A Sly Flourish Playtest

The following guidelines are intended to help DMs run fluid story-focused "theater of the mind" style battles but still define combat rules enough that players feel empowered and don't have to ask for permission to do awesome things. Consider these guidelines as a test. If you try these rules out at your table, please send an email to mike@mikeshea.net with your experiences.

Download the Narrative Combat Guideline Reference Sheet

A Guide to Narrative Combat

With the release of Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, many DMs have returned to running battles, at least some battles, without the use of a map and miniatures fixed to a 5 foot per square grid. D&D 5e still uses exact measurements for things like movement, range, and the size of area attacks but nearly all of the rules of D&D 5e do describe specific positioning that would require miniatures. Flanking rules, for example, are an optional rule in the Dungeon Master's Guide rather than part of the core rules while a rogue's sneak attack can be done as long as an ally is engaged with the target, something easily described in narrative combat.

For many players and dungeon masters who learned the game during the ages of D&D 3.5 and 4th Edition, running combat without a fixed 5 foot per square grid can be strange and uncomfortable. We're used to understanding the character's exact place in a battle. We're used to trusting the rulebooks more than the judgement of the dungeon master. In 5th edition, the philosophy has returned to one of dungeon master arbitration. Again, this can be an uncomfortable position for both players and DMs. It requires trust, fairness, and a shared goal of building a fun game for everyone at the table.

This guide is intended to help both players and dungeon masters understand how to run D&D combat without the need for a fixed grid or specific distances. Throughout this guide we refer to this style of combat as "narrative combat". It's often referred to as "theater of the mind" but in many cases we can still use maps and minis to represent areas and creatures so everyone at the table can understand what is going on even if we don't need to count off squares or use strange templates to figure out fireball bursts.

This guide is intended to give both players and dungeon masters a clear set of guidelines for running narrative combat.

Once you understand the ideas, you can use this narrative combat reference sheet and hand it out to your players so they understand how this style of narrative combat works.

Why Use Narrative Combat?

Why do we bother trying to run narrative combat? Let's look at a few specific reasons.

It's fast. Narrative combat can run really fast. We can squeeze in more small battles into an adventure and not burn an hour on a fight while everyone sets up their minis and worries about their position. Setting up a narrative battle is as easy as yelling "roll for initiative!" You don't have to arrange a big battle area, set up the right monster minis, and position the PCs.

It's cheap. Running narrative combat can save you big bucks since you don't have to invest in a huge collection of miniatures, maps, or 3d terrain pieces. You can use this stuff if you want to, but you don't need to.

Narrative combat flows into the rest of the story. In narrative combat there is no break in the story to set up miniatures or maps. Other than rolling for initiative there might not be any break at all in the pacing of the story. This lets combat, social interaction, and exploration all mingle together into a single flowing adventure.

It's accessible. For players who are visually impared, narrative combat helps make D&D more accessible. Rich descriptions of enemy traits and encounter areas help visually impared players understand what's going on without requiring that everyone else at a table explain it to them.

There are no limits. When you run narrative combat, you have no limit to the size or scope of your environments. Characters can fight on the sides of mile-high waterfalls suspended by vines. They can fight flying on the back of hover disks attacking an airship. They can battle on the back of roaring dragons or from floating earthmotes in the elemental chaos. When you no longer have to worry about building a gridded battle map, you are free to come up with any fantastic location you want.

Not Just In Your Head

This style of narrative combat can take on many forms. Sometimes it just DMs and players talking. Other times it has a full array of maps and miniatures on the table.

If a group is already familiar with gridded combat, there are a few ways to ease them into this idea. One way is to continue to use maps and miniatures but forgo the grid and, instead, define larger "zones". Another way is to use it for small battles with circumstances that are easy to describe. A third way is to use it for strange and fantastic circumstances that simply can't be represented with a flat map and miniatures.

Keep in mind and reinforce with your players that this isn't a wholesale replacement for gridded combat. Instead, this is another option to use when a combat scene doesn't fit well into a grid or a battle is intended to run fast. If your group loves gridded combat, consider using this only once in a while when gridded combat simply doesn't work that well.

The section "Table Aids for Narrative Combat" has specific ideas for the types of tools that can aid in narrative combat and help players who tend to prefer the grid understand the intent of these less specific rules.

"What Do You Want To Do?"

There is one fundamental rule to good narrative combat:

A player tells a DM what they want to do and the DM tells them how they can do it.

This is basically the same as the core mechanics for D&D overall on page 6 of the Player's Handbook:

• The DM describes the environment.
• The player describes what they want to do.
• The DM narrarates the results of the adventurers' actions.

In order for this to work, the player has to trust the DM to adjudicate fairly and the DM has maintain that trust by doing so. In general a DM should steer in the PC's favor when handling edge cases as long as it is within reason (for a fantasty action game) and is fair to the capabilities of the other players.

Different situations will call for different rulings. Sometimes a fireball may take out only four kobolds while another time it will take out twenty. A lot of variables can change these guidelines and these changes should be made clear before PCs commit to any given action. If players feel screwed out of their turn because the DM decided their move isn't as affective as they thought, that player won't trust the DM's judgement and won't enjoy narrative combat. In general, during narrative combat, players should have the option of changing their minds.

Just remember the core mechanic of narrative combat: the player describes what they want to do and the DM tells them how they can do it.

Zones

Most narrative battles will take place in single small spaces like the room of a dungeon. Others, however, might span across larger areas. In these narrative combat guidelines, we can handle fighting in these larger areas with the use of "zones", an idea inspired by other story-focused RPGs including 13th Age, Numenera, and Fate Core.

Think of a zone as a part of an area roughly forty to fifty feet square. The sizes and boundaries of zones are flexbile so DMs can use them to represent each room in a series of rooms or as different sections of a large outdoor area. Generally speaking, a zone is sized so a PC can get from one zone to another by moving on their turn.

Why Use Zones?

Using zones in narrative combat helps in a few ways:

• Zones give players a better idea of how a battle area is set up than loose descriptions.
• Understanding zones and their features helps players choose their actions without requiring continual DM adjudicating.
• The guidelines for zones give players and DMs a codified set of narrative combat rules that everyone can understand.
• Describing zone features pushes DMs to come up with interesting features that PCs and enemies can interact with.
• Zones are flexible enough to build large fantastic locations that a flat gridded map simply can't represent.

The DM will want to make it clear what zones are in play during narrative combat. This might be something like the "hall of shattered heroes" and the "bladed throne dias" in a large audience chamber. Most of the time combat will only take place in a single zone but larger battles might have two, three, or even more zones in play depending on how big it is. Running in narrative combat means you can have fun complicated battles such as engaging in combat across multiple decks of a crashing airship.

Describing Zones and Zone Features

When a DM builds out a battle area, they think of all the major areas for the battle and define each with a characteristic or feature that may come into play in a battle. These descriptions help clarify one zone from another while also giving players ideas for how they might interact with the area. Here are ten example zone descriptions:

• Rickety bridge over bottomless chasm
• Unholy altar to Azmodeus
• Crumbling statue of Ser Valin
• Spined throne of the Dragon King
• Flaming balcony
• Hall of the stone dwarves
• Pit of the demon spawn
• Cells of twisted iron
• Pyramid of the ancient obilisk
• Fanged maw entryway
• Burning pyres
• Crumbling staircase
• Halls of murder holes

Generating a random Ancient Monument is one easy way to create an interesting feature for zones.

Movement and Ranges in Zones

In general, during a turn, a PC or monster can move from one zone to another. They can also move anywhere within a zone, including moving next to an enemy anywhere in the same zone. When moving zone to zone, they can generally go from anywhere in one zone to anywhere in another. If one part of a zone is harder to reach, it should probably be another separate zone.

Short ranged attacks (up to 30 feet as defined in the Player's Handbook) can hit anyone in the same zone as the attacker. Longer ranged attacks (greater than 30 feet) can generally hit anyone in any zone that the attacker can see. As it is in D&D combat rules, if an enemy is adjacent to a ranged attacker, that ranged attacker attacks at disadvantage.

Opportunity Attacks

If someone is engaged in melee with an enemy, they will likely take an opportunity attack if they try to move within a zone or move to a new zone. They're also likely to take an opportunity attack if they try to move to attack another enemy. Narrative circumstances, of course, can change this.

Adjudicating Area Effects

Adjudicating areas of effect requires specific guidelines in narrative combat Many area effect spells have different sizes, shapes, and targets. For the sake of simplicity and clarity, we can group these area effects together to determine how many creatures an area effect actually affects.

There are two questions we must answer when adjudicating an area attack. The first question is "which zone or zones can it affect?" The second question is "how many creatures in those zones can it affect?" To adjudicate area effects, we should ask ourselves and our players the answer to these two questions.

The following table offers guidelines and potential number of targets for area effect spells. The target numbers are based on the guidelines for adjudicating areas of effect on page 249 of the Dungeon Master's Guide.

The comparable measurement column gives you an idea what sort of spells fit into which type of area. Once you have a feel for it, you can forget about the specific measurements and start thinking about all area effects as either tiny, small, large, or huge.

Cover

Typically, determining cover can be difficult in narrative combat. For the sake of simplicity, consider the following guideline:

Assuming a zone has objects that can provide cover, a creature not adjacent to an enemy can take half cover as part of its move action. Three quarters or full cover is very hard to get and is based on the DM's descretion.

In general, half cover is easy to get and any other cover is hard to get.

Table Aids for Narrative Combat

It is possible to run narrative combat with no physical aids at all. The whole point of narrative combat is to describe the action taking place in a battle. Table aids, however, can help everyone understand what is going on. For players used to gridded combat, the DM may want to ease into narrative combat by using similar encounter battle layouts and ease in to the concepts of abstract distances and zone-focused movement.

3x5 cards are a great way to quickly define zones by writing a zone description on a note card and placing it on the table. If a battle includes multiple zones, you can use one 3x5 card for each zone, each labeled with a zone description, and place it on the table in the layout of the overall encounter area.

Pathfinder Flip Mats by Paizo are one of the best aids for running D&D games. Though gridded by design, it is easy to ignore the grids and use the surface of the poster map to write out all sorts of information such as the names and characteristics of enemies, current damage on those enemies, enemy AC once it's clear the PCs know it, and all sorts of other information. The blank dry-erase poster map is an incredibly useful and versatile tool for running D&D and a great investement.

While not required, miniatures for the PCs can help everyone keep track of the zone in which each PC is located and with whom they are engaged. You don't need miniatures for enemies when running narrative combat, but it can also make it easy to track which monsters are in the battle, which zones they are in, and which monstere are engaged with which PCs. On a dry-erase poster map, you can also write down the name or characteristic of a monster and use that to track the monster as well, though it is harder to show it moving from PC to PC.

One easy layout for keeping track of PCs and monsters is a layout we call the "Final Fantasy Battle" layout. In older Final Fantasy games, combat occurred between a line of PCs on the right side of the screen and a line of monsters on the left side. There was no movement or engagement between PCs and monsters, the PCs simply chose which they would attack and the monsters did the same. We can arrange our own table layout the same way, using miniatures mainly to show who is up front, who is in the back, and who is enaged with who.

When using a dry-erase poster map like this, its important to clarify to your players that there is no fixed distance on the map. As mentioned before, players should tell the DM what they want to do and the DM should tell them how they can do it.

Using Random Numbers

Because we're running an abstract battle, it's important that we avoid taking advantage of the lack of specificity by letting our monsters gang up on the PCs. Good narrative combat will only work in a group if there is trust between players and DMs. We can build up this trust and avoid favoritism by randomly selecting who gets attacked by our enemies. If there isn't a good clear reason why one monster would attack one particular PC, choose the PCs a monster attacks randomly by rolling a die as close to your number of players as possible and having the monster attack that PC. When you roll this way, roll it in the open so all of the players can see why one PC got attacked over another. Sometimes this might mean one PC gets ganged up on, but everyone at the table will know why.

