We can have a lot of personalities at our table and trying to balance them all out to ensure they're all having a good time can be hard work. Feedback is vital to ensure we grow and improve as game masters. It can be hard to get good, useful, and honest feedback for our game, however. The type of feedback we want to receive requires asking useful questions. Today we're going to look at effective questions we can ask our players to get the good feedback to help us improve our game.

"What Did You Enjoy Most About Today's Game?"

This is a good positive question to ask that gives you an idea which parts of the game your players enjoyed the most. You can usually figure out which parts of the game people didn't enjoy just by the process of deduction. It also gives you a clue which types of gameplay each of your players enjoy. Players are also likely to talk about things their characters did, which gives you direct access to the hooks you can use to integrate their character into the game.

Make sure to write down their answers. Keep these notes with your game prep material (which is likely just a couple of 3x5 cards if you're paying attention) and review it before you prepare your next game.

"What Are You Looking Forward To In Our Next Game?"

This is another positive question that gets your players thinking about what they will enjoy later. The answers to this question can directly influence where you take the game in the next session.

You can break this question down as well. What are they looking forward to in the story? What are they looking forward to for their character?

The positive nature of this question is a good way to hear what they want more of without them bashing what has come before. If you use it correctly, this gives players direct agency over the game they're playing. Again, write down their answers and use them. None of these answers do you any good if you don't figure out how to incorporate them back into the game.

What Elements of Today's Game Do You Want to See Again?

The fantasy RPG 13th Age builds this question right into their system with the "Player Picks: Adding Recurring Elements to the Game" section on page 189:

At the end of every game session that has gone well, the GM may ask you to pick an element of the session's fiction you'd like to see as a recurrent part of the campaign. You might choose an NPC, a city, a type of monster, a legend, a magic item that got away, an ambiguously aligned cult of ecstatic dancing, or any other engaging element of the campaign that appeared in the current session.

Sometimes you need to refocus players on specific story elements rather than getting general feedback like "I liked the battles today" or "that dragon was a pain in the ass". Ask questions like "how did you like the bartender, Alvond Foggyglass?" or "what did you think of the Cult of the Devourer? Do you want to see more of them?"

Focusing On The Pillars

Michael Mallen, the Id DM, offers advice that we might focus our questions on the specific three pillars of D&D: interaction, exploration, and combat. We might ask specifically how our players enjoyed scenes based on these three pillars. Here are some examples:

"In today's adventure we had a battle with Talis the White, the interaction with the captured cultist, and the discovery of the trained wyverns. Which of these three did you enjoy the most?"

Tailor Your Own Questions

As you seek to improve your game, you'll want to tailor your own questions to help you get specific feedback on the things you want to improve. Spend some time thinking about your own questions that help you do this. Above all, keep the following ideas in mind as you tune your questions:

• A good question focuses on the game, not the people.
• Keep questions positive and safe. Don't put players on the spot by asking questions that make them think they'll hurt your feelings if they answer the wrong way.
• Be prepared to really listen to the answers players give you. Don't brush them off, interrupt, or think you know what they're really saying until after they've finished describing it. Let them say their whole piece before you respond.
• Use what you receive. Write it down. Review it before you prepare your next session. Try to see how you can hook in their desires.

Do It In Person

You're likely to get better feedback by asking these questions right at the end of the game. Don't count on getting good feedback in email. Many times they'll just ignore it or forget about what really mattered to them. You'll also miss out on their body language when they're answering. The unspoken messages you receive can give you a lot of feedback you won't simply get in text.

Keep It Simple

Above all, keep this whole process simple. People don't want to answer twenty questions about your D&D game. One or two questions is about the best you'll get before the whole thing becomes too formal and weird. Asking what they enjoyed about the game is a nice casual question that can give you a lot of good information.

However you incorporate feedback into your game, you will likely find it to be an invaluable resource as you continue to improve as a GM. Stay open, pay attention, and keep learning. That's the way to become a true game master.

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 4: Gracklstugh. 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
• Running Out of the Abyss Chapter 5: Neverlight Grove

Like previous articles, this article will be packed with blackened soot-covered spoilers.

A City of Rough Politics

There are many different factions at work in Gracklstugh and all of them play rough. There's some subtly to their actions but much of their actions and reactions will be direct and hard. These aren't the drow houses of Menzoberranzan we're talking about. Duergar have the bawdiness of dwarves with the dark streak of slavers in league with Asmodeus.

It's easy to run Gracklstugh as a city full of straight villainy that constantly harries the PCs but its more fun to give the PCs some wiggle room. The various factions of duergar can see a lot of value in using outsiders to further their own gains, even if they're not as subtle about it as the drow. Nearly any duergar group that runs into the PCs may see the greater benefit of using the PCs as pawns in their own struggles rather than just crushing them with hammers.

The Constant Choking Smoke

The constant roar of its furnaces, the continual hammering of iron and steel, and the ever-present choking smog define Gracklstugh. Reinforce these traits often as the PCs travel through the city. The section on Grakle-lung on page 54 is a fun way to directly inflict this strange city's effect on the PCs but simply describing the clang of stone, the heat, and the continuing red haze will reinforce the strangeness of the city to them.

The Drow Emissary

One of the random encounters includes a run-in with a drow emissary house. This encounter can be very useful to reintroduce the PCs to the threat of the Mizzrym hunters who still, after all this time, want to find those escaped slaves. You don't have to roll this encounter randomly and you don't have to randomly choose a house if you don't want to.

There's been a lot of interesting things going on with house Xorlarrin and House Baenre in the various R.A. Salvatore books recently, so they're great houses to introduce. If you aren't inclined to read these books, you can catch up with a few wikipedia summaries of the books including Night of the Hunter and Archmage. This sort of background can make these drow come to life and help in their motivations in how they deal with the knowledge that the escaped slaves of Velkinvelve are alive and well in Gracklstugh.

Themberchaud versus the Cult of the Flame

One of the more interesting struggles is the symbiotic struggle between the dragon Themberchaud and his followers / captors / would-be assassins, the Keepers of the Flame. Both Themberchaud and the Keepers want the PCs to recover the missing dragon egg from the Gray Ghosts down in Whorlstone Tunnels. The Keepers want the egg so they can murder Themberchaud and put a younger and more easily controlled dragon in charge of maintaining the furnaces. Themberchaud doesn't want any of this.

One way the PCs can learn about this plot is through a secret derro slave who actually works as Themberchaud's spy against the Keepers of the Flame. The Keepers are too arrogant to think that a derro would be able to serve the dragon as a cunning spy. This spy of Themberchaud can be the main contact between the red dragon and the PCs as they move through Gracklstugh.

The PCs are left with an interesting choice here. Do they want the anarchy of a rampaging red dragon in Gracklstugh or do they want to succumb to the order of the city and give the egg over to the Cult of the Flame?

Either choice could have interesting consequences. Perhaps if the PCs choose to give it to the Keepers, Themberchaud escapes through the use of a pygmywort mushroom to confront the PCs about it later.

Whorlstone Tunnels

Whorlstone Tunnels are the main dungeon in this chapter and, regardless of why the PCs arrive here, it should be a nice fun dungeon crawl. The primary goal, regardless of the path they took, should be to follow the insane derro, Droki, as he leads them into the den of the Gray Ghosts. The lump of black metal he has is a perfect way to inflict some demon-lord type madness into whoever touches it. You can roll randomly to determine which demon lord's power might have touched it and what the object may look like. If you want, roll 1d8 and consult the list below:

1. Baphomet: a strange maze-like inscription on a metal horn.
2. Demogorgon: A twisted pair of metal tentacles.
3. Fraz Urb'luu: A hunched gargoyle of metal.
4. Graz'zt: A six-fingered hand of iron.
5. Juiblex: A melted statuette covered in eyes.
6. Orcus: A metal skull.
7. Yeenoghu: A three-headed flail.
8. Zuggtmoy: A metal mushroom.

This list can work all over this adventure if you want it to. Whenever you roll for a random encounter, you might roll on this list to see which demon prince might influence or flavor the encounter. It's a great way to continuously reinforce the invasion of the demon princes.

A Word on Madness

The infliction of madness in Out of the Abyss is one of the fun strengths of the adventure. Unfortunately, once the PCs acquire remove curse, the effects of madness have little consequence. Instead, consider going with the more difficult rules that long-term and indefinite madness requires greater restoration to cure. Remove curse and dispel evil can still remove the effects of short-term madness. The madness score, however, can never be removed and continues to rotate as the PCs acquire new madness effects.

Madness can come from just about any form in the game. It might be the insane eye of a follower of Juiblex or a maze-like pattern scrawled on a wall in blood. It might be the gaze of Demogorgon himself or an idol to Yeenoghu. It might be the hunk of metal carried around by Droki. Madness is a fun thread that weaves continually through this adventure.

Bigwigs and Pygmyworts

The strange mushrooms in Gracklstugh that let creatures grow big and small can have a lot of play inside and outside the Duergar city. Remind your players about them if they don't seem to be using them and give them some freedom to come up with creative ways to use them that you might not expect. If they're careful, the PCs will keep a bunch of these to use later. It's also very possible that a pygmywort lifted by Themberchaud's derro spy can save the red dragon from his fate at the point of a Duergar ballista.

Seeding the Next Chapter

As the PCs explore Gracklstugh, consider what seeds you can throw in that will lead the PCs to the next chapter in the book, be it Neverlight Grove or Blingdenstone. If you'd rather run the adventure a bit more open-ended, plant seeds for both and see which way the PCs head. Whatever faction the PCs end up aligning with should give them the solution they need to move onward. This might be an introduction with a caravan master. This might be access to an ancient portal that cuts 80% of the travel time down. This might be a strange stone that knows the way. When your PCs first arrive at Gracklstugh, we should be thinking about how they'll leave it and where they're going next.

Many GMs have begun embracing the fine art of "asking questions" to fill out our game worlds. This gives our players agency to build out parts of the world and parts of the story outside the boundaries of their character sheets. "Do they die?" is one such question along with one of my favorites "describe your killing blow!" Not really a question but you get the idea.

Proposing questions to our players is a powerful weapon in the arsenal of the lazy dungeon master. It creates aspects of the story we would never consider and offloads some of the creative burden we would otherwise keep to ourselves.

Not all questions are good questions, though, and it's not always clear which questions are good and which ones are bad. Today we're going to look at a few of the wrong questions or the dark paths that lead us to these questions. Let's begin.

No One Like Proper Nouns

As writers and as GMs, proper nouns are a pain in the ass. No one can easily come up with a name for a NPC, the name of a gang of thugs, or the name of the local bar easily off the top of their head. That's why there are about a million random name generators. Here are a couple of good ones:

• Sly Flourish's Random Name Generator
• The Donjon Name Generator
• Yafnag

If we don't like coming up with good proper nouns on the spot, why would we force this on our players? We get upset when we ask our players to name their favorite uncle and they come up with "Grumpstershorts" but what do we expect them to come up with? "Aragorn" probably took Tolkein four years to come up with.

This doesn't mean we can't ever ask a player to name something, but give them the time and the tools to do so the same way you'd do it yourself. "What is the name of the fencing school you got kicked out of?" is fine if we follow it up with "Here are some interesting names, take your time and get back to us later."

Don't Put Players on the Spot

Some theatrical players are more than happy to join in all your whimsical improvisation but others don't have either the experience or the desire to leap into the world of improv. Putting players on the spot to come up with some bit of creative genius can cause all sorts of problems. First, it can embarrass them, which is a terrible feeling to invoke at the table. Second, it can screw up your pacing if it takes them time to come up with stuff.

When posing general questions, ask the group and let any one of them answer it. You can start with the one most likely to be comfortable with it but you might be surprised who happens to have an idea.

That said, you don't want to ignore folks who might be a bit more quiet. Try them out and see if they're comfortable answering the question. You might be surprised.

Give everyone a chance but don't put everyone on the spot if they aren't comfortable there.

Don't Ask Questions You Don't Want the Answer To

The best questions to for player-driven storytelling are built to steer things in a general direction and still hands over interesting details to the player. If you're whole game is heading down one path, you're better off asking questions within that path rather than asking a wide open question and letting the answer screw things up.

"Which way do you go?" in an overland scenario can cause all sorts of problems unless you're able to shift the entire world around to ensure the most interesting stuff is always in the direction they choose.

"What strange ruins did you run into during your journey to Terokar?" is a more focused question with clear directions but an opportunity for the players to fill in the details. "What difficulty did you run into during your journey through the Mere of Dead Men?" is a 13th Age style montage question that can add quite a bit of fun but still makes the journey's destination clear.

An Elegant Weapon for a More Civilized Age

Player-driven storytelling is a wonderful technique to tap into the imaginations of your players. That said, we're still playing a game with structures and boundaries. Our players may still not be comfortable thinking outside of these boundaries. Knowing the right questions to ask and the best way to ask them is a key to making this great tool work as well as it can.

Recently I asked the following question on Twitter:

"What is one of your your favorite awesome #dnd moments as a player or DM?" - SlyFlourish

I received a bunch of great answers including the following:

Mine was when my PC (halforc barbarian) help the front line vs waves of orcs (20+) giving room my party raging left and right. - QasemHammerHead

Party lured a gelatinous cube into a near by lime pit reasoning that chemical reaction (base/acid) would dissolve it. Success! - ReallyRhenny

One of our first 5e games, we were 3rd or 4th level and facing a mummy. I landed two back to back 20's with smite = dead mummy. - andyjte

When epic-level Druid (@ThatOnePC) shifted into a tyrannosaur & cast a spell to turn her body to iron to fight a mithral golem. - ThatOneGM

Caves of Chaos Playtest, we made peace with the ogre to trounce. Then I offered him Alchemist's Fire, said it was a heal potion. - SnarkKnight1

100 commoners imprisoned by 20 bad guys. My Warchanter gave every commoner a BAB of +15 and a club and led a revolt. - JohnduBois

My girlfriend's paladin smiting the BBEG dragon on the first initiative count, and killing it through death by massive damage. - BeholderPie

DMing for a party while they battled a demon lord on the backs of giant Eagles. Ended in a 200ft choke slam nearly kill a PC - Purp_crunch

My PC's dropped an Apparatus of Kwalish on the head of a sleeping dragon from 150 feet up. Spoiler - warranty didn't cover it. - jahubbard80

My Dragornborn Rogue jumping off a cliff to attack a dragon in midair. And succeeding. #dnd - TheIdDM

My party perfectly pulling off the Temple Of Doom cut-the-bridge-we-are-standing-on move to kill a bunch of kuo-toa was awesome. - ICBMoose

Monk ally at 1HP, going to die. Polymorphed him into a Giant Ape and he beat the hell out of the boss that nearly killed him. - jaa0109

Killing a Drow captain (that KO'd 3 PCs) by Armor of Agathys, remaining at 1 HP. - VNarvek

They used a slingshot made out of web to shoot a dragonbane sword at a dragon while the cave was collapsing. They rolled nat 20 Eorthan

Resurrecting a deity while facing two other godlike beings and intraparty betrayal. The reborn god tipped the scales. ChrisSSims

just had a my group take on their first dragon They got their hands on an arrow of slaying and then the ranger critted the shot Mentalburnout

The Common Element

First off, I cherry picked some of these tweets and ignored some that didn't fit the theme of this article, so don't consider this a pure scientific conclusion. Still, there is enough of a trend in the responses I received that it pointed towards an interesting direction I hadn't thought about when I asked the question. Here's a summary:

Players love it when they get to break the game.

