have a pre-existing published adventure, you can't easily fall back on other tools that help you skip certain steps.

Sometimes, when you're in the middle of a campaign, you might already know what fantastic locations are coming up. You might also have an idea of what scenes might take place or you simply don't care and plan to let the game go wherever it goes.

Generally, though, you'll want to go through all eight steps.

In a recent Shadow of the Demon Lord campaign I ran, I ended up falling back to my own story and my own campaign. Unlike running published adventures, I needed all eight steps to help me fill out each session. I found the checklist helpful (one would hope I would!) but I did need to go through each step on it.

Even if you are playing in someone else's campaign world (and most DMs likely are not), this won't really help you skip steps for any given session. An overall campaign world means less work on the details of the world but all eight steps are still relevant for the next session you plan to run.

When running your own series of adventures in your own campaign world, you'll likely benefit from going through each of the eight steps while preparing for your next game.

The Continuous Published Adventure

Though likely not in the majority, many DMs run larger published campaign adventures such as the D&D hardback adventures for fifth edition. Like the continuous homebrew campaign, these stories continue from session to session. Unlike homebrew campaigns, we have a lot of material we can fall back on that help us skip some the steps.

Big published adventures require a lot of work, but that work is mostly up front when reading the adventure through to understand what's in it. We'll also want to review the adventure before each session to know what comes up next. That said, such early preparation helps us skip steps session to session because the published adventure includes much of what we need. In particular, we can often skip the following steps:

• Scenes. We know what scenes are often coming up because they're listed in the adventure.
• Fantastic locations. We're using the locations in the book so we don't need to think them up ourselves.
• Important NPCs. We might still want to list the ones who matter to the characters but overall we don't need to come up with many NPCs from scratch because they're in the adventure itself.
• Relevant monsters. Again, these are likely in the adventure so we can skip it.
• Magic items. Also often rewarded in the adventure.

Some adventures, like Curse of Strahd, Storm King's Thunder, and Tomb of Annihilation have large open-ended chapters that require more prep from the steps above. When the adventure goes off the rails, it's up to us to fill them in with interesting scenes, locations, monsters, NPCs, and magic items. Most of the time, though, we can rely on the adventure to do that work for us.

This leaves us with the following steps we still need to do:

• Review the characters. We still need to focus on the actual characters in the game and how the world is reacting to them.
• Create a strong start. It still helps to start strong in our games, especially when we're in the middle of a published adventure.
• Define secrets and clues. Often we can drag these out of the background of a published adventure but we still have to write them down. These secrets are still tremendously valuable when we're actually running the game, published or not.

Going from eight to three steps is a nice drop, however, which is why I highly recommend running published adventures. There's a lot of value packed into these books.

Homebrew Single-Session Games

Like the homebrew continuous games, we're going to need all eight steps when running a single-session homebrew adventure. In particular, scenes become more important because we know we're going to need to fit in a full story arc in one session. Timing also becomes critical so we need to know where we can cut the story down and still get to the ending on time.

Overall, we still need the full eight steps when running a single-session homebrew game. That said, these eight steps help put together an entire adventure for four hours of entertainment which is a pretty great return for the effort.

Published Single-Session Games

We'll often see published single-session games when running organized play games or running games at conventions. Above all, the best value we get when running such a game is to read it and understand it before we run it. Often, time is the most critical factor. Like the homebrew single-session game, we have to complete a full story arc in the allotted time which can be a real challenge.

Some single-session published adventures may not have the same quality of design, editing, and playtesting as the big hardcover published adventures so it's worth paying special attention while reading it to ensure it can fit into a single session. This is the work we must do up front but, like the published continuing game, we don't have to use all of the eight steps.

Here are the steps we can likely skip:

• Review the characters. We often have no idea who the characters are so there's no real work to be done here.
• Create a strong start. Often these adventures start how they start. We might replace the strong start if the published start sucks but generally we'll use what they have.
• Develop fantastic locations. Already outlined in the adventure.
• Outline important NPCs. Already outlined in the adventure.
• Choose relevant monsters. Already outlined in the adventure.
• Select magic item rewards. Already outlined in the adventure.

This leaves us with two steps to focus on when running a single-session published adventure:

• Outline potential scenes. Because we know we're going to have to fit the adventure into a set amount of time, we want to have a solid understanding of the outline of the scenes and what we can cut if we need to get the time back on track. This step is vital for single-session published adventures when time is a factor.
• Define secrets and clues. It's still helpful to know what the clues the characters can learn to get them from point A to point Z during a single-session published adventure.

Pilfering Published Material for a Mashup Game

Many DMs enjoy taking published material and smashing it into their own campaign arc. This provides a lot of the benefit of a published adventure but with the creative fun of a home campaign.

When we're looting other published material, we don't have to stick to the fixed structure of a published adventure. This gives us more flexibility to share our own story but it means more work too.

When we pilfer published material, we're most likely to steal locations and NPCs. We'll still have to go through the rest of the checklist to fill in the blanks we have in our campaign. Finding interesting fantastic locations, however, can be a big benefit so it's always worth stealing what we can.

Further Room to Customize

These are just a few potential scenarios DMs will likely have while preparing their D&D games. Your own specific circumstances will determine which steps are most useful to you. As you prepare and run your own games, consider which steps help you the most. Focus on those, reduce or remove the rest, and continually improve your system to run the best game possible.

In the summer of 2018 at Origins, Wizards of the Coast and the D&D Adventurer's League ran the D&D Open, a multi-table competition-based D&D adventure called "Gangs of Waterdeep" as a preview to their Waterdeep Dragon Heist adventure. This adventure was writtin by Shawn Merwin, James Introcaso, and Will Doyle.

The adventure is considered "competitive" but the competitive aspect was limited to a point-based system in which only one table out of about fifty could actually win. The competitive nature wasn't the interesting part of this adventure; the interesting part was the style and format. Today we're going to look at some design tips we can learn from the design of the D&D Open Gangs of Waterdeep adventure.

Warning, this article contains minor spoilers for Gangs of Waterdeep.

Build Situations, Not Encounters

Gangs of Waterdeep mastered the art of building situations instead of encounters. The whole adventure was broken up into 60 to 90 minute segments that each focused on a heist. These could be break-ins, infiltrations, hijacks, and other heist-like situations. Before each of these larger events, the DMs gave players information they could discover and time to prepare themselves for the situation. Then the operation began. Maybe characters would fight their way through it. Maybe they would sneak. Maybe they would like or bluff. How the players chose to approach the situation was up to them and it was up to the DM to adjudicate how it worked out.

These larger scenes are different from the typical way we might plan out our Dungeons & Dragons games with specific exploration, roleplay, or combat scenes with pre-determined starts and conclusions. These larger situations are exciting because our options are nearly unlimited and the outcomes can be completely different from anything anyone can expect.

The next time you're planning out a D&D game, build a larger situation and let the characters choose how they interact with that situation.

Add Planning and Execution Timers

When we set up situations and give the players time to discuss how they're going to go about it, we can add timers to keep it to a reasonable amount. If a scenario is likely to take about an hour, we can let the players know that they have fifteen minutes to plan the job before it begins. It helps to have an in-game reason for such a limitation.

One reason to put such a limit on the planning is that the players really don't have all the information about the situation and their plan is very likely to change when more information gets revealed. The longer the planning goes on, the more planning will be thrown away when things go sideways. Limiting the planning session gives players some time to prepare but wastes little time when things don't go as they expect. In some circumstances you want to give players all the time they want to plan an approach towards a situation, like deciding how to get onto a pirate ship and steal a specific treasure they hold. It's always best to watch the body language of the group and see if the planning is going overboard, however.

Let the Players Choose the Gameplay Pillar

When we build out situations, we don't determine how the scene will go. We don't decide ahead of time that a scene will involve combat, exploration, or roleplaying. We can let the players decide how to approach it, both as they plan and as the scene takes place during the game. This can be great fun for both players and DMs since no one knows how a scene is going to go. It can help us to explain this to the players before the game so they aren't looking to us for clues to "solve" the scene. It also helps if we're prepared to run some of our combat in the theater of the mind so that we can seamlessly transition between roleplaying, exploration, combat, and back again without a big break in the flow of the narrative. If we have to set up a battle map and miniatures for just one of those scenes, it can slow down everything else instead of giving us easy transitions in and out of combat. Of course, if combat does occur between a good number of different monster types in a complicated area, a battle map or even a loose sketch, can help everyone understand who is where and what is going on.

Choose Monsters that Make Sense

Gangs of Waterdeep broke away from the typical Adventurer's League style of building level-appropriate challenges for the characters. Typically Adventurer's League encounters are built around a character's level. This can result in fighting a weird hodgepodge of unlikely creatures for the situiation like four swashbucklers and three master thieves breaking into a dress shop to justify a level 8 battle.

Instead, we can choose the right monsters for the story regardless of the level of the characters. If the characters run into a band of thieves on the streets, those thieves are likely bandits. Maybe their street boss is a bandit captain.

It's ok to run combat encounters that are wildly in favor of the characters if it makes sense for the situiation. There's no reason you can't have a group of sixth level characters fight five bandits if that's what makes sense. In Gangs of Waterdeep our gang of level five characters fought three cultists at one point. Could they have been cult fanatics? Maybe, but plain cultists makes a lot more sense.

The only time we might want to be careful is if a battle might be deadly. Then it's worth checking out the math to make sure we won't accidently kill the whole party.

Use Props and Costumes

Props and costumes can add a whole new tacticle and visual feeling to the game. Dressing up as guards, wearing hoods, and otherwise changing our appearance for the game can draw in another level of immersion. So can other props we can use at the table like rustic notes, maps, physical props, and other objects. A puzzle box or cube can become a staple in a long-time campaign, something we hold throughout our adventures. A heart-shaped gem or black coin we can hold in our hand can represent the phylactery of a villain or the trapped soul of a companion. Look for props everywhere, particularly costume shops or hobby shops, and drop them into your game to add a new layer to the story.

Add New Gameplay Elements

From time to time it can be fun to add a new gameplay element to our normal D&D game. Using a big Jenga tower to represent the psionic battle between two opponents can be fun. We can use mastermind puzzles, Caesar cyphers, or strimko puzzles to represent the puzzles our characters find in-game. Keep in mind that these puzzles don't work for those who are visually impared so be ready to toss them aside if players can't take part in them. It's usually easy to change a puzzle into a series of skill checks if players either aren't figuring them out, don't care about them, or are physically unable to take part.

A Solid Adventure Design

The Gangs of Waterdeep adventure models an excellent design for adventures overall. Its focus on developing interesting situations that the characters can explore in many different ways gives a freedom we don't often find in published adventures. It focuses on the story by putting thematically appropriate monsters in the right spots regardless of whether it's an "appropriate" challenge to the party. It times both planning and execution of the scenes in the adventure, keeping the tension high without removing the agency of the players' decisions. It included some excellent props and costumes to help bring another layer of depth to the game. It also included a fun new gameplay type, one that worked in parallel to the rest of the adventure, that proved to be a fun event all to itself. Gangs of Waterdeep was an excellent model for the adventures we can run at our own game table.

Leavold Goldenfingers worked his magic. Across the icy rocks of his home, high up in the Spine of the World, the sound of his tiny hammer clinking on the golden bowl echoed across the mountains. His knobby fingers fixed the rubies in place. They ached as he pressed the gems carefully into place feeling them set perfectly in the rim of the golden bowl. In a few tendays, each of the dozen rubies would be in place and then he could start etching the glyphs on the inside of the soft gold bowl, a bowl only he could make. A bowl that would, one day, serve a feast to heroes.

Leavold looked out over the rocky landscape of his home, the home he had lived in for nearly all of his eighty five years. He grew up here. He learned the crafting of the bowls from his father as he had planned to teach his sons.