Monsters aren't idiots though. If it's clear that a monster would attack a particular PC, such as one who imposes severe disadvantages when attacking anyone BUT that PC, the monster will clearly do that. Other times intelligent monsters will know to take out enemy spellcasters and healers as quickly as possible.

The main thing is that the players understand why one particular PC was attacked over another. If it doesn't make sense to them, they might feel picked on and begin to lose the trust that is so vital for running good narrative combat.

Go Big With Descriptions

Narrative combat gives you great freedom to go big with your descriptions of the environment and the battle. These descriptions are also vital to keep the battle interesting when we remove maps and miniatures from the table. Take the time to jot down the most interesting and fantastic features of your combat area. Many times, these features will end up as the description for a zone. Here are some examples:

• Battle on a round hill that is actually a huge iron demon skull half buried in the ground.
• Battle on the jagged cliffs on the side of a mile-high waterfall lost deep in the fey woods.
• Battle on the edge of a chasm that pierces from our world into the depths of hell.
• Battle on the shattered deck of an airship mysteriously buried in the middle of a mountain.
• Battle on the remains of a sunken cyclopean temple shaped like a long-dead god.
• Battle on a block of dwarven iron floating in the molten center of a volcano.
• Battle high above the city on the back of angry griffins and screeching vrocks.

During the fight, take time to describe the actions monsters take. Ask players for their own descriptions of their actions. Go with the famous "describe your killing blow" to move players from mechanics into storytelling.

Rich and evocative descriptions are the key to making a narrative battle feel as fun and interesting as one with detailed maps, terrain, and miniatures. Give these descriptions the attention they deserve before and during the game.

Ask Players to Describe Physical Traits to Identify Enemies

It's hard to identifying particular enemies in narrative combat if you can't tell one from another. One effective way to identify particular enemies is to ask your players to describe the physical characteristics of the enemy they're targeting. This has many advantages. First, you're opening up the player's imagination and getting it away from simple game mechanics. Second, You're removing the burden from your own shoulders. We DMs have enough to worry about. Third, it helps everyone at the table identify particular enemies without stepping outside of the story. Fourth, it's very easy to do. Just ask them.

When they give you a physical trait, write it down on a 3x5 notecard or on your dry-erase flip mat so everyone can keep track of this newly identified enemy.

The Right Tool for the Right Job

These guidelines for narrative combat are just one tool you can use to increase the enjoyment of your D&D game. If you find them useful, use this one page reference for narrative combat and hand it out to your players.

You don't need to use them all the time. Instead, use these guidelines to give yourself options for running fast combat described using in-fiction language to build fun, dynamic, and action packed stories.

In September 2015 Wizards of the Coast released Out of the Abyss, their third campaign adventure for the 5th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons. This sandbox adventure throws our poor band of PCs into the depths of the Underdark where, with little more than the cloth on their backs, they must make their way past the worst creatures vomited up from the depths of the Abyss.

This is the first article in a chapter-by-chapter series containing tips and tricks for getting the most out of this adventure. Stay tuned over the next few months for further articles.

Spoilers Ahoy!

Keep in mind that this article and future articles about Out of the Abyss are packed with spoilers. If you're planning to play in it, you probably want to stop reading right now.

And now, the tips.

Don't Be An Ass

The first chapter of Out of the Abyss puts the PCs in, quite possibly, the worst situation they could start in. The PCs have been captured by a drow raiding party and are currently held prisoner as they await transportation to Menzoberranzan to fill in Gods-know-what role. Sacrifice? Slave? Who knows.

Our band of level 1 PCs find themselves caged with few items and surrounded by drow guards, elite soldiers, and quaggoths - giant hairy nasty creatures. Any of these creatures are more than a match for the PCs even if they were well armed, and they certainly are not. Combat as a means of escape simply isn't possible.

"Killer" DMs are going to love this and it might even be loved by players who enjoy tough challenges. Others, however, might not get as much joy from it. 1st level 5e D&D is already rough and removing their weapons and equipment doesn't make them feel any more heroic or powerful.

Don't be an ass. Don't punish PCs for things they can't really control. Don't kill them over and over, particularly as this adventure begins at level 1. Make it clear to them that combat isn't likely to succeed.

If you want to be nice, consider running them through an intro adventure that gets them to level 2 or 3 before they're captured. Phandelver from the Starter Set works well for this purpose. If the PCs are level 3 when they begin Out of the Abyss, combat suddenly becomes a potential option.

If you DO choose to run your PCs through an intro adventure, don't try to shoehorn in some scene where they are all captured by drow. Few groups enjoy a battle that's one-sided from the beginning. Instead, just fade away from their last victory and then describe how they awaken with little memory of being captured as drow sleep poison tends to steal away short term memory. Since you have to railroad them into prison anyway, just do it and get it done.

Reward Ingenuity

Given their precarious position, good players will come up with interesting ways to learn about and eventually escape Velkenvelve, the drow outpost of their imprisonment. Reward these ideas. Don't shoot them down if they don't fit the story you had in your mind.

As DMs, we'll get the most out of this adventure if we don't plan things out and let the story grow from the decisions of the players when facing the situations in which they find themselves. This gives us excellent practice at learning to let go and watch the story evolve as players make choices and the dice hit the table.

Instead of having three ideas in your head about how the PCs could escape, take a good read into how Velkenvelve is arranged and watch as players discover their own ways to escape.

Keep Track of the NPCs

There are a ton of NPCs in Out of the Abyss and it can be hard for both you and the players to keep track of them all. Write their names down on 3x5 cards and keep them on the table so both you and your players can keep track of who's who. You can also associate them with a particular miniature if you have them on hand. Physical representations of each of the NPCs can help keep track when there's so many of them.

Given the chaotic nature of the first chapter, it's likely not all NPCs will survive and the number of NPCs the party will interact with over the rest of the adventure will be cut way down. That said, even if the party loses track of one of the NPCs in the chaos of the battle, that NPC might come back later on in the adventure. This is a nice reward for those players who take the time to remember them early on.

As you introduce each of the NPCs and perhaps include them in various scenes, keep track of which ones seem to resonate with the players. Do they like Stool the myconid or find Sarith's grim nature alluring? Take note of it. You can give players a good idea about each of these NPCs through conversations taking place in the jail and by including different NPCs in the various odd-jobs the PCs might undertake while they learn more about the jail.

The NPCs who can aid the PCs in their initial escape into the Underdark might be particularly useful. Ensure they players at least have a chance to get to know them. If they could care less about them later, that's fine too. It is nice for them to have the opportunity to meet up with a useful guide, though.

The NPCs who can act as (somewhat) useful guides include: Stool, Shuushar, Sarith, and Jimjar.

The Tyranny of Inventory Management

If you DO decide to go with the survival horror theme, enjoy the tyranny of inventory management. The PCs may find themselves running into the underdark with a 10 gold piece gemstone, a length of 5 foot of spider silk, and an ornery poisonous spider. How they survive against Demogorgon and Zuggtmoy with five feet of spider silk is the fun of an adventure like this.

If you are a DM who tends not to track things like food or spell components, you may want to for this adventure. Starvation might be a real enemy and a big motivator for the choices of the PCs. Enjoy the tyranny of inventory management and watch how it affects the story.

More on this in the next article.

Foreshadowing the Rise of the Demon Lords

Out of the Abyss is all about the rising of the demon lords. Foreshadow this with nightmares and visions. Demons attacking Velkenvelve can be a great way for PCs to get a shot at their escape. Seeing flocks of Vrocks attacking the stalactite towers will bring a good deal of fright and atmosphere to the situation. Use the right opportunities to present the theme of the adventure.

Think Survival Horror Not High Adventure

It can help both you and the players if you embrace the idea that this campaign plays out much more like a survival horror game than a game of high adventure. As one player put it, this is the "Dark Souls" of D&D. Choices matter. The land is dangerous. The PCs can easily find themselves lost in dangerous caverns without even food in their bellies. They might not have decent weapons for some time. For players who enjoy this sort of game, this can be a blast. For others, it might take some discussions for them to appreciate it.

If all else fails, you can always switch to "easy" mode by starting them off at a higher level and giving them easier access to good equipment. The "Dark Souls" of D&D isn't for everyone.

Stay tuned for further articles about Out of the Abyss in the coming months. In the mean time, keep your eyes open and watch out for those that stir in the dark.

On Saturday, the 10th of October, I had the opportunity to engage in a discussion on the topic of "One Year with D&D 5th Edition" along with Matt Click and Kirk Wiebe at BrigadeCon, an online gaming convention.

During this video we discuss all manner of topics related to our first year with D&D 5e including the number and types of games we've ran and our own experiences with how the system works.

Some highlights include our discussion of the assymetry of D&D 5e, why banshees are just as dangerous at level 14 as they are at level 4, how strange spikes in power can make for more interesting stories, comparing the feeling of 5e to Pathfinder and 4e, running narrative combat in 5e, and how an abolith can dominate a fight with careful conversations while stuck inside of a force cage.

You can watch the video below or view the video on Youtube. Enjoy!

Something about our human nature wants us to toss aside other people's good ideas and focus on our own. "Not invented here" syndrome lies deep within us, even us dungeon masters. This might be due to the creative nature of our hobby. We like to build things ourselves. Standard monsters and default campaign settings are often not good enough for us so we spend a great deal of time and energy building our own settings and our own monsters.

This is fine if it makes us happy and actually helps us run a great game. If we do it by discarding all of those other good ideas, though, we're throwing away a lot of great stuff. We're ignoring all the creative energy that others invest all around us. We can either trudge up the hill all by ourselves or we can ride the waves of the lives and imaginations of six billion other people.

Good ideas surround us. The growth of the internet over the past twenty years has pushed the art of dungeon mastering to all new hights. Before we had the net we might get some ideas from DMs we know personally or in the pages of Dungeon and Dragon magazine. Now we have more information than we can ever digest. We have access to the minds of thousands of dungeon masters. We have an ocean of great ideas we might use in our game.

The more we keep our minds open to the mechanics, atmosphere, and the story seeds we see all around us, the better our games will be.

Capturing These Ideas

Unfortunately, these ideas aren't nice heavy things we can find lying around and store in a big yellow plastic box. Some of them are like fleeting butterflies we must chase down with a net and carefully save in a jar. We might be flipping through a copy Dungeon World or watching Chris Perkins run the Acquisitions Incorporated game when one of these ideas shows up. How do we grab it and save it for later?

We can go back to the tools used at the dawn of civilization and write that shit down. Lots of people have their favorite tools. Mine is a Moleskine plain pocket notebook and a Sakura Micron pen. Others might use Evernote or another digital tool. Whatever we choose is likely fine as long as it can quickly capture the idea and store it in some sort of permanent record we can go back to.

Keeping an "RPG Ideas" text file on your computer or as a page in Evernote might be a good way to hang onto this stuff. Don't stress about the formatting, just get it down and keep it handy. Reference it before you run your game.

You might prefer a physical campaign folder to store your ideas. As ideas come to you, write them down on a 3x5 card and throw them in the folder. Dump them out on the table and go over them when you're prepping your game.

An Example Toolbox

Below are a few examples of the sorts of ideas and concepts we might capture that might be useful in our own D&D games:

• Escalation Die from 13th Age.
• Location Aspects from Fate.
• Easy 3x5 Initiative Cards.
• One dimensional combat from Darkest Dungeon.
• Abstract distances (engaged, close, far) from 13th Age.
• The Principles of Dungeon World.
• The One Unique Thing from 13th Age (thanks, Eric Fell)!
• Fronts from Dungeon World.
• Zones from Fate.
• The concepts behind narrative combat.

