Table of Contents

Credits and License 2

Introduction 3
GM Principles & Moves 4
Principles 4
Moves 5
World-Building 7
The Narrative Line 7
Improvisational Settings 11
Microscope 15
Hexcrawls 19
Pantheon Building 24
Kicking Off a Campaign 30
Session Zero 30
Using Stonetop’s Introductions Procedure in Session Zero 32
Campaign Prep 35
Threat Maps in Apocalypse World 35
Threats and Threat Maps in Stonetop 37
Structuring Your Sessions 39
Warm-Up Questions 39
Starting Move 42
Stars & Wishes: Feedback for Agile Session Prep 45
Ending the Session 46
General Session Prep 50
The Eight Steps of Lazy RPG Prep 50
Provide Your Players with Situations Rather than Scenes 53
Developing a Fantastic Location 54
A Combat Location 56
Area-Based Prep 59
Brainstorming Moves in Advance 65
NPC Prep 68
Item Prep 75
Different Genres of Sessions 77
Monty Hall Prep 77
Mysterious Monsters 79
Political Prep 82
Conclusion 85

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Credits and License
This document is written by J. Alan Henning, Troy Press. All edits by J. Alan
Henning are licensed under the CC BY-SA 4.0, 2023-2024. All edits
contributed from others are also so licensed.
The section “The Eight Steps of Lazy RPG Prep” is licensed under the CC BY
4.0, 2023, by Michael E. Shea of SlyFlourish.com.
The section “Steading Generator” is the work of Jason Lutes, 2015. Published
under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.
Thanks to the Dungeon World+ and Stonetop Discord groups for helping me
develop many of these ideas.
Cover copyright 2024 by Lady Sapling. Used under license.

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Introduction
GMs have a lot of different ways they can prepare for role-playing sessions.
One key is to prep what you find hard to improvise.
Prewritten Modules and Adventure Starters – Authors publish adventures
for free and on DriveThruRPG. These give you everything you need to begin a
session.
Lazy RPG’s Homebrew – Mike Shea’s Return of the Lazy DM template has 8
types of items to prep. This is a great technique: minimalist but not too
minimal. (See The Eight Steps of Lazy RPG Prep.)
Campaign Setting with Random Generators – You can homebrew your
own setting using Text Mapper to create a random map and Hex Describe to
create a hexcrawl. (See Hexcrawls.)
Area–Based Prep – The classic technique, which began with the birth of the
RPG hobby in the 70s, is to do a dungeon map and annotate what is in each
room. (See Area-Based Prep.)
Laptop Improv – I found myself using a laptop while DMing (I had used a
three-ring binder before) and found that I could rely on Google to help
improvise during play.
Monty Hall Prep – Prep three encounters players could start off the night
with, then foreshadow them and let the PCs choose between them in play.
(See Monty Hall Prep.)
PbtA Move Prep – When first learning to GM a PbtA game, you may find it
useful to brainstorm the outcomes of PbtA moves in advance. (See
Brainstorming Moves in Advance.)
Specialist Prep – For some sessions, you might want to prepare a mystery
structure, a party plan or social event, or a Monster of the Week countdown. (See
Mysterious Monsters.)
Threat Maps – These diagrams provide a structured overview of a campaign
centered on a holding or base. I used threat maps as campaign prep before I
did my session prep for Stonetop. (See Threat Maps.)
Switching prep techniques can help you be more creative and motivate you to
actually do some prep.

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GM Principles & Moves
Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) games—games in the school of design of
Apocalypse World—often outline moves and principles for Game Masters.
While these are typically intended for use during play, they can also be useful
in prep, as we will see, no matter which RPG system you use.

Principles
Here are some principles to keep in mind during prep—
● Name everyone, make everyone human - From Apocalypse World 2:
“The first step toward making your NPCs seem real is to name them…
Every NPC who gets even a single line or a single significant on-screen
action, give a name. Make your NPCs human by giving them
straightforward, sensible self interests.”
● Create interesting dilemmas, not interesting plots - From Impulse
Drive: “Play to find out what happens…. Look at what has been
established, and find conflicts that exist. When you add something to
the universe, look at what it wants, and what it does to get what it
desires, and how those desires conflict with other parts of the
universe. Find the points of tension between groups, NPCs, and the
crew. Think of interesting situations or dilemmas that bring those
conflicts to light, and pose them in the form of questions…. You don’t
want to answer these questions right now, though you may already
have some ideas. The answers will solidify in play. People are
pattern-recognition machines, and the dots will seem to connect
automatically as you play and you and the players explore these
interesting dilemmas.”
● Respect your prep - From Stonetop: “Some prep involves possibilities:
things that the PCs might discover, dangers that they could face,
problems that might arise. This sort of prep lives in a quantum state.
But until you actually use these ideas and introduce them to the
fiction, these ideas aren’t true. They’re just ideas—ideas that help you
punctuate the characters’ lives with adventure. A lot of your prep,
though, involves making decisions—real, binding decisions about how
the world is…. It might include decisions about what will happen if the
PCs don’t intervene, or how an NPC would react to X or Y. This type of

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 prep is part of the fiction already, even if you haven’t yet revealed it to
the players. Make these decisions carefully and thoughtfully….. Then,
during play, respect your prep. Treat it as fictional truth. Describe the
world, portray your characters, and make GM moves with these
decisions in mind. If you’ve done your prep well, you’ll find that
sticking to it not only helps you portray a rich and mysterious world, it
also (paradoxically) helps you play to find out what happens.”
● Prep what you can’t improvise - Inspired by The Return of the Lazy
DM. You may be very good at improvising locations on the fly, or you
may prefer to find or create maps to use. You may be very good at
making up voices in the heat of the moment, or you may want to make
notes for what NPCs will sound like. Whatever you’ve found difficult to
improvise is something you should integrate into your prep work,
either once or as a regular part of your workflow.
For more on principles, see the blog post The Agenda & Principles to
Becoming a Better GM.

Moves
While principles guide overall play, in PbtA games “GM moves” are the types
of responses that GMs make based on PCs failing or partially succeeding at a
task.
Here are some examples of GM moves from different games—
● Announce future badness - From Apocalypse World 2: “The most
important and versatile setup move. If you don’t have another move
already at hand, announce future badness:
○ ‘Someone’s in there, you hear them moving. What do you do?’
○ ‘She’s about to figure out where you are. What do you do?’
○ ‘Dude, you have a split second before that thing gets its teeth
into your arm. What do you do?’
○ ‘You hear a dog outside, sniffing and whining. A voice says, ‘you
found something, boy?’ What do you do?’” [You can purchase
Announce Future Badness as a T-shirt!]

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● Advance towards impending doom - From Stonetop: “Threats are
prep: you write them up between sessions. When you write up a
threat, you make real, binding decisions about it that require thought
and care. Don’t do this during play…. Hazards are environmental
dangers. They can impede or harm the PCs but lack initiative and
intent. Hazards can’t really be fought and slain with spear and shield;
they must be avoided, endured, thwarted, or overcome… Threats and
hazards might have impending dooms, each with a series of grim
portents leading up to them. When you make this move, you decide
that one of those grim portents has come to pass, and show it to the
characters.”
● Give them a tough choice to make - From Impulse Drive: “A tough
choice is when you tell them two dangerous or undesirable situations
they’re faced with, and they only have the opportunity to stop one. The
tougher the choice, the more intense the drama.” Since setting up true
dilemmas can be hard in the spur of the moment, this may be
something you want to prep. For instance, you’ll have part of a rickety
bridge collapse, with two established NPCs following; the nearest PC
can only attempt to save one—who will they pick?
● Bring in backstories and world-building - My own principle. Some
of your players may have written elaborate backstories for their PCs
and shared them with you; you may have developed backstories
together during your session zero; players may have described their
PC’s family, a guild they are a member of, the kingdom they fled from.
Tie together loose threads. Be dramatic: bring in the lost father or
sister, bring back the mentor presumed dead, have the villains
threatening something from a PC’s background. As one of my players
told me, “Great job pulling in our backgrounds. That was a literal game
changer for me.”

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World-Building
You have quite a few choices when it comes to the world of your RPG:
● Develop your setting improvisationally in play.
● Develop your setting up front but collaborating with players.
● Develop your setting up front without player input.
● Use a published RPG setting (in which case you can skip this section).
Homebrew campaigns can be the most difficult campaigns to prepare,
depending on how much of a world you want to create in advance. How you
will want to proceed with world-building will depend in part on where you
and your players want to draw “the narrative line.”

The Narrative Line

The Line separates what the GM narrates vs. what the player narrates. In
D&D, the player narrates their backstory and their current activity; the DM
narrates everything else.
Of course, even some DMs in 5e shift the Line a little – “You killed it! Describe
your final blow and its death throes!”
On the other extreme, take One Shot World by Yochai Gal. The players and GMs
collaboratively develop the world. “Set out a blank sheet of paper and ask the
player who is the most well-traveled to draw a rough outline of the region.
Then ask the most social character to draw a point of interest they’ve heard
rumors about. Finally, ask the most knowledgeable character to draw roads,
rivers, forests, mountain ranges, etc. If anyone hasn’t drawn something on
the map yet, they should then add a detail of their choice.”