Now "break the game" might be an arguable term. This is an RPG, after all, and in RPGs, we can do pretty much whatever we want. Still, if we're thinking about the raw mechanics of encounter balance, hit point ratios, the damage per round that any given character can inflict; all of that goes out the window when you give a demon lord a 200 foot suplex from the back of a giant eagle. I wonder what they talked about on the way down.

We GMs who like the codified nature of our favorite RPG's rules might bristle when a player comes up with a really creative way to bypass what we might consider a "balanced" encounter by pulling off some bullshit involving giant ape polymorphing. Players, however, love it. Being able to break the game's boundaries is what makes RPGs fun for them. It can be fun for us too, if we follow one of the core philosophies outlined in the RPG Dungeon World.

Be Fans of the Characters

If we are, first and foremost, fans of the characters, we'll LOVE it when they wipe out dozens of kuo-toa by cutting a rope bridge. We'll love it when they drop a huge iron tower on the head of an ancient red dragon. That sort of scene will forge itself in the memories of players forever.

At a recent Out of the Abyss game, our heroes decided to battle the armies of the pudding king all in one battle - over 100 oozes, puddings, and jellies. They thought tactically and had the friendly deep gnomes use their earthly magics to dig a big pit and, when the armies invaded, they pelted the huge soup of slimes with fireballs and a well-placed firestorm that did 1,000 damage. Does it matter that the warlock who laid out all of this destruction couldn't be hit? Not really! I bet that player remembers the moment for the rest of his life.

How Do You Feel About Natural 20s?

How do you feel when a player rolls a natural 20? Do you cheer in victory along with them? Do you get all mad and shake your head while your well-designed bad guy gets beheaded in a single strike? Being a fan of the characters means loving it when they succeed. There's a good reason GMs shouldn't use that big flashing d20. No one should celebrate when the monsters get a critical hit. That's scary for everyone.

Think about the emotional dynamic of craps tables. Craps dealers make their tips when the players are rolling well. When a good craps table is hot, everyone is happy. The dealers love it, the players love it, everyone's shouting in joy. The only enemies are the dice and the dice don't have feelings on the matter.

Good RPGs are a completely different experience when all of the human beings, players and GMs, are on the same side of the table watching the story unfold.

Adjudicating With Skills

How do we adjudicate the crazy ideas our players come up with? What tools do we DMs have to deal with insane situations we never expected? We need little more than straight forward skill rolls.

Instead of saying whether something is impossible or not, we affix a difficulty to it and let the dice determine what happens. Tools like advantage and disadvantage help us sway the odds a little depending on the situation. Skills, moreso than combat abilities, will often determine the circumstances for fantastic events.

Great, but Not All the Time

One thing that makes these events so memorable is that they're not the norm. They're special. Much of the time battles will go as we all expect. Monsters and PCs smash against each other, d20s are rolled, damage is inflicted, hit points go down. One side, usually the monsters, drops. This is all perfectly fine. We know it. We love it. If every battle was some crazy crashing-airship-into-the-skull-of-an-evil-god moment, the fantastic would become commonplace.

Still, we can keep our eyes open. We can be prepared to let go of our desires to stay within the boundaries of the game. We can keep our eyes out for those fantastic moments. And we can do our part to bring them to life.

When we think about the components we need to run a great RPG adventure, a bunch of things come to mind. Interesting NPCs, fantastic adventure locations, thought-provoking adventure seeds, fun combat encounters, mysteries, and puzzles; these are the building blocks of a fun and interesting adventure. Some GMs will throw story and plot into that mix, although we acolites of the lazy dungeon master know that we may omit story and plot to let them grow from the actions of the PCs.

There's one other set of components that can keep our games interesting and give information over to the players to help them build out the story as they choose courses of actions. We'll call these components secrets.

Update: Two Years of Secrets

This article has been updated since the original written in April 2014. Since then, I've used secrets nearly every time I prepare a game. Along with a starting scene and three to five scene ideas jotted down in a pocket notebook or on a 3x5 card, a list of ten secrets is the very next thing I write down and it works marvelously.

When I look back over the writings in the Lazy Dungeon Master, "Write Down Ten Secrets" is the one chapter I wish I had in the book.

What is a Secret?

For the sake of this article, a secret is a piece of information previously unknown to the PCs that, when revealed, gives them a tweet-sized bit of useful and interesting information.

This secret may be part of an assassin's plot. It might be a rumor about the mad king's terrible rituals. It might be the secret love interest between the prince of smugglers and the advisor of a duchess of Baldur's Gate. Maybe it's a scrap from the half-burned journal entry describing a villainous quest. Maybe it's a piece of the strange history about the dungeon in which the PCs explore.

Secrets aren't an entire story. They're not complete pictures. They're a single point of data in a large pool of undiscovered information. Through the history of a magical sword, the PCs might learn the origin of the bounty hunter who hunted them. It's not the whole bounty hunter's story, but it's a clue into the larger picture.

Secrets Without Context

When we're writing our secrets down, we don't need to give them context. We don't know how the PCs will learn about the mad king's terrible rituals, only that they might unconver it somewhere. When we jot these secrets down in a list of ten, we just put down the secret. It might only be two or three words.

We don't know nor do we care how the PCs will find it out. Maybe it will be an ancient carving on a wall. Maybe it's something whispered in an alley. Maybe its information retrieved from the charming of a thug. Maybe it's a piece of history that comes to a character's mind when they hold a strange small idol in their hands. That last one is important. Passing a secret as part of a skill check is a great way to give a player a reward for their fine roll. If they miss the check the secret may come up some other way.

Some Example Secrets

Here are a bunch of example secrets from a recent Out of the Abyss game.

• The Delzoun dwarves built a hidden outpost near Dark Lake.
• The outpost had a portal to Gauntlgrym.
• The outpost is about 2,000 years old.
• The dwarves had an alliance with Modrons.
• The Modrons kept the magical gate working. Only they can open the gate.
• The Delzoun dwarves fought a war against mind flayers.
• The Delzoun lost the war and retreated out their own gate.
• The dwarves had to fight hundreds of dwarven thralls.
• To this day the mind flayers want to control the gate to Gauntlgrym.
• In a dark decision, the Delzoun destroyed the Modrons so no one could open the gate again.

It's quite possible the PCs never learn all of these secrets. Maybe they can piece some of them together on their own. All the better. It's still nice to have ten secrets on hand.

Developing Secrets

We develop these secrets by asking ourselves a nice simple question:

"What secrets could the PCs uncover next session?"

As we sit down to prepare our game, asking this question drives us to write down our ten tweet-sized secrets. These secrets may never come into play or they might turn the entire course of your game when revealed. Until they come into play, they are fluid entities. They don't become real until the PCs discover them. They might change. They might disappear. We might use four secrets in one session, scrap the other six, and write a new list of ten before our next session.

When preparing our game the lazy way, we can jot down our ten secrets on a 3x5 card. One side of the card might have our starting scene, our three to five fantastic locations or scene ideas, and, on the back, our list of ten secrets that might be revealed next game.

As our game moves forward, we can continually look back over previous secrets and add in new ones to keep our list of ten secrets fresh.

Campaign Secrets

Instead of writing a 300 page document for our huge epic adventure, we can instead do some campaign building by writing down a big bunch of campaign-level secrets. Here are some example campaign secrets for a 13th Age campaign set in shattered lands of Moonwreck.

• The Three have sent mercenaries led by trusted draconic agents into Moonwreck.
• The agents of the Three seek the remains of the White.
• The agents of the Three may be trying to resurrect the White.
• The agents of the Three may be trying to ensure the White never returns.
• The Lich King has a citadel floating over Moonwreck known as Bonespire.
• The Lich King has sent a trio of liches to uncover the mystery of the Dark.
• Local witches and soothsayers say the Dark is a malevolent form of anti-life.
• The Dark may be older than the Ages.
• The Lich King may have used the Dark to battle the White before becoming the Lich King.
• Something happened in the last year to uncover many mysteries buried in the Moonwreck.
• The former Drow city of Darkspire was shattered by the Moonwreck 300 years ago.
• The Drow of Darkspire no longer hear the Elf Queen.
• A Living Temple of the Dark has surfaced in the City of Lost Temples.
• Eziel the Frost Witch likes to devour intelligent creatures to gain their knowledge.
• A mysterious elf was raised by nomads in the village of Blackleaf over 300 years.
• The mysterious elf traveled alone to the Cold Iron Citadel, throne of the Frost Giants.
• The mysterious elf faced and slew King Mountainhammer, lord of the Frost Giants.
• Many tribes humanoid and monstrous tribes of Moonwreck now flock to the banner of the mysterious elf.
• The mysterious elf is called Veseren Moonborn.
• Veseren's eyes swirl with shadow.

These campaign secrets may split and form into all new secrets as our adventurers navigate through the campaign. Some may fall off, never to be seen again. Others might become the main focus of the campaign.

Secrets As Game Preparation

Beyond useful aids to tie players to the story, secrets serve us well in preparing our game. They tell us what's important too. Just like using handouts for game organization we can use these secrets to help us understand the structure and threads of our game. These secrets may be just as useful to us as they are to the PCs who discover them. Good secrets serve double-duty as both organizational aids and useful information to pass to the players and keep things interesting.

Secrets Aren't Drivers, They're Fuel

We don't use secrets to steer the direction of the PCs. We use secrets to give them interesting information that helps them come up with their own directions. Sometimes we might guess what path the players will pick after learning an interesting secret, but the most interesting secrets are the ones that lead to more than one clear direction. Some secrets simplify things, but many secrets complicate things. As we may learn from D&D veteran Teos Abadia it's complexity that builds all the tasty nooks and crannies in our adventures.

If you find yourself adding in secrets to simplify your game and streamline it down to a single clear path, you might be oversimplifying things. Some groups are perfectly fine with this, but others may want to stretch a bit and explore a network of tangled secrets.

The Missing Chapter of the Lazy Dungeon Master

Secrets are powerful magic. A solid list of secrets helps GMs understand the scope and boundaries of their game while, at the same time, they build a rich texture for PCs to discover. When we think about the tools we need for the three pillars of exploration, interaction, and combat; a list of ten secrets is as vaulable to exploration as monster stat blocks are to combat. Next time you're thinking about how to organize your adventure, sit down and jot down ten secrets and see if it works for you.

Since the release of the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons I have had the opportunity to run a full campaign spanning levels 1 to 20. During this campaign, we ran through the two Tyranny of Dragons adventures, Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat and extended beyond the Sword Coast into the depths of the Nine Hells where our heroes cut down tremendous foes, including a few from Kobold Press's upcoming Tome of Beasts. Finally, at level 20, our heroes faced the fully powered goddess of dragons herself, Tiamat.

This experience gave us a wide-ranging view of D&D 5e, a better view than we had when 5e was first released. Before we had assumptions. Now we have experience. Throughout the rest of this article we'll discuss our observations running the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons from level 1 to level 20. Let's dive in.

Recapturing the Feeling of Dungeons and Dragons

A lot has been said about 5e's return to "traditional" D&D. After playing D&D 5e from level 1 to 20, this feeling stayed with us. From the beginning to the end, 5e just plain feels like D&D. These days we have lots of options for our roleplaying games such as Pathfinder, 13th Age, Fate Core, and Numenera. All of these games are great but when it comes to capturing the essence of original D&D, 5e does so from the beginning to the end.

Even after a full year running the game from 1 to 20, it's a joy to pull out the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide, and the Monster Manual and just get down to playing Dungeons and Dragons.

The Death of Superman

From the point of view of the players at our table, the one major observation they had is that, even at high levels, D&D 5e PCs don't feel as powerful as those in the 4th edition of D&D or 13th Age. A lot of this is due to the oft discussed flat math of D&D but a more streamlined set of options and more refined magic item progression feeds into this as well.

It's possible for 5e PCs to spike their scores in one area or another, getting high attack bonuses or high armor classes. Unlike previous editions, though, these spiked characters are likely to have big glowing weak points. That AC 25 fighter might be unstoppable in melee but any spell with a wisdom saving throw is likely to pin her right down. These glowing weak points become even more stark as characters reach higher levels and their saving throws don't change. A DC 11 saving throw at level 2 becomes a DC 21 saving throw at level 18 and the character's saving throw bonus of +2 helps a lot less in the latter than the former.

In D&D 5e, PCs are no longer superheros, they're back to being adventurers. Some players won't like this transition.

Power Spikes and Sharp Edges

D&D 5e is not a uniform game. It isn't perfectly balanced. In D&D 5e's design, the designers made it clear that uniformity wasn't what they were after. fireball, they explained, is simply more powerful than a lot of other spells at the same level. It's meant to be imbalanced because imbalance can be wicked fun. There are lots of these imbalances in 5e and it can drive a lot of DMs crazy. Some spells, abilities, and monsters are simply more powerful than others at any given level or challenge rating.

We could complain about this or we can accept that these imbalances give the game some unpredictable character. We don't really know how every battle is going to play out because it might turn out that the monsters we choose punch way over their weight class or a PC is going to nuke the battle with a well-placed circle of death spell.

There are a lot of examples of these power spikes and sharp edges. A banish cast against a pair of pit fiends does the equivalent of 300 damage with a single failed save. The banshee, a CR 4 monster, can be a serious challenge for high level PCs because the banshee's wail takes away ANY amount of hit points if the target fails the saving throw. The vampire and beholder are both CR 11 creatures but vary greatly in their actual difficulty. A beholder's disintegrate ray does 45 damage on a hit while the vampire does about 8 with a slam attack. Force wall and force cage can trap just about any melee creature in the game small enough to fit in it with no saving throw and no real way to get around it. These examples can go on and on.

And you know what? These sharp edges are ok. This is D&D and imbalances like these have been a part of D&D for four decades.

The choice of acceptance falls to us. Are we ok with the sharp edges or not? If we're not, we have plenty of other systems. If we ARE ok with them, we can accept them, even embrace them, and enjoy our game.

Sometimes these imbalances lead to some awesome stories. Here's an example.