Of course, there are a lot of physical tools we can use to run our game as well. We've covered a lot of this in the GM Walk Away Kit.

These ideas mostly focus on the mechanics of RPGs but we can just as easily form a list of "good story ideas" from the books, movies, and TV shows we absorb. Our toolboxes are infinite multidimentional spaces. There's nothing that can't fit within them.

Keep Things Simple

We can pack our DM toolbox with a lot of different things but that doesn't mean we need to use all of them at any game. Often the simplest tools, like easy initiative cards, end up being the most useful at the table. Big complicated sub-systems are likely to be more frustrating to teach and implement than a few different small ideas.

Keep our Mind Open and Try It At the Table

The only way we can keep filling up our toolbox is to remember that we all benefit when ideas come out, even if we're not sold on them in the beginning. Instead of immediately dismissing someone else's ideas, give them some careful thought and maybe give them a try at your table before you discount them. Obviously we can filter out ideas that we're sure we and our players won't like but even then it's worth considering why we might not like them.

Actually trying it is a much better gauge of how something will work than just reviewing it on paper. In the early days of the D&D Next playtest, there was an uproar about the "advantage" mechanic when we first saw it, including from yours truly. Once we actually started to use it, it worked out really well.

Before we start running off having an opinion about something, what if we take a good look at it first?

We can get far in this hobby if we consider the words of Roland Deschain:

"Head clear. Mouth shut. See much. Say little."

This is the second in an ongoing series of articles discussing how to best run the D&D adventure, Out of the Abyss. Our series began with Running Out of the Abyss Chapter 1 and it's worth starting your read there.

Spoilers!

These articles are intended for dungeon masters who are running Out of the Abyss. If you plan to play in this adventure, stop now and move along.

Mo Underdark, Mo Problems

When the PCs begin this chapter they have a lot going against them. They likely don't have any food or water. They likely don't have any weapons or equipment. Instead, they're lost in the caverns of the Underdark with a band of bloodthirsty drow hunting them down.

As the first session begins in this chapter, it's worth reinforcing these challenges. Don't give them solutions to these problems and don't assume they will follow one path or another. Lay out the problems and the situation and enjoy it as they come up with interesting ways to deal with these problems.

Your Exercise in True Sandbox Gaming

For those who prefer an adventure that walks the PCs through the story step by step, Out of the Abyss is likely to disappoint. Chapter 1 gave us a small sandbox with the PCs trapped in Velkinvelve and offered various potential ways to escape. Chapter 2 sticks the PCs smack in the middle of the Underdark with thousands of miles all around them to explore. This is more of a great desert than a small sandbox. The choices they make here could result in huge differences to the rest of the game.

Chapter 2 gives us many tools to help us run a long exploration of the Underdark. These come in the form of random locations, random monsters, and a handful of small adventure sites we can place into the rest of the adventure. We can likely get the most out of this adventure by avoiding leading the PCs down any one particular path. Will the PCs choose to head to Gracklstugh? Will they head to Sloobludop? We really don't know.

And that's fine. The best thing we can do to prepare our Out of the Abyss games is read through the material in the adventure and be ready to improvise as the game runs at the table. This won't be comfortable for a lot of DMs who prefer a nice path to follow, but the results can be both surprising and fun. This is great practice for the lazy dungeon master.

The Tyranny of Inventory Management

We probably don't want to run the entire adventure this way, but early on it can be fun to dig deep into the issues of inventory management. If the PCs find drinking water, how do they carry it? How do they start a fire? How do they keep a steady supply of food on hand as they travel through the caverns? How do they defend themselves against a band of drow hunters with nothing but rocks and petrified stalks of mushrooms?

Again, this probably isn't the way to run the whole game. Once they've properly outfitted themselves and clearly know how to keep themselves fed and healthy, we can let this go and get back to focusing on the high adventure. Early on, however, the threat of starvation, dehydration, and a lack of suitable equipment can be an interesting threat indeed.

Random Encounters: Show What Came Before

If handled incorrectly, random encounters can be really boring. Move for a day, roll a d20. If you roll less than a 13, move on. What if, instead, we showed them what they might have otherwise missed? What if we show them what came before or give them the chance to notice a band of monsters before stumbling upon them?

When traveling, have one of the players roll 1d20 and use the result to determine what tracks they might find leading into another tunnel. Many times the PCs might ignore them or they might use a survival check to determine what sort of tracks they are. If it's something they want to go after, they might hunt the monsters down.

The Underdark is a living breathing place. Creatures travel through all the time. By showing them what came before, you can add the fun of a potential encounter without having them constantly ambushed by monsters.

The same works for interesting chambers. Even if they miss an encounter roll, you can roll on the locations list and describe a place they might notice down another corridor. Likely they'll give it a miss, particularly if its hostile, but it's still interesting to see.

The only disadvantage of this is that you might run out of encounters or locations if you're using them all the time. There are only twenty encounters and locations in this chapter so don't do it TOO much or one encounter or location will start to feel a lot like another.

Good Choices or Good Rolls: Both Work

Focusing on the survival aspects of Out of the Abyss gives us a chance to return to the 40 year conversation of player knowledge versus die rolls. Some DMs prefer a game where players make smart choices and these smart choices help their PCs navigate deadly pitfalls. Others prefer to focus on the skills of the PCs and the results of their d20 rolls. There's no reason, however, that we can't do both.

Let's say a player has a good idea about how to store water for the long journey in the Underdark. If it makes sense and has little chance for failure, don't force them to roll. If, on the other hand, they are having a hard time figuring out how to store water, give them a chance to roll a survival check and the PCs might learn a good way to do so.

Some players are better coming up with good ideas while others prefer to use the brains of their PCs. There's no reason we can't use both in our game.

A Taste of Madness and the Demonic

As we can, it behooves us to foreshadow the demonic threat that has taken over the Underdark. The Underdark is a weird place anyway but we can make it even weirder with strange discoveries. This might be a pool of demonic blood or the corpses of beings who tore themselves apart with madness. It might be the remains of strange rituals conducted by demon worshipers or even the demons themselves. Exposure to strange spores might give them a horrifying vision of Zuggtmoy, demon queen of fungi. This is also our way to invoke the strange bouts of madness that occur in this adventure.

This madness, potentially a disease they catch from a nest of gas spores, can itself be a motivation for their exploration of the Underdark.

Planting the Seeds For Further Exploration

While we don't want to force the PCs down any one path, we can plant a lot of seeds to give the players some good ideas where they might go. Which NPCs they happen to be grouped up with will also guide their way. Does Eldeth want to join up with the dwarves at Gauntlgrim? Does Shuushar suggest they head to Sloobludop? Does Stool show them a fantastic vision of the myconid lair? Any of these might be options they can find.

All Roads Lead to Darklake

Whatever path they choose, they're likely to head towards Darklake so it's worth spending the time to understand how this strange set of underground waterways actually looks. Keep an eye out for our look at Out of the Abyss chapter 3 where we cover this fantastic underground lake.

The 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual includes static damage for every damaging effect in every monster stat block. Though we're used to rolling damage for monsters, there are big advantages to using this static damage score instead of rolling for damage.

In this short article, we'll make the case for using static damage values for monster attacks.

No One Cares

The easiest argument to make for using static monster damage is that, generally, no one will give a shit. Players love to see the variance in their own damage but they tend to not care whether or not a monster rolled low or high on their damage dice.

The only time in the game when damage variance matters is at low levels when players have few hit points and a high damage roll with a greataxe may drop their character to zero. Many DMs, myself included, don't really want that to happen anyway. Later on, as player hit points increase, the variance of the dice in a monster's attack is low enough that it doesn't really have a big effect on the game anyway.

As DMs, we typically don't care about monster damage either. We have so much other shit to do in our game that bothering to roll for monster damage isn't high on our priority list. Improvizing evocative location descriptions and roleplaying interesting NPC interactions is a much better use for our time.

Static Damage Speeds Up Combat

Combat speed isn't a critical factor in D&D 5e like it was back in 4e but we can always trim out parts of our game that aren't as vital as other parts. Rolling for monster damage is one of those parts. It is much faster to run a group of monsters by only rolling attack rolls and just dishing out the damage. Players may notice but it's unlikely they'll care.

Those of us who are used to 13th Age are used to running monsters with static damage know exactly how well this can work.

It's Within the Rules

Take a look at 5e monster stat block and you'll notice that the static damage is outside the parentheses and the roll is inside. The implication is that the static damage is the true rule but it might have been too big a switch to remove damage dice completely.

So no, you're not breaking the rules by using static monster damage.

Handling Crits

Handling critical hits is one oddity when using static monster damage. Given the infrequency, this is a good time to use the dice expression. If a monster has a damage score of "9 (1d8+4)"" and rolls a critical hit, just roll an extra 1d8 and add it to 9. If you happen to know the averages (rounded down) of the dice, you can use that instead but only if it is actually faster than rolling. Easiest is just to roll the die.

Give It A Try

You might still be apprensive about using static damage for monsters. It might not feel right to you after all of these years of rolling monster damage. If you really don't want to use it, you certainly don't have to. You might, however, 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.

Who knows, you might like it.

This is the third in an ongoing series of articles aiding dungeon masters in running the D&D 5th edition adventure, Out of the Abyss. You can read the previous two articles here:

• Running Out of the Abyss Chapter 1
• Running Out of the Abyss Chapter 2

Blah Blah Blah Spoilers

As before, this article is packed with spoilers. If you plan on playing in this adventure, skip this article series and go read a handpicked Sly Flourish article you might have missed.

Understanding the Structure of This Adventure

Before we dig into chapter 3, we might want to take a moment to understand the structure of the material within the whole adventure. Unlike Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat, this adventure is not linear. One chapter doesn't necessarily lead to the next. If you force your players to travel through the chapters linearlly, you're less likely to have a good time.

Here's a loose guide to the overall structure of this adventure:

Chapter 1: This chapter covers the mini-sandbox of Velkenvelve. The PCs are captured and must figure out how to escape. There are multiple routes out but all of them will lead to the next chapter.

Chapter 2: This chapter gives the DM a bunch of tools for running interesting adventures in the underdark. It includes random tables and small adventure sites that you can throw in whenever you want to spice up the story. You're likely to return to this chapter each time the PCs end up back in the caverns between visits to bigger locations.

Chapter 3: Like the previous chapter, this chapter also gives a bunch of underdark traversing tools, particularly focused on the Darklake. This chapter also contains all the information on Sloobludop (Sloob-Lu-Dop) which we'll talk about further in this article.

Chapter 7: Wha? Why'd we skip the other chapters? It's because Chapter 7 is where everything is headed. Chapter 7 describes the goals and directions the PCs might take and what happpens in between the other chapters. If you ask me, this should be chapter 3, not chapter 7, but we have what we have. If you take nothing else from this article take this: Read chapter 7 before running this adventure. This will give you a much better perspective on how the authors expect this adventure to play out.

Chapter 4, 5, 6: These chapters outline large locations the PCs might travel to. Each one is like a tiny location sourcebook tied to an adventure. Your PCs may never travel to these locations but it would be a shame if they miss them. Consider tying the story back to these locations so the PCs get to see each of them. You can do this with NPC motivators or other quests.

We're not going to dig into chapters 8 through 17 since those cover a much greater part of the adventure beyond the escape from the underdark.

Chapter 3 Part 1: Your Darklake Toolkit

As mentioned in the above chapter guide, the first half of chapter 3 gives you tools similar to those in chapter 2. We have numerous random encounter tables we can use to make traveling the Darklake fun and interesting. We can mix this chapter with chapter 2's tools to make the whole underdark feel like a living breathing place on both land and in the water.