Tears came to his eyes. For sixteen winters his son had watched him work, studying his art. Leavold told him of the heroes who purchased his bowls and used the divine food they served to push back the evils of the world. His son would smirk at these fantastic stories but soon he came to believe them. He believed them too much.

Leavold's son left to find his own way in the world, a world of adventure, discovery, and heroism. He only found the end of a gnoll's spear in his belly, setting in an infection that killed him a tenday later. His son's friend came to tell Leavold. They held eachother and wept together.

The next day Leavold continued to craft his bowl. He was the only one in the world capable of making such a fine bowl. With his arthritic fingers aching and sad memories in his eyes, he would continue to make them, one at a time, six moons passing before each was complete, until the day he died.

The Troubles of Heroes' Feast

There are a few troublesome spells in the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. One of them, in my opinion, is Heroes' Feast. This sixth-level cleric spell is powerful enough that many players will choose to cast it every day they can, giving its substantial benefits to all of the characters in the party every morning. Many of the spell's abilities are just fine. The hit point maximum and bonus hit points are great. Advantage on Wisdom saves is powerful but not game-breaking. Curing diseases and poisons is solid.

Then we come to its more difficult bonus: immunity to fear and poison. On the surface this doesn't seem like a big deal but many high challenge creatures are built around the damage they inflict with poison and the status effects they impose with both poison and fear. With every character in a party immune to these effects, certain monsters become much easier. This might be fine, but many of these monsters are intended to be truly powerful threats.

Let's consider the ancient green dragon. This challenge 22 monster inflicts most of its damage with its horrendous 77 point breath weapon, a weapon that is completely avoided with Heroes' Feast. Another of the dragon's powerful weapons, it's Frightful Presence is also negated by the same spell on all characters. This could potentially cut the ancient green dragon's challenge in half with a single spell.

The same is true with many other monsters. Yuan-ti rely on poison for the bulk of their damage. All of the high-challenge dragons use Frightful Presence as do many other monsters. Some of the most powerful monsters in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes rely on fear or poison for a good piece of their challenge including Baphomet, Moloch, Geryon (who uses both), and Hutijin.

The Fun of Breaking the Game

One of the core designs of the fifth edition of D&D is that certain spells, feats, and magic items can "break" the game. They go outside of the math that exists between characters and monsters. When the designers build a monster, like a green dragon or Geryon, they don't factor in spells like heroes' feast. They want those spells to shine in situations where it has an effect. Being able to go out of your way to make yourself immune to the breath weapon of a green dragon is a pretty cool part of the story.

Heroes' feast is so good, though, that many clerics and druids, when they have it, will cast it every day. Like mage armor for wizards, the whole party will get together every morning and spend an hour enjoying an amazing meal prepared by their priest.

There are lots of ways we DMs could screw with the power of heroes' feast if we wanted to. We could nerf it directly and make it resist poison instead of full immunity. We could have it give characters advantage on poison and fear saving throws instead of full immunity. That would solve all of the problems I have with it. Sure, it's powerful, but a green dragon's breath weapon still does something.

We could go the other direction as well and convert monsters' abilities to something other than poison or fear. We can't get away with this for green dragons, known for their poisonous breath, but we can for devil lords and others by converting poison damage to acid damage and converting fear checks to madness checks. This is probably worth doing when monsters are intended to provide a powerful challenge to parties (like Geryon or Baphomet).

The Scarcity of 1,000 gp Bowls

Another way to handle this is pure economics. Heroes' feast requires a 1,000 gp gem-encrusted bowl. Granted, by the time characters are high enough level to cast heroes' feast, they are also often high enough level to buy as many 1,000 gp bowls as they want. But who is going to sell those to them? Who has 1,000 gp bowls just sitting around in a stack like plasticware at a Walmart? The cost of a bowl like this speaks to its scarcity. There probably aren't a lot of bowls like this. Even if one has the 1,000 gp, finding those bowls might be a quest unto itself. Maybe the head of a temple gives an adventurer a bowl as a reward. Maybe they find one in an ancient tomb of a dragon priestess. Maybe there's an old man in the mountains who has made these bowls for 75 years but it takes him six months to make one and he only has two available.

We can prevent the over-proliferation of heroes' feast by limiting the component required to cast it. The characters can still decide when it's time to sit down and enjoy that fine meal before stepping into the ancient fortress of Coldsteel in the layer of hell known as Stygia.

This technique is a fun one because it helps balance a spell like heroes' feast within the story of the game. Acquiring bowls suitable for heroes' feast becomes it's own story.

Season 8 of Adventurer's League

Wizards of the Coast saw a problem like this one when looking at the Adventurer's League. After seven seasons of adventures and dungeon delving, high level characters in the Adventurer's League, like characters in home games, had plenty of gold to spend on bowls for Heroes' Feast. WOTC modified the adventurers league by severely limiting gold rewards in Adventurer's League games. This is fraught with all sorts of problems, well documented by Navy DM, DM David, and Merric Blackman, but it does take care of the Heroes' Feast problem. You really have to want those buffs to spend the 1,000 gp to cast it.

I don't Have a Problem. You Have a Problem!

Maybe you're reading this and thinking "Why are you nerfing Heroes' Feast like this? Let the players have their fun!" That's a perfectly acceptable reaction to these ideas. If your group is having a good time and you, the DM, don't care, don't worry about any of this. If you feel like the removal of poison and fear isn't a big deal, go with the gods. If, however, you feel like the challenge of certain high challenge monsters gets too easily avoided with a single casting of heroes' feast, consider following the money and make the bowls scarce.

The old man gazes over the frost-cracked rocks outside his home. A lifetime seems to swim in his eyes. Though often haunted by the ghosts of his memories, he still finds solace in his craft. Wincing as his arthritic knuckles crack, he begins his work again.

Last week I launched the Kickstarter for Fantastic Adventures: Ruins of the Grendleroot. You can learn all about it on the Kickstarter's page, of course, but for those of you who frequent Sly Flourish, I wanted to offer some deeper insight into the project.

Over the past few years I've experimented with a few different products. After writing an article for Critical Hits on "What I Want from Published Adventures", I experimented with Sly Flourish's Fantastic Locations. This book offered twenty locations GMs could drop into their games abstracted from the story, monsters, NPCs, and other stuff we bring into our game. I love this product but it's not everyone's cup of tea. In particular, it purposefully didn't offer accurate maps because the design idea was that GMs would build their own maps. That might have been asking for too much heavy lifting.

The original Fantastic Adventures came next and it hit the mark for a lot of of GMs. I designed that book to offer short focused adventures that made it easy for GMs to prepare them, run them, and drop them into their own campaign worlds. I think they worked well. The book gets lots of complements from people who give hard looks to published adventures. The book also sells well; about a couple of hundred copies a month.

After spending a year writing Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master and the Lazy DM's Workbook, I went back to the formula for Fantastic Adventures and played with it for a bit.

The result is Ruins of the Grendleroot, a book of ten adventures set in a single big mountain filled with ancient chambers, ruins, tunnels, catacombs, vaults, and lairs. It's a mountain of infinite possibilities for adventure centered around Deepdelver's Enclave, an outpost of explorers and adventures who just plain love digging down into all of those ruins.

Like Fantastic Adventures, each adventure is intended to run on its own. Unlike the original, five of these can actually be run in a series around a single miniature campaign arc. I wanted to add a little more theme to these adventures than the original had, and, if we meet the stretch goals, I'll add an entire history that GMs can pilfer from as they run these adventures.

Originally I had intended to build Ruins of the Grendleroot around randomness. Much like the tables in the Lazy DM's Workbook I thought it would act more like an adventure toolkit, something like Shadows over Driftchapel by Absolute Tabletop. After testing the idea out with some trusted advisors, however, it turned out that, like Fantastic Locations, it asked too much of the GM to build adventures out of the components without a hint. Thus, you'll find more refined adventures in this book but lots of advice for how to twist it and turn it around to fit your own story.

I am really excited for Ruins of the Grendleroot. So far it's the hardest project I've worked on with the most moving parts. The artwork, editing, and design are going to be awesome. I can't want to get it into your hands.

If you have the means, I hope you will give it your support.

I've recently been doing a lot of adventure writing, the results of which you can find in the Fantastic Adventures: Ruins of the Grendleroot Kickstarter. As part of this project, I wanted to dig deep into what makes great adventures. So, as I did when writing Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, I hit the books (and the blogs) to collect as much of the best advice on adventure design that I could.

Map from Temple of the Forgotten God, one of the adventures in Fantastic Adventures: Ruins of the Grendleroot.

This article consolidates many of the sources I discovered and read on adventure design. In the article I describe the source and some of the key tips that stuck out to me.

Chris Perkins on Writing Your Own Adventures. Chris has some excellent advice in this video and summary writeup. Here are a few key ideas:

• Analyze existing adventures.
• What motivates the characters to go on the adventure?
• Adventures need three things: motivation, locations, and a villain.
• Put a unique spin on a common idea.
• Have a kickass map.
• A little silliness is ok.

D&D House Style Guide. This free set of documents from Wizards of the Coast includes the house styles the D&D team gives to freelancers. It includes a short paper on adventure writing. Here are a few key points:

• Focus on the importance of the characters.
• Include a solid credible threat.
• Blend familiar tropes with clever twists.
• Focus on the here and now. Omit verbose backstories.
• Include meaningful decisions.
• Include options for exploration, roleplaying, and combat.
• Offer more than a DM can come up with themselves.
• Include a great map.

DM David on Will Doyle's Dungeon Designs. In this excellent article, David Hartlage discusses Will Doyle's advice for designing great dungeons including the Tomb of the Nine Gods in Tomb of Annihilation.

• Show the final room first. Show the goal.
• Cut the dungeon with a river, rift, or stairwell. Break through a linear dungeon with a feature that cuts through the whole thing.
• Make the dungeon a puzzle.
• Give the players goals that force exploration.
• Give each level a distinctive theme.

How to Write Modules that Don't Suck. This outline for a seminar at a convention by Goodman Games has a lot of fantastic advice in it. Goodman Games ended up extending it into a much longer ebook of the same title. The original is a golden summary of great ideas. Here are a few key pieces of advice:

• Convey the fantastic.
• Produce what home DMs can't produce.
• Put new twists on classic ideas.
• Include a hidden room with cool treasure.
• Make levels distinct.
• Include an intelligent ecology.
• Exude atmosphere.

[Kobold's Guide to Game Design: Adventures]. This book has a ton of excellent essays on writing adventures. Some of the key points include:

• The DM is your audience. Write for them.
• Give the DM the tools to make a fun game for players.
• Small beats large. Keep it brief.
• Don't bore yourself.
• Read your work aloud.
• Be specific.
• You're doing the hard work DMs don't want to do.
• If Conan doesn't care, neither should you.

Merric Blackman's NPC Advice. Merric Blackman had some excellent NPC advice he posted to Twitter. Here are a few key ideas:

• What do they want?
• How do they respond to trickery, diplomacy, intimidation, or violence?
• Present NPCs as they're intended to be used.
• Important NPCs need more guidelines for DMs.
• Don't force a DM to search for an NPC's information.
• Limit the number of important NPCs.

Wolfgang Baur's Adventure Writer Series includes a number of great articles, though they tend to focus on the third edition of D&D. The most relevant articles include Writing Your First Adventure, Structures and Plot, and Setting the Hook. Here are a few tips from these articles:

• Avoid useless backstories.
• Start strong.
• Trim excess encounters.
• Pick a motive: curiosity, survival, greed, heroism, loyalty, honor, or revenge.
• Make hooks personal.