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Games can draw the Line in different places from one another. Giving
players more ability to contribute to the narrative can mean less prep work
needed by you as the GM.

Where to draw the narrative What can players do?

line?

Edge of the line: Systems that draw the line here (illustrative examples
rather than an exhaustive list):

What the players can do in the All RPGs, with constraints from the rules and
moment fictional situation

Character backstory RPGs without backstory generators

Character’s people Many PbtA games but not games with established
campaign settings

Expand on the world’s past Many PbtA games

Flesh out GM’s environmental (“Describe your death blow” at one end, to
descriptions describing other items in a room at the other.)

Choose between two consequences Many PbtA games

of a poor roll

Flashbacks Blades in the Dark

Resisting bad things the GM has Blades in the Dark

already narrated

Create the world and setting Story games, esp. those planned for short
campaign runs (e.g., One-Shot World)

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For narrative authority over a character’s people, Fellowship offers a great
example: “You are playing as a hero, a champion of your people, and you are
the truth in all things related to your people. When you play as the Elf, you
decide what the Elves are, what their culture is like, what they value and care
about, what their relationship is with the rest of the world. When someone
asks about the Elves, all eyes will turn to you for the answer.”
Stonetop does this as well: players expound on their backgrounds, like The
Blessed, who worships Danu, and is instructed in Session 0, “Tell us about
Danu’s shrine in Stonetop and how she is worshiped.” But Stonetop draws the
Line even more on the side of player control. Like some other PbtA (Powered
by the Apocalypse) games, it has the GM principle “Ask questions and build
on the answers.” Its setting often provides a sketch on a canvas upon which
players are expected to paint details. For instance, the setting description
indicates that the crinwin are a threat to the village, and upon the first
encounter with them, players are asked a series of questions. Here’s half of
them:
● “What odd noise, heard in the night, is attributed to the crinwin? What
is it said to mean?”
● “What common thing do these vermin seem to covet above all else?”
● “When did crinwin last openly raid the village? What did they take?”

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This was occasionally a challenge to my Stonetop players. Sometimes there’s a
flight to authority. The first instinct is often to assume it’s written down
somewhere: What do the rules say about the Forest Folk? About creatures of
darkness? About how to worship Helior? Some players have to be coaxed to
co-create.
In my own games in other systems, I’ve been trying to move the line to where
players can add details to the environment that fit the spirit of what has been
described before. For instance, as GM I might say, “The thief runs off with
your coin purse and ducks into a smithy down the street.” If the player says, “I
duck into the shop and grab a poker from the fireplace” that works for me. If
she had said she grabbed a tire iron, we’d discuss it! My general rule, taken
from Sly Flourish I think, is to describe three aspects of the environment that
players can interact with. But, in the players’ defense, that leaves a lot
undefined. We can expand on the environment together based on common
sense and our expectations of the world.
Some GMs may fear that if players share narrative control then they will just
make life easier on their characters. That’s not been my experience. My
players want to see how their characters surmount dangers. For instance,
when I was GMing Atma, one of my players said, “OK, I’m going to stash Sir
Leonid in one of my pocket dimensions so he can take a power nap [special
move he has].” The player who played Sir Leonid was fine with that. When he
was later pulled out of the pocket dimension, his player then said, “I come
out, looking disheveled, clearly having just been fighting something. But I see
this new opponent and I charge…” Later the first player said, “OK, I pull out
whatever Sir Leonid was fighting, to defend me— it’s a chimordial! Argh!
Oh, and GM, I fully expect it to turn on me at some point.” As GM, I hadn’t
articulated what was happening in the pocket dimension, but these two
players took it upon themselves to do so.
Not all players will embrace the ability to share narrative authority to the
same extent. In my Stonetop campaign, the Fox, who has wandered the world
(in her backstory), often co-creates details of the world. But the Blessed, who
has been a homebody, rarely does; partly because of the character, but more
because the player doesn’t enjoy that. That’s fine! One game can
accommodate different players’ enthusiasm for co-creation, and a good GM
can draw the line in different places for different players.

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If you haven’t yet experimented with shared narrative control, a one-shot
game is a great place to do that. Again, check out One-Shot World, or my
resources for running Dungeon World one-shots.
My Session Zeroes have not historically asked about The Line and where it
should be drawn. It’s been implicit – as GM, I’m in charge of creation. In the
future, I’m going to have to make it explicit: What do the players want?
Where are they most comfortable drawing the Line? But then I’m going to
challenge them: let’s push the line a little bit past your comfort zone, as you
just might find that you enjoy playing even more when you can bring a bit
more creativity into the world.

Improvisational Settings
Imagine sitting down to GM a session of a role-playing game for which you
know nothing about the setting, because the setting doesn’t exist yet. The
setting will be created at the table together with your players.
That doesn’t mean there’s no prep to be done!
In fact, I spent a lot of time preparing for that level of improvisation. I might
have spent three hours preparing.

Collaborative Map-Making
John Aegard writes, in “Dragonslaying on a Timetable”:
I like having a map. I don’t use it for anything formal, but it’s a nice
grounding of our setting and a chance to doodle.
The map will be a grid of index cards arranged where everyone can see.
As the game proceeds, locations will be mentioned. Capture each of
them on a card and add them to the map. Also, as NPCs and premises
are added, make sure that you figure out where those live. Add location
cards for those places.
A map made of cards is super flexible and totally helps you earn your
“Draw Maps While Leaving Blanks” merit badge. See, if you want to
add a location between two other locations while you’re in the middle
of play, you can just insert a card in between those two locations.

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Yochai Gal develops this even further in One Shot World:
First, prepare a stack of index cards and permanent markers. Hand 1 or
2 to each player, then ask each to draw an image. It could be something
fantastical (a floating city, a dragon’s den), mundane (gorges,
mountain peaks, lakes) or simply represent a feature you might see on
a fantasy map (ancient ruins, temples, a city on a hill). These are
meant to inspire you and the players as you build your world map.
Next, choose two or three of the index cards and lay them down in the
middle of the table. They shouldn’t be touching; leave a little bit of
space between. Pick one that you feel is appropriate (an image of a
dark forest, the city docks, a mountain cave) and mentally designate it
as the starting point of the adventure. Use it to help set the scene!
As each player adds their details to the map, ask them what they know
about them! Work with your players to figure out what these cards
represent. They could be the player character’s hometown, an
overlord’s fortress, or an artifact of the landscape. You can also ask the
appropriate character (for instance, a Thief might know the name of
the capital city’s slums), the history behind a ruin, who rules the
Emerald Forest, etc. As you talk, you should jot this information down
for later use. Always remember to leave blanks!
Work with the players to build a unique world; think about the
answers they’ve already given you, and what kind of story you can
build with them. But go even further by asking more questions,
especially leading ones. Something that hints at a larger truth,
something hidden, or a secret agenda. If you’ve already established
that the characters will start out in the ruins of an abandoned temple,
ask them what happened. Why was it abandoned? Perhaps the Cleric
would know based on their religious past? Or maybe the Bard has
heard of it in legend? Ideally, you want questions that snowball into
more questions, filling out the world as you go. The one thing you
absolutely can’t bring to the table is a planned storyline or plot.
When you’ve finished the session, keep the index cards. You can use
them in future sessions, however you like!
The image’s view angle can be top-down, from the side, super zoomed
in, or even way zoomed out!

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 You can then begin the adventure, building out the map as the players
move through the world. If they need to cross a treacherous territory
on the way to defeat a great evil, place an index card image that best
illustrates the danger! It could be a rickety bridge between two
mountain peaks, or a dark forest, brimming with creatures of dark
intent. Use what the players give you!
Additionally, don’t feel limited by what you’ve got: you can always
move the existing index cards apart and insert a brand new one
between them! You or the players can also draw new locations as the
story progresses!
Some players may not feel comfortable drawing. That’s OK! After a
few sessions, you’ll develop a nice pile to choose from!