All of the same tricks for running chapter 2 work with this part of chapter 3. You can roll for an encounter and ignoring "nothing happens" events when you need something interesting to happen. You can also roll randomly to determine what might have come before the PCs arrived in a location or show them areas they might choose to avoid.

You'll return to this part of the chapter at least twice, once before the PCs reach Sloobludop and perhaps afterwards. Anytime the PCs return to the water is a good time to hit up this chapter. There's a lot of great material to pilfer.

Chapter 3 Part 2: The Drama of Sloobludop

The Kuo-Toa city of Sloobludop (Sloob-Lu-Dop) takes up half of chapter 3 in this book and, given the climactic end to the city, it's worth figuring out how to get your PCs to visit it. There are a lot of possible reasons the PCs might visit and hopefully as many reasons to get involved in the drama between Ploopploopeen (Ploop-Ploop-een) and Bloppblippodd (Blop-Blip-odd) (seriously, who came up with these names?). The scenes as they play out won't likely take a lot of time so don't worry about spending a lot of time in the city.

If your PCs are particularly crafty and able to avoid getting involved in the drama of Sloobludop, you might show them that one of the original NPC prisoners of Velkinvelve is now about to be sacrificed to the Kuo Toa God. Even if they don't rescue the NPC, they can see Demogorgon rise.

The Madness of Demogorgon

When Demogorgon shows up, it's time to hammer the PCs with that madness effect we've been reading about. Each of the PCs should make a DC 13 Charisma saving throw or suffer one level of madness and take on a short term madness effect. This might knock one or more of them completely out of commission so be ready to help them figure out how not to become sludge under Demogorgon's hoof. If they all fail, maybe another heroic NPC pulls them to the safety of a nearby cave.

When the madness effects hit, you have a great opportunity to turn the story back to the players. If they go to their happy place, what does that place look like? What horrors do they dream of while stunned? Let them describe their own madness and make it a part of their own character rather than force things on them.

Whatever happens, the PCs should escape somehow. Unless they make really bad decisions ("I hit Demogorgon with my axe!") give them plenty of chances to escape but no one escapes Demogorgon's presence unmarked even if that mark is buried in the minds of his witnesses.

The rise of Demogorgon is one of the main cinematic moments of this adventure. Take your time to let it flow into the story organically but don't let them miss it. It's a moment they'll never forget.

Back Into Darklake

With Demogorgon storming Sloobludop, our heroes will likely make their way out of the city. Diving through the eastern canal into an underground river and into a cavern is a good way to reach safety. At that point, they can return to the rivers of Darklake and continue their journey.

Choices

At this point the PCs have a few choices. They can head to the Duergar city of Gracklestugh or perhaps follow Stool the friendly fungi to the Neverlight Grove. Either direction gets us back to using the random encounters in either chapter 2 or chapter 3. It's also a good time for the PCs to run into one of the encounter locations in chapter 2. You can roll randomly to determine which one of the locations they happen to find on the way.

Either way, the adventures never stop coming as our heroes continue to make their way out of the abyss!

"Good pacing is probably the most important trait a GM can have."

- Monte Cook, Weird Discoveries

As dungeon masters who take their craft seriously, we must continually sharpen our skills. For some of us, this is a lifelong pursuit. The beautiful complexity of this hobby of ours gives us the opportunity to improve in many different skills. Improvisation, an acceptable understanding of the rules, the ability to listen and empathize, enthusiasm, time management, balanced facilitation, and on-the-spot creativity are just a few of these skills.

If we want to keep the energy up, though; if we really want to keep everyone interested, there are few more important skills than understanding pacing.

Authors without good editors love to fill prose with conversations between characters but action drives great stories. The same is true in our D&D games. Sometimes we DMs lose ourselves in the depth and background of our stories. Sometimes we lose ourselves in the details of our NPCs. But action drives our stories too, in particular the action of the PCs. This doesn't always mean combat, but it does mean doing something.

Looking over the list of D&D tips from Gencon 2015 nearly all of the tips have to do with good pacing. It really comes down to a single goal: keep things moving.

"What Do You Do?"

In the RPG Dungeon World designers Kobel and LaTorra focus DMs of the game on a single core question at any and every moment: "what do you do?". Making this question the cornerstone of your interaction with the players ensures your players continually think about the actions they take instead of long bouts of pontification and overplanning. "What do you do" becomes their primary interface with the world — a world of action.

Focusing on this question also forces us DMs to make the narrative of our story actionable. It's no good for a bunch of PCs to sit around and listen to an NPC wax history for twenty minutes. In any given scene it behooves us to understand what options the PCs have to act upon. Sometimes we might not even realize there is an opportunity to act but our players surprise us with some action. Don't negate it. Let them interact. Let the story evolve based on their actions.

Start With a Fight

There's no perfect formula for keeping up the pace in an RPG but there are some cheap tricks we can use. Starting with a fight is one of these tricks. You can start your adventure with a bang by throwing a pile of bad guys at your PCs and putting them right into the action. We talk about this a lot in Starting Strong. Starting your adventure with "roll for initiative" sure is a strong way to grab the players' attention.

Watch the Clock

It's easy for DMs to lose track of time when running a game. When we run a game, we're in our element, we find "flow". Losing our sense of time is one of the truest indicators that we've found this flow, but it can be hell on our pacing. Using a timer or watching the clock throughout a game can always give us an idea how much time has passed and how much time we have left. Using a timer helps us ensure our scenes are as long as they need to be and not any longer.

If we're planning for a key encounter, we should keep in mind when that encounter needs to start and be ready to move the action to that encounter to give it the time it needs. Setting a timer for every hour is a good way to keep a feel for the pace, but choose any time period that makes sense for you. It's always better to end a little early than to run late.

Keep Your Eyes Open

As a DM, we fill the air with the most words of anyone at the table but it's our eyes and ears that will tell us if our pacing is off. Watch your players. Look at their body language. They will show you if your pacing is off. Are they leaning forward or leaning back? Are they paying attention or surfing Facebook? Some relaxation is to be expected, this is recreation after all, but if you're seeing a lot of it from more than one player, its time to move things along. Set something on fire.

Don't Go Overboard

Too much action with no clear breaks can go too far. Even action movies have occasional slow bits just to ensure we have time to go pee. Find the right clock cycle for your game, a series of scenes of high action and moments of calm and interesting exploration or interaction. Pure action alone will overload everyone. Take a break from time to time.

Like all of the arts of the great dungeon mastery, a mastery of pacing isn't something we'll get overnight. Like all things, mastering pacing takes practice and continual improvement. Lucky for us, we get to practice it doing something we love.

A year ago I began a new project. It was a project that spawned right from the heart of The Lazy Dungeon Master. We have a lot of great tools to build fun adventures but one of the hardest things to improvize are interesting and deep locations in which our adventures can take place. Based on this I started writing a new book called Sly Flourish's Fantastic Locations with fifteen locatons you can drop into any fantasy roleplaying game.

A book like this needs more than me writing a big pile of words. It needs great editing, beautiful design, and lots of internal art. All of those things cost money to produce.

And that's where you come in.

I have just launched the Fantastic Locations Kickstarter where you can help turn this book from a dream into a reality. As I mentioned, I've been working on it for a long time and really want to get this into our hands.

Here's the awesome cover by Guido Kuip and here's a sample of the introduction and first chapter.

Please take a look at the Kickstarter and join us in bulding this fantastic book.

First, a quick service announcement. In my continuing quest to provide useful tools for game masters, I've launched a Kickstarter for Sly Flourish's Fantastic Locations. If you're a fan of this website and of the book, the Lazy Dungeon Master, please give it a look.

Now on with the article.

From September 2014 to March 2015 I published a set of articles with tips for running Hoard of the Dragon Queen, the first published Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition adventure. If you haven't seen them, you can read them all here:

• Episode 1: Greenest in Flames
• Episode 2: The Raider's Camp
• Episode 3: The Dragon Hatchery
• Episode 4: On the Road Part 1
• Episode 4: On the Road Part 2
• Episode 5: The Carnath Roadhouse
• Episode 6: Castle Naerytar
• Episode 7: The Hunting Lodge
• Episode 8: Skyreach Castle

I chose not to cover Rise of Tiamat the same way because, during my playthrough, the story of the PCs ended up moving the campaign far outside of the bounds of the adventure. A chapter-by-chapter guide does little good when we skipped entire chapters and rewrote others.

That said, there is value in looking at this half of the Tyranny of Dragons adventure path in whole. Thus, here we are.

Careful Honey, Spoilers!

As always, this aricle will be packed with spoilers. Please take care if you plan on playing through the adventure and maybe catch up on your viewing of Bob Ross videos instead.

The Engineered Plot of Rath Modar

We will begin with a look at one potential backstory for the entire plot to raise Tiamat and it all begins with an unexpected villain - Rath Modar.

Back during the Sundering, the Red Wizards of Thay managed to capture more than one Chosen of the gods. They learned how to channel the divine energy of these mortal beings into machines and magics of great and terrible power. They conducted their dark experiments in the Doomvaults from the adventure Dead in Thay. Rath Modar, one of these Red Wizards, noticed the potential of one of these Chosen, the Chosen of Tiamat.

Severin.

Rath Modar released Severin and taught him his true potential as the Chosen of Tiamat. Rath Modar placed him in power of the Cult of the Dragon and engineered the rituals required to draw Tiamat from the Nine Hells into Faerun where the Goddess might thwart Szass Tam himself and, perhaps, place Rath Modar in charge of Thay.

In this alternate storyline, Rath Modar is the brains behind the rise of Tiamat. He is no idiot. If the PCs face him, they usually face a simulacrum or a clone. Sometimes they might find themselves facing multiple Rath Modars, each of which has its own forked history and appearance. Rath Modar travels to many places and conducts many plots.

He has one weakness, though. His phylactery resides still in the phylactery vault of the Doom Vaults. Agents of the Red Wizards will make a deal with the PCs. If they promise to kill Rath Modar, the Red Wizards will let the PCs into the Doom Vaults to hunt down the phylactery. The only catch is, of course, that only these Red Wizard agents know of the PC's mission and all others will be hostile to them.

This can make for a fun side adventure in the campaign. Hunting Rath Modar in the Doom Vaults is the true way to face a brilliant wizard who is unlikely to ever put himself in harms way on purpose.

Return to the Mere of Dead Men

Of all of the locations in Hoard of the Dragon Queen, few have as much depth (pun intended) and history as the Mere of Dead Men. If you haven't read it, give Ed Greenwood's article, Voaraghamanthar, "the Black Death", a read.

This article is packed with interesting background stories and fantastic locations. If your group had a good time in the swamp and around Castle Naerytar, you might consider a side-adventure that returns them to the swamp. If they met the dragon, Voaraghamanthar and, maybe secretly, his brother Waervaerendor, this is a great time to reintroduce them. These two black dragons seek great treasures beneath the swamp and, perhaps, so too does the Cult of the Dragon.

The Mausoleum of the Ebondeath, a former lich's tower turned tomb for the powerful dracolich, Ebondeath, would make a great setting for an adventure. Perhaps Rath Modar has returned to the Mausoleum to seek out an artifact to aid in Tiamat's rise. Maybe he seeks to raise Ebondeath as one of the Heralds of Tiamat now that the black dragon mask is destroyed or captured by the PCs.

This is a great way to get your level 13 PCs into some high level undead dungeoneering and gives you some freedom to build out a cool sunken tomb of a dracolich.