Jaquaying the Dungeon. This article on the website the Alexandrian offers excellent advice for building exciting dungeons in our adventures. Here are some key concepts:

• Include multiple entrances.
• Include loops.
• Include multiple level connections.
• Offer secret and unusual paths.

[Writing With Style: An Editor's Advice for RPG Writers]. This is an excellent resource from an RPG industry editor to RPG writers. There's so much good advice in this book that it is hard to summarize in a few bullet points. It's an excellent read all the way through.

Designing Adventures Podcast Series. Shawn Merwin and Chris Sniezak have been running a series of podcasts on designing adventures. There's too many tips to list here but the podcasts are definitely worth a listen.

Note: This article contains spoilers for Waterdeep Dragon Heist.

Chapter 3 of Waterdeep Dragon Heist may be the best chapter in the book. This chapter fits well into the model of adventure design proposed in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. It has the ultimate strong start: a fireball exploding in the street outside of Trollskull Manor. It also builds the adventure around the infiltration of a location: Gralhund Villa. These infiltration adventures give players lots of options and push us DMs to heavily improvise the reaction of the villains as the characters make their choices. In my mind, it's the ideal situation for a fantastic adventure.

Bad Guys Have Bad Days Too

Chapter 3 begins with a misunderstanding between two groups trying to accomplish the same thing. An agent of Raenar Neverember is bringing the Stone of Golorr to the characters. Agents of House Gralhund have been trailing the gnome and two different groups attack him at the same time. The first is the former Zhentarim assassin Urstul Floxin. The second is a nimblewright sent by the Gralhunds. If the Gralhunds had trusted Floxin to do his job, the characters might never have known that the gnome or the stone existed at all. Instead, the nimblewright screwed up and fireballed the gnome, causing a catastrophe and getting a lot of attention in Trollskull Alley.

Bringing In the Xanathar's Thugs

To complicate the situation we can drop in a handful of Xanathar thugs and warlocks who also happened to be tracking the gnome. Now when the fireball goes off we have a whole bunch of different groups chasing down the stone all at the same time. Floxin gets it first and flees the scene, sending in his own thugs to ward off the Xanathar thugs. That's when the characters get involved. They might track the nimblewright but Floxin is gone as is the stone. Only afterwards, when the situation has cleared up, do the characters learn that the former Zhent assassin got away with the stone.

Tracking the Stone to Gralhund Villa

The next part of the adventure has the characters learning about the Stone of Golorr from Raenar Neverember and hunting it down to Gralhund Villa. We might have dropped some clues about the Gralhunds already. In my game, the warehouse where Raenar Neverember was first kidnapped was actually leased by the Gralhunds as a front for the Cassalanters, the adventure's true villain in my game. This way when the characters hear about the Gralhunds, it isn't for the first time.

The book offers some false leads that send the characters on wild goose chases but we can make life a little easier on the characters and drop in some secrets and clues that the Gralhunds are behind the theft of the stone and that it's now at their manor.

Infiltrating Gralhund Villa

When the characters arrive at Gralhund Villa we drop into a great infiltration adventure. We can read ahead on who is where in the villa and let the players decide how they're going to approach it. Urstul Floxin is arguing with the Gralhunds about their stupidity. If the characters overhear it, it will give them a clue that these bad guys have made some bad choices and that they're also working for someone else. It won't be their last bad choices either.

Grandfather Gralhund, a wight, is wandering around in the villa's courtyard as he does every night while the Gralhund children are playing with matches up in their rooms.

To complicate the situation, a band of Xanathar spies and thugs might break into the compound the same time the characters get there with the same plan to steal the stone.

Adding a Mini-Dungeon

The Gralhunds are former worshippers of Tiamat so we might add a shrine to Tiamat in the basement. These chambers might include an old teleportation gate that Urstul Floxin can use to escape the villa before he's confronted by the characters. This will begin the chase in chapter 4 but with a different spin: instead of a chase, the characters have to track Urstul's movements through the city to find out where he's taking the Stone of Golorr. We'll talk more about converting the chase in chapter 4 into an investigation in our next article on the Waterdeep Dragon Heist.

Some of the Gralhund's cultist friends might be hiding down in the shrine; cultist friends the characters will have to deal with when they get down there.

Setting the Stage for Chapter 4

With Gralhund Villa thoroughy infiltrated, the more arcane-focused characters in the party might use some Intelligence (Arcana) checks to find out where the portal went to. This location becomes the first step in the trail followed in chapter 4. More on that in the future article. In the mean time, enjoy the investigation and the infiltration in chapter 3. Think of it as an excellent model with an interesting hook and a lot of agency for the characters to choose the path they want to take. Of all of the models of adventures, infiltrations are one of the best.

One of the nice things about the eight steps for preparing a session of D&D from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master is that it works with just about any tool you already like to use. If you're a pen-and-paper DM, you can just write it down. If use Microsoft OneNote, as many DMs do, you can build templates in OneNote for each session using the eight steps.

I've recently been writing my session notes in text files as part of my Lazy DM Prep videos. I write them in Markdown so I can render them nicely on my phone. I actually wrote Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master using Markdown. It's a wonderful system-agnostic format that allows for a lot of rich markup without leaving behind the simplicity and cross-compatible nature of plain text.

Below you can find a text-based Markdown template for the eight step process from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. For a more specific description of each of these steps, see the free sample from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, watch the Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master videos, or [buy the book] and learn all about it.

To use this template, select it and copy it into a new blank text file. Save it as "adventure_template.txt" in the directory where you keep your adventure notes for a particular campaign. Each time you get ready to write up new adventure notes, make a new copy of this template with a new filename. You can also update the template with regularly appearing notes such as reoccuring NPCs and your character notes which tend to be the same from session to session. Resist the urge to copy over previous secrets and other information. That stuff is better thrown away and rewritten between sessions.

## Characters

**Name.** Description.

**Name.** Description.

**Name.** Description.

**Name.** Description.

## Strong Start

Description of your strong start.

## Scenes

* Small scene description.
*
*
*
*

## Secrets and Clues

* Secret description
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*

## Fantastic Locations

**Location**: aspect, aspect, aspect

**Location**: aspect, aspect, aspect

**Location**: aspect, aspect, aspect

**Location**: aspect, aspect, aspect

## Important NPCs

**Name.** Description

**Name.** Description

**Name.** Description

**Name.** Description

## Potential Monsters

* Name
*
*
*
## Potential Treasure

* Description
*
*
*

Here's an example of the template in action, this time formatted into HTML from the original Markdown version. These notes were for my first Shadow of the Demon Lord adventure but it can work just as well for D&D of course.

Characters

Leaky. (Bryan) Goblin magician Witch. Medicine. Proprieter of Leaky's Potion Shop. Between the sections of town. Likes spoons. Connection to the Fey. Leakys potion shop.

Smile Steel. (Sharon) Clockwork Priest Oracle. Teamster. Doctor. Follower of Astrid and the Church of the New God.

Pthank the Pleasant. (Mike) Orc MagicianSpellbinder. Torturer and Wilderness Guide.

Myab Shalin. (Michelle) Changling Rogue. Burgler. Engineer. Summer Court Fey connection.

Bobwise. (Gregg) Orc warrior fighter. Working in the guard. Politics and Arms Trader. Merchant polition.

Doogan. (Jorge). Dwarf Rogue. Charlatin and common teamster. Forger.

Strong Start

As the characters all cross by the well in the center of Grievings, the lowest district in Crossings, they come across a torn woman eating a man's body.

Scenes

• The characters witness the devouring of Bront Muddy Knees, a down-and-out soldier.
• They meet Sergeant Alyse
• They see a hired killer (Asys Brightfang) watching the Moore house.
• They go into the well or into the Moore house
• They find Father Gregory in the Black Vault

Secrets and Clues

• Father Gregory has gone missing. Word was sent to the church of the New God to let them know. They are sending someone.
• Members of the Rude Boys have been watching the Moore House.
• A week or so past, cloaked and hooded figures emerged from the Moore House.
• The well in the center of Grievings used to produce fresh water but the water has gotten tained since the coming of the red star.
• Shady characters have been lurking about in the ruined buildings.
• Rumors say that the Black Hand of Azul, also called the City of Death, have come to Crossings.
• The inquisition of the New God have begun to arrive from Seven Spires, their holy city. Some think they will purge villainy from Crossings. Other think they will raize it to the ground.
• The mages from the Occlusion are always quiet but always watching. They have agents everywhere.
• Caden Fen, a seller of oddities, has spoken about wanting to join the mages of the Occlusion. He believes they have learend how to live forever.
• Someone saw four cloaked and hooded figures sock Father Gregory in the face and drag him into the Moore house about a week ago.

Fantastic Locations

The Moore House: collapsed roof, obscene and troubling graffiti, litter of drug abuse

The Well: deep shaft in the ground, few trust the water within, bodies of the dead

The Tunnels: Natural endless caverns deep under the city, deep shafts leading down into nothingness, elven carvings and statues crying black blood

The Black Vault: Buried deep in the earth, maybe a thousand years old, covered with signs of the coming apocalypse, sacrificial altar upon which Father Gregory is being dissected while still alive

The Occlusion: Twisted tower of impossible angles, blots out the sun, surrounded by terrain of wreckage

The Faerie Spires: slender towers of white stone, impervious to damage, hum with secret calling to the fey

Important NPCs

Salas Wisewatcher. Spy of the Black Hand. Keeping an eye on things in the Crossings and in Grievings.

Father Gregory. Follower of the new god. Worried about the portents and has sent word to the City of God.

Caden Fen. Young and eager seller of oddities. Has a spellbook he got from a murdered hedge mage and wants to be a member of the Black Sun

Sergeant Alyce Ironhand. Member of the Brown Cloaks who has been investigating disappearances. She grew up in Grievings and wants to help people there. She's beginning to realize the council doesn't give a shit.

Monsters

• Corpse Flower
• Zombie
• Cultist
• Hired Killer
• Rats
• Organ filch

Treasure

Glimmer, an ancient elven dagger. You can use a triggered action when a creature gets a failure on an attack roll with a melee weapon to teleport to an open space within 1 yard of the triggering creature. You step through the Fey to reach your target.

100 copper pieces

I don't expect many people will directly use this template but hopefully it gives you a practical look what the eight steps from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master actually look like in use. Like all of the advice on this site, customize it and use it as it best helps you in your own game.

Waterdeep Dragon Heist's chapters alternate through many different playstyles. Chapter 1 runs much like any standard Dungeons & Dragons adventure with a strong start, a quest, some investigation and roleplaying, a dungeon, and a boss. Chapter 2 is a big sandbox in which the characters get involved with a bunch of factions and set up their own tavern and manor. Chapter 3 is an investigation and infiltration of a noble's manor which runs well as a situation-based encounter in which a situation is occurring at Gralhund Villa and the characters get to decide how to deal with it.

Chapter 4 takes us down a new path; that of a chase. Chases are tricky in D&D, particularly if we try to define a scene as a chase up front and don't let the players decide how to actually approach the situation. As written, Urstel Floxin, an agent of the villain in the adventure (in my case it's the Cassalanters), grabs the Stone of Golorr (the MacGuffin of the adventure), and runs off. The characters traverse through eight separate scenes as they chase the stone through Waterdeep.

There are a few problems with this. First, what if the characters short circuit the chase? What if they cast hold person on Urstel and grab up the stone in scene 1? One way to handle it is to just let them do so and keep going forward but that removes a big piece of the book. In the book the Stone of Golorr doesn't want to be found early but that feels artificial to me. What does the stone care about our chase?

What if the characters don't follow Urstel right away. In that case either the whole scene waits for the characters to rest up which feels arbitrary, or Urstel zips off with the stone and the characters are left with no idea where it might have gone to.

Both of these situations are more likely than actually going through the chase as written. It's also a big let-down if the characters chase the stone all over Waterdeep and end up not getting it.