One-Shots
If, like me, you find the idea of improvisational settings intimidating, then I
encourage you to run a “one-shot,” a campaign in a single session (though the
joke is that most one-shots take two sessions).
Here were some resources I used to prep two different Dungeon World
one-shots:
● “Dragonslaying on a Timetable” – Subtitle: “Running Tight 4-Hour
Dungeon World One-Shots With Zero Preparation,” by John Aegard.
This was my primary resource, and I went through it throughout the
evening, including leveling up as directed in the middle of the session
(the players loved this!).
● Things to do in the first session of your Dungeon World game –
Subtitle: “a guide to making player choices matter,” by Tim Franzke. I
used this to ask additional probing questions of each player during
world creation and identifying bonds.
● Spouting Lore: My recipe for starting adventures – Great advice from
Jeremy Strandberg, author of Stonetop, geared towards launching new
campaigns but helpful for one-shots.
● One Shot World – By Yochai Gal. This was what I initially planned to
use, and I would use it at the table, but because we were using Roll 20
and playing remotely, and because the players were interested in
learning Dungeon World, I just went with Dungeon World character

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 sheets instead. I think One Shot World would be perfect for demoing
games at a convention or game store.
● Safety Tools – More important than ever to emphasize. Personal to me
since I once freaked out a player who had arachnophobia; I never want
to do something like that again. I also shared this graphic from Monte
Cook Games’ Consent in Gaming.
● 20 Dungeon Starters – I wanted this for creative prompts, depending on
where the party might go.
● Dungeon World Tools – Helpful to select monsters based on terrain.
● Terrain Features for Better Combat – To maximize “theater of the
mind,” I wanted battles to have objects and obstacles that might affect
combat.
● Dungeon World Instant NPC Generator – For those random folks
players might encounter.
Now, because we only had a three-hour window, I encouraged people to pick a
class (first come, first serve) by text message in the week up to the game, and
to create their character in Roll 20. I then created a copy of the
“Dragonslaying on a Timetable” Google Doc and hacked out questions for
classes that weren’t going to be in my game, and changed some of the
questions for clerics to questions for the paladin instead, since I had a paladin
and no cleric.
In retrospect, during world creation, with three players, I should have pushed
for more locations, having each describe two separate locales instead of one.
Drawing on Roll 20 they put all their places next to each other, where in
person the places would have gone on index cards that could have been
moved around.
Fiction first did lead to one problem: They posited an ancient imperial city on
a mountain that was a source of contamination that had brought megafauna
back into the world (e.g., sabertooth tigers, cave bears, giant sloths). The druid
wanted to stop the contamination that had been damaging the area for
dozens of years; that seemed like a great campaign arc but way too much to
achieve in one night (at least for my improv skills, at that moment).
Meanwhile, the wizard wanted to find three of his students who had vanished
exploring the ruins, and the paladin just wanted to fight all the megafauna –
so I improvised clues and motivation for the students, and it worked out well.

14
I ended up cannibalizing the Eldritch Island starter from 20 Dungeon Starters
for details on the mountain and its bizarre contamination.
I got the players to lean into co-creation early, which I think really
distinguished the game from their experiences with 5e.
For the second one-shot I ran, with a different group of players, they
imagined quite a different world: a port city overlooking islands, to one of
which a kraken had come. The setting and play were epic. While they didn’t
defeat the kraken, they did encounter it and flee from it.
Here are some other resources that folks have shared with me since I ran my
one-shots:
● Burn After Running: Dungeon World One-Shots
● Dungeon World Convention Sheets

Microscope
You may want to spend more time together on world building than just the
start of a session. Microscope is an RPG designed specifically for collaborative
world-building.
I knew that I wanted to kick-off a new science-fiction PbtA campaign with a
Microscope session. Heck, our planned setting is literally the first scenario
listed on the Microscope website: “Humanity spreads to the stars and forges a
galactic civilization”! (Fantasy RPG players, the next two are “Fledgling
nations arise from the ruins of the empire” and “An ancient line of
dragon-kings dies out as magic fades from the realm.”)
Since we would be playing online, we used the custom app Utgar’s Chronicles
to manage our timeline. It provided such a great experience I became a
patron.
The game starts with these three steps—
1. Big Picture: Pick a concept for your history, no more than a single
sentence.
2. Bookend History: Make start and end Periods.
3. Palette–Add or Ban Ingredients: Each player can add or ban one thing
from the Palette. Repeat until a player doesn’t want to add or ban

15
 anything. Feel free to discuss–everyone should be happy with the
Palette.
Our big picture was “Earth expands through jump gates,” and our bookends
were “Earth experiments with blackhole generation” and “First Contact.”
Next we crafted our Palette: “The Palette is a list of things the players agree to
reserve the right to include or, conversely, outright ban. It gets everyone on
the same page about what belongs in the history and what doesn’t.” Each
player takes turns suggesting an item for the Palette or passing, until
everyone has passed. For instance, one player wanted real space physics
rather than cinematic physics, and I wanted to ban magic such as the Force.
We definitely are going more hard science fiction than science fantasy. Our
palette:

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17
The Palette by itself is such a useful tool that others recommend it as a
mechanic to use with one-shots (see: The Microscope Palette, Its Usefulness
in One-Shots, and a Dungeon World Starter Discovery).
The three steps of Big Picture, Bookends, and Palette are a time for discussion
and feedback, but after this “Group decisions are now over.” The joy of
building a timeline is that you can always add an event before or after it to
change its influence, so people are encouraged to expand the timeline on their
own, without discussion.
The core loop of gameplay involves either adding a period to a timeline,
adding an event to any of the defined periods, or hosting a scene to elaborate
on an event. For instance, we had the idea of Expanse-like gates to handle
interstellar jumps. One player created the period “Jump Race: Race to Claim
Systems” after this gate technology was invented, and another player added
an event to this period, “Illuminati-like group organizes jumps to help direct
exodus from earth to other systems.” Scenes are designed to answer questions
together and involve more traditional role-playing.
The game is recommended for two to four players, but we played with six (it
should be noted, explicitly over the author’s written objections in the rules).
The main ramifications of playing with too many:
● It took us two sessions (about 2-3 hours each) to give everyone
opportunities to contribute.
● We only ran two scenes (we found them time-consuming for the
payoff).
● One of the players felt like the game bogged down with so many of us.

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Here’s the timeline we produced:

Overall, the game was such a success that two of the players immediately
announced their intent to use it in a new 5e campaign they are starting.
Remember your GM move, “Bring in backstories and world-building.” I tried
to review our timeline before each session, just to have it fresh in my mind.

Hexcrawls
One of the GM principles of Dungeon World is called “Draw maps, leave
blanks”:
Dungeon World exists mostly in the imaginations of the people playing
it; maps help everyone stay on the same page. You won’t always be
drawing them yourself, but any time there’s a new location described
make sure it gets added to a map.
When you draw a map don’t try to make it complete. Leave room for
the unknown. As you play you’ll get more ideas and the players will
give you inspiration to work with. Let the maps expand and change.
Hex maps are particularly useful for this. They can cover a large geographic
area, but sparsely populating it, leaving plenty of room for improvisation.

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For my first major homebrew campaign, which was pitched to players as a
game of exploration, I created a 10-by-10 hex map using Text Mapper, an
open-source utility by Alex Schroeder that converts a description of hexes
into a graphical map (SVG format). This tool is perfect for people like me who
are more comfortable in a text editor than a graphic design program. And
there’s another incredible benefit, which I’ll get to in a bit.
Text Mapper offers a range of options. I used the random generator based on
Erin D. Smale’s algorithm, then kept tweaking the results by hand until I got
something I liked. For instance, I wanted the starting hex to border each type
of other terrain (forest, mountains, hills, swamp, lake, grassland) so that
players could choose the type of environment (and therefore monsters) they
wanted to explore. I lengthened a mountain range that divided the middle of
the map, and had the west side be arid and the east side be fertile, indicating
that rains blow westward.
Editing the map doesn’t involve drawing but involves changing descriptions
of hexes:
0101 green firs thorp
0102 light-grey mountain cliff1
0103 light-grey mountain
0104 light-green firs thorp
0105 green fir-forest
0106 light-grey forest-hill
0107 light-grey mountain
0108 light-green firs thorp
0109 grey swamp
0110 grey swamp
0201 light-grey mountain cliff0
0202 white mountain
0203 light-grey mountain
0204 light-green fir-forest
0205 light-grey mountain cliff0
I also ended up adding names into the map for some of the major landmarks.
The following illustration is just of a random map, as I don’t want my players
to see the actual map I’m using. Half the fun is in the discovery.

20
Now why create maps like this?

21
The key reason is that you can then copy that map into Hex Describe and
create an entire campaign!

All of a sudden you have 100 regions that your players can go explore! And of
course you can hack and edit any description to better suit your players’
interest. But it is much easier to start with 100 descriptions already generated
then to start with a blank page.
Hex Describe is another utility by Alex Schroeder. This one generates
“generates mini-setting books: a hundred pages or more of descriptions for a
map based on random tables”. The setting uses statistics compatible with

22
most old-school RPGs. And it uses setting elements from Alex Schroeder’s
own system, Halberds & Helmets.
The generator has different collections of tables:

Alex Schroeder Peter Seckler Matt Strom

Best for Alpine maps Smale maps Smale maps

Tables 1,848 311 228

Word count 101,007 17,882 101,165

License Public domain Public domain Copyright held by

various authors

For my hexcrawl, I actually ran all three sets of tables and combined them. I
ran the same map through the generators from Alex Schroeder, Peter Seckler
(a fork of Alex’s supporting different terrain types), and Matt Strom. Then I
copied and pasted each together. Tedious and not something I’d do again but
Alex’s doesn’t cover all terrain types. In retrospect, I’d start with Alex’s only
and then cherry pick from the other two documents rather than combine
them all to start with.
The specific rule set that Hex Describe uses is Alex Schroeder’s heartbreaker:
“Halberds & Helmets is the name of my Players Handbook for old school D&D. It
takes its inspiration from B/X D&D (1981) via Labyrinth Lord and
incorporates many of the various rules and ideas I tag Old School.” This is
mostly compatible with B/X but Halberds & Helmets (and therefore Hex
Describe) uses its own sets of spells.
I’ve used the same setting for both Dungeons & Dragons 5e and for Dungeon
World, simply looking up the monsters in the appropriate reference book.
I’ve extensively rewritten each of the hexes my players have visited, keeping
some elements from Hex Describe’s output. The random hexes generate ideas
that push me to be more creative and inspire confidence that, should my
players set off in an unexpected direction (as they often do) or get lost (less
often), I can describe where they end up.