At about 14th level, the heroes of the Sword Coast crawled through the Doom Vaults of the Red Wizards of Thay. There, in a room with a strange pool, they found themselves face to face with an abolith. Our crafty warlock dropped a force cage on the abolith and the rest of the party began discussing how best to kill it with ranged attacks.

Then the abolith started talking to them. It described its plight as a prisoner of the Red Wizards. It described the Abolithic Sovereignty's own struggle against Tiamat. It described the power it could give to the party if only they would allow themselves to become part of the Sovereignty. It knew things about Tiamat and her cult that no one else in the multiverse knew. All they had to do was join with the Sovereignty and these secrets would be theirs. Two of the characters agreed and up the nose the tentacles went!

The abolith wasn't lying to them. The characters got a lot of advantages being part of the Sovereignty, including a dragon-slaying great axe. The Sovereignty got a lot out of it as well. And that's how an abolith in a force cage wins the fight—with some careful conversation.

Poor Encounter Building Rules

Of all the niggly bits of 5e, poor encounter building rules gave me the biggest problem across levels 1 to 20. Encounter building rules in 5e are too complicated and don't work even when you bother to go through the trouble. As we discussed monsters at the same challenge rating will vary widely in their actual threat. Consider the numerous discussions of total party kills due to the rat swarms in the beginning Hoard of the Dragon Queen.

As PCs raise higher in levels, battles become much easier than the encounter building rules would lead you to believe. In particular, adding a PC or two to the group above four greatly increases the power of the group. The rules attempt to account for this but not very effectively.

Beyond not being a very good gauge of difficulty, the default encounter building rules are also very cumbersome.

Encounter building essentially comes down to twisting two knobs, the experience point value of a monster and the number of monsters in the battle. You begin with an experience budget based on the levels of the PCs and then for the whole group. Then you spend these experience points on various monsters you want in the fight. With that done you then use a potential multipler to the budget based on the number of monsters. This might change your budget completely which means going back and either removing monsters or changing the type of monster. This, in turn, might change your multiplier and thus you're going back and forth until you find the right balance between the experience cost of a monster, the number of monsters in the fight, and the multipler based on that number of monsters.

Pain. In. The. Ass.

These complicated encounter building rules are a fixable problem and we lazy dungeon masters have a couple of tools we can use to make our lives easier. First, we can use the Kobold Fight Club to balance our encounters with glorious computational calculations. Second, we can come up with a simpler system for calculating encounters that mimics the systems of 4th edition and 13th Age by matching the amount and power of monsters to the individual power of each PC in a battle.

Like every previous edition of D&D or its variants, encounter building becomes a lot harder as characters get higher in level. Because some battles are completely circumvented with spells like force cage or banishment, you don't really know how hard or easy a battle is going to be. If you build encounters conservatively, you're likely to watch the PCs stomp over them. If you throw in the kitchen sink, things could get really hard on the PCs really fast.

This is a perfect problem for Wizards of the Coast to fix with a set of optional encounter building rules in an Unearthed Arcana article.

Better Rules for Narrative Combat

Beyond better encounter building rules, I really wish 5e included better rules for running abstract narrative "theater of the mind" style combat. I used narrative combat a lot during our 1 to 20 sessions and it was never perfectly clean.

I don't find measuring 5 foot distances to be particularly exciting in a game of fireballs and demon princes. Because 5e retains its traditional Dungeons & Dragons roots, its certainly acceptable that the game doesn't throw out the use of specific distances and makes them the default.

Yet I would love to see Wizards of the Coast release a set of optional rules for running "theater of the mind" style combat. As written, it feels like cheating when we ignore five-foot squares and every casting of thunder wave results in a scientific debate about the Pythagorean theorem if there isn't a set of miniatures on a grid.

Page 249 of the Dungeon Master's Guide helps us adjudicate area of effect spells but it doesn't go far enough to make it easy for players and DMs to run full theater-of-the-mind combat.

This would make another perfect Unearthed Arcana article. We can, of course, use Sly Flourish's Guide to Narrative Combat to help us in the mean time.

A Few Final Thoughts

As we close in on the end of this article, here's a few quick summaries of our experiences running a full-range 5e D&D campaign.

• D&D 5e is imbalanced by design and that's ok. Imbalance leads to interesting stories.
• No monster, even a legendary one, can stand alone against a group of PCs and not get killed fast. Even Tiamat needs a couple of pit fiend bodyguards.
• Players love it when they put down a big bad evil guy with a single casting of feeblemind. Don't steal the joy from them but don't let them get away with it all the time.
• In contrast, players HATE it when their PCs are incapacitated by bullshit spells like feeblemind or force cage. Use them sparingly and give them some way to deal with it.
• Use simpler encounter building rules and accept that they don't always build the encounters you expect.
• Discuss the arbitration of "theater of the mind" combat with your players so everyone understands how it works. Try out the Guide to Narrative Combat.
• Don't worry about rewarding too many magic items. Attunement prevents a lot of abuse and good magic items give players back some of the feeling of being a superhero.

This is the look you have on your face when you critically hit Tiamat with a vorpal sword. How many times do you get to do that in your life?

Bringing Friends Together

When it comes down to it, the real value of a roleplaying game is its ability to bring together a group of friends, share a fantastic story, and have a lot of fun. From the first level to the last, D&D 5e brought us a wonderful campaign, a mountain of laughs, and a great story to share and remember. We had an epic campaign of deep personal stories, epic battles, and unique moments we will remember for the rest of our lives. After running D&D 5e for all 20 levels, I can safely say that, warts and all, I love this game. I can't wait to play it again.

This article is one of an ongoing series of articles covering the fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons adventure, Out of the Abyss. In this article we're going to cover chapter 6: Blingdenstone. 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
• Running Out of the Abyss Chapter 5: Neverlight Grove
• Running Out of the Abyss Chapter 4: Gracklstugh

Like previous articles, gigantic elemental-bound spoilers will be tearing free from the rocky walls so watch out!

Well-Placed Paranoia

Depnding on how the PCs arrive at Blingdenstone, they are likely to face the careful paranoia of the deep gnomes. The deep gnomes of the city have had a hard life here in the city and they have a lot of persistent problems going on right now. Even they are not far enough away or buried deep enough to avoid the problems of the arrival of the demon princes. Here in Blindenstone, that has manifested through the Pudding King and his connection to Juiblex, the Faceless One.

Because of this, the deep gnomes aren't likely to be all that welcoming to our adventurers. They shouldn't be complete jerks, but it will take some diplomacy to get in their moderately good graces, much less get in the door.

The Demon-Touched Elementals

One way the adventurers can show their worth is through an encounter that puts Blindenstone in danger. When the adventurers arrive, the deep gnomes summon a set of elementals as guards. The caster of these elementals could lose control of them as the elementals succumb to a demonic influence. The elementals, for example, could be touched by Juiblex. As the svirfneblin lose control of them, eyes appear all over the elementals' rock-hard skin and acid begins to drip from their fists inflicting an extra 4 (1d8) acid damage per hit.

When our heroes help the sverfneblin defeat the elementals, the deep gnomes begin to not only trust but also witness the power of the adventurers. This is more than enough of a motivation for the svirfneblin to let the adventurers into the city and ask the PCs' help with the problems facing Blingdenstone.

The Main Quest: The Gateway to Gauntlgrym

Depending on how we've been running the adventure, we could insert a single big and powerful quest for our underdark adventurers to accomplish: find the gateway to Gauntlgrym.

Gauntlgrym is really far away from the Dark Lake and all of the areas around it, which includes all of the areas in the first half of the whole Out of the Abyss adventure. One way our heroes might cut some time off of that journey is to find an ancient gate to Gauntlgrym hidden and buried by the svirfneblin. Only the two leaders of Blingdenstone know where this gate is and how to get there. They're willing to give this information to our heroes for a price.

Blingdenstone's Price: The Three Quests

There are three main quests our adventurers can undertake in Blingdenstone to learn the location of this gate to Gauntlgrym. These include solving the wererat problem, defeating the pudding king and his army of slimy things, and stopping Ogremoch's Bane. It isn't necessary that the adventurers undertake all three quests. It's nice for the players to have a bit of a choice in the matter. For example, they might send Glabbagool (who went by the name Skelly Jelly in our own game) as a spy into the Pudding King's empire. Glabbagool can give the PCs valuable information when the adventurers return from solving another quest.

Each of these three quests has different ways they can be solved and its nice to leave these options open. Sure, fighting an army of slimes might be too hard on the surface but not if the adventurers are smart enough to dig out a huge pit, fill it with the slimes, and then blast them to death with fireballs.

Maybe the adventurers convince the wererats to join back with the citizens of Blingdenstone or maybe they clear the wererats out to the last wisker. One solution doesn't have to be better than another.

The PCs might not even have to complete all three quests before the deep gnomes give up the info they have on the gate to Gauntlgrym. Maybe if the deep gnomes and the wererats have banded together and already taken care of the Pudding King, they decide they can handle the Orgremoch's Bane situation on their own. The city is a dynamic place and not everything needs the attention of the characters all the time.

A City as Big As You Want

As written, Blingdenstone is a big city with a lot of things going on. It's up to you on how much you want to expose to the characters. Maybe it's just a handful of NPCs including Dorbo and Senni Diggermattock and maybe Nomi Pathshutter. You can move any quests or interactions to these three NPCs so you're not overwhelming your players with even more NPCs for them to remember. It all depends on how long the characters are going to stay in Blingdenstone or how soon you want to move them on. The same is true for the side adventures and the ghosts. You can add what you want or just simplify the whole thing down to the three big quests.

The Foaming Mug is a nice relaxing place for our characters who have had it rough for many months of travel through the underdark. It's also a nice center for rumors in the area. It can make a nice local headquarters for our heroes as they solve Blingdenstone's problems.

A Sandbox Within a Sandbox

The Blingdenstone chapter is a nice sandbox within the larger sandbox of the whole Out of the Abyss adventure. We'll likely get the most fun out of it running it that way. Put the characters in the center of it, lay out some interesting hooks, introduce some interesting NPCs, put them in some hard situations, and let them surprise you with the choices they make.

Once they leave Blingdenstone, the deep gnomes can give the characters a map and key to a hidden magical portal to Gauntlgrym but they might have a surprise or two in store for them before they can reach it! We'll go over those ideas next time.

In the mean time, keep your torches lit, your food dry, and your eyes peeled for wayward mind flayers as you head ever deeper into Out of the Abyss!

Note: this article has been updated since the original published in April 2013

One of the things that sets Dungeon World apart from d20-based RPGs is the inclusion of a core mechanic with partial successes. Instead of a mechanic with only either success or failure, such as rolling 1d20 + skill modifier and matching it against a difficulty check number, Dungeon World gives a wide middle range of partial successes. In fact, given the 2d6 curve of Dungeon World, the odds are higher that you'll have a partial success than a full success or full failure.

There's no reason we can't steal this idea and add it into our d20-based RPGs like the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder. Though these games have a focus on "roll a d20, add a modifier, check against a DC score", we can change this slightly to "roll a d20, add a modifier, and see what the results are". We don't actually NEED a DC score for many things.

Climbing the DC Ladder

Typically when we run our Dungeons & Dragons game, we choose a difficulty for any particular action. In D&D 5e, this ladder is between 5 (very easy or "why the hell are we rolling for this?") to 30 (very hard or "I'm pissed at you and really don't want you to succeed."). Generally speaking, we're picking numbers between 10 and 20 for this DC. When players roll, add their skill or modifier, and then tell us the result, we check to see if it succeeded or failed.

It doesn't have to be this way. Instead of picking a single DC, we might pick a range of DCs to represent shades of gray. For example, Say a PC is drawing negative energy out of a powerful magical pillar tied to the Shadowfell. We might set the lowest DC for this to 13 and the highest DC at 18. Instead of succeeding or failing, we can describe different results depending on which DC they successfully met. Rolling below a 13 for example, causes tremendous negative energy feedback resulting in necrotic and lightning damage to the PC attempting the check. With a result between 13 and 17, the wizard has successfully deactivated the pillar. On a result of 18 or above, the surge of energy flows into the wizard and gives the wizard advantage on its next attack roll or arcane skill check.

We can set a number of skill DCs for a given situation. Very low results usually do something bad to the PC. Mid-range results are successes but with complications. High results succeed. Very high results give some major advantage to the PC.

Overachieving

What if the PC blows way past whatever DC you had in place? Reward them for it. Show them how much better they are than this pitiful challenge. For story-based skill checks its easy to describe how much better they did.

Consider the scene in Romancing the Stone when our heroes approach the local drug kingpin in his lair. After a tense discussion involving a pistol, the villain looks out the little slot in his door and says "You're Joan Wilder? The novelist??". That's a critical diplomacy check right there. In our game, maybe that cynical guard is actually a huge fan of the PC asking the question. Maybe the PC had saved the villain's cousin six years back and it ends up saving the lives of the PCs. Overachieving should never get a PC in trouble. It should offer something even greater than what they had set out to do in the first place.

Winging It

Many GMs already do something like this. They don't have a fancy chart giving them a range of successes or failures, but when they hear about a particularly high or low roll, they describe a greater success or terrible failure. Sometimes, when a player sees how low he or she rolled, he or she might describe the critical failure without the GM's help.

In reality, we probably don't need a DC at all. We ask for a check, the player rolls the check, we look at the result and we describe the outcome. No DC needed.

This turns skill checks into an analog gauge rather than a binary "success" or "failure". There's not a lot of preparation required for this sort of change. All that's required is trust between a player and a GM that the GM isn't trying to screw them and is actively using this power to make the game more fun.

We might keep some mechanical tools at our disposal for particularly fantastic rolls. Maybe the character gains advantage on its next attack or skill check. Maybe damage is boosted. Maybe monsters become vulnerable to particular types of attacks. Maybe the skeptical castle guard just became the PC's new best friend. There are lots of ways for us to reward high successes and we should keep them in mind.

Fail Forward

A lot of game masters and newer RPG systems have discussed the concept of "failing forward". Instead of a failed skill check resulting in a monologue of disaster from the GM, a failure can instead put PCs in a tough spot. Maybe they fall prone. Maybe they lose a valuable resource. Maybe they are forced into a more desperate situation. Dugneon World refers to these as "hard moves" that we make to put PCs in a tough spot.

Failing forward means putting PCs on a new path, a hard path, that still propels the story forward. It's not easy to do. Saying "no, you fail" is a lot easier than changing the course of a scene. This is why a lot of us haven't done this for most of our GM lives.

Adding levels of success puts a lot of pressure on GMs. Instead of two potential outcomes for a skill check we could have twenty. A good GM can come up with dozens of variants to a situation depending on this role and this, of course, is the advantage of having a human being running these games. All of this depends heavily on good improvisation skills, a key skill of the Lazy Dungeon Master.