There's another way to run this chapter, though; one that follows more of the philosophy of chapter 3. Set it up as an investigation and let the players navigate the situation how they wish.

The rest of this article describes an alternate way to run chapter 4.

The Stone Gets Away

In our version of events by the time the characters finish up with Gralhund Villa in chapter 3, the stone is already gone. We're going to arrange it that the characters don't really have a way to get ahold of the stone during the chase. Urstel is already a few steps ahead.

We begin this setup by ensuring that Urstel escapes from Gralhund Villa and it takes some time for the characters find him. For example, Urstel Floxin could have used a teleporter in the cellar of Gralhund Villa and the characters need to spend hours figuring out where it led. They spend this time exploring Waterdeep, using arcana checks to triangulate where the teleporter ended up. When they find the location, the stone is already well on its way to its final destination.

What Path Does the Stone Take Regardless of the Characters?

When we're developing a situation like this, we can ask ourselves an important question. If the characters didn't get involved, what course of action would take place? In the Cassalanter scenario we use the summer encounter chain. If the characters don't get involved, the path of the stone's journey goes something like this:

1. Urstel teleports to a mausoleum of the Cassalanters and gives the stone to some Cassalanter cultists.
2. It turns out two of the four cultists are actually working for the Xanathar. They kill the other two and take the stone to the converted windmill to give it to Xanathar agents later that day.
3. The Cassalanters have spine devil spies who see the ruse of the cultists. They kill cultists at the windmill and get the stone.
4. The spined devils bring the stone to the Cassalanter butler, Willifort Crowelle, at his carriage in the alley.
5. The three street kids dig a pit in the street and throw some canvas and dirt over the pit. Crowelle's carriage overturns and the kids steal the stone thinking it's some loot.
6. Urstel Floxin, watching the path of the stone himself, sees that they lost control of it so he goes after the kids, wounds them, and takes the stone.
7. Urstel Floxin takes the stone to the Cassalanters himself, something he had hoped to avoid so he wouldn't be seen going to the Cassalanter's villa.
8. The Cassalanters now have the stone.

This whole series of events probably takes a few hours. The characters might start their investigation of the path of the stone while it's still happening or afterwards. If it's afterwards they can still learn the path of the stone and find out that it's with the Cassalanters.

You can change up your own series of events based on which season of Dragon Heist you're running. The big question to ask is "how does this series of events go if the characters don't get involved?"

Turning a Chase Into an Investigation

Now that we know what path the stone will take regardless of how the characters get involved, we can watch how they do get involved and see if it changes the path. If the stone is two or three steps ahead, the characters will have to move fast if they want to catch it, which isn't very likely. It is possible through scrying or invisible familiars they can watch it switching hands. Otherwise they'll have to look at clues, talk to witnesses, and gather the information they need to figure out where the stone went. Floxin and the Cassalanters were hoping to move the stone discreetly but when they get betrayed by their own cultists and robbed by three street urchins, they leave evidence behind that the characters can discover.

It's even possible the characters manage to short circuit the chain of events themselves by getting really lucky, really smart, or both. If they do, they succeed in getting the stone and it's off to the vault of dragons. If they don't, it's time for something else.

It's time for a heist.

In the next article on running Waterdeep Dragon Heist we'll talk about using the lairs in chapter 5 to add in the heist to steal the Stone of Golorr.

We're in an amazing time for our hobby. The number of people playing D&D appears to be roughly doubling every two years. That's a lot of new Dungeons & Dragons dungeon masters coming into the hobby every day.

Many of us have also been playing D&D for decades. We've been "holding the torch" as Grant Ellis says. We've played four or five versions of the game over the years and bring these decades of experience to the games we run.

This mix of new and veteran dungeon masters can bring an incredible wealth of shared experiences from both new DMs and veterans alike.

If we let it.

In today's article, I offer two letters; one to new dungeon masters and one to veteran dungeon masters. My goal is to help bridge the years between new and old DMs so we can equally share our experiences and all learn from one another without the years becoming barriers between us.

A Letter to New Dungeon Masters

Welcome to one of the most amazing hobbies in existence. Dungeons & Dragons brings friends together to share amazing stories that rival anything we've read in books or seen on a screen. With the mixture of creative ideas from ourselves, our players, and the randomness of the dice, we will watch stories unfold that will stay with us the rest of our lives. We're going to build worlds together.

This hobby can also be intimidating. We have to get past our inhibitions and become kids again. We have to be willing to play make-believe again. We have to be willing to make mistakes. We have to get past the fear that we'll look stupid in front of our friends. The smarter we get, the richer our imaginary worlds become, if we're willing to let go of the barriers our society has placed on us in their attempt to get us to "grow up".

we don't have to be afraid. Millions of people of all ages now enjoy Dungeons & Dragons. Groups like the team at Critical Role show us that adults playing make-believe is as fun to watch as it is to play.

It can also be intimidating when new players talk to people who have played D&D for decades. A lot of veterans in this hobby love to tell new players how long they've been playing. These stories might scare new dungeon masters, making them believe it takes decades before they'll be good at this game. Most of the time these veterans just love to have new people to share their old war-stories with. They love to talk about things like THAC0 and how hard Tomb of Horrors was back in '78. Its been a while since anyone cares to hear these stories so they're always looking for an ear.

A few veterans, however, use their experience as a way to try to prop themselves up above new DMs. They're intimidated by all of the new people coming into the hobby. They're afraid it will change their game in ways they don't like. They fear their voice doesn't hold as much weight as it used to. They may use their years of experience as a goal post new DMs need to meet—one they can't meet since it's entirely based on longevity.

Here's a secret. Those years of experience tell you nothing about how good a dungeon master they are. Those years of experience might even bind these experienced dungeon masters into old styles best left to decades past. Some experienced DMs have closed their minds to new ways of thinking about their game. They don't just ignore Critical Role, they actively speak against it. "That's not D&D" they'll say because it isn't the kind of D&D they're used to seeing and playing. They're shutting themselves off from the growth of the game.

In this hobby, years of experience is no indicator of skill. You can be a great dungeon master in just a few months. We've never had better resources to become great DMs than we do right now. We can learn the basics, watch people play, ask questions, share our experiences, gather tools, and find people to play with all online. The hobby has never been easier to get into and easier to get better at than it is right now.

You can be a great DM with just a dozen or so games under your belt. After about fifty games, you could be as good as any DM out there if you continually learn along the way.

This path, of course, isn't the same for everyone. You'll have to find which tips and tricks help you the most yourself. If you're looking to begin, you might start here.

You don't need years of experience to run great D&D games. Keep your eyes open. Continually learn. Share your experiences. Pay attention to the experiences of others. Do these things and you're well on your way to being a great dungeon master.

You can do it.

A Letter to Veteran Dungeon Masters

D&D is changing. You and I have some decisions to make as the number of people in this hobby continues to grow. We can resent this growth or we can embrace it. I doubt many of us actively resent it but that doesn't mean we're not resenting it subconsciously. We have to push this resentment away and remember that every new DM entering this hobby makes the whole hobby better. Every new DM gives us new experiences we can learn from ourselves.

This means welcoming new people into the hobby. It means teaching them the ropes and making it as easy as possible for them to see what this game has to offer. Put yourself in their shoes and teach them the things that will help them. They don't care about how hard multiclassing was back in 1st edition; they need to figure out what they need to run a game now.

We can start by making it as easy as possible to bring new people into the hobby without using our years of experience as a barrier. Don't start a conversation by mentioning how long you've played D&D. Ask them about their own experiences. Listen to them before you talk. If they ask how long you've played, just say "a while". Don't push them away by digging a canyon of decades between you.

Here's something even more important. You have as much to learn right now as you did years ago. New dungeon masters are coming from all sorts of places with all sorts of backgrounds and their own experiences. They'll have all sorts of new ideas we can learn from.

We can learn as much from new dungeon masters as they can learn from us.

Keep your mouth shut and watch them, whether it's in online discussions, in video, or in real life. Watch them, listen to them, and learn from them. See what they bring to the table.

The growth of our hobby is as useful to us veterans as it is to new DMs. We can watch more DMs running games now than ever before. We can learn from more systems, sources, and adventures than ever before. We have many wonderful avenues to share our experiences and learn from other DMs however long they've been playing.

We might think, with our decades of experience, that there is nothing new under the sun. We would be wrong. We can learn as much about how to run great games now as any new DM. Embrace the philosophy to always be learning and let your style improve as it never has before.

You might be perfectly happy playing the way you've been playing over the years. Your group might be happy too. If that's the case, go with the gods. There's no obligation to change the way you play. Don't assume your way is the right way, though. There are many ways to enjoy this game.

Even small tweaks can bring more joy to the games we run. Continuously running small experiments keeps our game fresh over the years. If you feel yourself resistant to change, take a step back to ask yourself why. What holds you back? You don't have to make huge leaps. Small experiments can go a long way.

Learn From One Another

Whether you have six months experience running D&D games or thirty years, we can all learn from one another. This hobby, more than ever, is filled with ways for us to share our experiences. We have more access to more material than we could ever digest. Run some games, watch some games, pick up some tips, listen to other DMs however long they've been playing, and run small experiments to make your game the best game it can be.

This article contains spoilers for Waterdeep Dragon Heist.

This is one of a series of articles covering the hardback Dungeons & Dragons adventure Waterdeep Dragon Heist. You can read all of the articles here:

• Session Zero of Waterdeep Dragon Heist
• Running Waterdeep Dragon Heist Chapter 1: A Friend in Need
• Running Waterdeep Dragon Heist Chapter 2: Trollskull Alley
• Running Waterdeep Dragon Heist Chapter 3: Fireball
• Running Waterdeep Dragon Heist Chapter 4: Dragon Season
• Running Waterdeep Dragon Heist Chapter 5: The Heist
• Waterdeep Dragon Heist Lazy DM Prep Video Series

One of the common complains about Waterdeep Dragon Heist is that it doesn't actually contain a heist. The heist in this adventure actually took place years earlier when Dagault Neverember embezzled half a million gold dragons from the people of the Sword Coast. Instead, as we outlined in our session zero, our characters are conducting an investigation, not getting involved in a heist. There's a way, however, to add a heist to our Dragon Heist game that also squeezes more out of the Waterdeep Dragon Heist book itself and sets up a fun situation for the characters to navigate.

Chapters 5 through 8 of Waterdeep Dragon Heist contain descriptions of four major lairs for four possible villains including Jarlaxle, Manshoon, the Cassalanters, and the Xanathar. These lairs don't come directly into play in the written adventure. They are optional areas DMs can use if the situation happens to arise.

We're going to ensure that it does.

In a previous article we talked about how to turn Chapter 4 into a situational investigation. The Stone of Golorr goes missing and the characters have to follow the trail to figure out where it went. Instead of running chapter 4 as a chase, we ensure the stone gets away and the characters' job is to find out where it went and steal it back instead of intercepting it on the way.

Where did it go? To one of the lairs in chapter 5 through 8.

The villain you chose when you began this adventure will determine where the Stone of Golorr ends up. In my game, it ends up in the Cassalanter's villa.

Setting Up the Situation

Urstel Floxin, the former Zhentarim assassin, has delivered the Stone of Golorr to the Cassalanters. They want to use it to recover the gold from the Vault of Dragons so they can buy out of their contract with Asmodeus and save the souls of their two remaining children. They will be doing so when things die down in Waterdeep given that the whole situation to recover the Stone of Golorr got so hot in the first place.

The Cassalanters plan to recover the gold in a few days time. First, they're just about to have a big event at the house. Unknown to them (and this deviates from the published adventure but I like this better), their head butler, Willifort Crowelle, plans to poison the guests of the Cassalanters so he can raise his station among the worshipers of Asmodeus. He thinks that the Cassalanters have lost their edge when it comes to devil worship and wants to take over.