23
At this point, I’ve used the same setting for three different campaigns and for
my Twine gamebook, A New Life in Auspele.
I encourage you to give both Text Mapper and Hex Describe a spin.

Pantheon Building
The general advice for DMs building their own campaign worlds is to
recognize that most world-building won’t end up being experienced by the
players. While you can go full Tolkien if you wish (to obey your own muse),
you’re typically better off creating simple systems and then using fractal
design to zoom in on those parts that players show an interest in.
Gods loom large over fantasy settings. Clerics derive their magic from the god
they worship. Paladins follow the ideals of their god. Ancient temples and
altars provide opportunities for adventure.
For my Hexedland campaign, rather than write The Silmarillion, I developed a
one-page pantheon, where the description of each god shared the major myth
associated with that god. Read together, this provides a summary of the
mythos. What follows is what I provided players at Session Zero.

Gods in Hexedland
Humans believe in all 12 of the main gods, but most have two gods they
consider patrons. They wear an upper arm ring with a symbol of their favored
god and a finger ring with the symbol of their second god. They do not need to
pick a god that exactly matches their alignment.
Common beliefs no matter which gods a player favors:
● Gods are not omniscient. They rely on prayers to learn what is
happening in the world.
● Gods are not omnipotent either. They channel their actions through
clerics and believers.
● Some people became gods, either through Diahaj granting them
apotheosis or through them recruiting enough worshipers to achieve it
on their own (Tolcu-Tolcu).

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● Where a spell on a scroll can only be read by magic users, a spell on a
prayer leaf can be read by anyone. A prayer leaf is a piece of parchment
folded in half and then folded in thirds and placed in a small leather
pouch.
● Each god has an associated taboo, an activity a character must avoid.
For instance, followers of Wenmaju avoid dry food (rations), while
followers of Pentwer won’t set traps or associate with someone who
sets traps. Violating a taboo will suspend a player’s ability to use any
prayer leaves until a tithe has been paid to the right temple in Auspele.
● The twelve gods often contest one another in mortal affairs. Other,
more idiosyncratic gods are worshiped elsewhere. 

25
d12 Deity / Archetype / Symbol Background
Alignment Taboo

1 Ausdia Creator / Sunburst She created the sun, the trinity, and populated the
LG public eating with 12 rays world with immortal plants and walking trees. No one
ate anyone else.

2 Neccelio Lawbreaker Cave The god of the trinity, he rebelled and created animals
CE / jokes entrance and night and death. Sometimes called “The Devourer.”

3 Sterdia Caregiver / Crescent The goddess of the trinity, after the first nightfall, she
LG selfishness moon & star grew the moon and the stars.

4 Diahaj Magician / Painted The other-gendered god of the trinity, they

CG routine skull transformed substances, resurrected the dead, and
deified mortals.

5 Wenmaju Lover / Two eyes A sublimely beautiful intersex human, they were
N dry foods wooed by each of the trinity.

6 Regwena Hero / Bow with Originally a princess, she single handedly defended her
NG torture arrow brothers from an orc attack and then found and freed
her kidnapped husband. Mother of Coronosej.

7 Coronosej Ruler / Crown She created an alliance of races, defeated an invasion of

LN frivolity monsters, and became the first empress of Cedreg.

8 Pentwer Explorer / Flames A dwarf, he went into the wilderness and blazed a trail
NE setting traps for settlers. (Caring little for those who lived there.)

9 Ogmalbo Sage / E-shaped An elf, she compiled lore on the lands opened up by
LE deception rune Pentwer.

10 Zeipots Everyman / Bumblebee Originally a human farmer, he was the first to tame
LG luxury goods bees and cultivate honey.

11 Mehupots Jester / Ancient A halfling bard, she stole honey and invented mead.
CN books & vase
scrolls

12 Tolcu-tolcu Innocent / City on a She taught cosmopolitanism and radical inclusiveness

CG bigotry hill to the citizens of the empire, became widely worshiped
and achieved apotheosis on her own.

26
Notes

The archetypes for these gods came from the book The Hero and the Outlaw. The
icons were all sourced from The Noun Project (for which I have an annual
license).

Generic Pantheon
If even a one-page cosmology is more than you want for your setting, you can
develop a generic pantheon instead.
For a hexcrawl module I’m writing, I didn’t want to go with specific gods, but I
struggled to come up with something generic that a Game Master could easily
adapt to their setting.
I wanted to make less work for GMs. This is prompted by me encountering
things in modules like “A steep hill rises from the forest and at its top there is
a shrine where stands an old statue of Yemathic, about 20 feet tall” and not
finding enough about Yemathic to know what is intended. (OK, pages and
pages on, including passing a few more references, I found out that it was a
god or goddess – not sure which – of justice.)
The Greeks and Romans had almost the same gods, just with different names:
Ares vs. Mars. Then the Romans tried to translate every local deity into their
pantheon: “Oh, your god Taranis is just another name for Jupiter.” So that is
the hybrid I looked for: “You encounter a wall painting and a shrine to what

27
the runes name as Ausdia, a goddess of the sun, with a solar halo behind her
head.” Easy to reskin to Apollo or Belenus or Dol Arrah or Frey or Odur or
Pelor or Phlotus or Re-Horakht or your homebrewed solar deity!
One approach would be just to go with the D&D 5e domains: Knowledge, Life,
Light, Nature, Tempest, Trickery, and War.
For another approach, I re-read “Appendix B: Gods of the Multiverse” from
the 5e Player’s Handbook and did a word count on the Deity column:

Word Count Word

12 war

11 magic

9 nature

9 sea

7 death

6 knowledge

6 fertility

6 storms

6 good

5 healing

5 giants

5 craft

5 light

5 fire

5 sun

4 music

4 love

4 evil

4 elf

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For the main pantheon, I went with 8 gods (so I can use a d8 to look up a god),
with a d6 for gender (1-2=male, 3-4=female, 5=dual, 6=nonbinary):
1. god/goddess of death [War domain]
2. god/goddess of fertility [Life]
3. god/goddess of knowledge [Knowledge]
4. god/goddess of magic [Trickery]
5. god/goddess of nature [Nature]
6. god/goddess of the sea [Tempest]
7. god/goddess of the sun [Light]
8. god/goddess of war [War]

I left out alignment references, as I think those are easy for a GM to swap in as
needed.

For ancient ruins, I want to use a d12:

1. god/goddess of craft [Knowledge domain]

2. god/goddess of death [War]
3. god/goddess of fertility [Life]
4. god/goddess of fire [Trickery]
5. god/goddess of healing [Life]
6. god/goddess of knowledge [Knowledge]
7. god/goddess of magic [Trickery]
8. god/goddess of nature [Nature]
9. god/goddess of the sea [Tempest]
10. god/goddess of storms [Tempest]
11. god/goddess of the sun [Light]
12. god/goddess of war [War]

A common pattern, which I omitted from my tables, is to have gods of a race:

a god of giants (5 references in the PHB), a god of elves (4), etc. Those can
easily be added depending on the history of a location.
While you can certainly invent gods in play, and improvise, a little bit of prep
work will pay dividends throughout your campaign.

29
Kicking Off a Campaign

Session Zero
The first Session Zero I ever ran was prior to my first homebrew campaign.
We had just wrapped up a 41-session, open-table campaign set in Melvaunt in
Forgotten Realms, and we were about to start a closed-table campaign, O5R
style (OSR-inspired 5e, that is fifth edition played with an Old School
Renaissance sensibility).
Your group’s Session Zero may have different things to cover, but here’s what
we found useful.
The questions I asked to better tailor this campaign:
● What was your favorite moment from the last campaign? Least
favorite?
● What did you like in general about the last campaign? What did you
dislike?
● Do you want to play one character over the new campaign or play
multiple characters?
● Should we allow players to be resurrected or not?
● Do you like creating maps?
● Do you like codes and ciphers?
● What kind of records are you as a team going to keep about the world
and your adventures?
● What types of monsters would you like to encounter?
● How would you feel about a session with no combat?
● How can we speed up combat? [We have 7 players, so I feel like it can
bog down, though not every player felt that way.]
Introduction to any house rules. For instance:
● For a player who is not present during a session, their character is
assumed to be present and along for the ride but not contributing
much. An absent player’s character cannot be killed.
● At the end of a session, the players reach consensus on where they
want to go the next session. [A complaint was how long it took them to
decide which clue/quest to follow at the start of a session.]