Organizing the Factions

As they battle the Cult of the Dragon, our heroes will no doubt forge many alliances. Perhaps these allies include the metallic dragons, the armies of Waterdeep, or the elves of the Misty Woods. How do we best incorporate these factions?

The easiest way is to narrate a huge battle against the Cult of the Dragon, its mercenary army, and the devils they have summoned already from hell in the bloody sands of the Well of Dragons. Our heroes might be given specific areas to take, villains to cut down, or machines of war to destroy while their allies fight the armies of the Cult until the Temple of Tiamat remains unguarded before them.

Tiamat IS Rising!

This adventure isn't any fun if the party doesn't get to face Tiamat herself. While some groups might enjoy thwarting the plot and preventing her ascent to Faerun, most will want to fight her.

We can solve this problem easily enough by ensuring that the PCs are well aware of her imminent arrival. Instead of their actions preventing her rise, they ensure that, when she does arise, she will be weakened by their efforts.

This weakening can occur in two ways. The first is the capturing and destruction of the dragon masks. The masks are part of her channel to the prime material plane. With their destruction, her ascent will be much harder and she will be weakened when she makes her rise.

Stopping the proliferation of the hoard is another way to weaken her ascent. Rath Modar and Severin had planned to capture a much greater source of treasure than they end up having. Losing Skyreach Castle and its treasure hoard is a great loss.

Severin, Rath Modar, and the Cult of the Dragon do not sit by as the PCs attempt to thwart their plans. They have another way to bring up her ascent, the sacrifice of the Heralds.

The Heralds of Tiamat

The Heralds of Tiamat are mighty dragons, her first children on Faerun, who have remained hidden for centuries. Unlike most dragons, these do not seek vast fortunes and fame. They have grown mighty in the shadows and quiet, knowing that, one day soon, they will be called to Tiamat's side.

That time is now.

As the PCs destroy the dragon masks, the Cult builds altars for each destroyed mask and calls a Herald to the altar. The altar drains the life out of these mighty dragons and creates anchors between Faerun and the Nine Hells. Tiamat can use these anchors to pull her way into the prime material plane.

These heralds will not come into play until the PCs arrive at the Well of Dragons. When they arrive, they will see the altars and will want to defeat each of the heralds to weaken the anchors before Tiamat's rise.

The Temple of Tiamat, Hidden in Shadow

It is likely to come out early that the Temple of Tiamat is hidden in the Well of Dragons. We need a good reason that the PCs can't just fly straight there. Rath Mordar or Severan may have hid the Temple of Tiamat in the Shadowfell. At the end of the campagin, one of these two can call the temple back to the Well of Dragons in Faerun to prepare for Tiamat's ascent.

The PCs might get a glimpse of the Temple of Tiamat if they see any portals to the Shadowfell in their travels but only when Tiamat's rise is imminent will it shift into the prime world and become accessible to the PCs.

Tuning Tiamat's Power

In the Rise of Tiamat adventure, Tiamat herself may be under one or more disadvantages when she rises depending on how the factions go. We can forgo the faction implications and instead implement these difficulties depending on how well the PCs did in acquiring masks and cutting down the Heralds.

You may want to tune these a bit further as well, depending on your own group. Perhaps she doesn't take as severe a hit to her hit points if your PCs inflict particularly high damage. She can be tweaked in other ways to make her a clear challenge to the PCs. Maybe her breath weapons aren't reduced so severely if your group has a lot of high hit point PCs.

Still, if the PCs went through the trouble to thwart her clean entry into Faerun, you'll want to ensure they see the results of that effort when Tiamat comes screaming and clawing, wounded and vulnerable, from the maw of hell.

Don't steal that victory from them even if you do want Tiamat to be a good challenge for them.

Extending to Level 20...in Hell!

As written, Rise of Tiamat ends when Tiamat is sent back down into the pits of hell. Yet how many times in our lives do we actually get to run a D&D game all the way to level 20? Do we really want to end it at level 17ish or do we want to keep going and see how the full range of the game plays out?

When Tiamat is sent back down into the pits of hell we can give our PCs (and our players) a choice. They can enjoy their victory and retire to a life of comfort and ease. They can become masked lords of Waterdeep or hunt pirates on their floating castle.

Or they can solve a a bigger problem. Tiamat isn't dead. She's just banished back to hell and the rifts she has opened to hell remain open unless the PCs go down into three layers of hell including Cania, Minauros, and Tiamat's home plane of Avernus in order to break the ethereal chains that bind the Nine Hells to Faerun. It's quite possible Asmodeus himself wants the PCs' help in breaking the anchors and capturing Tiamat in hell to prevent a civil war between devils loyal to Asmodeus and those loyal to Tiamat.

This "extended cut" of the adventure gives you some room to build your own mini-adventures in hell and the gloves are off. You can throw the kitchen sink at them if you want to. If you're looking for a good reference of hell, check out the D&D Classic sourcebook Tyrants of the Nine Hells which has interesting descriptions of the various layers of hell.

The Adventure of a Lifetime

We play a lot of D&D adventures but its rare for us to watch our heroes fight gods. When running an adventure of this magnitude, it's always worth taking a step back and enjoying the big picture. To quote one of my players:

"I just hit Tiamat with a vorpal sword for 150 points of damage. How many times will I get to say that in my life?"

With the holidays upon us and the end of the year coming soon, there are few better times to talk about the best roleplaying game products for you or your friends.

Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition

This is the first full year for the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons. As gifts go, it's hard to go wrong with the three core books: the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide, and the Monster Manual. The Monster Manual is also a great gift for anyone who just plain loves monsters but might not play D&D. The artwork and the backgrounds of these monsters are a pleasure for anyone who enjoys reading about monsters.

The Dungeons and Dragons Starter Set is still a fantastic product one year out from its release. The included adventure, Lost Mines of Phandelver, has a great story, fun encounters, and fantastic locations. I'm not sure it's perfect for those who haven't played D&D before, but with a little help from an experienced player, this box is a great place to start.

Wizards of the Coast has released a few big adventures since the release of D&D 5e but my personal favorite is Out of the Abyss. It's a huge adventure with some of the coolest locations I've seen published. Even if you or your GM doesn't play the adventure through, there's a lot of material to steal from. If your favorite GM doesn't have this one yet, now's a great time to pick it up for them.

13th Age

Last year Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet, two veteran designers of previous versions of Dungeons and Dragons, released an exellent d20 fantasy roleplaying game called 13th Age. If you or your GM miss the days of the 4th edition of D&D, this is the game for you. 13th Age differentiates itself from D&D 5e in a few ways. First, it's a high power game. PCs are REALLY strong compared to 5e PC. The math scales up much higher, giving the impression of real growth as PCs level up. 13th Age also focuses on "icons", the major powerful NPCs in the game world. PCs align themselves to these icons and, each session, those relationships can manifest. This drives the story into new and interesting directions every session.

The 13th Age Core book also available in PDF has everything you need in it to run the game including character creation, magic items, rules for the game, a pile of monsters, a game world called the Dragon Empire, and an adventure that shows how randomly determined icons can steer the adventure.

Even if you're not sure you or your GM will run 13th Age, many of the ideas in the book are designed to be portable to other roleplaying games. It's a fantastic game.

Flip Maps

My favorite tabletop accessory, by far, is the unversally useful Paizo Basic Flip Mat. This basic style is getting harder buy, having been replaced with a new Bigger Basic Flip Mat. The bigger mat is great if you keep it on the table of your home game, maybe under a big sheet of acrylic plastic.

If you want more variety in the textures of your flip mats, consider the excellent Flip Mat Terrain Multi-pack. It has excellent textures for forests and grasslands, underground chambers, water, and fancy worked stone. This is my favorite set of flip mats.

Paizo also re-released a bunch of their older and highly useful flip mats under the brand Flip Mat Classics. If your group plays with gridded maps or miniatures, these are highly useful for a lot of different situations.

If your GM already has a bunch of flip maps, consider giving them a pack of dry-erase markers. You can never have enough of these.

It's been a great year for RPGs. Hopefully this article gave you a few ideas how you can put a smile on the face of your favorite gamer.

A quick Sly Flourish announcement. In my continuing quest to provide useful tools for game masters, I've launched a Kickstarter for Sly Flourish's Fantastic Locations. If you're a fan of this website and of the book, the Lazy Dungeon Master, please give it a look.

Now on to the article...

"He never assumes that he knows more than you do. He says: 'We'll learn this together.'"

Annette Kowalski, Bob Ross's Strange Afterlife

Mastery is a weird thing. To some, mastery is an end goal, a certain level of proficiency that shows one's true capability and understanding of something. To others, mastery is path, a continuing road one travels to improve at something.

The ideas on Sly Flourish aren't finished. Every article, every tweet, and every idea is an experiment based on a hypothesis. Can narrative combat be as interseting as combat with maps and miniatures? I don't know, let's try it out! How will your running of Rise of Tiamat work out? I don't know but here's how it worked out for me.

The tone of the writing and the use of the active voice in Sly Flourish articles can sometimes give the impression of direction. "Do this" might be a tone one picks up anytime one reads about an idea. That's just the style of the writing.

The real theme is "let's try this and see how it works out". Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it works for some of us. Sometimes it doesn't work for others.

There are over three hundred and forty articles on Sly Flourish. I guarentee you that a bunch of them just plain suck. There are a lot of ideas here. Some of them still work well. Some of them have been tried, discussed, and tossed aside.

The ideas on this site and on Twitter don't live in a vacuum. This blog lives beside dozens of other active blogs and hundreds of thousands of other sources of great GMing ideas. The internet, with Twitter, Youtube, podcasts, and blogs gives us a huge hivemind of great GMing ideas. The last ten to twenty years has given us amazing access to great GMing minds.

James Introcaso, Enrique Bertran, Liz Bauman, Liz Theis and I all discussed these ideas on one of my favorite alltime podcast episodes The RPG Twitter Community. Give it a listen if you want to hear about the advantages and trials of the RPG community on Twitter.

None of us are done learning. There aren't any real "master" game masters. We're all trying things out every game. Some of us play a lot. Some of us think about it a lot. Some of us are great. Some of us are terrible. But none of us are done unless we just plain quit. We're all learning from eachother. We're watching the Youtubes. We're reading the tweets. We're arguing about spell description meanings over at EnWorld. And, hopefully, we're all keeping open ears and an open mind so we can all get better at this stuff.

You won't find mastery or direction Sly Flourish, even if it sounds like it sometimes.

We're all here learning together.

First, a quick announcement. In my continuing quest to provide useful tools for game masters, I've launched a Kickstarter for Sly Flourish's Fantastic Locations. If you're a fan of this website and of The Lazy Dungeon Master, please take a look.

Now on with the article.

We've talked about the importance of pacing but this is a hard concept to understand at a practical level. How can we worry about pacing when we have a pile of friends on their way over and need to keep them entertained for four hours?

Simple tools and checklists can give us a lot of leverage when running our RPGs and we can use such a checklist as a basic guide for maintaining an interesting pace during our next game.

This article contains one such checklist in the form of an adventure skeleton.

The adventure skeleton is a simple outline that can fill out a two- to four-hour gaming session. It builds in pacing throughout and maintains enough flexiblity to support a wide range of interesting adventures. It's a dangerous tool, though. Use it too much and all your games start to feel the same. Still, when nothing else is working quite right, this is a good way to build some solid pacing into your game before you begin.

In short, here is the adventure skeleton:

1. Start with a battle.
2. NPC interaction that sets the stage for the rest of the adventure.
3. Exploration.
4. Another fight.
5. More exploration or interaction.
6. The final battle.
7. A conclusion.