Partial Successes

Describing partial successes is equally hard. With a partial success, you give something and you take something away (what Dungeon World refers to as a "soft move"). PCs may get what they want, but not through the obvious method or in the way they want it. Complications occur. Maybe they got attention when trying to pick that lock. Maybe they absorbed the magic of the rune and have to pour it out before it devours them. Something good happens and something bad happens. You have to decide what they are. Like many storytelling areas of D&D, this could potentially be a bit of negotiation between you and the player. Stretch your improv muscles with a bit of "yes and" back-and-forth. 13th Age designer, Rob Heinsoo, is oft described as running "lets make a deal" sort of negotiations in these sorts of situations.

A Conversion to Analog

As human beings, we don't have to live with zeros and ones, "yes" or "no", or success and failure. We have huge ranges we could work within as players roll skill checks. There are as many possible outcomes for a skill roll as there are numbers on the die and every one of those outcomes could fork our story in a new direction. Step back from the DC ladder and enjoy the shades of gray.

Note: This article has been updated since the original published in February 2013.

There are few games more different from D&D than the story-focused RPG Fiasco. In Fiasco, a group of players determine backgrounds, relationships, actions, successes, and failures through cooperative storytelling and a few rolls of the dice. There's no GM involved.

Other games have picked up on the idea of building character interrelationships right into the game. Dungeon World's character sheets include a number of potential inter-party relationships on the sheet, as do the pre-generated character sheets for Numenera.

The 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons includes a number of character development pieces such as traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws. The Player's Handbook includes many potential options for these character background concepts but we can easily make up our own.

These character traits, however, don't include inter-party connections, but this is something we can easily fix. The "bond" box on the D&D 5e character sheet is a perfect place to plug in a relationship tied to another PC.

Why Tie PCs Together?

Pre-determined relationships between characters is a great way to tie an entire adventuring group together before the story even begins. It avoids the difficult question of "why would I go along with the group?" that can screw up games early on or when the PCs start to have divergent opinions about the challenges they face.

Bonded characters ensure groups have a reason to work together. They aren't just mercenaries who met up in a bar. With these bonds in place we know why they are together.

Tying PCs together through bonds also works very well for single-session games. It quickly ties the group together into a supportive and cohesive knot and focuses the limited time of a single-session game on the story itself.

Twenty Sample Character Bonds

Below is a sample of potential bonds that tie characters together.

1. Is a sibling of
2. Was saved by
3. Served with
4. Protected by
5. Adventured with
6. Is a friendly rival of
7. Childhood friend of
8. Is magically bound to
9. Survived with
10. Escaped with
11. Apprentice of
12. Acolyte of
13. Idolizes
14. Drinking buddies with
15. Business associate with
16. Lost a bet to
17. Is indebted to
18. Was trained by
19. Dueling partner of
20. On the run with

How to use this list

During character creation, each player either chooses a bond or rolls 1d20 to determine a bond. They then either pick another character to share that bond or roll randomly to determine which character they are bound to.

Once they know who they are bound to and the general nature of the bond, the players can discuss the details of that bond. Perhaps instead of just being siblings, they're actually twins. Perhaps the bet the warrior lost to the wizard has forced the warrior to travel with the wizard for one year. Perhaps the barbarian is an apprentice to the ranger's mastery of nature.

These discussions are important to reinforce the bond and to give the player agency over the bond's nature. As a DM, you can suggest how to better tie the bond to the details of the story.

Generating a Larger Story

Some interesting things can happen as players discuss their bonds. New stories develop and the hierarchy of the group can change. Maybe, once the bonds are in place, the group has a clear leader and clear followers. The overall dynamic of the group can change before we ever drop that group into the world. These discussions can also change the very world around them. New religious orders spawn into existence. Guilds of wizards form out of thin air. Dangerous assassins step out of the shadows. The threads of these bonds not only tie PCs together but can weave into the very fabric of the world itself.

Tailoring this list

This list is just one example. If you want characters to be more closely tied to your campaign's theme, you can build a custom set of bonds that connect characters together and to the story.

Here are ten bonds that could tie characters to the campaign of Curse of Strahd.

1. ____ and I seek out our lost Vistani family.
2. ____ is prophesied to save me from a terrible fate.
3. ____ found me in the bowels of a haunted ruin.
4. ____ is oath-bound to save me from a terrible curse.
5. ____ and I are the only survivors of a horrible werewolf attack.
6. ____ and I share dreams of exploring a huge and horrible cliff-side castle.
7. ____ and I are sworn to recover the Icon of Ravenloft for our fallen church.
8. ____ and I are sworn to recover the Sunsword for our order.
9. ____ and I were sent by our arcane order to recover the history of Ravenloft.
10. ____ and I have been sent by a seer to save the daughter of a noble lord from a terrible fate.

Keeping the List Positive

Some RPGs include bonds that build conflict into the party. One character might be distrustful of another, for example, or another might disdain another for their use of magic. The bonds included here avoid these sorts of conflicts. In some story-focused games, Fiasco included, these antagonistic bonds can add a lot of interesting conflict into the story. In our traditional D&D games, however, these conflicts can end up taking the whole game off the rails. Thus our bonds are positively charged.

Reinforcing the Unwritten Rule

Just as we get together to share a story with our friends every time we sit down to play D&D, we intend for our characters to join together and face their challenges as a party. These inter-character bonds build in a strong network that ties our characters together, reinforces their place in the world, and builds fertile ground for fantastic adventures.

This article is the final of an ongoing series of articles covering the fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons adventure, Out of the Abyss. You can find previous articles here:

• 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
• Running Out of the Abyss Chapter 5: Neverlight Grove
• Running Out of the Abyss Chapter 4: Gracklstugh
• Running Out of the Abyss Chapter 6: Blingdenstone

Like previous articles, this article will contain deadly spoiling secrets that might kill you with a single word. Be warned!

Not By the Book!

Unlike previous articles, this article doesn't follow the adventure at all. Instead, we're going to use this chapter to tie off loose ends that the PCs have seen or caused throughout the previous chapters. We're also going to use this moment to come up with a big bang of a conclusion in case we're only running the first half of this adventure.

In short, don't expect this article to follow what's in the adventure itself. Instead, use it as one example of what we might do with that chapter to tailor it for the group for whom we're running Out of the Abyss.

The First Loose End

As this chapter begins, our fearless heroes are heading towards Gauntlgrym. If you used the ideas in our previous article on Blingdenstone, the deep gnomes gave our party a map and a key to a long-buried chamber containing a gateway to Gauntlgrym that will save them months of travel through the underdark.

Before our heroes reach this gate, however, we can tie off the first loose end. Depending on what happened to the PCs throughout the rest of this adventure, this loose end could take many forms. Maybe it's a murder squad of Duergar from Gracklstugh bent on revenge. Maybe it's a fungal lord seeking to recover Stool from the PCs as part of Zuggtmoy's wedding. In our game it was Themberchaud the red dragon who managed to escape from Gracklstugh before the Duergar could assassinate him.

Whatever group it happens to be, we can build a fun encounter by having the PCs meet up with this vengeful group at one of the random environments from chapter 2. This keeps things interesting for both us and our players since none of us know exactly where this encounter is going to take place or how it is going to play out.

This encounter is just the warm up round, however. It's designed to help us tie off any outlying thread before we get into the main event and the big surprise.

The Chambers of the Gate

Following the map given to them by the deep gnomes, our heroes come to an invisible doorway in the rock that opens with the aid of the key given to them by the deep gnomes of Blingdenstone. When they do so, they immediately feel that some sort of magical ward has been broken. If they investigate thoroughly, they will come to realize that old scrying protections on these lost chambers has now been broken. Outside magical eyes can see this gate.

When our adventurers enter these chambers, they find an ancient gateway built by the Delzoun dwarves thousands of years ago. It hasn't been touched for centuries since the dwarves and gnomes of Blingdenstone sealed it off both physically and magically from prying eyes.

Mosaics and carvings on the wall depict mighty battles of dwarves against drow, goblins, and orcs. Among the dust of the halls, the PCs can find the bones of dwarves who seemed to battle dwarven thralls of mind flayers. We can reveal all of this in the form of tweet-sized secrets that the PCs uncover as they investigate. This is also a foreshadow of things to come.

The Conclusion of House Mizzrym.

The main event for chapter 7 is the final confrontation between the drow hunters of House Mizzrym and the PCs who escaped from Velkenvelve so many ten-days ago. It is possible throughout the rest of the adventure that House Mizzrym has formed an alliance with another group, ideally one the players will recognize. In my game, this was House Barrison Del'Armgo, second house of Menzoberranzan. Our heroes, you see, had taken to forging documents claiming to be on retainer by House Barrison Del'Armgo and the house got wind of it. Along with the hunters of House Mizzrym, more powerful fighters and mages of House Barrison Del'Armgo too hunted the PCs.

With the scrying magics gone, now it is possible that House Mizzrym can teleport in their hunting party or finally catch up with the adventurers in the chamber of the gate to Gauntlgrym.

The Set-Piece Battle: The Gate of Gauntlgrym

Since this scene will be the the final big conclusion of the adventure, it warrants setting up a nice set-piece battle. You might build a portal prop and use some other 3d terrain to build a fun tiered chamber with lots of interesting places to go and things to do.

This set-piece represents the ancient gateway to Gauntlgrym. The Delzoun dwarves, in our little fork of the world here, built a gateway near Blingdenstone thousands of years ago to give them quicker access to the eastern chambers of the underdark. When the mind flayers sought to use it, the Delzoun dwarves sealed off the gate. Now the gate lies dormant but our adventurers have the key to open it.

How you define this key to opening the gate is up to you. In our game, an NPC with the party had the secret to opening the gate but it would take a number of rounds to do so. You'll see why this is important in a moment.

Meanwhile, our party gets a nice solid fight against their hunters, the drow of House Mizzrym. We shouldn't get too gonzo with this fight. This is our players' chance to really enjoy the growth and power of their characters. Put some drow elite guards, drow priestesses, a drow mage maybe, and a big pile of regular drow soldiers so PCs with area effect spells can blow down big swaths of drow jerks. It should be a tough fight but doable. If the PCs find ways to totally screw over these drow, let them do so. Let them use all of the save or suck effects they want. This is their fun revenge for their imprisonment so many months ago.

When they defeat House Mizzrym, it's time for the second wave. Again, in our game, this was House Barrison Del'Armgo. These drow didn't care about House Mizzrym losing to the adventurers but Barrison Del'Armgo would be damned to let the PCs simply walk away. This force is significantly more powerful including multiple elite guards, mages, and priestesses.

Wave 2: The Coming of Orcus

But then something terrible happens. A pair of gateways opens up, this time psionic gates, and in float two mind flayer arcanists. They begin to open up an even bigger gate, much bigger, and out steps the very demon prince of undeath himself—Orcus.

This is our change to remind the players about the true chaos that's taken hold of the Underdark. The Prince of Undeath, you see, also wants to open the gate to Gauntlgrym and he doesn't care who stands in his way.

At this point, in our game, I handed over reduced stat blocks for each of the drow to each of the players. They had the chance to roleplay these drow however they wanted. The chaos of seeing Orcus show up is enough to shake anyone's resolve or past alliances.

It's also time for a madness check. A DC 16 charisma check sounds about right to stave off the madness of seeing Orcus directly. Those who fail roll on the madness chart in the Dungeon Master's Guide. This includes the drow. This madness lasts for 1d10 minutes with a couple of caveats. Mad characters may make another saving throw at the end of their turn, if another creature spends its action to shake them out of it, or if they take damage. This makes madness not quite so horrible.

As for Orcus, we're playing with his actual stat blocks found at the end of the adventure. He's not too worried about the situation so he doesn't just go crazy but he isn't afraid to use power word kill from his wand. He'll probably start with the drow but eventually you might start rolling randomly against all opponents to see who he hits. The key here is to spread his attacks across all of the opponents, not just the PCs.

There are a few potential ways the PCs might deal with this. They might realize that the key to Orcus's arrival are the two mind flayers. If the mind flayers are killed, Orcus goes away. They might also just choose to wait it out until, three rounds from Orcus's arrival, the gate to Gauntlgrym opens and the PCs can escape with the gate slamming shut behind them.

This probably goes without saying but you'll want to be careful how you run this fight. A total-party kill in the final battle isn't much fun but they also shouldn't feel like they're fighting a much weaker version of Orcus. If they DO die, and you're not a complete bastard, you might have them awaken in Gauntlgrym itself, being saved by one or more of their NPC allies who were left behind to steer Orcus away from the gate before it closed for good. There are lots of potential options here.

However they get out of the situation, the PCs end up in the dwarven city of Gauntlgrym and the city's new king, King Bruenor Battlehammer. He will have heard of the battle against Orcus from those dwarves guarding the gate's other side but might dismiss it as clear madness. He does know, however, that the darkness of the abyss has opened up in the underdark and, as those with the most experience, asks the PCs to step in once again into the belly of the beast to find the source of this corruption and close it for good. The choice lies with them, of course. Retire happily back to the surface or dive down deep into the abyss once again!

Your Results Will Vary

Of course, this is just one way to end Out of the Abyss at the mid-point of the adventure. Given how many different paths each group of players might have followed throughout the adventure, its important to tailor this final piece around the choices they made, the things they enjoyed, and the loose ends they want to tie up. Build it out however makes sense for you. You might decide the whole thing with Orcus is just all too much and leave it to a nice big battle against the drow of House Mizzrym, and that's totally fine. The most important thing is that you and your players enjoy the conclusion of the campaign.

That takes us to the end of our play-through of Out of the Abyss. Time to take a step into another darkness and face the Curse of Strahd!

Sometimes we DMs really love to throw a single powerful monster against our PCs. In the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons, these single powerful monsters are called "legendary" monsters. They have a special set of abilities that put them a step above the rank and file nasties in the Monster Manual. These effects are straight forward. Legendary monsters get legendary actions, legendary resistance, and, in some cases, lair actions.

Today we're going to look at a simple method for turning any monster into a legendary monster that will shake the resolve of the PCs and give the players a thrill.

The Basics: Legendary Actions and Legendary Resistances

There are some easy mechanics we can throw right on any monster to make it "legendary". The first, and easiest, is legendary resistances. Legendary resistance can be found in any listing of a legendary monster in the Monster Manual. Here's a summary:

Legendary Resistance (3/Day). If the monster fails a saving throw, it can choose to succeed instead.

This is a simple but powerful ability. It essentially removes any save or suck effect from ruining the legendary monster's ability to threaten the PCs. This can be a frustrating ability, though, so you'll likely want to give players a hint that their big save or suck ability isn't likely to affect this monster. More on this later.