30
 ● While the DMG says a permanent magic item every five levels, we are
going to have some different items that come along more often.
● Combat ideas:
● Everyone rolls for initiative (including me as DM for monsters).
High roll goes first, then combat proceeds in clockwise order
around the table.
● Players can postpone their turn if they are not ready. [We were
already doing this.]
● If the AC is obvious (humanoid wearing armor), I’ll tell the
players it. Everyone will roll d20 and damage die together,
ignoring damage die if they didn’t hit.
● I’m going to provide better feedback into the declining health of
the opponents.
Discussion of how the world differs from prior experiences or from other
expectations. In our case:
● There’s a shop with common magic items only, but anything rarer –
even uncommon – will require tracking rumors and legends to find.
● Rather than copper, silver, electrum, gold, and platinum pieces, the
lands use electrum pieces universally, though their home city is
unique in that it has copper pennies too. The electrum pieces are the
only reminders of the wider world of the vanished empire: which
city-states used the minotaur coins, the winged horse, and the lion?
After much discussion of character races and classes, I had every player tell us
about their character. I had already encouraged them to think of a high
concept and troubled aspect of their character’s background. Then also had to
tell us how their character knows the character of the player to their right.
Based on what I learnt from the session, I tweaked the encounter tables that I
had developed for wandering monsters, and I changed some of the clues and
potential storylines. For instance, while one of our past players loved riddles
and ciphers, that wasn’t something any of the current players wanted much
of, so I dropped that aspect.
The Session Zero paved the way for another great 40-session campaign, with
a truly creative ending by the players! Over the course of the year, it produced
an enduring setting in which I’ve now run two other campaigns.

31
Some questions I’m going to ask in future Session Zeroes:
● “Where do you want to draw the narrative line?” (Different answers
from different players can possibly work in the same campaign.)
● “What are the core things that you want to earn experience for?” (See
Ending the Session below.)

Using Stonetop’s Introductions Procedure in Session Zero

For a different campaign, I ran a Session Zero based primarily on Stonetop’s
Introductions procedure.
Stonetop is a hearth fantasy PbtA by Jeremy Strandberg (you can preorder it
here). Each playbook has two customized sets of questions: one set for the
player to answer about NPCs and one set for the player as PC to pose to the
other PCs.
Here’s the process for the Ranger, excerpted from the Ranger playbook.

Ranger
Introductions
Wait here for everyone else. When everyone’s ready, take turns introducing
your characters. When someone reveals something and you want to know
more, ask them about it. When someone asks you a question, answer it
truthfully.
1. On your first turn, introduce yourself by name, pronouns,
background, origin, and appearance.
2. On your second turn, describe your special possessions and how you
contribute to the village (beyond working the fields).
3. On your third turn, tell us what you’re worried about (see “Something
wicked this way comes”).
4. On your next turn, answer one of the following, naming one or more
NPCs who live in Stonetop.
a. Who is your closest kin?
b. To whom do you always return home?
c. Who would be lost without you?
d. Who has much to learn from you?

32
 5. Go around again. Answer another question from 4, or pass. When
everyone has passed, go on.
6. On your next turn, ask your fellow PCs one of these. When others ask
you, answer as you like.
a. Which one of you fears the wider world?
b. Which one of you has shown me great beauty?
c. Which one of you have I caught sometimes staring out at the
horizon?
d. Which one of you lacked the stomach to put something out of
its misery?
7. Go around again. Ask another question from 6, or pass. When
everyone has passed, go on.
8. Add your home to the steading playbook.
When everyone is done, let spring break forth!

Details
Stonetop is about adventuring for the sake of protecting and growing your
Iron Age village, and the questions about NPCs help you co-create the village
you are protecting and come up with links to the people you will protect.
These questions, in my experience, work much better than Dungeon World’s
Bonds for forging connections between PCs. In fact, Jeremy originally
developed these Introductions as an alternative to Bonds. Later he lifted an
idea from Apocalypse World 2:
AW2e did that thing where it took the Hx prompts in the playbooks
(where were [the inspiration] to DW-style Bonds) and replaced them
with ‘Which of you __?’ questions, which I loved as a way to really
shape the conversation and distill it down to its essence.
With fill-in-the-blank bonds, you’d get this weird situation where a
player would assert their relationship with another PC, which was
occasionally brilliant but just as often kinda cringy and awkward.
With “which one of you <X>?” questions, you’ve got the guidance of a
loaded/leading question, but it’s an invitation rather than an assertion,
which is what I found happened in healthy and respectful playgrounds
anyway.”

33
Together, these introductory questions give a new group of PCs a cohesion,
backstory, and history that methods like “you meet at a tavern” fail to provide.

Adapting Introductions for Other RPGs

My Stonetop group enjoyed the Introductions process so much that I
immediately knew I wanted to use it again in the future for different RPGs.
For our Impulse Drive campaign, I collated all the question lists from the
Stonetop playbooks. (Stonetop text is licensed under the Creative Commons.) I
omitted those questions that were setting specific, such as ones relating to
Stonetop’s pantheon.
I also added some questions to flesh out the initial setting: in our case, a space
station. And I integrated some aspects of the Impulse Drive mechanics into the
Introductions procedure.
We had a blast going through this procedure, and it made a nice bridge from
our world-building session to our first real Impulse Drive session. The players
loved the process of introductions, with one immediately planning to borrow
the mechanic for their next campaign.
You can make a copy of this Google Doc to customize the Introduction
procedure for your own campaigns. (And don’t forget to order Stonetop on
BackerKit!)

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Campaign Prep
Unlike world-building, which is often about creating a panorama, campaign
prep is focused on the PCs and what threats may come to bear on them in
future sessions (not just the next session).

Threat Maps in Apocalypse World

One of the great bits of tech from Apocalypse World 2e is the threat map, which
provides a concise summary of campaign prep. You can adapt it for other
systems as well, if your play centers on a holding, a home base, or a city.
Here’s an example from my Stonetop campaign:

D. Vincent Baker and Meguey Baker describe the process of using threat maps
as follows:
List the players’ characters in the center circle. As you name NPCs,
place them on the map around the PCs, according to what direction
and how far away they are.
The inner circle is for the PCs and their resources. The “closer” ring is
for threats in the PCs’ close surroundings. The “farther” ring is for
threats at or over the PCs’ horizons. The “notional” outer ring is for

35
 threats that exist as rumors or ideas, maybe real and maybe not real at
all.
Threats in the “in” section can be threats within the local or
surrounding landscape or population, like a disease, a cult, or a species
of parasite. Threats in the “out” section can be truly alien, originating
in the world’s psychic maelstrom or even elsewhere. [“Close your eyes,
open your brain: something is wrong. At the limits of perception,
something howling, everpresent, full of hate and terror. From this, the
world’s psychic maelstrom, we none of us have shelter.”]
For my first homebrew campaign, the one I had created as a hex map using
Hex Describe, I updated the hex map as a living document as a regular part of
my campaign prep. That would not work as well for a game like Stonetop,
which – like Apocalypse World – centers the PCs’ adventures around their
home.
The threat map provides an overview of threats, which AW2 documents using
half sheets that summarize each threat. These forms list the type of threat, its
impulse (its drive), its description, its supporting cast (if any), what is at stake,
and may even include a custom move or countdown clock. I’m not using these
forms: my notes about specific threats are less structured and more of a grab
bag of things I might find useful.
The other key part of the threat map, though, is the “I Wonder” section. This
section gives you permission to ask yourself questions about the campaign
that you don’t yet have the answer for. From the book:
Leave yourself things to wonder about. You’ll know it when it happens.
A player will say something and you’ll be like, hey wait, there are fish
swimming down there. So you’ll ask, and the player will answer, but
you’ll be like …I don’t think that’s the fish I’m after. I think the fish I’m
after is still down there, deeper than I thought, and bigger than I
thought too.
Sometimes it’ll happen with one of your own NPCs. You’ll be talking
along, and you’ll suddenly be like, hold on, this guy Scrimp is …
weaselly… but he isn’t afraid of Marie at all. How can that be?
You don’t need an explanation right now! … Nod to yourself and back
away, fixing the spot in your memory. (Which means to note it down
on your threat map under “I wonder.”)