Step 1: Start with a Battle

We know how important it is to have a solid start and there are few more gripping starts than a good battle. D&D combat gets everybody rolling dice and focuses on the strongest pillar of the game—combat. This battle also serves as a good way to introduce the PCs to the problems they may face. This battle might even LEAD to their problems. Perhaps they killed the Wererat kingpin's only son or cut down the king's favorite mercenary lord. Sure, he was a jerk, but he was the king's jerk.

Step 2: NPC Interaction

Next jump into interesting NPCs and some useful conversation. After the battle is over it's time to bring in our helpful questgiver who steers the direction of the PCs. Maybe this is a good person or maybe it's a scumbag, but someone needs to help the PCs navigate the rest of the story and point out the interesting locations.

Step 3: Exploration

Next comes our scenes of exploration. This might be an investigation into some sort of crime. It might be the exploration of an ancient ruin. It might be a series of interviews with other NPCs to understand the full scope of the situation. However we play it, this is the scene where the players get to do LOTS of non-combat sorts of stuff. Uncovering clues, disarming traps, manipulating the corrupt town guard to learn of the criminal underpinnings, that sort of stuff.

Step 4: Another Fight

Time to bring the pace back up again with another good solid fight. This one shouldn't be too hard. Maybe slightly less diffcult than the first and certainly less difficult than the final fight. Keep in mind that most fights should give the PCs some clue about the overall storyline going on. Pepper in interesting clues all throughout the game. This fight could be less about monsters and more about an interesting environment. Are they hanging from the side of a cliff? Are they fighting on the remains of a crashing airship? What's the environmental hook in this fight?

Step 5: More Exploration or Interactions

Depending on the type of adventure going on, this is a great time for the PCs to tie up any loose ends. This is where the big reveal occurs. It might be the lowest level of a dungeon, a secret chamber in the castle, or finding out that the queen's attendant is really an ancient sorceress in disguise.

Step 6: Final Battle

Near the end of the adventure our heroes come face to face with the true villain. This should be a nice challenging fight with interesting terrain and other interesting variables that make it an exciting batle. This is your big set-piece fight if you're using cool maps or 3d terrain.

Step 7: Conclusion

We don't have to leave a lot of time at the end but we should leave some time to tie off the loose ends and give the PCs some closure. Usually, by the end of a big final fight, players are packing up their dice and starting to check their watches. A little extra time to describe the impact of their actions usually ties off the game right.

A Blunt Instrument

This outline isn't perfect and it shouldn't be used all the time. In particular it doesn't work for more standard serial adventures where, in many cases, stories will be broken up across multiple sessions. Still, a good balance of interaction, exploration, and combat helps keep the beats of pace going.

As a tool to get you started building a fun adventure, you could do a lot worse than an outline like this one. Like all of our tips, try it out and rebuild it into something useful for you.

This article has been updated from the original published in November 2012.

It's often better to be positive than negative when thinking about improving our skills as game masters. Sometimes, however, it is worth looking at the bad so we can better understand the good. Today we're going to look at common game master mistakes we might often see, might often even do, and might spend some time learning to avoid so we can run the best RPG we can. Let's put our egos aside and dig in.

Above: Keep an eye out for potential indicators that your game is not resonating with your players

Forcing Your Story

We love our stories. It's what got us to play D&D in the first place. Our drive to tell stories often gives us the desire to run games. It's a hard thing to remember that we GMs don't create the story, the group does. D&D stories aren't written down ahead of time—they're created during the game.

We all know this. It's an easy thing to say. It is equally easy to forget it and let our overactive imaginations run wild, building seven volume epic stories that push players from point A to point B without ever considering what the players want.

Forcing our games to go down one path when the drive of the game may head down another is one of the biggest pitfalls even expert GMs fall into.

Shutting Down Good Ideas

The greatest source of creativity we have at our table is the collective imaginations of our players. Each player often has something interesting to bring to the table. These wild ideas, though, sometimes don't follow our expectations as GMs. Thus we're more likely to shut these ideas down without even considering them.

Shutting down these ideas may remove the greatest potential source for fantastic stories. Take the D&D improvisation tip of Steve Townshend and learn how to say "yes, and".

Losing Patience

Sometimes in our RPGs, things just don't go like we want them to go. Players take to long coming up with decisions. Players find weird loopholes in the rules that circumvent encounters we carefully planned ahead of time. Boss monsters drop after only half a round of combat.

For some reason, something in the game makes you lose our patience.

We're all here to have fun and enjoy the game. The tighter we squeeze, the more pissed off we can get when things slip through our fingers.

Take it easy. Relax. Be patient. Don't rush through things. Try to do less in each game so you're not in a rush.

Ignoring the Desires of our Players

The more we pour ourselves into our stories, our campaigns, and our worlds without considering the backgrounds of the PCs and the desires of our players, the less likely we are to pay attention to what the players actually want from the game themselves. Everyone comes to the table with an expectation for the type of game we want to play. As a GM, we owe it to ourselves and our players to take the time to figure out what sort of game our players want to play.

The easiest way to handle this is to bring our players into the conversation before we begin building out our campaign. We can ask them what they want to get out of the game. As we run our campaign, we can use PC-focused campaign worksheets to keep our own visual focus where it belongs, on the PCs.

Really Just One Big Problem

The above mistakes come down to a single problem: taking too much control over the game. Don't forget that the group drives the story, not the game master alone. Embrace the ways of the lazy dungeon master and move the focus of your game to the story that grows at the table.

My good friend and all-around fantastic D&D guy, Teos Abadia, wrote a thought-provoking article entitled Talent vs. Experience. Before you continue, give his article a read and then come on back.

Teos and I had a chance to work together on the D&D adventure Vault of the Dracolich along with Scott Fitzgerald Gray. It was a hell of an experience, and one Teos mentions in his article.

This article is more introspective than others on Sly Flourish. If you're not interested in the self indulgence, here's a quick summary of my main points on this topic:

• I believe that good GMing comes from experience mixed with a desire to continually evolve and improve.
• Advice is bullshit. Don't let anyone or any idea get in the way of trying things out for yourself. A lack of experience isn't a reason to not try GMing.
• You can't make yourself love GMing if you don't. As John Baldessari says, you have to be possessed which you cannot will.
• Good GMs embrace childlike wonder.

Is Good GMing Talent or Experience?

First, for the sake of this article, we're going to consider running a roleplaying game as its own form of art. I certainly think so and many others do as well. It doesn't have to be fine-art or bullet-in-the-ass progressive art, but it's art none the less.

That takes us to the question of whether making art comes from raw talent or experience. There are thousands of books on the topic and probably a billion words on the web about it so we won't dig too deep here. I think that good artists come from both their actions and their environment. There are lots of variables that come into play. Some internal and some external. Someone having a knack for a creative enterprise isn't very useful if they don't actually practice it.

I tend to think that talent exists but it probably isn't as important as drive, effort, experimentation, and repetition.

In a documentary about the artist John Baldessari, Baldessari offers three pieces of advice for young artists that I think are relevant here:

1. Talent is cheap.
2. You have to be possessed which you can't will.
3. Being in the right place at the right time.

He might have meanings for these different than my own, but I think these relate very well to running RPGs.

Even if talent matters towards running RPGs, there's a lot of talent out there. I think it certainly helps being a GM if you have a bit of a performer in you. I think good GMs don't mind, or are even comfortable, being the center of attention. That might be natural or it might be something someone learned to get used to.

Baldessari's second rule is the most important for creative work. You have to really want to do it. You have to have to do it. As lazy as I like to pretend it is, GMing is hard work. People may try it out and then step away. Others couldn't let it go if they tried. If we want to get good at it, we have to do it all the time which isn't hard because we want to do it all the time.

Burning History

10,000 hours of experience on its own doesn't make someone awesome if they aren't taking the time to continually review their work and evolve it. To me, GMing is a lifelong persuit of improvement. We have to learn together. We have to throw away bad ideas. We have to try stuff out and throw away what doesn't work for us.

In the She DM's excellent response to Teos's article, Davena Oaks had an interesting insight into the importance of experience for GMs:

"I learned experience is no guarantee of skill or quality. It can be a yoke, weighing down a good DM, making them inflexible, unable to adapt or improve despite any superior qualities they might have. It can make them strangely jaded, lacking in enthusiasm and creativity. Now when I recruit DMs I don't express interest in learning too many details about a DM's gaming history I've found it helps me focus more on the DMs other qualities."

In 1970, John Baldessari burnt 13 years worth of his art, baked the ashes into cookies, and then put them into an urn with a plaque that described the birth and death dates of the artwork along with the recepe for the cookies.

Now there's a guy who knows how to throw away the past to focus on the future. Like Davena Oaks says, experience can lead to inflexibility and an inability to adapt or improve. The more experience we take on, the more we owe it to ourselves to throw away past misconceptions and learn new things.

On Writing D&D Stuff

Here comes the self-indulgent navel gazing on writing I warned you about earlier. You can blame Teos for bringing this up in his article:

"Working with Mike Shea, he made his work on Vault of the Dracolich seem effortless. And I work so hard to finish my half of Confrontation at Candlekeep as quickly as Shawn Merwin does. Is that their talent? Or am I just not seeing their effort?""

That's a nice thing to say but a lot of the creativity in Vault of the Dracolich came from the ideas of Teos and Scott Fitzgerald Gray.

I am a consistent writer. I can meet deadlines. I can publish regular work. I know how to break down projects into chunks that I can do regularly. I try to write 500 words a day of something and, over 2015, I was able to do that 274 days of the year. Often I edited or ran a D&D game on the off days. For the past five years I've written or updated an article a week for this website.

That consistency helps me finish projects like Vault of the Dracolich.

While consistent in output, I don't consider myself particularly imaginative. It is far easier for me to write an article like this one than it is to write an adventure like Vault of the Dracolich or the Drowned Tower. There's a reason it took me a year to write the first draft of Fantastic Locations. That was not effortless. That was a pain in the ass (and it still is but you guys are worth it).

Consistency helps me get through pain-in-the-ass creativity. Having a nice daily quota to meet means I can push through even when I'm not feeling very creative. There's a lot of science behind the idea of consistency. A lot of writers, myself included, feel that good writing comes from keeping up a long pace, not waiting for inspiration or spraying out beautiful blasts of fireworks three times a year.

I might argue that this machine-like method of writing hurts creativity. For me, it might. It doesn't stop Stephen King from hammering out awesome books like Revival, though.

Here's a peek into King's process:

"I used to tell interviewers that I wrote every day except for Christmas, the Fourth of July, and my birthday. That was a lie. I told them that because if you agree to an interview you have to say something, and it plays better if it's something at least half-clever. Also, I didn't want to sound like a workaholic dweeb (just a workaholic, I guess). The truth is that when I'm writing, I write every day, workaholic dweeb or not. That includes Christmas, the Fourth, and my birthday (at my age you try to ignore your goddamn birthday anyway)."

Embracing Childlike Wonder

There's one other criteria I think is important when we think about being great GMs: our willingness to embrace our childlike wonder. We tend to lose our childlike wonder as we grow up and become fearful of going there. Beyond experience and talent, we need to embrace the fantastic. We need to remember why we're playing these games in the first place. We need to become kids again.

Where Does That Leave Us?

On the question of talent versus experience in GMing, where does that leave us? I think it's an interesting question to discuss but I also think it can be a dangerous one. As Steven Pressfield writes in The War of Art, all sorts of tricks (Pressfield refers to these tricks as "the Enemy") are trying to get us to stop making things, whether its the great American novel or our Sunday afternoon D&D game. This question of talent versus experience could easily become an excuse not to try running RPGs or to quit doing it after a few attempts.

The question doesn't matter. What experience you have doesn't matter. What talent you have doesn't matter. Only running RPGs matters. Give it a try.