Legendary actions are a little more difficult to figure out. Stock legendary monsters usually have a set of special abilities designed for legendary actions but our custom legendary monster will not. Here's the boilerplate for legendary actions:

The legendary monster can take 3 legendary actions. Only one legendary action option can be used at a time and only at the end of another creature's turn. The legendary monster regains spent legendary actions at the start of its turn.

The easiest way to handle this is to give your monster an extra attack as its legendary action. Some monsters might have other abilities you can substitute in as legendary actions. You'll have to gauge the power of these abilities to see if they deserve one, two, or three points to activate.

In general, the easiest way to handle it is to give the legendary creature an extra single melee or ranged attack for one legendary action.

Tweaking Hit Points

Now our legendary monster has some better defenses against save or suck effects and more actions per turn than your standard beast. What else should we tweak?

Generally speaking, we shouldn't have to mess with attack scores or its armor class. If it fits the monster, you can tweak attributes a little bit but that is probably more troublesome than its worth.

Instead, focus on hit points. This is a much bigger version of that standard monster you're changing and bigger monsters have more hit points. There are two ways to do this.

First, consider maxing out the creature's hit points rather than using the average. This is easy to do in the middle of your game. Look at the monster's hit dice, multiply the dice by the max amount on each die, and add any hit point modifier to it.

There's another easier way to handle this as well and that's to double the monster's hit points. This puts the monster outside of the normal range any version of that monster should have, but it won't be too far off. Maxing hit points is certainly more accurate but doubling is easier to do and will make that legendary creature even more challenging.

Flavoring Your Legendary Monster

As it stands, giving monsters more hit points, legendary resistance, and legendary actions is pretty boring. Sure, it's a big version of a monster, but why?

Flavor is what will bring this terrible creation to life. What makes them so powerful? Have they been touched by a dark god? Are they the spawn of a demon lord? Are they infused with the glyphs of a powerful wizard? Think about what makes this legendary monster so powerful.

Legendary Identification

Should you let your players know they're facing a legendary creature? Should they know what it means if they do? Different DMs will have different opinions on this. I lean towards the 13th Age style of "play in the open". You don't have to break the narrative to give them a peek behind the curtain:

"Grash, the legendary nether-touched orc lord stands before you. You feel deep down that this foe possesses great strength and resolve."

As we mentioned earlier, legendary resistance can really frustrate players if they blow a powerful save-or-suck spell like dominate monster or banishment on a legendary creature only to have it fail. Sure, it knocks one use of legendary resistance away, but they'll have to hit it with two more of those before they have a chance at landing a spell. Usually its better to give the player a clue that their save-or-suck spell isn't likely to affect such a legendary foe.

So yes, much like how Fallout 4 places a star next to a legendary monster's name, we too can give our players a clear indication that the foe they face is clearly a legendary foe and should be treated as such.

No Monster Fights Alone

Because our legendary monster feels so powerful, we're tempted to have it fight a single group as a solo monster. Even though our monster has legendary resistances, however, doesn't mean something won't completely paralyze it. Force cage, for example, could still trap it. All creatures, including legendaries, could probably use some help. What minions and bodyguards does this legendary foe have with it? In some cases, these bodyguards can end up more dangerous than the legendary creature itself.

When building an encounter around a legendary version of the creature, it's best to treat it as two creatures at the same challenge level. If you're designing an encounter around four CR 5 creatures and want to make them legendary, have the legendary creature count as two.

Tying Into Out of the Abyss

The Dungeons and Dragons super-adventure Out of the Abyss is a great place to drop in some legendary monsters. The corruption of the abyss into the underdark could have twisted many powerful foes into legendary champions of any particular demon prince. This corruption is a great opportunity to flavor a legendary monster. Here's an example:

Grash, the Legendary Gnoll Fang of Yeenoghu

There's one really powerful effect we can add to a legendary abyssal-touched creature in Out of the Abyss: madness. At some point in the battle, the legendary abyssal creature may put an abyssal eye onto a target, invoking a madness in its opponent. The targeted creature must make a charisma saving throw with a DC somewhere between 12 and 15. You can calculate this saving throw if you want using the rules in the [Monster Manual] or just wing it. Generally DC 12 to DC 15 is right. On a failure, the creature succumbs to short-term madness found on page 259 of the Dungeon Master's Guide. These are really powerful effects, however, so be careful.

Risk for Reward: Adding Treasure to Legendary Monsters

Powerful monsters should have powerful loot. There are a couple of ways to add some good rewards to a legendary monster. The first is to give it a CR appropriate treasure horde, re-rolling on the table if no permanent magic items happen to show up. A second way is to roll ahead of time and pick out and flavor some interesting items to arm your legendary creature so it might get a chance to use them against the PCs in the fight.

You can also use K. Walter's random treasure generator to run a bunch of parcels and then pick the one you'd like to affix to your legendary monster.

Of course, you can always hand-pick some interesting loot to award to players based on items that fit their characters. That's usually the hardest to improvise but is often worth the effort given how much joy it gives to the player.

A Quick Way to Add Some Flavor

Throwing some legendary monsters into your game is a great way to shake things up. Players won't be expecting it and everyone enjoys some added challenge now and again. Give it a try.

We here in the Sly Flourish laboratories continually look at where GMs can get the most from their effort and time. This all led to the book The Lazy Dungeon Master where we propose that limiting the time we spend preparing our game can actually make our games better.

Many activities potentially offer little value for the amount of time we spend. I would suggest these few:

• Designing your own monsters.
• Writing a detailed history of your own game world.
• Writing a significant amount of adventure text.
• Planning step by step how the PCs will get form point A to point B.

I also submit a few ways we might maximize our preparation time to make our game great:

• Reading over the backgrounds and desires of the PCs.
• Parceling interesting treasure for the PCs to acquire.
• Deciding how our next session will start strong.
• Designing some fantastic locations our PCs might visit.
• Thinking from the point of view of the antagonists in our campaign.

It's this last one that we'll discuss in the rest of this article.

Back in 2013, Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel published the roleplaying game Dungeon World, a fantasy RPG based on the story-focused principles and mechanics of the game Apocalypse World. Dungeon World received a lot of well-deserved attention for its focus on player-driven storytelling and world building, even getting the attention of lead D&D designer, Mike Mearls who said:

"Even if you're not looking for a new RPG, Dungeon World has some nifty elements like fronts that are useful in D&D."

You can read further about Dungeon World fronts and a previous Sly Flourish article about using Dungeon World Fronts in D&D.

Dungeon World fronts are a great way to move your mind away from designing plots and instead driving the story forward through the actions of the most influential aspects of the world. Fronts are the oncoming storms soon to smash into our PCs.

The easiest fronts to define are major NPCs. Depending on the scope of your game, these NPC fronts might be Alesburn the influential sheriff or Orcus Prince of Undeath. Focusing fronts on NPCs works well since they're so clearly atomic entities. Other more nebulous fronts can work, like a malevolent plague sweeping across the land, but might be harder to get your head around. It's also hard to see through the eyes of a massive blighted storm overtaking the forest of Moonwood.

Simplifying Fronts

As written Dungeon World fronts are already nicely stripped down ways to think about the major threats in your shared world. Some of the concepts, however, can be a little obscure and, for some, not as useful. Instead, we can break down fronts into a more simplified form. Here's an example:

• Who is the major NPC?
• What is their goal?
• Who is their lieutenant?
• What group enforces their will?

This alone is usually enough to build out a nice front. In any campaign its probably worth having three such fronts to keep things complicated and engaging. As fronts get wiped out, new fronts might appear. More than three might become too complicated to manage. Fewer than three makes the game feel a little too simple.

Grim Portents, the Impending Doom, and the 5x5 Method

Apocalypse World had a wonderfully named component referred to as the Armageddon Clock. Dungeon World renamed this the Impending Doom. If the PCs do nothing, what horror will villain unleash on the world?

The impending doom is led to by grim portents. What are the visible steps the villains will take to inflict their doom upon the world? This is very similar to Dave Chalker's 5x5 Method in which you define five major threats and the five steps those threats need to take to reach their goal. It's a simple and elegant solution that builds a wonderfully complicated nest of problems and threats in which your PCs can get involved.

It also doesn't take a whole lot of time.

It certainly doesn't need to be five steps either. Three steps are usually easier to come up with.

Icewind Dale and the Eyes of the Stone Thief

If we look at the D&D adventure Legacy of the Crystal Shard, we can see three clear NPC fronts and three clear impending dooms:

• Hedrun The Ice Witch is bringing the beasts of the Spine of the World under her control to wipe out Ten Towns.
• The undead remains of Akar Kessel uses the power of Black Ice to return him to power.
• Vaelish Gant of the Arcane Brotherhood wants to rule over Ten Towns.

All three of these villains have clear motivations, goals, and impending dooms. However the PCs move, these villains move forward as well. The grim portents for these villains are all outlined in the adventure, so we won't to over them here.

Looking at the 13th Age adventure, Eyes of the Stone Thief, we can create another set of fronts. We'll stick to three main goals for each front since many of these are likely to change as the campaign moves on.

Front: The Orc Lord

• Lieutenant: Arkasa the Orc Shaman
• Henchmen: Fangrot and the Black Hands
• Impending Doom: The Orc Lord harnesses the Stone Thief into a weapon of war against the Dragon Empire.
• Grim Portent: Fangrot enters the Stone Thief and learns of the eyes.
• Grim Portent: The Black Hands acquire the two eyes of the Stone Thief.
• Grim Portent: The Orc Lord's shaman bind the spirit of the previous Orc Lord, Gandrax, to the Stone Thief's will.

Front: The Crusader

• Lieutenant: The Red Lady
• Henchmen: The Ebon Gauntlet and Cackle the Assassin
• Impending Doom: The Crusader gains control of the Stone Thief and binds it into the Crusader's ultimate weapon of cleansing.
• Grim Portent: The Crusader acquires Indego Sharp and learns more of the Stone Thief's history and construction.
• Grim Portent: The Ebon Gauntlet acquires both eyes of the Stone Thief.
• Grim Portent: THe Red Lady lures the Stone Thief into the Echo where the denizens of the Echo will break its will, devour pieces of history, and return it as a weapon of the Crusader.

Front: The Prince of Shadow

• Lieutenant: Whisper the Assassin
• Henchmen: The Daybreaker Mercenary Thieves
• Impending Doom: The Prince of Shadow captures the Stone Thief and uses it as a threat, as protection, and as influence over the Dragon Empire.
• Grim Portent: The Daybreakers capture Indego Sharp.
• Grim Portent: The Whisper and the Daybreakers acquire the second Eye of the Stone Thief.
• Grim Portent: Whisper and the Daybreakers lure the Stone Thief into the Underworld where they put it into hibernation and establish guardians.

Exposing Fronts

All of these worldly events are great, but how do they affect the lives of the PCs? Good fronts, grim portents, and impending dooms are only good if the PCs can learn about them. If they're too large in scale, are pushed too far outside the PC's views, or are too secretive to be discovered, our PCs may never benefit. That's sure a waste of time.

We can fall back to another powerful tool of the Lazy Dungeon Master: secrets! After we have our larger fronts written out, before each session we can write out a dozen or so tweet-sized secrets that our PCs can discover. These secrets can be all about the fronts, grim portents, and impending dooms along with any other clues that might give them a view of what's going on. Secrets are powerful GM magic, use them well.

The Danger of Overwhelming Threats

Pushing multiple fronts is a great way to build a living, dynamic, and dangerous world around the PCs. Some players, however, aren't really big on this. They might like it in theory but in practice they feel like no matter how well they're doing with one front, they're always two steps behind with the other two. As they take on the threats of one of the fronts, the others are moving forward without them.

Looking back on the Legacy of the Crystal Shard, this can certainly be a problem. While the PCs are off saving the barbarians from the Ice Witch, Gant is busy kidnapping the speaker of Bryn Shander and the dwarves are getting further corrupted by Akar Kessel's black ice.

If the fronts move too fast, the PCs can find themselves defeating one villain only to have two others succeed with their nefarious plots.

We can handle this by making sure that the other fronts take some time to move forward and that there's always opportunities for the PCs to push things back. We can also fail forward by ensuring that, even if the villains do get close to, or even succeed, in accomplishing their Impending Doom, that the PCs can still get in there and push them right out again.

Fronts and the 13th Age Icon Rolls

The fantasy RPG 13th Age gives us another tool to keep fronts moving at the right pace without outrunning the PCs' ability to stop them. Instead of all fronts moving forward at the same pace, we can use 13th Age icon rolls to see which of the fronts have moved and which have run into troubles outside of the PC's involvement. Again, we can make these results visibile to the PCs through clues, secrets, and rumors.

A Simple and Powerful Tool for Lazy Worldbuilding

The concept of fronts continues to be a powerful tool we can add to our lazy dungeon master arsenal. With just a few notes on some 3x5 cards, a sheet of paper, or a text file on our computer; we can design large and powerful threats that bring deep complications into the lives of our PCs and into the imaginations of our players. Give them a try.

Note: This article has been updated from the original published in September 2012.

Of all the difficulties facing our desire to run D&D games, the greatest difficulty will always be finding and keeping a great group of players. It is the great limitation of this hobby. Some groups manage to stay together, living through adventures, for decades. Most of us, however, have to actively and continually work to build and keep our groups going as long as we can.

We face a continual struggle to scrape time away from the rest of our lives to play D&D. We ask the same for each player who agrees to take time away from their families, their work, and their other responsibilities to join us and become a kid again. Sometimes the very location we live limits our ability to find and retain players.

Times have changed as well. The ways we find groups, organize groups, and even the environment in which we run our games has changed along with it. In this article we're going to look at some ideas for finding and retaining a solid group of D&D players. As always, if you have your own ideas, tips, tricks, and stories, please share them on Twitter or in email.

Expanding our Nerd Circles

We live in the age of the nerd. Electronic gaming is a bigger industry than the motion picture industry. Movies and shows like Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Hunger Games, and Walking Dead has built huge groups of fantasy and science fiction lovers all around us. Many of these lovers of gaming, science fiction, and fantasy are easy marks for potential players in our Dungeons & Dragons games. The easiest way to find out is to talk to them about it.

Most importantly, we shouldn't fear discussing and describing our hobby to anyone and everyone. We don't have to hide our hobby in the closet anymore. Wearing our love of this game on our sleeve is a great way to draw out others who share our interest and love.

Friends of friends also make for great potential D&D gamers. Even if our direct acquaintances aren't fans, they might mention it to someone who is. Word of mouth is a powerful tool to find new players.

Get Involved in Organized Play

The D&D Adventurer's League is a great way to find local game shops that run regular D&D games. Their Facebook page is a great place to hunt down local groups looking for players or players looking for a DM. These public play games are also fantastic ways to meet new players and perhaps recruit them for your own home games. Not everyone feels safe or comfortable at gaming shops, however, so make sure to do your part to make it as safe and comfortable an experience as you can make it for everyone who shares our love for the game.