36
Threats and Threat Maps in Stonetop
I encountered threat maps first in AW2 and then applied them independently
to Stonetop. But Jeremy Strandberg, author of Stonetop, had already added
threats (but not threat maps) to the game years before. Writing on the DW+
Discord in 2019, he wrote:
The short version on how I got to Threats for Stonetop instead of
Fronts per DW is: I just cribbed it from AW2e. The architecture of
“fronts” (where each adventure front has multiple dangers [each with
grim portents/dooms], a cast of characters, stakes questions, and
custom moves) makes the most sense in a game where PCs wander
from adventure to adventure and occasionally leave loose threads
around. But in Stonetop, the PCs are centered in a home base and
threats rear up around them. The AW2e structure of just categorizing
everything that could come back to cause problems later as “a threat”
and maybe giving it a countdown and maybe writing stakes questions
and so forth, and then plotting those threats on a map showing their
relative position to the PCs… that just makes more sense for Stonetop.
I sort of combined the Danger types from DW and the Threat Types
from AW2e, and kept the idea of “MC moves by threat type” but I
always found the specific subtypes for Dangers in DW limiting rather
than inspiring (and feared that the same would happen with the
AW2e-style threat sub-types). So I just went with examples and their
instincts, rather than making a supposedly exhaustive list.
As for how mandatory I think they are… I think they’re super, super
helpful for Stonetop. If nothing else, keeping track of the threats that
have been established makes life a lot (a LOT) easier when you get to a
Seasons Change roll and it results in a threat growing worse, or the
PCs getting valuable insight into a threat, or they get a “threats
abound” result. And they’re also really useful for handling
complications and misses on homefront moves. Like, if the PCs have
the village Pull Together and get a 7-9, and pick an unforeseen
requirement, look at your threats and have one show up to cause
trouble. Or when the PCs are investigating strange goings-on in the
village itself, a miss can lead you to directly advancing one of the grim
portents and BOOM, the Widow Eira (who all the farmers listen to)
gets murdered in her sleep by the fae that’s been causing trouble.

37
 Ooor… a 6- or a hard choice on a 7-9 can result in a new homefront
threat, which left unchecked can result in increasingly bad problems.
And here’s the current Stonetop draft’s discussion of “I wonder”:
Keep a running list of open questions—things that you wonder about,
but either…
… you don’t know how to answer yet, or
… you want to leave unanswered for now and see it get answered
through play.
“I wonder… what did happen to the Forest Folk? What was that thing
Vahid faced when he got the Mindgem? What exactly is making the
crinwin so bold?”
Refer to these questions as you prepare adventures. Use the list to help
identify the adventure’s central opportunity or threat, or to help write
the setup questions that you’ll ask the characters.
Refer to this list during your sessions, when you need something
interesting to say. Can you say something that answers one of these
questions? Or that hints at the answer? Can you turn one of these
questions back on the characters, and ask them to give you the
answers?
Update these questions between sessions. If a question has been
answered, remove it.
If a new question occurs to you, add it to the list.
I also integrate feedback from Stars & Wishes into my “I wonder” list, but see
the next section for more on that.
In the future, I might even adapt the threat map to my next hexcrawl, using it
to track rumors (“notional” threats) and other dangers, centered on wherever
the PCs have selected as a base.
I hope you’ll find threat maps as useful for campaign prep as I have.

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Structuring Your Sessions
By applying a small bit of structure to your regular sessions, you can set
yourself up for easier prep.
I’ll often have warm-up questions that go out with a session reminder, then
during the session itself have a starting move and an ending move.

Warm-Up Questions
Because Stonetop wants you to zoom out and see the passage of time, and
because players are encouraged to co-create the village and its traditions, I’d
often prep questions for my Stonetop players to think about prior to the
session. Initially, I’d send these out with a reminder for our biweekly game.
My warmup questions were always to encourage my players to do some world
building. Not all players are comfortable improvising in play. So then my
players asked to get the questions the day before, so they would have some
time to consider their answers. They started bugging me if I hadn’t given
them their “homework” yet, as they called it!

Example 1, with actual answers

● Siska, your Uncle Owl has been unwell. You’ve been tending him as
best you can. What do you worry about if he were to die? How did you
help with the harvest? “Uncle Owl is very knowledgeable about
planting any kind of crop. He knows how to locate good soil, good
drainage and how to keep insects, rabbits and other small pests out
away from our crops. If we lose his experience and support, it will be
difficult for all of us.”
● Yorath, who do you personally think has been stealing from folk?
Those refugees from Marshedge? How did you help with the harvest?
“The town constable should investigate where the refugees from
Marshedge have any stolen property. I have been manning tower
watch as is my job, overlooking all outside work in the fields.”
● Wynn, the old timers are agitated about all the changes to Stonetop
(the mill, the windmill, the refugees). What have you been saying to
them? How did you help with the harvest? “Darn Luddites. I listen to
their concerns and acknowledge the changes. I give gentle reminders

39
 of the benefits of our growing town (better food, improved living
conditions, talents of the refugees). I invite them to a sumptuous meal
made by the refugees and try to find common ground in the dinner
conversation.”
● Grell, does anyone in town ride Crinwin [the horse he’d rescued from
Winoc]? Have the other two horses in town only known the yoke or
have they been ridden? What are the names of the other two horses?
How did you help with the harvest? “No one else in town has ridden
Crinwin. Most people are nervous about riding and prefer walking
(safer, touching the ground is ‘right’ riding is ‘wrong’). The other two
horses (Brynny and Betty) have never been ridden. I help with the
horses and loading the cart with the harvested grain to bring it to the
mill and deliver it to individual homes of people who are not able to
pick up their share for whatever reason (sick? old? bedridden?).”
● Passan, what do you find refreshing about how people do things in
Stonetop vs. Barrier Pass? Where have you made your home and set
up your laboratory? How did you help with the harvest? “The only
reason that the Southerners are able to live like this is because of the
hardened culture and fight of us Northerners. I have set up my lab and
home in a house near the stable that was abandoned by a family who
left to Marshedge. I helped out the town by using Blyth to speed up the
mill.”

Example 2
I’m looking forward to our game tomorrow night!
● Question for everyone but Passan: Early summer activities – while the
Seeker was making new paving stones and spending time meditating
with moss in the Great Wood, what were you up to? What’s something
interesting that happened to you?
● Grell, what did you learn about working with horses that surprised
you, thanks to time spent with the horses and Aeln, the refugee from
the Hillfolk?
● Yorath, what did Aeln boast to you about, regarding how the Hillfolk
won a surprising victory over Gordin’s Delve?
● Wynn, what staggering defeat that the Hillfolk suffered at the hands of
Gordin’s Delve did Aeln confide to you, when you promised not to tell
anyone?

40
 ● Siska, as your Uncle Owl has gotten to know some of the immigrants to
Stonetop (Aeln, Callach, Catlin, Ciara, Nill, Torin, Wanchu), which
one’s care of Owl when he was sick and assistance to him when you
were traveling finally softened his heart towards Stonetop’s new
residents? What did that person do that won him over?
● Passan, what strange behavior have you seen from Wanchu recently?
What rumors have you heard from travelers about attacks along the
road from Gordin’s Delve?

Example 3
It’s been a harsh winter for Stonetop, and the food supplies may not last the
winter.
● Yorath, game has been scarce in the forest this winter, and when you
have caught game, you’ve run into trouble. You had brought down a
young buck, but what happened that prevented you from bringing it
back? How did you and Whimsey barely escape with your lives?
● Wynn, you’ve been helping ration the beans, potatoes, and barley.
Who do you suspect has been stealing from the stores? What problems
have you encountered with rationing?
● Eamon, as you’ve become reacquainted with Stonetop, what surprises
you the most about Stonetop today? What has been gained, what has
been lost?
● Passan, what have you been working on in your lab? What have you
been researching?

Example 4
● Passan, what did you leave for the others to find in your lab, in the
hopes that they would use it to the benefit of the village?
● Yorath, as a hunter and trapper, you are more comfortable with dead
bodies than most villagers, so you’ve been the main person to clean up
Passan’s house. Still, what did you find among the mutilated corpses
that shook you to your core?
● Makios, you’ve spent time reverentially studying the great standing
stone, listening to lightning strike it, and worshiping Tor (Rainmaker,
Thunderhead, Slayer-of-Beasts!). What has most delighted you about
how Stonetop residents worship Tor? What has most disappointed
you?

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 ● Wynn, did your journeys ever take you as far south as Lygos? If so,
what most stands out from your journey there? If not, what made you
afraid to travel there?
● Eamon, your experience with the Lady of Crows, and your long
absence, have made you worry that if you are not more careful, you
could be the last Judge. What have you done to share more about being
a Judge with your apprentice? What are they clearly not ready for?

Conclusion
This bit of routine prep really helped engage us. The answers fueled further
improv during play. It became a nice “start of session” ritual. We reviewed the
answers, and—sometimes—if a player hadn’t answered their question prior
to the session, they’d improvise an answer then.
Writing these warm-up questions would sometimes get me in the mood to
start with my regular prep. Other times, it would be the way I ended my
session prep. For me, these questions are less work than love letters.

Starting Move
While I latched onto warm-up questions as a starting move for Stonetop, some
other systems have their own starting moves.
Urban/Modern/Fantasy, in which PCs embrace or discover the supernatural,
was the first system I encountered with a Start of Session move—
Start of Session
When you start a new session after your character has significant
downtime, say if you primarily focused on your mortal life and
obligations or if you furthered your supernatural interests.
If you chose mortal, the GM will tell you how one of your
Entanglements, Desires, or Dread became a problem. Choose one:
• you handled it fine, more or less; it won’t be an issue for now
• it all went wrong and you’ll have to deal with the fallout; mark XP
If you chose the supernatural, the GM will tell you how a supernatural
contact or Entanglement ran into problems.