This article is one of an ongoing series of articles covering the fifth edition D&D adventure, Out of the Abyss. In this article we're going to cover chapter 5: Neverlight Grove. Here is a list of previous articles:

• Running Out of the Abyss Chapter 1: Prisoners of the Drow
• Running Out of the Abyss Chapter 2: Into Darkness
• Running Out of the Abyss Chapter 3: The Darklake

Like previous articles, this article will be packed with fungus-filled spoilers so hang onto your caps!

Wait, Where the Hell is Chapter 4?

If you have an even rudimentary background in mathematics, you'll see that we skipped chapter 4. What gives?

As we've discussed in previous articles, Out of the Abyss is best played as an underground sandbox adventure. Your group might, as mine did, decide to go left instead of right and you might find yourself headed deeper into the book than you expect. That's fine. Our players should be free to choose where they want to go without us forcing them down the table of contents of the adventure.

However, given the excellent material in this adventure, it's probably a good idea for us to find reasons for the party to visit all of the locations in the book. They're all pretty great.

Guided by NPCs

One great way to give the PCs some direction is to guide NPCs from place to place. In our adventure, the PCs met a duergar in Sloopludop who wanted the PCs to escort him to Gracklstugh while the small mushroom, Stool, wants the PCs to go to Neverlight Grove. The PCs can choose which way they want to go.

For this reason, it's best that the NPCs with the greatest drives to visit interesting locations are the ones with the PCs. Even if they didn't rescue them in chapter 1, they might run into them in their travels.

The NPCs that can best guide the PCs to interesting locations are:

• Buppido who wants to go to Graklstugh
• Stool who wants to go to Neverlight Grove
• Shuushar who might take the PCs to Sloopludop
• Jimjar who can take the PCs to Blingdenstone

Stool in particular makes for a great NPC to join the party. He's an obvious non-combatant and yet has a great tie into the events of Neverlight now and in the future. If the PCs aren't with him, or even if he somehow died, now is not a bad time to reintroduce him.

The Main Quest: Journey to Gauntlgrym

Chris Perkins describes Out of the Abyss as a D&D version of Alice's journey through Wonderland. That's all fine but if handled the wrong way it can feel like the PCs are in a little teacup traveling through the worst It's A Small World ride ever constructed.

Motivations are important and, at this stage in the adventure, it's important to ensure these motivations solid in the minds of the PCs and in the minds of your players. There are probably a few big quests they might follow, even some that come from the backgrounds of the PCs themselves, but there's a strong one built into the adventure: get to Gauntlgrym.

The NPC that can best steer the PCs this way is Eldeth Feldrun. She could have the strongest motivation to get to Gauntlgrym and can reinforce the need to let the forces of good know about the horrors that are unleashed in the Underdark.

The quest to reach Gauntlgrym and warn the king about the arrival of the demon princes is a good one to carry them halfway through the adventure.

Through the Looking Glass

No area in the first half of the book captures the theme of Alice in Wonderland as well as Neverlight Grove. Giant mushrooms, plant-covered stone walls and floors, and brilliant multicolored phosphorescent light build an area completely alien to any the PCs have likely scene. Play this up quite a bit and return to it as you run this chapter.

The Bipolar Nature of the Hive Mind

Mushrooms don't think and talk like any other creature. You might consider thinking about this like a giant fungal internet. Any fungus connected to the rest of the patch can understand the thoughts of all of the rest of the fungi attached here. This fungal connection can expand throughout the underdark. It is extremely powerful but also extremely dangerous since any rogue thought can be heard by the rest of the collective. Individuals have their own minds when connected to this fungal net, but there are no boundaries and no secrets to those connected.

The fungi of Neverlight are connected in such a way. The only way to have a private conversation with any of them is to tear them free of the net and have that conversation.

Though the creatures of Neverlight share a single ocean of thought with one another, each of them has their own consciousness. Now a great rift has opened up within this single view of the world: the coming of Zuggtmoy. Half of the grove wants to serve her and expand her empire while the other half know something is terribly wrong. Because of their open connections to one another, those who wish to uncover the truth of Zuggtmoy can use the PCs to investigate this truth.

Focus on Sovereign Basidia

Sovereign Basidia is the main point of contact between the PCs and the rest of the grove. He's not happy about Zuggtmoy's coming and asks the PCs to investigate the truth of the grove. Throughout their time in Neverlight Grove, he can be their primary quest giver and even speak to them through the great fungal internet once they leave.

See Zuggtmoy and GTFO

The main goal of this chapter is for the PCs to uncover the upcoming wedding of Zuggtmoy, witness the madness of the rehearsal, and then get the hell out of the grove. Stool is very useful in relaying this information as is Sovereign Basidia. Basidia should likely want to stay in the grove but can, perhaps, communicate to the party through Stool when Stool is able to connect into a patch of fungus somewhere else in the underdark.

A Visit to Wonderland

Like a few of the chapters in Out of the Abyss, the main purpose of chapter 5 is to give the PCs a view of the rarely seen fantastic location of Neverlight Grove and witness the further corruption of the underdark through Zuggtmoy's upcoming wedding. It also foreshadows chapter 16, the Fetid Wedding, further along in the adventure.

As the PCs flee from Neverlight, we can return them to either Chapter 2 or 3 for their further explorations leading to locations they have yet to visit.

RPG sage Monte Cook wrote an interesting article called PCs versus NPCs in which he discusses the time we often waste statting out NPCs. These NPCs, he argues, just show up, talk for a bit, and disappear forever. Here's an excerpt:

NPC (and creature) detail is one of the ways in which designers and GMs are often forced to waste a lot of time. That's because the game has all these great rules for fleshing out PCs and making them cool and interesting. A game that explores how well a PC is at combat, at interaction, at a wide variety of skills and actions, and makes all those things equally interesting is a great game. But then, it comes time to make NPCs.

In the article Monte is referring not just to our typical bartender NPCs but also to monsters and other potential combatants. He uses this article to promote the NPC design methods of the Cypher system (the RPG system that powers Monte Cook's Numenera roleplaying game) which uses a greatly reduced method for building NPCs, both combatants and non-combatants.

That's great for Cypher games, but what about 5e D&D? How can we strip NPC creation down so small that we don't even have to write anything down to run an NPC?

We likely can't design a system as simple the one in the Cypher system for combatant NPCs. Monsters in D&D have quite a bit of crunch to them with their six attributes, hit points, armor classes, attack scores and the like.

Interactive NPCs, however, don't usually need all that stuff. Most of the time they're not likely to draw a sword or get stabbed to the point that they need hit points or an attack bonus. For that quirky bartender we can come up with something simple.

The Divine Art of Making Shit Up

At its core, D&D 5e comes down to rolling a die, adding a modifier, and checking it against a difficulty check (DC). In just about any interaction that has a challenge, the DC is all we really need to come up with. And to come up with this, all we really need to do is think about how difficult it is.

Here's some simple math for creating an NPC.

When a PC wants to interact with an NPC in some way that might be challenging for example being diplomatic, lying their asses off, or threatening them; all we need to do is ask ourselves "On a scale of 10 to 20, how difficult is this?". The answer to that question is our DC check.

Any particular NPC may have strengths or weaknesses when dealing with the PC. Maybe they're not very easy to intimidate (DC 16) but might succumb to flattery (DC 11).

This curve isn't perfect. A DC 10 is still potentially a challenge. Many times things will be less challenging than DC 10 and, if they are, we might just skip the roll altogether.

"Roll and Tell Me What You Get"

Another technique, even easier than making up a DC, is to ask the player to roll a check and then, from the result, tell them what happens. This gets into the idea that there aren't just successes and failures but shades of gray. Someone who rolls really well may get something more than someone who just rolls in the middle. Someone who rolls a 1 might bring some hilarity to the situation.

When you're basing the results of an interaction on an arbitrary roll like this, focus on the total result and not just the die roll. If someone rolls a 2 but happens to be +12 to that particular skill, they might be clumsy about it but will still get the job done. Players want to feel empowered by the points they have in particular skills so even if their roll sucks, that power should be accounted for in the narrative.

The best thing about this "roll and tell me what you get" approach is that there is no math involved at all. It's even easier than Monte Cook's cypher system.

What About Combat Stats?

Coming up with DCs for interactions with NPCs isn't too hard, but what about combat? Again, we can't have a system as easy as the Cypher System for this, though it would be pretty cool if we could. Instead, we can choose one of two systems that still make it very easy.

The first system is to reskin the NPC with a stat block in the Monster Manual. The NPC section at the end of the book is pretty good for coming up with some arbitrary NPC combat statistics.

The second system is to use some basic math to build a quick stat block. First, you choose the challenge rating of the NPC and the use that to determine the rest. Here's a quick guide:

• AC: Somewhere between 12 and 20.
• Hit Points: 20 hit points per CR.
• Attack Bonus: Somewhere between +3 and +10.
• Damage: 6 damage per CR.
• Saving Throws / Attributes: Wing it. Somewhere between +0 and +10 depending on their strengths and weaknesses.

That's a handy formula to keep in mind which is why we added it to the 5e campaign worksheet.

Mix and Match

As always, you can mix and match these systems together as you run your game and choose whichever one you prefer at the moment. Sometimes its nice to let players know what the DC is for any particular check they're going to make while other times you might enjoy seeing how well or poorly they did without a specific DC in mind.

Sometimes you might want to pull up that mage stat block in the Monster Manual and wrap it around the angry sage the PCs decided to take down. Other times you just whip up some stats on a 3x5 card for that strange rock monster the PCs poked in the eye. Try them all out and see which ones you like.

As for fully statting out that bartender, however, you can probably leave those days safely behind you.

"When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine."

- Pablo Picasso

We dungeon masters have lots of favorite tools. Some of us like to go big with tables full of glorious Dwarven Forge. Others love to talk about the zen-like simplicity of the 3x5 notecard. Some love detailed and lovingly painted miniatures. Some love the unlimited special effects budget of the "theater of the mind".

We all have our favorite tools and this one is mine: the Paizo basic poster map.

Why do I love this laminated fold-up map? For many reasons. Today we'll look at a few ways to use this map beyond its obvious use as a gridded battle map for miniature combat.

Your Portable Horizontal White Board

The flip mat makes a perfect horizontal white board. You can fold it up and take it whever you plan to run a game. It weighs little and packs nicely. When you put it out, it makes a good-sized 24" by 30" surface you can put right in the center of the table between you and all of your players.

You can draw anything you want on this surface. You can sketch out the town in which the PCs explore. You can draw a strange glyph or symbol they saw on a wall. You can write down the stats for monsters so everyone knows what they have to roll to hit them or how much damage those monsters have already taken. If you're not into using 3x5 cards for simple initiative you can write out the initiative list on the flip mat so everyone can see who is up and who is next.

Though the tendency is to draw top-view maps, you can just as easily draw the front of a castle or the side of a cliff full of caves. You can sketch out a huge statue the PCs are attempting to scale. If you're particularly skilled, you can draw three-quarter views or cut-away drawings to give players a different point of view.

There's no limit to what you can draw or write on these things but, because we're used to using them as tactical maps, we tend not to think that way. While tactical maps are the obvious intent, there's a lot more we can do with these wonderful mats.

Different Tactics for Different Folks

If you do end up using the flip mat for tactical combat, you have quite a few options. First you can use it in the typical 5 foot square method. Every square on the map equates to 5 feet in the game.

There are other more abstract ways to use it though. You can draw out a room and then designate zones in the style of Fate. You can also set up bad guys on one side and good guys on the other in a Final Fantasty style abstract combat. This lets you write out damage right next to a monster and move PC miniatures around to designate who is targeting who and how close they are in relative terms.