Running Online

Running a D&D game online was never really an option until the last few years. Now, with fantastic tools like Roll20, groups can get together and play D&D from anywhere in the world. Running online games is a topic all to itself and one likely better written about by those who spend more time on it than I do. It's a fantastic option, however, for those who can't easily organize a local group or simply prefer running online. Give it a try.

Other Ways to Find a Group

There are a lot of online resources for finding players. Meetup.com runs a popular Dungeons and Dragons Meetup Group website with over 200,000 members, mostly in the US and UK. Message forums such as Enworld are also potential sources to find local players.

Begin with Short Campaigns and One-Shot Adventures

As you feel out new potential players, offer to run one-shot games or short campaigns so you can all gauge whether the chemistry of your group is right for a longer commitment. Most people will have a hard time committing to a regular weekly game, but if you get the energy behind it, they might end up in one anyway and loving every minute of it.

This also give us a needed chance to feel out our players and ensure we have the kind of group that will bring the most fun to us all. If the chemistry isn't right, you aren't committing to a big campaign, just a one-shot game.

Focusing on Four to Six Players

D&D 5e is built around the idea of four PCs and four players to run those PCs. After hundreds of games, I've come to the conclusion that four to six players is the sweet spot for the game. Fewer than that and the creative synergy isn't as awesome. More than six and each player gets too little time and attention of the whole game. It's also much harder to manage the game and balance encounters with more than six players. For this reason, we might consider keeping the size of our group to between four and six players.

Building An On-Call List

If we find ourselves lucky enough to have a group but end up with more than six interested players, we might consider talking to a couple of them to join as "on call" players. Often there are people who want to play but cannot play regularly or people who want to join after we already have a core group of six regular players. If they're willing, we can put them on the "on call" list and invite them when a seat opens up at any given session. This isn't a perfect solution, but discussing the topic openly and ensuring everyone understands how this works can prevent hurt feelings. In some cases, players are happy to be on call because it means less of a commitment for them as well as us.

After our group is solid we still might meet new people interested in playing. We can add these to our on-call list if they're interested or offer to run some one-shot games with the new group so people can still get a shot at rolling some dice. We never know if these on-call players will end up becoming regular members so it's always worth keeping the option open.

An Eternal Struggle For Our Favorite Game

Finding players for our D&D games is a continual struggle. Sometimes we find ourselves lucky enough to have a core group of players for many years but other times, as the river of life twists and turns, we find ourselves seeking players to fill out the table. Options are available to us but there are no easy answers. When we find our good group, we owe it to everyone to enjoy each and every game as much as we can.

With the release of Curse of Strahd, the latest rewrite of the excellent Dungeons & Dragons adventure, I6 Ravenloft; Wizards of the Coast also released the book's introductory adventure, Death House, online for free. If you haven't grabbed a copy, do so now.

Death House is a fantastic house of horrors adventure for low level PCs and a great introduction to Curse of Strahd and the atmosphere of Barovia. While not as general purpose or introductory as the Lost Mines of Phandelver adventure included with the fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set, Death House is a superbly written and fun adventure to move D&D into the realm of gothic horror.

In this article we'll discuss how to get the most out of Death House and how to use it as the springboard for our Curse of Strahd campaign.

Level 1 is the Suck

I've mentioned it before and I'll say it again here; level 1 is the suck when it comes to playing fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. Experienced players often hate the over-simplified and super squishy nature of level 1 play and new players are going to hate how fast they drop to zero, or just plain die, because of their low hit points.

Consider either starting the PCs at level 2 or give them ten extra hit points at level 1. Those ten hit points won't matter much at level 8 to level 20 but they will sure help out in the low levels when D&D is at its most lethal.

Death House is no less lethal to level 1 PCs. There are some really tough monsters in this adventure and level 1 to level 2 PCs are likely to get beaten bloody if they're not super careful. If you want to run your adventure Dark Souls 3 style, that's up to you and your players but there's also nothing wrong with beefing up the PCs a bit so everyone has a more enjoyable time. It's always easy to up the power of monsters if they're having too easy a time (hint, maximize their hit points and give them an extra attack if you want to quickly power up a 5e monster).

Choose Your Introduction and Strahd's Wolves

I am a huge fan of the original introduction to Ravenloft with the Vistani dropping off the note that looks like it's from the Burogomeister but is actually from Strahd. It's a fun campy traditional introduction that players can have a lot of fun with even if they know it's a trap. Later, when the PCs find the bloody note of the real Burgomeister, it's a fun way of trapping the PCs in the land of Barovia.

Death House doesn't start this way on its own but there's no reason you can't run it that way anyway. It's a great way drop some handouts on the players with some clues as to their origins (the penmanship of Strahd and the Burgomeister are quite a bit different). If you need some handouts for this part of the game, look no further.

There's another fun approach to introduce the PCs to Barovia. Stage an ambush around the messenger who holds the bloody note of the real Burgomeister. Wolves are a good choice for this since there is a lot of wolf imagery in the adventure overall and they're a nice challenge for hte PCs.

When the PCs find the mangled body of the messenger (be as graphic about his state of rot and disembowelment as your players are comfortable with), a pack of wolves descends on the PCs. These wolves fight with clear intelligence; they're not just mindless beasts. Standing behind them, watching the battle unfold is a powerful dire wolf with red glowing eyes. This wolf never attacks but just watches as his wolves test the PCs. This wolf is secretly Strahd out to take a first-hand look at these new heroes.

The wolves will never go in for a killing strike since Strahd himself doesn't want the PCs dead. Even if they could kill a PC with massive damage, they will hold their kill on the dire wolf's barked command. This is a special trick since wolves hit way outside of their weight class. They're only CR 1/4 but they hit for 7 damage, have pack tactics, and can knock prone on a failed saving throw. Generally with level 2 PCs you'd want one wolf for every PC on the table.

If anyone attempts to attack the red-eyed direwolf, it will use spells like shield, greater invisibility, and counterspell to avoid the attacks. That should certainly get the players' attention. This is no wolf. This is the master of Barovia himself who has come to see the mettle of these new adventurers himself. When the wolves are slain, the dire wolf fades off into the mists before the PCs can approach him.

Approaching the Death House

With the wolf fight under our belts, our players have had a nice challenging fight before they start exploring Death House. Combat-focused players might not like all of the investigation and NPC interactions with the two kids if they haven't gotten a fight in so the wolf fight helps calm them down for some nice non-combat roleplaying and exploration of the main house.

Players are smart. Anyone who plays with experienced players knows that you can't slip much by them. You have one smart mind working against five other smart minds working together. There's a reason they always sniff out your doppelgangers and succubi before you ever get a chance to use them. They can smell traps and illusions a mile away.

And they might do so easily with Death House. The key is not to have that matter too much. The Death House wants them. The house itself is the main villain in this adventure, like a giant enormous mimic. Like an angler fish, it dangles the very realistic illusion of two children out to bring in sacrifices for the evil that lives in the depths of its bowels.

Most players know that if you have an adventure called "Death House" that its a freaking trap and that they're going in anyway. Good healthy players who want to have fun know that, as much shit as they give it, they should walk into the mouth of this house anyway. Some might be pains in the asses about it but it is likely rare that a group will simply bypass the house.

And if they do? Let them. Sure, you'll all miss out on a cool haunted house adventure but the players may be telling you they really don't want to play it if they all decide to give the two little frightened children the finger as they pass on for loftier goals. There are probably ways you could trick them into the house if you wanted to but why not give the players some agency and let them skip it if they decide to skip it.

Likely most will decide to go in, however, and when they do, thats when the Death House really wakes up.

Reinforcing Horror

This adventure is going to be a big test for our ability to evoke horror as we facilitate the story. Every blowing drape appears like a screaming specter. Every chime of the servants bell whispers of an evil awoken and on the prowl. If done right, our players will seek these moments to go along with the haunted house feeling. They'll volunteer to peek under the beds, unwrap the bundle in the black-veiled baby basket, and play the strange harpsichord in the music room. Do they investigate the rotted lion-skin rug by turning it over? Bugs! Hey, are those stuffed wolves moving around the room when we're not looking? Fun-loving players will seek out opportunities to get scared because they want to.

Reward those who dive head-long into the story. Reward those who do things they clearly know they shouldn't for the good of a fun story. Inspiration is the perfect way to reward their play. It's decisions like these that inspiration is designed to reward.

The Escalation of Creepiness

Its worth noting that things get significantly creeper as the PCs explore the house. The lower floors are clean and pretty, although there are bits of creepiness all around. As the PCs go up the house, things get dirtier, older, and definitely more creepy. When the PCs discover the secret room with Strahd's letter, thats when things turn around. That room is where the PCs really see the veil pulled back and at that point the house itself knows that the PCs know and does less to hide its malevolence. Strahd's letter itself is a good way to invoke some madness. Whoever reads the letter must make a DC 13 charisma saving throw or suffer short-term madness as described on page 258 of the Dungeon Master's Guide. This madness effect is a great equalizer among all groups of PCs, whether they be powergamers or not.

Adding Humor

Death House, and all of Curse of Strahd for that matter, can seem really bleak if you don't add a little bit of humor. The fact that this is a haunted house filled with armed and armored adventurers is already in a good state for some laughs. Do what you can to add and reinforce some humor intermixed with the horror, desperation, and hopelessness of Death House. One example is the animated broom on the third floor. It's an odd encounter but, if handled right, it can be good for laughs. Was that broom really animated or did it simply fall on the knight and he overreacted Three-Stooges like?

A Good Test for Theater of the Mind

The floor plan for Death House isn't very big. Rooms are usually little more than ten to fifteen feet wide. There's not a lot of room for tactical combat in here so why not practice your "theater of the mind" and run combat in the narrative? You don't have to do it for ALL of the battles in the adventure but a lot of them can work well when included in the general flow of the story without having to whip out maps and miniatures.

It's worth mentioning, however, that the floor plan of the Death House can be confusing if you don't draw it out. Drawing sketches of the rooms and the layout on a Pathfinder Flip Mat helps everyone get a good idea of where things are and what they can do. You can treat the rooms as zones when people describe where they are and what they want to do instead of worrying about every five foot step.

Keeping Them In the House

In the adventure itself, PCs are free to enter and leave the house but if they leave, they might never come back. It also doesn't make sense that the house would let them leave. If the house itself is the villain, why wouldn't it trap them inside so it can digest them over thousands of years. If the PCs need a rest, there are a few good places they can do so. The best place is likely in the room with the children in the attic once they've made peace with the real ghostly children and not the monsters outside who are little more than a lure. When the PCs try to leave, the doors slam shut or maybe even turn into a mimic. The railings around the balcony raise up and aim their barbed tips at the throats of the PCs.

The Secrets of Death House

The Death House is a perfect place for us to sprinkle in discoverable secrets. Some of these are built right into the game, like the note from Strahd to the Dursts (see the handouts) calling them a bunch of losers. Others we know as the DM but might not be as easily discovered by the players. Here are examples of secrets we can drop into the game, either through the mouths of the ghosts and specters in the house, as torn journal entries, or as strange visions that flow into the heads of those mortals within. Keep in mind that, while many of these are reinforced in the adventure itself, some I simply made up because they sounded cool.

• The Dursts led a cult that attempted to worship Strahd. Strahd didn't give a shit and openly mocked them.
• Gustav Durst convinced the nursemaid that he could sire a wonderful child with her who would break away from the dark cult beneath. It was a lie and the child died before birth.
• Gustav and his cultists might have sacrificed the nursemaid's child while it was still in her womb.
• The Dursts and their cultist followers sacrificed the nursemaid on an altar in the basement.
• The Dursts locked the children up in their room when they saw too much down beneath he house. They died of starvation.
• The rituals of the Dursts did manage call an ancient horror from its slumber. That horror still resides in the chambers below.
• For hundreds of years the Death House has devoured those lured into it by the children outside. The locals know not to go into it.

Rose and Thorn, Reoccurring NPCs

Just because the party laid Rose and Thorn to rest doesn't mean these spirits have to go away. These NPCs can be fun little additions for the rest of the Curse of Strahd. Those who they possess might hear from the ghosts from time to time, who give them useful clues as they strive to dethrone Strahd from his command of the region.

It also makes more sense that Rose and Thorn wouldn't want to be buried deep in the Death House but would, instead, like to be buried in the Barovia cemetery. This can help the PCs meet the priest and touch on his future threads such as his son in the basement and the risk to the life of Ireena.

The Dungeon Below

Unlike the upper house, the dungeon has many combat encounters. If you want to ensure the PCs get to see most of the dungeon, put a door that leads down to the lower level that can only be unlocked by a key hanging from the neck of the ghast version of Gustav Durst. This way the players won't miss some of the fun to be had in the upper levels.

There are probably too many combat encounters right in a row down in the cellar. A big pile of ghouls is followed by a big pile of shadows and then the ghasts. Instead, either skip the ghouls or lower the number of shadows to maybe two. Before you run this section of the adventure, read through it and decide what combination of encounters you think will be the most fun for the group.

The Collapse of the House

When the PCs succeed in ridding the house of the horror below and make their escape, the house can end up swallowing itself just like the house in Poltergeist. When the PCs step away, they might notice a sign, pointed the wrong way that says "Death House. Don't Talk to the Children!" just before a voice echoes out from one of the houses with a drunken slur "welcome to Barovia!"

Completing the Housemaid Quest

One NPC that doesn't get much love in the adventure is the poor housemaid. First of all, we can avoid the uncomfortable topic of how she became impregnated by Gustav by suggesting that he convinced her that she could bring light into a dark house with a child born of their love. Second, we can conclude her part in the story by giving the PCs a vision of the poor housemaid after the collapse of the house who lifts a hand in thanks atop the ruins of the accursed house.

It's Like a Horror Movie, but with Swords and Armor

The players and DMs who will most enjoy Death House know it is a horror movie, but instead of hapless sex-starved teenagers, we have barbarians and druids and paladins armed to the teeth. There's a lot of fun to be had in Death House with the right attitudes. This isn't a simple dungeon of monsters and loot. There's a dark story to discover and some fun to be had. Discuss the approach of Death House with your players and enjoy the results.

Note: This article has been republished from the original published in June 2012.

Flash fiction, small focused stories running usually less than three hundred words, have a great place in Dungeons and Dragons. Whether used as pieces of read-aloud text, adventure summaries, or emailed stories to keep your group engaged between sessions, flash fiction is a great tool for D&D DMs. Today we're going to take a look at some tips for writing fantastic, gripping, and useful flash fiction.

Three uses for flash fiction

There are numerous places flash fiction helps us in our D&D games but we're going to focus down to three.