Ammalia Cassalanter has taken the Stone of Golorr to her transformed son Osvaldo Cassalanter, now a chain devil, who may reside in his room if you choose or in a vault down in the temple to Asmodeus down in the cellar, which I chose.

The characters need to prevent the poisoning of the guests and recover the stone. How they go about this is up to them and up to the evolving situation at the mansion

Options Other Than Combat

A direct assault on the villa isn't the best solution to this problem and smart players will spend some time figuring out how best to infiltrate the villa during the party without bloodshed, or much bloodshed. They may pose as guests, they might break in through a well in the center of the villa's yard, they might pretend to be hired servants, or they might just break on in. The fun of setting up a situation like this is that the players can spend some time thinking up different ways to get in and then the situation plays out, often much differently than they planned. Of course, the characters don't have all of the variables. They don't know about the poisoning yet. They may discover it while they're there, seeing Willifort poisoning the fancy foods the Cassalanters plan to serve to their guests.

As for the other variables, arcana checks might help the characters discover that the stone is down in the cellar or they might learn it from an interrogated guard or servant. When they get down there, characters might even strike up a deal with Ammalia Cassalanter herself if they promise to save her children. Victorio is likely not as accommodating.

You'll want to make sure the players don't spend too much time planning ahead of time. Help them solidify their plans and put them underway. Remind them that things aren't likely to play out the way they think. If their characters would know or remember something that the players do not, help them out. Too much planning can get boring and, as every good group knows, it all goes out the window the minute they get there.

Going Easy

Players aren't always perfectly coordinated either and we don't want to punish them for this. Go easy on them if their plans don't work out perfectly. Add complications for failed checks and don't let the whole house come crashing down on them. If their attempts are solid enough, give them advantage on checks. Help them succeed even if their success doesn't follow the plan. If everything does seem to be going their way, add some complications. Maybe Jarlaxle shows up. Maybe the Blackstaff shows up. Maybe the Open Lord herself shows up. Maybe all three.

Running situations like this is a good way to keep your upward and downward beats continually oscillating.

The Dungeon Below

When the characters make it down to the cellar, we have an opportunity for some traditional dungeon delving. The cellar can be full of cultists, fanatics, and lesser devils. They might run into the room containing the transformed Osvaldo, a room full of chains he can animate to make life very hard for the characters. Perhaps only Ammalia can save them and only if they promise to help her restore her son and save her other two children.

Returning to Chapter 4 and the Vault of Dragons

When the characters complete this heist, it's probably a good time to level them to sixth before they return to chapter 4 and head into the Vault of Dragons. From there, the adventure takes a traditional path. We likely don't need a writeup of running that part of the adventure. Thus this article concludes our look at running Waterdeep Dragon Heist. With the right modifications this adventure can fill in as one of the best city-based adventures you and your group may experience.

Make it your own and enjoy it.

Back in July 2018 I had the great honor to talk with Jeremy Crawford on the DM's Deep Dive. I had neglected to write up the notes for this interview and seek to remedy that problem right now.

You can watch the video below or watch it directly on Youtube.

Here are some notes from the interview.

Jeremy's Top Three Tips to Get the Most Out of D&D Monsters:

A monster is more than a sack of hit points. Monsters are characters. They're a roleplaying opportunities and story building blocks. Jeremy will flip through Volo's Guide to Monsters or Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes and look for a monster that sparks his imagination. Look for a way to make a monster funny or scary. Monsters can dispense story information in the midsts of combat.

Use monsters as the seeds of adventure design.

Monsters imply an environment. Monster choices can have a ripple effect for your adventure design, campaign design, and roleplaying.

Adjust numbers on the fly. Your players don't see what's behind the screen. Hit points are the average and can fall anywhere within a monster's hit dice range. Adjust on the fly to make combats memorable and appropriate for the moment in the story. Adjust the numbers to hit the appropriate emotional beats. If a battle is dragging on too long, drop the hit points and let the monster die sooner. The hit dice number is a tool for DMs to know the range of hit points.

You can do the same thing with damage. The average is listed but so is the range. As a DM you can go anywhere within that range. If you want your monsters to do minimum damage or maximum damage, go for it; although maximum damage is really scary. Imagine fire giants hitting for 86 damage!

The DM is the adjudicator of the threat and can tune the numbers appropriately.

Monsters have bad days too. DMs, be kind to yourself. Sometimes you'll forget an ability of a monster and realize after the game that things would have been much different if you remembered. Don't beat yourself up. It happens to everyone. Use this as an opportunity for a second chance. Perhaps Bob the minotaur's sister, Charlotte, shows up.

D&D has endless opportunities for DMs to get better.

Mike's tip: when running boss monsters, find ways to run a boss monster twice so you can try it out once and then run it for real the second time. Lichs, vampires, and spellcasters with simulacrums have built-in ways to die and come back later.

How Does WOTC Make Monsters?

The process WOTC uses to build monsters varies depending on the book. If they're building monsters for an adventure, they know they'll need monsters of a particular challenge rating. For a monster book, their origins are more vague. They'll start with concepts, then abilities, then the CR calculator, and then reality-check the monster. Where do they fit within the range of existing monsters?

A monster's design says something about the broader world. New monsters impact the world and older monsters define the world in a way that matters in the process of creating new ones.

Wizards of the Coast uses their own internal challenge rating calculator when designing any official D&D monster. The guidelines in the Dungeon Master's Guide are a loose extrapolation of this internal challenge rating calculator. The internal one has much more atomicity than the DMG guidelines. The calculator adjusts challenge on the fly every time a monster gains a new feature.

Sometimes monsters are tweaked based on the art, which explains the Winter Eladrin and its sad bow attack. Man, it's been a year and, looking back, that Winter Eladrin is really really sad.

The DMG monster design rules tend to lead to monsters with higher hit points and more damage than monsters designed with the internal challenge rating calculator Wizards of the Coast uses.

Since the design of the Monster Manual, Wizards of the Coast is willing to let a monster's challenge rating change based on their capabilities other than hit points and damage.

How Do We Run High-End Boss Monsters?

A boss isn't designed to be encountered in a white room. They should be encountered in the battlefield they chose. If you're going into their throne room, you will arrive tuckered out from traps and previous encounters. If you're fighting the boss fresh after a night's rest, that is very different than fighting through eight waves of guards.

There are three ways to tune the difficulty of a boss monster.

• Encounter sequencing. What encounters took place ahead of time?
• The setting of the battle. Where does it take place?
• Bosses don't appear alone. What monsters will protect the boss?

When we talk about encounter difficulty, boss battles should be on the "hard" level. It's ok even to make them "deadly".

Bosses have ways to escape. Vampires and lichs have built-in ways to escape defeat.

Jeremy has run vampires for the entire life of fifth edition and has yet had a group defeat one. He plays them as geniuses. They don't stick around in a fight they're not going to win.

Night hags can planeshift. They're not going to stick around if they're getting their asses kicked.

Questions from the Audience

What considerations are made for bosses that aren't legendary?

Monsters without legendary traits are expected to be with other creatures. A really high CR monster might be a threat for a single group. If a single non-legendary monster faces a group of characters with a CR equal to level, it's going to get squashed.

What are some of your most favorite and terrifying monster abilities?

Jeremy is able to terrify within the roleplaying sphere but nothing scares players more than hit point drain or mind control, especially long-term mind control. Mike's tip: make hit point drain require a lesser or greater restoration instead of just a long rest to cure. Now it's REALLY scary.

Mike thinks young kruthiks are very scary. CR 1/8 and it has pack tactics. Jeremy mentions that pack tactics makes low challenge monsters a good threat to high challenge creatures. Thugs are always dangerous.

What are some favorite combat systems in non-D&D RPGs?

Jeremy was fascinated by the combat system in Ryuutama. Jeremy likes the abstract combat system based on zones instead of concrete measurements. Jeremy likes more abstracted combat systems than the measured concrete system in D&D.

Mike likes Numenera's combat system because of the simplicity of its challenge rating. Monsters are just a single number which makes it really easy to build things on the fly. Mike also likes the abstract distances in 13th Age.

None of the Wizards design team uses miniatures anymore. Chris Perkins got rid of his huge vat of miniatures he used to wheel around. He gave them away as gifts.

Jeremy rarely ever builds his own monsters for his own game. He'll just reskin existing NPC stat blocks. There's almost always some stat block he can already use.

Thanks to Jeremy Crawford for taking the time to share his wisdom!

Here at Sly Flourish we're big on setting up situations in our Dungeons & Dragons games instead of building pre-determined encounters. Instead of deciding that there are three bandits and two scouts in a chamber underneath the haunted mansion, we know that there are roughly six bandits, two scouts, two hobgoblins, and an evil wizard hanging out in the whole cave complex down there. Depending on what they're up to and whether they hear of the characters, they could be in various places; eating, checking on their fine stolen wares, or looking longingly over the sea. Which bandits, scouts, hobgoblins, or wizards the characters will encounter first depends on how they approach the situation. If they're sneaky, maybe they can catch two of them unaware playing dice or sharing a bottle. If they're loud, the whole hideout might prepare for their imminent attack, choosing which corridors to defend or which rooms to reinforce.

We set up situations so our players can interact with them any way they wish. They can sneak around, they can talk their way through it, they can rush in and attack; whatever way they choose, the situation will adapt. We don't have to build scenes around one of the three styles of play: roleplaying, exploration, or combat. Instead we can build out a situation and let the players choose how to approach it.

Not all situations have to be this complicated. Sometimes simple situation can offer many potential options while also teaching us something about our players and bringing a lot of fun to our game.

Two Thugs in the Woods

Let's say the characters are on an island trying to find the site of a dark ritual going on in the woods. While sneaking through the woods the characters come upon two thugs hanging around slacking at their job of looking for intruders.

We don't have to build a big set-piece battle for a situation like this. We don't have to pull up Kobold Fight Club and see how hard the fight is going to be. We don't have to ensure there's all sorts of special terrain to keep people busy or write up two pages of history on these two thugs and their issues with their troubled childhoods.

It's two thugs in the woods. That's the situation.

And yet there are many ways to deal with this situation. Will the characters try to sneak up and listen to their conversation? Will the characters try to trick the thugs into thinking they're with the cultists performing the ritual? Will they sneak around them? Will they jump them and beat them into the dirt? A situation of two thugs in the woods has a lot of potential for many different styles of play.

Two thugs in the woods is an excellent way to gauge the interests of your players as well. Listen to the conversation your players are having while planning it. Watch their body language. Who is looking to have a conversation? Who is looking to listen in? Who wants to kick their asses? You'll learn a lot about your players when they choose their approach towards the two thugs in the woods.

Such simple situations aren't the whole picture. Sometimes we want a great boss battle. Sometimes we want the characters to run into a whole army of bandits or a ship full of pirates instead of just a couple of thugs. Sometimes we do need to consider how an entire hobgoblin war party occupies the ruined castle.

Sometimes, though, two thugs in the woods is all we need to build an interesting encounter, give our players the freedom to choose their approach, and help us learn more about our players' desires.

The first step for Dungeon & Dragons game prep recommended in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master is to review the characters. The characters are the primary interface between the players and the world. For each player, their character is the most important aspect of the game. Thus, it behooves us DMs to not only do our best to understand the characters, but help the other players understand them as well.

Before we begin any other preparation activity we can spend some time reviewing the characters. This helps us get their backgrounds into our minds before we start building out the rest of the adventure for our next session.

During the session, however, we can do some things to elicit more details of the characters so us DMs and the rest of the players can better understand each of the characters in our story.

Today we're going to look at a few ways we can learn more about the characters in the games we play.