Like drawing things out on the mat, there are no limits to the styles of combat you can run on such a flexable tool.

Choose Colors To Suit

While the Paizo basic poster map has fine whiteish and sandy terrain on its two sides, you might want to invest in the Paizo Flip Mat Terrain Pack. This one costs a few dollars more but comes with two different fold-out maps with grasslands, caverns, worked stone, and water textured maps. My personal preference is for the darker caverns / grasslands map since the whiter stone doesn't look very dungeony to me. It's nice to have a variety of base textures to use if you do happen to use these mats as a tactical battle map.

Pick Up Some Good Markers

I've tried a variety of different markers on my flip mats over the years and the best ones I've tried are the trusty Expo black dry-erase markers. You can get fancy with colored ones but that can end up taking a lot of time when all you really need is a quick sketch to get everyone on board and then dive into their own minds for the imaginative details.

Good for Any RPG

While we tend to think of these maps for games like Pathfinder or Dungeons and Dragons they can work just as well for more story-focused roleplaying games like 13th Age, Numenera, or Fate. All of these games benefit from having the ability to sketch some things out so everyone can see them.

There are a lot of tools we DMs try from time to time. Some of them work really well. Some of them end up in a box in the closet. One accessory I continually use and find useful is the Paizo Flip Mat. If you don't already have one, give it a try.

Dungeons and Dragons games give us an unlimited special effects budget. Powered by our combined imaginations, we can create entire worlds that simply cannot exist in our own universe. Any boundaries we place on these worlds are placed there by us. Any limitations are are own whether intended or not.

Expanding our imaginations and breaking out of these limitations can give us and our players truly fantastic locations to explore and in which to do battle.

Today were going to look at ten fantastic encounter locations. These ten locations are intended to seed your imagination when building your own locations or to be lifted and used directly.

Think of these as a taste of the places you'll find in the upcoming book, Sly Flourish's Fantastic Locations.

You will note that some of these locations do not work well on a gridded battle map. You are free to either figure out how to conform it to one or try your hand at running narrative combat. In fact, these locations are designed to show both players and DMs how narrative combat supports such wonderful battle arenas.

Each fantastic encounter location includes read-aloud text you can use directly or paraphrase, a description of the location, and area aspects which highlight potential interactive elements of the location. You are intended to use these features however you see fit. They might simply be flavor, players might come up with something interesting to do with them, or you might tie a mechanical effect to them. Use whatever would make the encounter more fun and interesting.

These encounter locations don't include any story or monsters. Add whatever monsters and whatever story hooks fit your game.

The Abyssal Heart

The energy of creation and destruction roars around you. Slabs of cooled black iron float in a sea of fire and electricity. A blast of violet lightning strikes a nearby iron island, sending it flipping over into the chaotic sea. A great crystal pulses with red and black energy, the heart of the Abyss itself.

Area Aspects: Islands of black iron, bolts of violet chaos energy, the pulsing abyssal heart.

The PCs begin standing on unstable slabs of black iron floating over the sea of the chaotic energy that forms the Abyss. The slabs shift and move, some flipping over as bolts of violet energy crack across the surface.

The Great Chain

You stand on the links of a great chain, suspended hundreds of feet over the sea of molten iron below. Each link of the chain must weight as much as a castle. Each of the links in the chain is decorated in large dwarven glyphs of power. Far off, a great creak echoes and the chain shifts, sending the link ahead of you over from one side to the other.

Area Aspects: Massive shifting chain links, dwarven glyphs of power.

What connects the chains at either end is up to you. The PCs are able to cross the chain without difficulty until they engage in combat. The movement of a large weight can shift a link about twenty degrees with a great thunderous screech. Who can say what power the dwarves infused into those glyphs.

The Web

The thick strands of this web stretch over the cliffside and down into the bottomless abyss. Cocoons of creatures, some dead and some still weakly wiggling, sit embedded in the nearly vertical web. What beast lies at its center fills the nightmares of those who look upon it.

Area Aspects: Thick sticky web strands, mysterious cocoons.

Hanging nearly vertical, those that wish to climb the web find the large sticky strands both helpful and frustrating. Moving is painfully slow, requiring great patience to not tear one's self free and fall into the abyss below. The web is highly flammable, burning large sections into ash and sending anything within those sections into the pits.

Idol of the Great One

Red gem-filled eyes shine in the upper shadows of this cyclopean idol. It's twisted grin seems to leer at those who would dare attempt to ascend its surface. A necklace of demonic faces, each twisted into shapes of rage and agony, circles the colossal idol's neck. Thick iron spikes pierce out of the idol's stone surface, many covered with a strange tarry black liquid.

Area Aspects: Black-coated iron spikes, shining gemmed eyes, twisted demonic skull necklace.

Nooks and crannies within the idol's surface can hold all manner of monster protecting the statue and feeding off of it's dark power. The spikes may in fact be poisoned or simply coated with the blood of former victims. The upper reaches of the statue is said to contain a wondrous treasure.

The Storm Motes

Massive stones orbit and collide above the swirling sea of storms below. Great gusts of wind crash against the motes, sending them spinning outward or smashing into one another. Hail of sharp rocks tear across some of the motes without warning. A bolt of black lightning strikes a nearby rock, stealing its strange magic and sending it hurling below.

Area Aspects: Colliding stones, wind gusts, rock hail, anti-magic bolts.

Combat on the rift motes is hideously difficult. Even those who can fly or levitate can find themselves smashed between two orbiting rocks. Bolts of static electricity that seems to dispel magic makes things even more disruptive. Only fools would hope to defeat their foes among the motes.

The Shell of the Beast

In all the ages known to mortals, the beast has walked its path. Great spines and scales cover it's massive back, the plates shifting as the beast moves. Cracks in its shell reveal it's layers of fiery skin beneath the scales. The beast takes little notice of those who ride on its back, for the lion does not hunt flies, but it may choose to swat them if the annoyance becomes too great.

Area Aspects: Shifting scales, fiery skin below, the great swatting of flies.

This beast may take any form relevant to the situation, be it a giant turtle, a huge frog, or a massive dragon that soars in the skies above. It is a creature none know how to kill even for those that would want to. For even the greatest villain cannot stand the thought of bringing such an ancient creature to death.

The Falls

A mile high waterfall flows down from the rocks above into the valley below. Sharp rocks and deep fissures offer just enough purchase to ascend the brutal wall. Rainbows swim in the misty clouds, a faint song in their wake, beckoning those who dare climb the sheer rocks to end their tormented journey with one last embrace of the wind.

Area Aspects: Mile-high falls, singing rainbows, razor-sharp rocks.

This vast waterfall contains numerous tunnels and alcoves from which assailants might attack those who dare climb the waterfall. Aerial monsters in particular are fond of attacking quarry too distracted with the climb to give much of a fight.

The Hanging Cells

Large circular cages of wrought iron hang from huge rusted chains that disappear into the darkness above. The cages swing eternally back and fourth, momentum carried by centuries of inertia. Sharp spikes pierce out from the wrought iron of the cages to dissuade any attempt at rescue. The cage doors have no locks, the dead space below serves as the only lock they need.

Area Aspects: Huge swinging cages, spiked bars, antimagic shell.

An eternal prison for the damned, the environment around the hanging cells prevents any form of magic from taking root. Those placed in the cells are soon forgotten, their very lives stripped from the collective memory of those who once knew them.

The Crystalline Titans

Massive crystalline titans have collapsed and shattered here, their broken bodies spanning a deep gorge. A strange resonance echoes off of the stone walls, its volume rising and lowering. Deep cracks and razor sharp edges line the titanic statues. In the chasm below, the crushed crystal forms a bed of lethal razor-sharp glass shards.

Area Aspects: Huge titans of glass, pool of shards below, harmonic resonance in the air.

These huge crystal titans form a bridge over an otherwise impassible gorge. Formed by heroes and monsters of old, the titanic statues now threaten to crumble underfoot. A well-timed resonance may shatter the columns, sending those atop them into the flesh-flaying pools below.

Build Your Own Fantastic Encounter Locations

Former D&D designer Rodney Thompson once remarked on the "three Fs" of good locations: fantastic, familiar, and functional. We can use all three of these to build our locations, beginning with what makes the location unique and memorable to our players. Next we play off of our players' experiences to make the locations realistic, at least in game-world terms. Finally we build in what makes this location functional for both PCs and NPCs.

Beginning with three simple phrases that define the world (the notable features above, for example) can help us build an interesting location our players will remember for years to come.

A Taste of Fantastic Locations

If you enjoyed these encounter locations, they are just a taste of the upcoming book, Sly Flourish's Fantastic Locations, available this summer.

A while back on the Dungeons and Dragons podcast, D&D design lead, Mike Mearls, described one of the great advantages of narrative "theater of the mind" style combat: the limitless nature of our imaginations.

When we think about the mechanics of running combat without a grid, we might tend to oversimplify the battle. After all, if we're fighting four orcs in a square 30 foot room, it's easy to describe and everyone around the table is going to have a good idea what's going on. But how interesting is that environment? Why even have a battle that's so obviously simple?

It's Not Just About the Monsters

Interesting battles in Dungeons and Dragons aren't just about the monsters. They're about the environment, the situation, and the goals. Instead of figuring out how to simplify the environment and focus on the monsters, we can take advantage of the fact that we don't have to build out a gridded map and build something truly fantastic in the imaginations of our players.

Here are a few examples:

• The PCs are on a crashing airship being attacked by wyverns and flying mages. Can they jump start the elemental engine before the ship crashes?
• The PCs are fighting hordes of goblins in a two hundred foot vertical chute of an underground waterfall. Can they capture their escaped prisoner before the hoards overtake them?
• The PCs battle a red dragon in the center of an active volcano. Can they steal the dragon's prized gemstone before being burnt into cinders?
• The PCs are fighting a beholder in a spherical chamber with passages heading off in all directions. Can they rescue the prince-turned-thrall without being disintegrated?
• The PCs fight giant rats, rat swarms, and wererats on an enormous garbage warren beneath the city sewers. Can they prove themselves to the warren king?
• The PCs climb a sheer cliff while harpies scream and tear at them. Can they get to the summit without being thrown into the gorge below?
• The PCs battle bulettes and umber hulks while mounted on the back of a huge purple worm roaring through the tunnels of the underdark. Can they steer the purple worm away from it's nest in an acidic lake?

We have a lot of other locations like these in our list of nine fantastic encounter locations if you're looking for more.

We have no limits on the size and scope of the battles we want to run. We have an infinite special effects budget. Our only limitations are those needed to keep things believable and the limits of our own imaginations.

Hiding from the Truth

Players and DMs might tend to focus on the mechanical aspects of running narrative combat. How will movement work? What are the distances for ranged attacks? How many monsters will a fireball hit? On the surface, this seems like the harder part of running narrative combat but really coming up with fantastic environments and fun goals is the harder job. We would just rather hide behind mechanical problems than have to really let our imaginations go. That's one of the hard truths of the lazy dungeon master.

Still, it's important that we codify a good set of rules for our players when running narrative combat. This is a game after all. Here at Sly Flourish we've put together a set of narrative combat guidelines for Dungeons and Dragons intended to keep everyone on the same page and keep narrative combat focused on the most exciting parts of the game.

Don't Throw Away the Grid

Of course, this is just one way to run combat in D&D, not the only way. Don't throw out all of those fine poster maps and glorious Dwarven Forge sets yet! We have lots of options for running fun, exciting, and unique battles both on and off the grid as we see fit. The ideas we've talked about here are just one way of running awesome battles.

The important thing is to focus on the rules that matter and abstract the rest. With some simple guidelines in place, we can focus on digging into the creative brains of you and your players to come up with the most fantastic battles any of you can ever imagine.