First, flash fiction works very well for flavor text descriptions of rooms, areas, NPCs, objects, and scenes. Each of these has a clear focus and idea that we can tell in as few words as needed. In general, try to keep these bits of flavor down to one to three sentences. Focus on only the most important elements needed.

Flash fiction also works well for between-game emails. Beyond simple game summaries, the obvious choice, we can also use flash fiction to give our players a point of view away from their characters. Focus the fiction on an interesting NPC they might know or introduce a villain they have yet to meet. Use flash fiction to show how the world moves on regardless of the PCs' place in it.

Flash fiction can also be helpful for introductory game summaries. Like other examples, we can use flash fiction to keep our PCs focused on the most important elements of the campaign up to this point. It helps remind players where things stand and keeps them focused on the options currently available to them.

Your two best sources for writing

Two books stand above all others when it comes to excellent writing. The first is the venerable Strunk and White's Elements of Style. The other is Stephen King's On Writing. Both of these books will help you in all forms of writing including something as short as flash fiction. If you read any books to help you write, these are the two to choose.

Now, as we look particularly at writing flash fiction, a few tips stand out.

Keep to the point

When writing fiction under three hundred words, you must keep a clear eye on the main points you want to make. Before you begin your flash fiction, jot down the most important things you want this bit of fiction to reveal. When writing between-game stories in email, think clearly about what you want your players to learn from it. Are you introducing a new character? Are you showing a bit of backstory? Are you revealing a parallel journey to those taken by the PCs?

As you answer questions like these, understand the main points you want your players to remember and use those as the key focal points around which the whole short work revolves.

Focus your words

When writing your flash fiction, every word matters. Use only those words which push forward the main points you want to make. Don't meander about, telling every little detail. Use one or two words that spark the vast imaginations of your players and move on to the important details. Use as few words as possible to make the points you want to make.

Revise and rewrite

When you're done, don't just hit save or send. Revise and rewrite. Figure out how to cut that fourteen word sentence down to seven. Look back over every sentence you have written and decide if it reinforces your primary purpose or not. Keep that focus tight as you edit your words.

An example: Glyphimor and Orcus

Glyphimhor, the Balor General of Orcusgate, stepped outside of his capital city and took flight over the Plains of Hunger. All around demons and undead cowered in his shadow, hoping to avoid the wrath of Orcus's champion.

The Balor General slammed onto the ground, cracking the ancient stone of packed bone dust under his powerful hooves. The two Molydeus that guarded Everlost's front door stepped back.

He walked through Everlost, listening to the screaming from below and hearing the whispers of Orcus's personal servants as he entered the throne room. On the floor lay the massive primordial construct, Timesus the Black Star. Just looking at it made Glyphimhor nervous.

"Marvelous, isn't he," spoke the Prince of Undeath. Glyphimhor wasn't sure he agreed with his lord.

"Elder Etharix is dead," said Glyphimhor. "Killed during a ritual in Lash Embarer by the Shieldbashers. They apparently disrupted the Soulgrinder as well. We lost track of them after that."

"I know," said Orcus. "Gavix told me." Glyphimhor hated the Glabrezou, Orcus's ambassador and pet. He had hoped the Shieldbashers would have cut off his dog head in Lash Embarer. Orcus stood and walked over to Glpyhimhor. As massive as the Balor General was, his master still towered over him.

"It matters not. All is in hand." Orcus laughed. Glyphimhor didn't like the ease with which Orcus spoke of these matters. The slaying of his highest priest should not come so easily. Orcus seemed to see this in Glyphimhor's eyes. "The human gamblers have an expression," said Orcus. "When their money grows thin but they have a good hand of cards. They call it going 'all in'. We're going all in on this, Glyphimhor. We cannot turn back and what happens from here on out cannot stop what we have put in motion. In just a few days, Etharix's death will not matter at all."

"Nor will mine, I suppose," said Glyphimhor. Orcus smiled at him.

"Now you begin to understand. Let me show you what commitment looks like."

"I called you here to do something," said Orcus as he walked over to a massive stone altar stained a deep red from centuries of bloodletting. "Something none of the others dare to do. Only you have the strength and will to do it." Orcus pointed down to Glyphimhor's vorpal blade. Orcus placed his left forearm on the altar. For the first time in his long life, Glyphimhor understood what fear felt like.

"Do it."

The above bit of flash fiction isn't perfect but it serves as an example. It's too long, for one, and probably has quite a few needless words that get away from its main points.

The main intent of the fiction above, sent in an email to the players of the Shieldbashers late in the epic tier of our campaign, showed that Orcus had a plan and introduced Glyphimor, Orcus's balor general. It gives a good flavor for the world of Thanatos and shows the players what Orcus knows and doesn't know of their actions. It also leaves the party with a great sense of mystery. Why would Orcus have his general cut off his hand? That's a pretty big mystery and it plays strongly into the rest of the story.

The flash fiction helps reinforce all of these bits of story, clarifies what should be clarified and obscures what is best left a mystery. Again, it's not perfect, but it serves. This is just one example of the great many uses for flash fiction in your DM's toolbox.

We game masters love to tell stories. We have big tales we want to share. We have 3-ring binders filled with worlds waiting to explode out into our games. When PCs enter a new location and study their environment, its easy for us to step back and start describing the thousand-year history of the place, the meaning of the mosaics on the walls, the lineage of the kings now portrayed in bronze sarcophagi formed in their images, and the rich history of cities buried for two thousand years.

This pushes us outside of the point of view of the characters, though. During these explosions of exposition we risk losing the attention of our players because, often, these expositions have nothing to do with them. They're not doing anything in these scenes.

There's a simple trick to handle this. As you know, we lazy dungeon masters love our simple tricks, especially when these simple tricks lead to multiple beneficial outcomes. Other examples of these tricks include sharing secrets, using player-driven characteristics to identify monsters, and empowering player-driven storytelling.

So what is our dirty trick for drawing players into the narrative? Tie the discovery of the narrative to the backgrounds and skills of the PCs. Let the PCs discover the story as they observe the world around them, through their own trained eyes.

Say we have an ancient dwarven outpost with a gateway back to a long-lost dwarven city. Hundreds of years worth of battles have taken place in this outpost. It has statues of ancient dwarf kings. It has mosaics of two thousand years of history.

We can describe all of these things directly. We can step back and talk about the wars that took place here. We can talk about the kings who ruled over this outpost. We can describe the vast magical portal, now dormant, that dominates one side of the chamber. We can watch our players fall asleep or start reaching for their smartphone.

Or we can let the PCs discover these pieces of the environment themselves through skill checks and discoveries based on their background. Sometimes the players might ask to do it directly ("I want to study this wall, is there anything I can understand from it?") or we can give it to them indirectly ("Argon, during your time as a sailor you learned all about the ships of Lusken. You know this one is flying the flag of Ship Kurth").

Here's an example of what we might say if we're NOT tying the narrative to the backgrounds and skills of the PCs:

Detailed mosaics cover the walls of these ancient dwarven halls. Bronze statues stand in alcoves, each depicting dwarven kings in ancient armor thousands of years old. A huge portal dominates one side of the chamber, detailed runes outlining the stone archway. Within the chamber lies piles of bones, dwarves who appear to have battled other dwarves. Some of these dwarves appear to have fought in the typical style of shield dwarves while a great many others fought with poor tactics and wild abandon. The skulls of these wild dwarves appear cracked around the nostrils—a sign of manipulation by mind flayers.

This isn't a horrible narrative but likely you saw some of the problems with it. None of it has anything to do with the PCs. Here's a different way we can do this.

Brothon, your training in history and heritage as a dwarf helps you identify the mosaics depicted on these walls as that of the Delzoun dwarves, dating back over 2,000 years ago. You recognize the statues as the dwarven kings of Gauntlgrym who reigned during that time.

Inarik, as you study the large archway your training in the arcane arts gives you a feeling that there is much more to this gateway than meets the eye. Roll an intelligence (arcana) check to learn more.

Alverez, your background as a soldier tells you that this battle between dwarves is quite odd. In your experience fighting alongside dwarves, you see that some of these dwarves fought as shield dwarves while others, a great many others, appear to have fought with wanton abandon against them.

Jadia, as you investigate the skulls on the ground, roll an intelligence (medicine) check. Ok, you rolled a 12, you notice that the skulls of these wild dwarves all appear to be broken around the nostril region.

This sort of description would, in play, be much more interactive. Players would ask questions and, given their backgrounds or skills, you would give them different degrees of answers. This is the difference between simply telling players what is going on in a scene and letting them discover it. This turns narrative exposition into one of the key pillars of the game: exploration.

Using Skills and Backgrounds

You'll notice that the above examples use skills, trained skills, and backgrounds as the interface between PCs and the narrative of the story. We can mix and match these all we want. Sometimes, a background alone gives the PCs access to information. A soldier might know of the battles that took place in these halls. A sage can understand the importance of the gateway. Other times its a skill check. Sometimes we can use both.

Sometimes PCs simply know what is going on while other times they have to roll for it. Of course, don't force a roll for a vital piece of information. If the PCs have to know it, they should just simply discover it. Otherwise skill checks can give them more or less information depending on their roll. There's a great opportunity to use shades of gray instead of all-or-nothing skill checks. Poor rolls can still give PCs vital information while high rolls can reveal much more.

We can even mix skills and backgrounds together. Anyone can perform an intelligence (investigation) check to learn more of the battle that took place here but a character with the soldier background gets advantage on the roll.

Mixing up skill checks and character backgrounds keeps the game fresh. It changes the interface between the PCs and the world they inhabit in interesting ways and it makes players feel like the choices they made for their characters really matter.

Turning Passive Narration into Action

One key advantage for tying narrative to the skills and backgrounds of the PCs is that it turns typically passive narration into actions taken by their characters. They aren't just learning things, they are the ones seeking out information. They're walking around the halls. They're picking up skulls. They're studying glyphs on the walls and matching them with glyphs they have in an old tome.

They're doing something.

Doing things, acting, is what draws players into the game. The more opportunity we have to move the story, even tell the story, through the actions of the PCs, the more interested our players will be. It doesn't even matter if that story is 2,000 years old as long as its the PCs who discover it or remember it.

Letting PCs Own the Narrative

There's another advantage to tying the narrative to PC skill checks and backgrounds. It takes the narrative which you possess and gives it to the players. It becomes their narrative. It's their PC who knew about the dwarf kings. It's their PC who discovered the skulls of the mind flayer thralls. It's their character who knew the fighting style of the shield dwarves or could read the ancient dwarven magical runes on the portal. These bits of exposition become part of their character instead of just flavor painted onto the walls.

They might even build their own sub-quests based on what they discover and we'd be foolish not to let them do so. If they can take something they discovered and turn it into a quest for their character, we can take that and run with it. Now we know it's something they're directly interested in that we can fill out in the rest of our game.

Forcing Us to Focus on the PCs

This sort of exposition also forces us to remember what the PCs are about. If we reveal information based on their backgrounds we have to know what those backgrounds are. We begin to learn more about the PCs as our players tell us about them, how they know something, what they think about something, and what they care about.

Another Dirty Trick in the Toolbox

Tying the narrative of our game to the skills and backgrounds of the PCs is another fantastic trick for opening up our game and ensuring that each of the PCs, and the players who run them, have a direct stake in what happened, what is happening, and what is going to happen. The more the game focuses on their PCs, the more invested they will be and the more fun we'll all have at the table.

Here at Sly Flourish we talk a lot about focusing our games around the backgrounds and motivations of the PCs. We think this is the best way to draw players into the game and build cooperative collaborative stories well beyond the single imagination of one person. It's a core focus of the Lazy Dungeon Master and we've written a lot of articles about it including the following:

• Player-driven Stories
• D&D 5e Bonds Based On Fiasco-Style Relationships
• A Collection of Awesome Events
• Common DM Mistakes
• A Troll Named Handbag
• Empowering Player-driven Storytelling
• Do They Die?
• What's Cool?
• Put PCs First
• Facilitating Empowered Investigations
• Providing Real Choices
• Mistakes Were Made

We even designed a PC-focused GM worksheet that takes the place of or augments your typical GM screen.

There's a reason we've written so many articles about this topic—it's surprisingly hard to do. It is much easier for us to write down a rigid outline or follow the chapters in a published adventure without even considering how the PCs fit in. Sometimes it works out just fine. Players have fun. We have fun. No harm, no foul.

When we focus a story around the PCs, though, our game moves up a level. It feels like a unique story built by the group. It's a creation greater than the sum of its parts.

It's hard to fit character focused storytelling into the basic components of what builds a good D&D game, though. When we're building a D&D game we might put down a loose outline of our next session; where it begins, what scenes we expect, what secrets we might reveal, which NPCs might come into play, and which combat encounters might take place. Where does the background and motivation of the PCs fit into this?

One way we can fit character focused stories in is to actually build encounters around the background of those characters. Many published adventures including Out of the Abyss and Curse of Strahd include random encounter tables to throw encounters in during travel. What if we modified them or replaced them with encounters built to tie into or showcase the backgrounds of the PCs?

Let's look at an example. In our Curse of Strahd game we have six regular PCs, each with their own personalities, backgrounds, and interests. We can write down a short list of potential encounters with the hooks that tie them to these PCs. Here are some example encounters:

1. A band of werewolves known as the Children of the Nightmother try to ambush the party but they smell that Milo has some werewolf blood in him. He can spot the ambush and they are wary to attack him. One might even recognize him from another werewolf pack.
2. Vistani bandits try to jump the party. One of them carries a purse with the mark of the Houndmaster on it, the very Houndmaster that Volanthe seeks. This houndmaster is none other than Rictavio currently staying in Valliki. The bandit got it when Rictavio summarily beat them down with his cane and then paid them for their trouble.
3. Vampire assassins in a loose alliance with Strahd, are sent to assassinate the "bearer of light", Tellos the cleric. They see him as a direct threat to Strahd.
4. A crazed druid runs into the party and tries to convince Lilly that the way of the druid in Barovia is to worship the darkness within the land.
5. Vistani servants of Strahd run into the PCs. One of them is a cousin of Jinokio.
6. A group of soldiers following the Order of the Silver Dragon seek out the destroyers of the Death House. They try to recruit Sir Ander to their cause and tell him to join them outside of Argynvostholt.

Using This List

We might be tempted to use this list as a standard random encounter list. Each time the group is traveling, we can roll on this list and use the listed encounter. This ensures we're not playing favorites. Instead, we might just pick the encounter we think fits best given the time, place, and attendance. Obviously we don't want ot run an encounter for a player that isn't actually at the game.

Mixing In Interesting and Relevant Encounter Locations

We can, of course, spice up these encounters with some interesting encounter features. Here's a quick list of ten. You might also use a randomly generated ancient monument. The ones below are flavored for our Curse of Strahd campaign. Feel free to add an appropriate effect to the feature such as bonus radiant damage, advantage on particular attacks, or another such interesting effect. You can also, if you want, add a random Tarokka effect to really spice things up.