What's Their One Unique Thing

If we want to make our characters truly unique in the world we can steal an idea from the excellent roleplaying game 13th Age. Beyond being a wonderful d20-based superheroic fantasy game, 13th Age includes a ton material to steal and throw into our existing Dungeons & Dragons game. "One Unique Thing" is one such example. In 13th Age, each character chooses one unique thing about their character; one thing, often fantastic, that makes them unique in the world. For example, in one such game I had a paladin who was actually guided by the ghosts of three hags only I could see.

We can bring this idea right into our D&D games if we want. We can ask, often during our session zero, what makes a player's character unique in the world. We can keep this somewhat mundane or make it as fantastic as the world allows depending on the theme we're shooting for in the campaign.

Tales Around a Campfire

The game Savage Worlds includes an interesting mechanic for players to talk about the backgrounds of their characters. At some point in the adventure, when the characters are around a campfire or the like, a randomly-selected player can pull a card from a deck. Depending on the pull they can share a story of love (hearts), victory (diamonds), tragedy (clubs), or loss and defeat (spades). This rewards the character with some sort of boon. In our D&D games we might reward inspiration, for example, or some other interesting effect to that character, maybe even a boon from the Dungeon Master's Guide that lasts for the day.

Ask Guiding Questions

Aother option is to write down one question for each character during the character review in our game prep and then ask it at our next game. We don't have to do this every session but it might be fun once in a while. Our questions can be specific, with a veto option by the player if they have some other aspects of the character they want to discuss. Here are some examples:

"Shelby, what made you leave Ahoyhoy?"

"Stone, what happened on the ship when all those civilians died?"

"Feski, how did you learn about your ancestor, Fausto the Reluctant?"

"Truth, when did you decide to end the source of the Death Curse?"

"Fromash, when did you find your true connection with the preservation of the natural cycle of death?"

Write down the answers when you get them and add them to your game notes for your next prep session. Doing this every few sessions can define interesting details of the characters we would otherwise never know and gives those details to the other players as well as us.

Downtime Activities

If the story of our game offers some in-game time between sessions, we can ask the players what their characters did during that time. At the beginning of the session, even before our strong start, we can ask for a volunteer to tell us what their character did during this downtime. Maybe they conducted some research in a library. Maybe they spent some time with an old flame. Maybe they talked to some seedy contacts in the rough bar in the docks district. Sometimes these descriptions might lead to a skill check to see what they learn. It's a perfect opportunity to drop in some secrets and clues depending on what they do and how well they do it.

These independent montages may help us learn about the character while they get something done. The players are filling out a piece of the world right in front of our eyes, while, at the same time, telling us more about their character than we otherwise know. Sometimes these events might completely change a session, which is perfectly fine for us flexible DMs.

A Little Bit At a Time

It helps us when we learn about a character a little bit at a time. We might often start D&D games with large backstories for characters (when we do them at all) but the most interesting characters evolve over the course of the game. We don't need huge backstories. A little bit each session lets us all watch characters grow and evolve as we play.

This is particularly true in convention games. Our friend DM David talks about this his article with the pithy title How to Get D&D Players to Make Unforgettable Character Introductions That Take a Minute or Less. We can ask for more than a race and class, instead asking for a line or two that describes the character. Even in one-shot games this helps us add some flavor to the overall adventure.

A Greater Understanding of the Characters

All of this is intended to help us, and the other players, get a better understanding of the characters in our story. The more we know about them, the more they can interweave into that story. We don't need a novel's worth of material, sometimes just a line or two can do it. Spend time next game getting to know a thing or two about the characters in your world.

Chapter 17 of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master describes the value of running a "session zero" for a new campaign. In a session zero, our players can build their characters together while also discussing the story of the campaign. It's a great time to reinforce the main themes of the campaign, integrate the characters together into a group, and discuss any sensative issues anyone might have with these themes.

With our Waterdeep Dragon Heist campaign complete, my two groups both began their adventures in Ghosts of Saltmarsh. This was the perfect time to start fresh, take a deep breath, get together with our friends, and learn about the world and the characters who will sit in its center.

The Ghosts of Saltmarsh Player's Guide

Download the Ghosts of Saltmarsh Player's Guide

For this session zero I wrote a Ghosts of Saltmarsh Player's Guide. This one-page guide, influenced heavily by Matt Coleville's video on the value of player guides, is intended to give the players everything they need to understand where the campaign is going and how their character might fit into it. It offers some history of the region; the notable details of Saltmarsh such as inns, taverns, and other landmarks; their potential backgrounds; and, most importantly, the central theme for their characters:

Above all you are companions who, together, seek to bring safety and prosperity to the village of Saltmarsh.

Such a refined and focused drive for the characters helps ensure the players bring characters to the table who will work well together and fit the theme of the campaign. This avoids the oddball character who comes in with a clearly different motive and drive that never quite fits either the group or the adventure.

Getting to Know Saltmarsh

Session Zeros are a great time to relax with our friends before the adventure begins. We don't need eye-popping strong starts at the beginning of the session. We can describe the locations of Saltmarsh, letting players jump in when they hear of a place about which they want to know more.

It's a great time to introduce notable NPCs such as the council members, Wellgar Brinehanded the cleric of Procan, and Ferrin Kastilar the druid with his pet bullfrog Lorys. The characters can learn of the tension between the traditionalists and the loyalists. They can pick up some rumors at the docks.

Session zeros are great times to let the characters explore Saltmarsh and learn what it has to offer before they go out with swords drawn into the dangers surrounding the seaside town.

Some Session Zero Props

Props can help make the ethereal ghosts of our campaign begin to feel solid and real. I recommend both a color map of the village of Saltmarsh and a black-and-white map of the Saltmarsh region. The D&D Beyond version of Ghosts of Saltmarsh includes high resolution versions of both of these maps along with high-resolution maps of all of the locations in the whole book. The Saltmarsh village and regional maps can be printed on 17x24 for about $3 each at your local Staples or Fedex print center and they look great on the table when you're running your session zero and describing the locations. Players can fill in the blank regional map as they discover new locations throughout their adventure.

What Sources to Allow

We're getting to the point where there are quite a few books containing a wide assortment of races. In some campaigns this doesn't matter too much but it's hard to figure out why a githyanki or yuan-ti might be involved in the issues surrounding a fishing village. You might either select a specific list of allowed races that fit the theme of the campaign or allow certain books such as Xanathar's Guide to Everything, Volo's Guide to Monsters, and the Elemental Evil Player's Companion. You could also let the players know that anything in the Player's Handbook is fine but they should bring up any other options with you before they pick it so together you can decide if it fits what's going on.

You also might be the sort of DM who lets players choose anything and come what may. That's a fine option too but you might have to do some story-yoga to figure out why a githzeri makes sense in Saltmarsh.

The Body on the Beach

As a fun way to get the story started, you might have a body wash up on the beach. A woman, drowned, clearly looking as though she was recently bound and died trying to swim away. The state of her clothing shows her as a potential prisoner. Are the slavers back? Where did she come from? Someone might recognize her as one of two adventurers, brother and sister, who came to town with dreams of finding the alchemist's gold at the haunted mansion only to never be found again.

The loyalists see the body as a sign that the town needs more protection and a heavier hand. The traditionalists see it as meddling by the outside iron gauntlet of the king. Both groups, through the council, want to send the characters to the haunted mansion to see if they can find her brother and uncover the woman's mysterious death.

Thus our adventure begins.

A Time to Build the World

Session zeros give us a chance to spend time with our players and watch the world come together. With a whole session dedicated to understanding the town, the region, the themes of the campaign, the characters, and their relationships we have a much better start to a nice long campaign. The next time you're getting ready to start a new campaign, start it off with a session zero and watch the world come together.

Over the past ten years, I've been posting a single D&D dungeon master tip each day to Twitter. I've collected these over the years and released them in a single big archive so anyone who wants to use them, can do so.

I also wrote a Twitter bot that randomly selects one of the older tweets and posts it to Twitter each day. That bot is called dndtweets. It's a fun one to follow if you like what you find on Sly Flourish. You'll see daily tips, top retweeted #dnd hashtagged tweets, and article reposts twice a week.

Lately I've become fascinated by randomness and creativity and also by Brian Eno and his deck of cards for breaking out of creative ruts called Oblique Strategies. You can see his Oblique Straties in action on the web. They're a set of random concepts intended to break creative people out of a jam. Like rolling a d20 and letting it change our D&D games, these cards force us to think about problems in a new way.

The D&D Tip Generator

Recently I combined these ideas into a new D&D dm tip generator backed by 1,700 tweets from about the past four and a half years. I selected this time period to avoid a whole bunch of largely outdated 4th edition D&D tips. I also cleaned them up a bit.

The generator posts a single tip on a clean and fast HTML page. It's suitable for mobile or desktop. You can click on the tip to load a new one if you want to go through a few.

You can bookmark the site or stick it on the home screen of your phone if you want. Anytime you're preparing for a D&D game or thinking about your game you can pull it up, take a look at the tip, and see if it inspires you to think a little differently about your game.

Hopefully you find it a fun little tool.

In July 2019 I had the pleasure of speaking with David Chris on the DM's Deep Dive. David Christ is the owner of Baldman Games, the company that runs D&D organized play events at a half-dozen of conventions every year. At Gencon alone he runs 8,000 players through about 1,200 games. He's run over fifty shows at this point and manages over 2,500 DMs over the years. He also runs surveys of all of these DMs, receiving feedback on what worked well and what has not.

This gives David a unique perspective on Dungeons & Dragons dungeon mastering. David has DM feedback on thousands of games. Though these views are limited to convention games, which don't always correlate well to how DMs run home games, it's still a huge amount of experience we were able to tap into during this interview.

You can watch the full interview in the video below, directly on YouTube, or listen to the podcast on the Don't Split the Podcast Network.

The rest of this article contains notes from our discussion.

David Christ's Top Three Tips

Running a D&D game is about the group, not you. D&D is a collaborative story. The players have as much control over that story as the DM. Bring the group into the story.

Have fun. Smile. Laugh. You don't have to know all of the rules. If you're running a fun game it will make up for other defficiencies. Everything else takes care of itself. Hiccups are easier to take care of when everyone's laughing about it.

Nothing goes as planned but disasters are fun. If you roll with the punches things turn out well.

Top Traits of High-Scoring DMs

Preparation. Lack of preparation shows. If you've read, re-read, and taken notes on your material you're in a much better place to handle the strange things that happen. You don't want to have to worry about what the next encounter is. A good DM prepares. A good DM is ready to improvise. If you don't prepare it's hard to improvise.

Smile. It's a game. Have fun. If you start stressing out it leaks through the rest of the game. It's a bad cycle when you're stressed out and the players see it. Take a ten minute break and regroup.

One of the easiest ways to get a low rating as a DM is for the DM to say "I'm telling the story, you're just along for the ride". The DM who is so certain that their way is the right way is the one who is going to get crappy ratings. If a DM thinks their way is the best, that's a sure sign that they're taking in feedback from their table.

Mike compares this to the Dunning Krueger effect. Someone who thinks they're really good many not be as good as they think while those who realize they have much to learn are on the path towards greatness.

Some of the newest DMs are the best DMs because they're not encumbered by historical baggage. DMs who think they're great DMs will ignore the results and then select themselves out of the program.

Not being prepared is a sure sign of a low rating game. Your numbers fall if you stop at the beginning the game to read the module. This is a particular problem at convention organized play games. People paid for these games and don't want to sit there watch someone read a module.

David's Preparation Tips

Read the adventure and take notes. Write down NPC names. Pronounce them ahead of time. Put monster stat blocks on cards. Use an initiative tracker. Preroll initiative.