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 Choose one:
• you helped them out; they owe you one
• you ignored it or it was a trap, your choice; mark XP
If you mark XP, the GM chooses if the game starts in the middle of the
event or if it happened off-screen. If the latter, they will offer you the
choice between two things you might have lost; pick one.
When you make this choice, be sure to give the GM as much context as
you can.
FOR THE GM: If a player’s choices seem interesting enough to spark a
session, go for it! If more than one do, interweave them.
If a player marks XP, be sure to inflict the costs, one way or another.
And don’t forget to weave in the fallout, if there is any.
This move scares me to death! It is clearly written for a GM who favors
improv.
In contrast, Impulse Drive, a PbtA game patterned after episodic science fiction
television, has a starting move that points to the need for prep—
Previously On
When your group starts a new Episode, go through the following list:
»» Briefly go over what happened in the last session, mentioning any
highlights.
»» List each Crew Member’s Hooks. Players may take this opportunity
to change their Hooks or write new ones.
»» Set the scene for the beginning of this session and begin playing.
Previously On is useful to help everyone refresh on what happened in previous
sessions, and to state some intent for this session.
“Set the scene for the beginning of this session” was a great reminder to me
every week to make sure I created a “Strong Start” (see The Eight Steps of Lazy
RPG Prep below).

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In our own campaign, we kept hacking on this move until we ended up
with—
Previously On
When your group starts a new Episode, go through the following list:
● Tell people about any leveling up or gear you took between
sessions.
● Briefly go over what happened in the last session, mentioning
any highlights.
● Make a wish for what you’d like to see in this session.
● The GM will set the scene for the beginning of this session and
begin play.
We replaced Hooks with Drives and didn’t feel a need to highlight those after
the first few sessions of the switch.
People were often forgetting to level up between sessions, so our prompt
reminded people to do so, and for those who had done so to share what they
had chosen.
Late in the campaign, I added the wish (see the next section) as it helped keep
me calibrated with the players.
From a prep perspective, this move kept me focused on preparing a strong
starting situation for the players. Sometimes that starting scene picks right
up on a cliffhanger from the prior session. Other times it is a brand new
scene, after a time jump. And rarely you might even frame it as a flashback.
For our final session, we started “12 HOURS EARLIER” with the PCs in the
calm before the storm, making small talk about what they expected.
I loved having a Starting Session move. It was a great segue from small talk
into the game itself. Frankly, I think I'm going to hack such a move into every
PbtA campaign I run from now on.

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Stars & Wishes: Feedback for Agile Session Prep
Stars & Wishes is a tested method to get positive feedback and constructive
criticism, helping you understand what your players thought of your TTRPG
(tabletop roleplaying game) session.
Here is my adaptation of the method. I use these as my last two prompts at
the end of every session, encouraging each player to contribute:
● “Award a star to someone for a great moment of gameplay.”
● “Make a wish for what you’d like to see in a future session.”
I love these prompts as a formal way to unwind from a session and reflect on
what happened and what people would like to see happen next.
I use Stars & Wishes to calibrate with my players about what they want to see
in future sessions. The expressed wishes are a tremendous shortcut for
prepping, highlighting things that I should prepare for the next session or
sometime later. I keep a list of past unfilled wishes and review it as a part of
my session prep. My new story arcs typically emerge from the rumor or
rumors that players wish to follow up on.
One of the things I love about Stars & Wishes is that it just encourages us to be
more in alignment with one another and to get used to asking for feedback.
For instance, in Stars & Wishes early on, one of the players basically exhorted
the others to not worry so much about the optimal approach but to simply
wing it and have fun. That resonated, and he reminded them of that a few
times when things bogged down.
In one session, I earned a star for using the prompt “Describe your death
blow.” The victor loved the opportunity to embellish and that’s now a regular
part of our narrative.
Some GMs grant experience points to each person awarded a star, but I’ve not
felt a need to treat this as a formal game mechanic.
I’m a much better Game Master because of Stars & Wishes. If you’re not using
Stars & Wishes yet, my wish for you is to give it a try.

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Ending the Session
Most sessions seem to be played in two to four hours. Sometimes you’ll need
to end a session at a predetermined time and, on other occasions, at a natural
break in the action. This can be when the PCs request taking some downtime,
for instance, or want to pursue some long-term goals. But don’t be afraid to
end a session at the start or even in the middle of combat: serialized shows
often end an episode on a cliffhanger, after all!
When preparing to run a PbtA (Powered by the Apocalypse) TTRPG, keep in
mind how experience is gained. Many PbtA games have an End of Session
move that awards experience points. Make sure you’re giving players chances
during the session that align with this move!
If you're playing a system without an End of Session move, you might want to
add one!
Here is the End of Session move in Dungeon World:
When you reach the end of a session, choose one of your bonds that
you feel is resolved (completely explored, no longer relevant, or
otherwise). Ask the player of the character you have the bond with if
they agree. If they do, mark XP and write a new bond with whomever
you wish.
Once bonds have been updated look at your alignment. If you fulfilled
that alignment at least once this session, mark XP. Then answer these
three questions as a group:
• Did we learn something new and important about the world?
• Did we overcome a notable monster or enemy?
• Did we loot a memorable treasure?
For each “yes” answer everyone marks XP.
After character development (bonds and alignment), Dungeon World is
primarily about exploration, monsters (who can be overcome in other ways
besides combat), and loot. When I run Dungeon World, I too often skimp on
providing good loot, so that’s something I need to plan for better.

46
And here is the corresponding move in Stonetop:
When a session ends, point out how you demonstrated or struggled
with your instinct. If you can, mark XP.
Say how your relationship with or opinion of a PC, NPC, or group has
changed. If you can, mark XP.
Answer these questions as a group. For each "yes," everyone marks XP.
• Did we learn more about the world or its history?
• Did we defeat a threat to Stonetop or the region?
• Did we improve our standing with our neighbors?
• Did we make a lasting improvement to Stonetop, or tangible progress
towards doing so?
Praise something about the session (in the fiction or around the table)
that you enjoyed or appreciated.
Finally, offer up a wish for future sessions: more __, less __, a chance
to __, handling __ in a different way, etc. Wishes can be about what
happens in the fiction or around the table. The GM will take notes.
As the GM when playing Stonetop, I need to make sure there are threats to
the region (I sometimes let myself get sidetracked into having it be more of a
player-driven sandbox). My players are good about setting goals for
improving Stonetop (e.g., increasing the fertility of the fields, building a
windmill), and I typically simply need to provide them multiple paths
towards achieving the upgrade they are pursuing.
From Monster of the Week:
At the end of each session, the Keeper [GM] will ask the following
questions:
• Did we conclude the current mystery?
• Did we save someone from certain death (or worse)?
• Did we learn something new and important about the world?
• Did we learn something new and important about one of the
hunters?
If you get one or two “Yes” answers, each hunter marks one experience.
If you get three or four, each hunter marks two.

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It’s not that Monster of the Week is more stingy on awarding experience, just
that it uses different math (awarding an improvement for every 5 experience
points instead of every current level + 7 in Dungeon World, for instance).
Weirdly, given the name of the game, there’s no achievement that calls out
monsters by name.
From Blades in the Dark:
At the end of the session, review the xp triggers on your character
sheet. For each one, mark 1 xp if it happened at all, or mark 2 xp if it
happened a lot during the session. The xp triggers are:
• Your playbook-specific xp trigger. For example “Address a challenge
with violence or coercion.” To “address a challenge,” your character
should attempt to overcome a tough obstacle or threat. It doesn’t
matter if the action is successful or not. You get xp either way.
• You expressed your beliefs, drives, heritage, or background. Your
character’s beliefs and drives are yours to define, session to session.
Feel free to tell the group about them when you mark xp.
• You struggled with issues from your vice or traumas. Mark xp for this
if your vice tempted you to some bad action or if a trauma condition
caused you trouble. Simply indulging your vice doesn’t count as
struggling with it (unless you overindulge).
• You may mark end-of-session xp on any xp tracks you want (any
attribute or your playbook xp track).
If you’re finding that you are regularly not providing experience along one of
the dimensions the end-of-session move invokes, talk with your players. In
my two Dungeon World campaigns, we’ve tweaked the move:
We replaced Bonds with this move from an older edition of Stonetop:
“Describe how your opinion of or relationship with another character (PC or
NPC) has changed this session. If everyone agrees, mark XP.” We then later
changed that to “If no one objects”, from a Reddit comment by Xyz0rz.
We’ve supplemented Alignment with Drives.
We’ve broadened the scope beyond monsters: “Did we overcome a notable
challenge?”