1. A cracked statue of the Morninglord bathed in the one beam of sunlight in all of Barovia.
2. A statue of the Nightmother that appears to weep blood. Minions of darkness can use it to turn day into night and gain advantage on attacks until it is restored.
3. A series of crusified werewolves who aren't quite dead.
4. A circle of ancient standing stones with glowing glyphs from a primordial age.
5. The ruins of a watchtower destroyed before Strahd's turn. It's protectors still haunt the ruin.
6. An abandoned farmhouse with the torn remains of its owners still laying as they fell. These remains seem not yet to be at rest.
7. A tree covered in the hanged decaying corpses of knights of the Silver Dragon. The corpses scream for mercy from passers by.
8. An ancient graveyard filled with turned dirt and broken coffins. The land remains unhallowed.
9. An abandoned field filled with decaying scarecrows that burn eternally with flame.
10. A cracked pillar topped by a grinning gargyole whose head and ruby eyes fall upon those who pass by.

An Evolving List

Our character-focused encounters need not remain the same throughout our campaign. In fact, it's better if we change them up as we go. Just as the stories of the characters continue to grow and evolve, so can the encounters that showcase those backgrounds. We don't have to change them all every session but it's worth reviewing them before each game, seeing which ones are still relevant, and modifying them to fit the story as it is now. A few tweaks each week is probably all we need.

Reinforcing the Characters in Our Mind

Exercises like this have the added benefit of reinforcing the stories of the characters in our mind in a way that we can directly use in our game. It's one thing to say "keep the character backgrounds in mind" and something else to actually use those backgrounds to build out parts of our adventure.

Building out these encounters helps us tie together interesting threads between the game we're playing (like Curse of Strahd) and the backgrounds of the characters. We don't have to put character backgrounds on one side of our table and the story we want to tell on the other. Tricks like this help us mash the two together to build practical components of our gaming sessions based on the parts of the game our players love the most—their characters.

Of all of the spells in the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, there are few that suck the fun out of the story more than counterspell. Counterspell pulls the flames out of fireballs. It sucks the air out of a cone of cold. It turns the game into an arms race where spell levels start disappearing on both sides with no real results either way.

The way we're used to running counterspell is to simply say "nope". Is the mage about to drop a 10d6 fireball on a pack of enemies? Counterspell says "nope"! You can almost hear the squeaky farting sound in the air—a sound that is anything but fantastic.

It doesn't have to be this way. Counterspell can be as powerful and evocative as lighting bolt or fireball. Counterspell can be exciting and fantastic and it doesn't take a single mechanical change to be so. All we need is the right flavor.

Let's talk about Harry Potter for a moment. Remember all those wizard duels between Potter, Voldemort, and Dumbledore? Those are filled with counterspells. Remember when their wands connect and bolts of green and red flame burst around dripping molten arcane energy onto the ground? That's counterspell.

When Voldemort creates a huge firestorm and Dumbledore wraps it in a huge ball of water—counterspell. When Voldemort throws a billion shards of glass at Potter and they smash against a shield and turn to sand—counterspell. When Harry's parents save him from Voldemort's power word kill and beams of multi-spectral light crash into one another—counterspell.

In the final battle where Harry and Voldemort lock wands and Harry finally pushes him back and disintegrates him, think how many spell levels they had to spend before Harry finally got through. That's what a layered set of counterspells looks like.

The Harry Potter movies are our model for how to make counterspell awesome and that's how we should describe it when counterspell is cast.

Counterspell feels like such a flavorless "nope" spell only because we don't think of it as the antithesis of the spell it's countering. When a PC casts fireball and the mercenary mage casts counterspell, describe it as a whirling windstorm that pulls the fireball into an inferno and launches the vortex up into the clouds. When a PC casts lightning bolt, describe the bolts of red light cast by the enemy lich that smash into it, leaving puddles of molten arcane energy burning on the floor. When a PC casts banishment on your favorite pit fiend, describe the angelic hand that reaches for it through the rift between worlds and then the twisted tentacles that tear into the angelic hand, pulling its skin down to the bone before the hand retreats into the rift with no pit fiend in its grasp.

Counterspell is the opposite reaction to any spell a caster can cast, and it should be described as such. The more powerful the spell being countered, the more powerful the reaction should be.

Sly Flourish's Dirty Counterspell Tricks

Now, just in case you came here for some dirty counterspell tricks, I'll give you a couple. First, counterspell is a reaction which means the caster can cast counterspell to counter an enemy's counterspell even if it's on their turn during the casting. For example, if an evil mage casts fireball on the PCs and the PC sorcerer casts counterspell, the evil mage can counter the counterspell by using its reaction even though it's in the middle of the evil mage's turn. This means that whoever has the most mages with counterspell on a side will generally be able to get off the most spells. The side that gets off the most spells is the side with the most mages able to cast counterspell because they can throw more counterspells up than the other side, leaving the primary spell still working.

Is That Legal?

I've gotten a couple of notes from folks asking about the ability for a wizard to cast counterspell on their turn in addition to a main spell. To be clear, we're going back to the following example. A wizard casts fireball. Another wizard casts counterspell to counter that fireball. The first wizard, as a reaction, casts counterspell to counter the second wizard's counterspell.

The question comes up on whether or not this violates the rule that a spellcaster can only cast two spells on a turn unless one of them is a cantrip. That rule, however, only applies to bonus action spells. There is no such rule for casting spells as a reaction.

Here's the specific wording:

A spell cast with a bonus action is especially swift. You must use a bonus action on your turn to cast the spell, provided that you haven't already taken a bonus action this turn. You can't cast another spell during the same turn, except for a cantrip with a casting time of 1 action.

The section on casting spells as a reaction has no such limitation.

Some spells can be cast as reactions. These spells take a fraction of a second to bring about and are cast in response to some event. If a spell can be cast as a reaction, the spell description tells you exactly when you can do so.

Another argument against being able to cast counterspell to counter a counterspell comes up when discussing whether or not a spellcaster can use a reaction during their turn. While it wasn't allowed in the 4th edition of D&D, it IS allowed in 5th edition and is specifically spelled out in the rules.

Certain special abilities, spells, and situations allow you to take a special action called a reaction. A reaction is an instant response to a trigger of some kind, which can occur on your turn or on someone else's. The opportunity attack is the most common type of reaction.

Finally, this very example is directly addressed in the sage advice compendium:

Can you also cast a reaction spell on your turn? You sure can! Here's a common way for it to happen: Cornelius the wizard is casting fireball on his turn, and his foe casts counterspell on him. Cornelius has counterspell prepared, so he uses his reaction to cast it and break his foe's counterspell before it can stop fireball.

Holy Shit, Stop the Rules Lawyering and Let the Game Flow

But really, we should ignore all that nonsense and remember how and when to make counterspell awesome. Too much counterfuckery on the side of the DM can really ruin the fun for players. Thus, we should only consider using counterspell on the DM's side if it will truly make the game more fun. Don't do it to save your favorite bad guy. Don't do it because you didn't plan on a fireball and all your bad guys are going to get killed in a single blast. Only do it if the players are short-circuiting the game by casting big-ass game-breaking spells over and over again. Breaking the game once or twice is awesome. When it becomes routine, then it might be time to make things a little more interesting with some well-placed counterspells.

When the counterspell battles start to explode, we should pour flavor out of every orifice of our bodies while this is happening. We should be standing up. We should be pantomiming what is going on. We should be making so many sound effects that we have to wipe our spit off the table when we're done.

Every counterspell is another beam of huge and powerful energy pouring out of arcane casters. It's sucking the life out of them to keep these counterspells going. People can see the cracks of magic smashing into one another for miles around. Purple veins are popping out of their foreheads and their eyes are going black. A counter to a counter to a counter is like smashing three high powered microphones together hooked up to a 10,000 watt amplifier. No one should be able to hear for a week when it's done.

Counterspell isn't a small weak farting noise. Counterspell is armageddon.

In typical published adventures, locations and the creatures within them are tied closely together. There is no Castle Ravenloft without Strahd and his strange menagerie of followers. There is no Velkenvelve without the dark elf slavers who run the subterranean den of evil. As DMs, we often tie our locations, stories, and monsters together into a single unit.

Why?

When I started thinking about Fantastic Locations, I asked this question. How come our locations, stories, and monsters are tied so closely together? In many cases our locations have nothing to do with the monsters that inhabit them. In Scourge of the Slave Lords, the slavers themselves reside in the ruins of an old temple. The keep in Village of Hommlet has centuries of history even if it simply houses evil bandits working for a cultist.

When we're considering our game's world, there's no reason we have tie locations, monsters, and stories together. In many cases, it's useful to keep them separated.

Separating locations from stories and monsters helps us focus our time on the location; its history, its structure, its fantastic qualities; without having to worry about who is there or what's going to happen. This makes good locations reusable even if our group heads off in a different direction. It keeps interesting locations independent from the power of the characters or the progress of the story. It helps ensure that locations are solid things that feel real to both us and our players without making them so rigid that they don't actually come across in our game.

Great locations are one of the things worth spending our time on, even if we're a lazy dungoen master. Our time won't be wasted on them. They will work regardless of how we and our players steer the game. Notebooks full of storylines and detailed histories aren't as useful as a notebook full of interesting places our PCs can visit and explore.

Locations AS History

Detailed locations can become an interface between our players and the history of our world. Players want to see stuff. They want to do stuff. When they're exploring an ancient pillared ruin sunk deep into a fetid swamp, it's interesting that the statue's head they're hanging off of is the head of Emperor Araxis, the tyrannical serpentine emperor rumored to have bathed in the blood of children to keep himself young.

We might have a hundred thousand words of history banging around in our notebooks, our wikis, or our heads. We can break that history down into nice tweet-sized units and wrap these tiny bits of history around tons of objects all throughout our locations. Every pillar can be a carving of a famous figure or a terrible horror of history. Every wall can be a mosaic of a war from 300 years ago. Every tome can, in summary, tell the tale of the queen who slew her sister and stole the throne.

Anchors in a Sea of Gray

The lazier we GMs get, the more fuzzy our world becomes. We don't know what anything looks like until we and our players put our minds' eyes on it. This can be a problem if we or our players aren't very good at making things solid at the table. Our monster manuals help with this. You know what's solid? An iron golem, that's solid. Monsters are solid. Good loot from the Dungeon Master's Guide is solid. A lot of our rules are solid like 8d6 fireballs and +7 attack rolls with advantage.

Storylines aren't solid. Which monsters might appear in any particular game don't necessarily need to be solid. 13th Age taught us to be ready to come up with all sorts of different monsters depending on how the icon rolls go at the beginning of a game.

Locations can be solid too, if we build them right. Spending the time to build out a ruined castle half buried in the side of a mountain gives us something else that's solid. Maybe it has animated skeletons in it. Maybe it's infested with wererats. Maybe it's home to a fallen dwarf king or a group of cultists who worship Ogremoch. What matters is that it has towers and a throne room and a secret treasure vault and a network of forgotten sewers that lead into a labyrinth of caverns once ruled over by the dragon king Infernus. That stuff is solid.

Stealing Locations from Published Adventures

There's an unwritten truth that many adventure writers know and believe. We don't just allow people to change adventures for their table, we hope for it. We BEG for it. I would love to hear how people twist Vault of the Dracolich to fit their own adventures, tearing out all of the monsters in there and replacing it with entirely new monsters, new stories, and new details for their own group. One of my proudest moments in this hobby of ours was opening up the back pages of the Dungeon Master's Guide and seeing the map to Vault of the Dracolich; a map Teos Abadia, Scott Fitzgerald Gray, and I designed and Mike Schley made real; offered up as a generic map for DMs to use however they see fit. We don't begrudgingly accept that people are going to twist adventures like The Innocent or the Drowned Tower to fit their gaming table. We want it. Rip it to shreds, pull out the parts that work for you, and discard the rest.

Published adventures like Hoard of the Dragon Queen, Rise of Tiamat, Princes of the Apocalypse, Out of the Abyss, and Curse of Strahd are packed with great locations for you to abstract from the rest of the adventure and drop into your own campaign wherever they work.

Our Own Vault of Fantastic Locations

As we travel through this big world of ours, we can fill up our own portfolios of wonderful locales, place we can drag out at a moment's notice and suddenly make real. Maybe it's an old Mayan ruin we visited. Maybe it's the strange tunnels underneath Venice we read about. Maybe it's the mountain-side villages from Isle of Dread or the Amber Temple from Curse of Strahd. Some places are real, some we've found in our favorite old adventures. Regardless, they all go in our vault of fantastic locations.

The vault might be an actual list you keep or it might just be in your mind palace. These places, though, are places of power. We don't need full adventures to run our D&D games. We just need some awesome locations, some badass monsters, and the seeds of the stories that come from our group. The rest we leave to the magic of our table.

What is this about? Scroll below the card list to read more about these Tarokka-based encounter effects.

The lord of Ravenloft gazes into a pool of clear liquid, observing these strange adventurers who have traveled into his land. As conflict brews, the lord draws a card from an ancient frayed deck at his side. Gazing at the card, he smiles and throws the card into the pool.

The card reads...

Full Card and Effects List

A Return to I6 Ravenloft's Combat Modifiers

The original I6 Ravenloft adventure had one interesting use of the Tarokka deck that isn't included in the Dungeons & Dragons 5e super-adventure Curse of Strahd; modifiers to combat encounters. It was a small feature and, as presented in the original adventure, sort of boring.

However, we also have this nice juicy Tarokka deck that we really only use once in the whole adventure. There has to be more we can do with this thing!

Thus we have Tarokka-based random encounter effects.

Using Tarokka-Based Random Effects

Every time you (or Strahd!) thinks an encounter is looking rather bland, our lord of Barovia (you the DM!) draws a card from the Tarokka deck and throws it into the middle of the table. Then, using the card list, you determine what effect comes into play for that encounter. Sometimes these effects are good. Sometimes they're really nasty. Sometimes they're just plain weird. In some cases, they have no effect at all depending on the situation. If that's the case, sometimes Strahd gets pissed off and draws another card. That's his prerogative!

Unless otherwise noted all last for five minutes from the time the card is played.

This tool assumes you DON'T happen to have the Tarokka deck on hand so we've taken the step of rolling it for you when you load the page. You can reload the page to draw another card if you wish.

A Fun Way to Spice Up Encounters

These effects are intended to add another layer to encounters that otherwise might feel a little bland. You don't have to use it for every encounter, or any encounter really, unless you think it will add a bit of a fun variable for you and your players. The next time the PCs are facing a relatively simple fight, toss out a card and see what happens!