Players who see a DM with their shit together will feel more confident in the game and their DM. It's contagious.

DMs at conventions talk to other DMs in their tier and with those running the same adventures. Sometimes they're even talking to the authors of the adventures. How do we replicate this at home?

David believes people get a score bump for using candy for monsters. A timeless classic. In Dave's opinion Reece's Peanut Butter cups are more well-liked than miniatures.

The people with terrain and minis can make a great experience. A DM with the maps and minis, however, can be too tied into their own story to forget about all of the important stuff. The guy with the empty table might be running a great game. Minis and terrain are no indicator of how good a game it will be although it does show a DM who has prepared.

The Difference Between Home and Convention Games

According to David, convention games don't have the same flexibility as a home game. Side quests are a feature in home games but a bug in convention games. There's much better food at home games. Home games have a much greater sense of flexibility than convention games.

A really good convention DM knows how to railroad characters back into the plot of an adventure without the players knowing its happening.

The Growth of D&D

Theres been an explosive growth in D&D over the past three years and David is seeing this in the convention games he manages in the following ways:

• The average age is going down.
• Players are typically looking for shorter games.
• New players want shorter campaign arcs.
• Everyone likes rolling dice.
• Many more women and better diversity.
• Not as much about the wargame mentality versus story.

On the Importance of Rules Knowledge

Rules knowledge is the least important trait of the four traits on which Baldman Games scores DMs. In order the importance of traits are:

• Prepared
• Friendly
• Fun
• Rules knowledge

If prepared numbers are low, all the rest of the numbers are usually low. If rules knowledge is low, it doesn't correlate to lower scores in the other categories. Friendly is more important than fun but the two are often tied together.

A lack of rules knowledge can actually help break past an adversarial relationship when the DM asks the players to help with rules.

Other Notes

There were fifty new DMs at Gencon.

The internet has done many terrible things but it gives us a wide range of DMs with whom we can share experiences.

We have a huge online D&D community with tremendous interconnection between DMs sharing experiences but then each of us goes home and runs a game in isolation for our four to six players. What happens at that table doesn't have any effect on the rest of the world. It's a very different sort of hobby. Some really great DMs in home play cannot work well in organized play.

Thanks again to David Christ for letting us squeeze his brain and get his experience running so many D&D games over the years.

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the adventure Ghosts of Saltmarsh.

Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh is the first adventure in the Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign adventure book. In this article we offer some tweaks and advice to make this 37 year old adventure as fun as it can be.

We began this Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign with a Ghosts of Saltmarsh session zero.

A New Hook

Our adventure begins with the characters traveling to a supposedly haunted mansion. The adventure itself, however, doesn't offer very strong hooks to get there. In fact, more than one NPC has a goal to ensure the characters don't to go the mansion.

Thus, we can help this adventure out by offering a stronger hook. For example, the body of a woman can wash up on shore. This woman was last seen with her brother, both of whom were adventurers that planned to go to the haunted mansion and recover the alchemist's gold. Instead, he never returned and she washes up on shore drowned and wearing prisoner's garb with binding markings on her wrists and ankles.

The body causes great concern among the council members. The traditionalists believe it has something to do with the recent rise of the king's forces in the area while the loyalists believe it is a clear sign of the return of the Sea Princes. Only Anders Solmor acts as the balance between the two, bringing together the characters to investigate the situation as outside advisors to the council.

This creates a stronger hook than those proposed in the adventure itself. Your own hooks may work better than any others, of course.

The Sinister Secret in Saltmarsh

There is a sinister secret in Saltmarsh that we can begin to put into play with this hook. You see, Anders Solmor isn't acting on his own in this. He is being fed information and advice from his family's longtime advisor, Skerrin Wavechaser, a secret agent of the Scarlet Brotherhood. We need not introduce Skerrin to the characters (players have a nose for secret villains like a bloodhound) but he is working in the background none the less. His goal is to destabilize the council of Saltmarsh and take it over with members he can control, just as he controls Anders.

Skerrin has sent another agent to the haunted mansion, Ned Shakeshaft. Skerrin sent Ned to find out what the smugglers are doing there so Skerrin can figure out how to use it to the advantage of the Brotherhood.

Ned, however, doesn't know who Skerrin is. Ned was sent from a nearby city and met his contact in Saltmarsh who appeared cloaked and masked. The masked man had a strange affectation, however. He often told jokes and, after doing so, would clear his throat as though punctuating the joke.

This is a ruse, however. The loyalist council member and smuggler Gellan Primewater himself has such an affectation and Skerrin knows it so he uses it to steer attention away from him and towards the corrupt council member who he plans to either turn to the Brotherhood or remove from the council.

This is our sinister scarlet secret in Saltmarsh and we can play it out between all of the adventures we run in this book.

When to Level Characters

Looking back at the actual Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh adventure itself, we need to pay special attention to the characters' first level.

This tends to come up as advice in every article I write for 1st level adventures and it's still just as important when running Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh.

1st level characters are really squishy. No other level in D&D is nearly as dangerous as 1st. Four 16th level characters facing an ancient blue dragon archmage and her simulacrum isn't nearly as deadly as four 1st level characters facing four giant centipedes.

1st level D&D adventures are their own special game and these games should be treated differently than every other D&D game we run.

The low hit points of 1st level characters is the main reason things are so hard. Characters can drop very easily, especially when they're hit by creatures like giant poisonous snakes (16 damage on a hit and failed save) and giant centipedes (14 damage on a hit and with a failed save).

Chapter 2 of Ghosts of Saltmarsh doesn't describe when to level characters. I recommend leveling characters to 2nd level when they have cleared the first and second floors of the mansion and 3rd level by the time they have cleared out the smugglers in the caves below the mansion. Level the characters to 4th level once they have dealt with the Sea Ghost and reported to the council of Saltmarsh that the smuggled weapons are going to the lizardfolk at Dunwater river.

Running the Cellar

Most of the upper two floors of the mansion in chapter 2 of Ghosts of Saltmarsh runs smoothly and requires little modification from the book. The cellars, however, are a great example of how we build situations and let the players navigate that situation. The smugglers in the basement don't break down into perfectly balanced little combat encounter groups. They're a dynamic bunch. Among them are three scouts, five bandits, two hobgoblins, and Sanbalet the wizard. How they split up, group up, and face the characters will depend on how the characters act. If the characters triggered the screaming magic mouths, the smugglers know they're coming. That doesn't mean they'll act perfectly, however. These are simple bandits. They're not very bright, not that easy to control, and prone to either acting stupidly or running away.

Thus, when the characters come down the stairs in area 20, the smugglers are likely to hear them. The smugglers enjoying dinner in area 21 are likely to grab Sanbalet in area 22 and they all go back down into the tunnels in areas 25 through 29. When the characters are done dealing with the skeletons and the alchemist (a really fun encounter so hopefully the characters don't skip it), they will face split groups of scouts and bandits throughout the caves.

This can be a really hard fight at 2nd level so be nice to the characters. Bandits may flee if they take a hit. They may provoke opportunity attacks. They may have less than average hit points. If the characters are having some bad luck you can tweak things on the other side so the bandits luck isn't so great either.

Hopefully it's a fun epic battle in which the characters struggle but prevail.

Failing Forward

What if they lose? This is a good chance to fail forward. Sanbalet can capture the characters and stick them in area 27 under guard. The characters might escape or might be transported to the Sea Ghost when it comes back in. From there you'll have to decide how things might turn out given how the characters react to the situation. Luckily, as hard as the situations can be in the caves and on the Sea Ghost, capture is a realistic option and escape is a fun approach to get out of it.

The Weapons of King Skotti

For a fun twist, we can add a secret and clue to our game that the smuggled weapons found by the characters are actual weapons of King Skotti's armies. This adds a potential conspiracy theory that somehow the King's forces are behind the arming of the lizardfolk against Saltmarsh. This works right into the hands of the Scarlet Brotherhood and adds pressure in the opposite direction from the rumor that the dead woman shows that the Sea Princes are returning. Who actually is selling the king's weapons to the smugglers? An agent of the Scarlet Brotherhood of course! This particular agent, however, will end up dead if the council (and thus Skerrin) finds out that the characters know who it is.

Running a Downtime Session

Between clearing out the haunted mansion and taking on the Sea Ghost, we might have a downtime scene or session. In this session the characters can spend a few days reconnecting with Saltmarsh, tying back in with their backgrounds, investigating leads they might have come across, or anything else they might want to do. Running downtime sessions, which we'll talk about in detail in another article, are a different type of D&D scene. In particular, when running downtime sessions you'll want to do the following:

• Let your players know there will be a downtime scene or session ahead of the game so they can think about what their characters might do.
• Ask your players to review the downtime activities in chapter 2 of the Player's Handbook.
• Review the downtime activities in the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide, Xanathar's Guide to Everything, and the downtime activities listed in the Ghosts of Saltmarsh adventure book.
• Write down a handful of possible downtime activities given their location, the current point in the story, and the backgrounds of the characters.
• During the session ask the players to describe what they want to do within the week-long period while the council figures out what they want to do about the smuggling ship.
• Pay special attention to the time and make sure every player gets a chance to talk about what they want to do.

Once their downtime activities have concluded, it's time to jump to the next part of this adventure.

Running the Sea Ghost

Just like the cellar encounter, the Sea Ghost is another big and dynamic situation. To make things a little easier on the characters, consider leveling them to 3rd once they have cleared out the smugglers under the house so they have more resources to take on the crew of the Sea Ghost. As written, it's a tough situation.

When the characters return to Saltmarsh, the council asks them to go back out to the mansion and infiltrate the Sea Ghost to learn where the pirates on the Sea Ghost are bringing those weapons. If the characters already learned that the weapons are going to the lizardfolk, the council wants them to learn where exactly these lizardfolk are.

Open Situations, Focused Quests

When we're setting up a big scene like the infiltration of the Sea Ghost, we want to keep potential approaches open but also focus the required quests so the players know what they're supposed to do and can choose how they want to do it. When it comes to the infiltration of the Sea Ghost, the council of Saltmarsh gives the characters the following quests:

• Learn where the smugglers are bringing the weapons.
• Neutralize the crew of the Sea Ghost.

These quests are important otherwise the characters will be floundering around on the ship itself, unsure how to deal with it and unsure why they're there in the first place. This can lead to a lot of frustration if the quests aren't clarified.

Beyond clarifying their goals, we can also help guide the conversations the players are having about their approach towards the Sea Ghost by steering it towards realistic options. Will it be possible that they sneak on disguised as the smugglers from the haunted mansion? Do we think they can realistically row up and challenge the whole crew at once? We can offer some guidance in the form of levels of difficulty.

Offer clear goals and leave the approaches open.

If things go straight into combat on the Sea Ghost, spread things out so the characters aren't facing all of the crew at once. Some crew might be sleeping. Some might be afraid to run up on deck. Some might need a couple of rounds to get their pants on and find their sabers. Let them attack in waves and don't be afraid to tweak their hit points for the flow of the story. When it works well, a fight on the Sea Ghost can feel like the one of the best action adventure movies we've seen.

With the Sea Ghost taken down, our characters return to Saltmarsh with the information they need to head into Ghosts of Saltmarsh Chapter 3: The Danger in Dunwater.

Stretching our DM Muscles

The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh is a wonderful adventure that helps us stretch a lot of DM muscles that we often talk about on this website and in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. This adventure is full of dynamic situations, intrigue, and potential downtime activities. It's hard to run some of these situations. We really have to be comfortable thinking on our feet. When they run well, however, such adventures can feel like magic.

This article has been updated from the original written in November 2015.

The Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition Monster Manual includes static damage as the default in every monsters' stat block and yet 90% of us still roll for damage. The 40 year tradition of rolling for monster damage is a hard habit to break and many have no intention of doing so. This is, of course, perfectly fine. In this article, however, I'll make the case for using static damage values for monster attacks.

Static Damage Speeds Up Combat

Combat speed isn't a critical factor in the fifth edition of D&D like it was with the fourth edition but we can always trim out parts of our game that aren't as vital to the story unfolding at our table. Rolling for monster damage may be one of those parts. Rolling only attack rolls, even when compared to rolling attacks and damage together, is much faster than rolling both attack and damage rolls. It isn't just about the roll, it's also about the math. Some of us are really good at doing quick addition in our head but its still not as fast as reciting a number we already have in front of us.

Other independent RPGs such as 13th Age and Numenera have moved to static monster damage not only as the default but as the only method of quantifying monster damage. Those of us who have played these games have seen it work well.

There's also an advantage in needing less dice. I've carried a small set of Easy Roller metal dice in my on-the-go DM bag for a while now and I've never need more dice than the seven in that little box (I replaced the percentile die with another d20 for advantage and disadvantage). A simple kit means I can spend more time thinking about the world and less time fumbling around with a giant bag of dice. Blasphemy for some, I am sure, but sometimes we must let old gods die.

While combat length is no longer the problem it once was, using static monster damage is a quick and easy way to speed up our game and put our minds where it belongs—in the story.

It's Within the Rules

Take a look at Monster Manual stat block and you'll notice that the static damage is outside the parentheses with the dice equation on the inside of the parentheses. The implication is that the static damage number is the default rule but, of course, you can roll the equation if you want. Most do. You'll notice that hit points are the same way. How many people roll for a monster's hit points? I'd bet hardly any. How many roll for monster damage? Nine in ten. Why? Because it's what we're used to.

If you think using average monster damage is against the rules, it isn't. It's right there on the page. If you think it goes against the spirit of the game, you might consider that the spirit has changed across editions. Rolling for monster damage isn't as important as it used to be.

No One Cares

The easiest argument to make for using static monster damage is that, generally, no one really cares. Players love to see the variance in their own damage but they tend not to pay much attention to how well a monster's damage roll went. If things are really down to the wire they might pay attention to how many hits they have left but unless its right on the edge, it still doesn't matter.

"My players will metagame" is a common argument I've heard as I proselytize the use of static monster damage but I don't think it happens that often and, when it does, I don't think it matters that much. If you do see your players continually metagaming monster damage, ask yourself if it really matters that much. They can guess the average amount of damage anyway if they're already paying attention. If the metagaming gets bad, you might have a bigger problem going on. Why aren't the players drawn into the story? And, of course, you can always switch back to dice damage if you want to.

Rolling attack rolls matters a lot. There's a whole lot of variance in that 1d20 roll. There's far less variance in that 6d6 + 7 that a fire giant rolls for damage. Make your life easier and stick to the 28. Focus more of your attention on the story going in on the game and the descriptions of the world as it unfolds and less on the math.

Handling Crits

How do you handle critical hits when using static damage? Given its infrequency, this isn't a bad time to pull out the dice. If a monster has a static damage score of "9 (1d8 + 4)" and rolls a critical hit, just roll the extra 1d8 you would have rolled on a hit. On a crit, roll whatever dice are listed in the equation. If you happen to know the average of each die (rounded down), you can use that instead but only if it is actually faster than rolling. It's probably easiest is just to roll the die.

-3 + 1d6

If you want to add a little bit of variance to your damage rolls, you can use the Chris Perkins trick of subtracting 3 from the static damage amount and adding the results of a single 1d6 roll. A fire giant's attack might do 25 + 1d6 instead of the static 27. Honestly, I'm not sure that matters very much and at that point we're back to rolling dice which defeats much of the advantage we had with static damage in the first place. Its one option, however, if we're worried about too little variance.

Tune Monster Damage On the Fly

One other huge advantage of static damage is that we can tune monster damage on the fly based on the story and pacing. We can use the listed average but we don't have to. When I spoke with Jeremy Crawford on the DM's Deep Dive he mentioned that we are free to tune monster damage within the listed dice range, including maxing it out if we desire. This lets us tune monsters as we're running the game to hit the right level of danger when needed. That fire giant's 27 points of damage seems scary. You know what's scarier? A fire giant hitting for 43 damage every hit. That's scary.

In my experience, many of the higher challenge rating monsters don't hit nearly hard enough to threaten higher level characters. Maxing out their damage is an easy trick to increase their threat where it should be.

Sure, you can add more dice to a damage roll to get the same effect but players will notice and the swing is going to change a lot. Adding another 6d6 onto a fire giant's attack gives you the same general average damage but now the fire giant is hitting for 12d6 + 7 and that might have too high an upper threshold.

Give It A Try

Even after reading this you might still be apprehensive about using static damage for monsters. It might not feel right to you after all those years rolling monster damage. If you really don't want to use it, you certainly don't have to. You might give it a try. Maybe use it on a battle with a lot of enemies whose damage variance is largely inconsequential. See how it feels.

Like me, and like many others who have since switched over to static monster damage, you just might start to like it.

Most of our Dungeons & Dragons games focus on exploration, roleplaying, and combat. We typically describe time in minutes and hours for exploration and roleplaying and seconds during combat. Sometimes, though, our characters find themselves with a lot more time on their hands. After recovering a damaged ship, the characters find themselves with a week in Saltmarsh to investigate leads, run errands, talk to NPCs, and engage in other activities.

Sessions like these, called Breather Episodes in TV tropes, extend the scope of our game from minute and hours to days and weeks. They're not the typical sort of D&D game we're used to running. They can be, however, an interesting change of pace in our games and bring a lot to the story we're sharing around the table.

Here are some quick tips for running great downtime sessions:

• Let your players know ahead of time that a downtime scene or session is going to take place so they can prepare for it.
• Suggest to the players that they read about downtime activities in chapter 8 of the Player's Handbook and chapter 2 of Xanathar's Guide to Everything.
• Read up on downtime activities yourself in the above chapters and in chapter 6 of the Dungeon Master's Guide.
• Write down a handful of custom downtime activities for the characters' current location and place in the story.
• Prepare some secrets and clues to fuel your downtime activities.

Suggestions from Twitter

In preparation for this article I asked folks on Twitter for their best tips for running downtime sessions. You can read the whole D&D downtime twitter thread here. There were a lot of responses to this query and they tended to fall in a few different groups:

• Let the players know ahead of time that downtime is coming.
• Feel free to run some downtime events away from the table.
• Hand the world over to the players.
• Define downtime options.
• Frame events.
• Clarify hooks.
• If you and your group isn't into them, skip them completely.

We'll dig into a few of these as we discuss how to make the most of downtime sessions in our D&D game.

Reviewing the Core Books

When considering a topic like this it always helps to go back to the core books and see what they have to say on the subject.

Chapter 8 of the Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook includes descriptions of various downtime activities characters can perform when they've returned to town, immediate threats have subsided, and time in our game's world stretches out. We can recommend to our players that they read up on downtime activities in the Player's Handbook if we think we're going to be running a downtime session in the near future.

Chapter 6 of the Dungeon Master's Guide likewise gets into this topic, offering advice for DMs on how to run such sessions. This is a good section for us DMs to review before we run downtime sessions.

Xanathar's Guide to Everything extends these downtime activities in Chapter 2 with optional downtime rules for rivals, selling magic items, crafting, carousing, pit fighting, and more.

The Acquisitions Incorporated Campaign Sourcebook has a whole chapter devoted to building businesses in our fantasy worlds. It includes new positions, a fast franchise generator, and a whole slew of new activities the characters can perform during their downtime. If your campaign includes the characters setting up a business, this book is packed with material to make those downtime scenes sing.

These are all excellent sections of official D&D books to review before we run our own downtime sessions. These books really are packed with a lot of the information we need.

Let Players Know Ahead of Time

I recently ran an eleven-session campaign of Shadow of the Demon Lord. One of the interesting things I did was to run every session as a full adventure, beginning with at least two days of downtime since the previous. Thus, when we began each session, we'd go around the table and figure out what the characters did in the time between sessions. The players all knew this structure ahead of time so they had time to think about what their characters might be doing. These sessions also tended to focus on the profession of the character instead of their classes or focused on how the character advanced since the last session.

This format worked well throughout the entire campaign and I believe it did so because the players knew we were having a downtime scene at the beginning of every session.

Players probably expect traditional adventures when they sit down at our table. They're ready to hear about the quest they're going to go on and then get into the action. They're not likely thinking about what their character might do if they had a week off. Probably the best thing we can do to run a smooth downtime session is to let players know ahead of time that a downtime session or scene is coming. This gives the players ample time to think about what their character might do if they had a week to themselves. If they have any personal goals or activities tied to their backgrounds, this is the time to bring it up. If they expect they're heading down into a dungeon, they're not likely to worry about visiting their mother or commissioning a new suit of armor.

Define Downtime Activities

We love D&D because it's generally open ended. We don't know what is going to happen and we don't know what twists and turns the story may take. Players have many options when it comes to the actions of their characters. These options can sometimes be paralyzing which is why we're comfortable with a bunch of characters in a dungeon. Those halls and doorways give us a nice finite number of options.

Those options fall away in downtime sessions taking place in towns or cities. The number of options are generally endless and that can be completely paralyzing.

We can help our players out by defining some clear options. These don't need to be the only options; players are free to choose their own; but a handful of default choices can help players who might not otherwise have ideas in mind.

We can stick to five to seven options, some general and some tailored to the adventure, location, or even the character themselves.

Custom downtime activities can help tie characters to the story. Beyond the suggestions in the Player's Handbook we can add a handful of new ones and offer them up as suggestions. Here are some example activities for my Ghosts of Saltmarsh game:

• Research the Black Hunger (an ink-black whale that sunk many ships).
• Meet the local wizard Keledek.
• Pick up rumors at the Empty Net.
• Hunting for Ned Shakeshaft, the elusive spy.
• Conduct ceremonies at the druid's grove or the temple of Procan.
• Research the Endless Nadir.

The players are, of course, free to come up with their own activities beyond these. Our goal is to offer some structure when players might not otherwise have something in mind.

Secrets and Clues: Your Fuel for Meaningful Downtime

A lot of options for downtime lead to the discovery of new information. As they can in many areas of our D&D games, listing out a number of secrets and clues can help you drop in useful bits of information in many different contexts during a downtime session. Carousing, meeting local contacts, or conducting research can all serve as vehicles for secrets and clues.

If you're running a downtime session, you may want to use more than the standard ten secrets and clues recommended in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. Since a good piece of the session may revolve around learning such secrets and clues, you want to have a lot of secrets ready.

Adding Small Adventures

Even when running a downtime session adventure may find the characters. Perhaps they hear about someone lost in the sewers beneath the city. Maybe they heard about bandits lurking around the burnt-out ruins of the waystation outside of town. Maybe there's an ancient crypt beneath an old knotted tree behind the crabshack, one from which madmen hear voices begging them for release. Even in the middle of a downtime session our players may want their characters to switch back to adventure mode and engage in one of these small adventures and who are we to say no?

Keep a handful of maps to small lairs handy to support such small adventures. Dyson's maps, the maps in the back of the Dungeon Master's Guide, and the lazy lairs in the Lazy DM's Workbook can help you improvise such small adventures in the middle of your downtime sessions.

A Different Type of D&D

Both players and DMs tend to think about D&D within the context of exploration, roleplaying, and combat. Downtime scenes are their own kind of scene; different from the others. The extended amount of time in such scenes and the nearly unlimited options of activities set them apart from our typical group-based adventures. Running downtime scenes without the proper preparation can lead to slow, boring, and frustrating sessions. With some preparation, however, downtime scenes can end up defining the characters and building the story more than any other scene in our game.