48
Since, as I mentioned, I was inadvertently stingy with the loot, we’ve
diversified beyond loot: “Did we gain a significant treasure or boon?” (This
was inspired by a Reddit comment from qimike.)
Finally, as discussed above, we integrated Stars & Wishes so that I would have
regular feedback about the future direction of the campaign:
● “Award a star to someone for a great moment of gameplay.”
● “Make a wish for what you’d like to see in a future session.”
My homebrewed End of Session move for Dungeon World:
When you reach the end of a session..
Describe how your opinion of or relationship with another character
(PC or NPC) has changed. If no one objects, mark XP.
Give an example of how you’ve met the requirement of one of your
Drives. If no one objects, mark XP.
Then answer these three questions as a group:
• Did we learn something new and important about the world?
• Did we overcome a notable challenge?
• Did we gain a significant treasure or boon?
For each “yes” answer, everyone marks XP.
Award a star to someone for a great moment of gameplay.
Make a wish for what you’d like to see in a future session.
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States
(CC BY-SA 3.0 US) by J. Alan Henning, 2021. Based on the “Make Camp” move
from Homebrew World by Jeremy Strandberg, 2019, which is based on the “End
of Session” move by Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel, 2012, from Dungeon World.
In your Session Zero for a PbtA campaign, ask your players if they want to
swap out one of the three questions with a different focus for the campaign.
You’ll serve the end of the session best if you start your prep with it in mind.

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General Session Prep
The following is useful advice for you when preparing individual sessions of
your campaign.
The best book I’ve read on gamemastering so far is Matt Shea’s The Return of
the Lazy Dungeon Master. The key philosophy is to prep only those things that
you find hard to improv. Here’s an excerpt from The Lazy GM’s Resource
Document.

The Eight Steps of Lazy RPG Prep

by Matt Shea

For a typical game session, the Lazy RPG Prep checklist looks like this:
Review the characters
Create a strong start
Outline potential scenes
Define secrets and clues
Develop fantastic locations
Outline important NPCs
Choose relevant monsters
Select magic item rewards
Here's a brief summary of each of the steps.

Review the Characters

Before we do anything else, it helps to spend a few minutes reviewing the
player characters. What are their names? What do they want? What plays
into their backgrounds? What do the players of these characters enjoy at the
table?
You might not even write anything down during this step, but reviewing the
characters helps wire them into your mind — and ensures that the rest of
your preparation fits around them.

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Create a Strong Start
How a game starts is likely the most important piece of preparation we can
do. Setting the stage for the session determines a great deal about how the
rest of the game will go. When you define where a game session starts, you
figure out what's going on, what the initial focus of the session is, and how
you can get close to the action. When in doubt, start with a fight. Example
strong starts can be found later in this document.

Outline Potential Scenes

With a strong start in hand, we can then outline a short list of potential
scenes that might unfold. This step exists mostly to make you feel as though
you have a handle on the game before you start. However, as GMs, all of us
must always be ready to throw our potential scenes away when the game goes
in a different direction — as it often does. Usually, it's enough to come up with
only a few words per scene, and to expect one or two scenes per hour of play.
At other times, you might skip this step completely if you don't think you
need it.

Define Secrets and Clues

The next step is second only in importance to the strong start, and is one of
the most powerful tools available to GMs. Secrets and clues are single short
sentences that describe a clue, a piece of the story, or a piece of the world that
the characters can discover during the game. You don't know exactly how the
characters will discover these clues. As such, you'll want to keep these secrets
and clues abstract from their place of discovery so that you can drop them
into the game wherever it makes sense. This lets the game flow freely, while
still allowing you to reveal important pieces of the story at any point where
the characters might discover them. During this step, you might write down
ten such secrets or clues. Example secrets and clues are offered later in this
document.

Develop Fantastic Locations

Building evocative locations isn't easily improvised. As such, it's worth
spending time writing out a handful of fantastic locations that the characters
might discover and explore during the game. Each location can be thought of
as a set, a room, or a backdrop for a single scene in your adventure.

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Describe each location with a short evocative title such as "The Sunspire."
Then write down three fantastic aspects for it, along the lines of: "Blazing
beam of light shining to the heavens," "Moat of molten rock," or "Huge elven
glyphs carved into ancient stone." Ultimately, whole dungeons can be built
from a series of connected fantastic locations, with each location
representing a large area or chamber. A specific location might not come up
during the game for which you prepare it, but it will be ready for a later
session as the characters explore.

Outline Important NPCs

During our preparation, we'll outline those NPCs (nonplayer characters) most
critical to the adventure, focusing on a name and a connection to the
adventure, then wrapping the NPC in a character archetype from popular
fiction. Many other NPCs — maybe even most of them — can be improvised
right at the table.

Choose Relevant Monsters

What monsters are the characters most likely to face? What monsters make
sense for a specific location and situation? We're using the term "monster"
loosely here, so as to include enemy NPCs as well as truly monstrous foes.
Whatever type of enemy you need, reading through books of monsters can
give you the fuel to choose the right creatures for the right situation.
Additionally, understanding the loose relationship between monster
challenge rating and character level can help you understand how a battle
might go. Most of the time, you can just list a number of monsters and
improvise encounters based on what's happening in the adventure. For boss
battles, you might have to do more work. See Lazy Combat Encounter
Building for more information.

Select Magic Item Rewards

Players love magic items, and it's worthwhile to spend time preparing items
they'll find interesting. This step also helps to directly impact the characters
— by dropping an interesting part of the story literally into their hands. You
can use a mixture of techniques to reward magic items, from selecting items
randomly to selecting specific items based on the themes of the characters

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and the desires of the players. Magic items are also a great mechanism for
delivering secrets and clues.

The Lazy RPG Prep Checklist and Online Play

These steps and processes work just as well whether you interact with your
players online or around the table. However you play, the Lazy RPG Prep
checklist still works.

The 5-Minute Reduced Checklist

If you have very little time, reduce the checklist to the most important things
you can prepare before it's time to run the game. Here are three example
steps.
Create a strong start
Define secrets and clues
Develop fantastic locations

Provide Your Players with Situations Rather than Scenes

While still following Matt Shea’s advice, instead of “Scenes”, I’ve relabeled
that section in my notes “Situations”. Here’s a good example of why.
In one session my PCs encountered a band of 19 orcs: I had prepped
interesting terrain for a battle or a staged retreat, plus I had written a
sentence about the leader’s motivation. The players could engage with this
situation in any of the Three Pillars of roleplaying: exploration, social, or
combat.
One of the PCs had ended up in prison at the end of the prior session (he had
been possessed by a ghost and then, possessed, tried to commit regicide). So
his player introduced a new PC, whom I knew nothing about beforehand: a
16-charisma dragonborn archeologist.
Heck, I didn’t even know there were dragonborn in this world!
That provided me with a good reminder that roleplaying is co-creation
between players and the DM, even in a homebrew setting.

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While I never would have expected an archeologist, the overall campaign arc
is about exploring ancient ruins to learn why the empire fell, so that was a
good call on the player’s part.
As mentioned, an hour or two into play, 19 orcs appear on the horizon. Selma,
our naïve half-orc PC, wants to approach the orcs but gets talked out of it. The
dragonborn player, whose regular PC has by now been broken out of prison,
decides to make a point of how evil the orcs are and sacrifice his new
character by marching him off to the orcs all alone.
Off the dragonborn goes. But he rolls a 24 on a Persuasion check!
All I knew about the orc leader, besides his name, Jomongen, was that it was
his motivation to study the old empire to establish a new one. So now
Jomongen wants to bring the architect back to his citadel to explain his land’s
role in the old empire!
With this unexpected new ally, suddenly secrets and clues (again from Sly
Flourish’s guide for session prep) now end up being volunteered by their new
orc ally instead of discovered in other ways!
And I accidentally have the orc leader talk about the dragonborn’s tail, so now
dragonborn have tails in this world. (That’s canon now.)
So, yeah. The DM’s job is to provide situations. The players’ decisions will
create the scenes.

Developing a Fantastic Location

Another bit of advice that I find particularly useful from Matt Shea is to add
three features to a fantastic location for players to interact with. In Creative
Mind Exercises for D&D, he writes:
What are the three fantastic features of this location?
This is the key blueprint to the construction of fantastic locations.
Whenever we come up with an interesting location, big or small, we
can ask ourselves to note the three fantastic elements of this location.
Does this old keep nestled between two mile-high waterfalls? Does
this hill-side mine glow an incandescent blue in the dead of night? Do
these strange narrow caves seem to breathe sulphuric gas?

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 Coming up with a single fantastic feature usually isn't hard. A second
one isn't too terrible either. The third starts to get tricky but that's
often where we find something really unique. Going with our first
response alone usually isn't the best answer.
For a delve into a mine, for my second 5e campaign, my three “fantastic
features” were a rusted minecart, rail track, and a trellis bridge over a deep
chasm.

I didn’t create any rules for minecarts, nor do I think you should. Instead, improvise rules
for features using your RPG system’s mechanics. For instance:

1. The artificer took a turn to oil the wheels of the minecart, which I ruled
he automatically succeeded at. (Where’s the fun in a minecart that
doesn’t move?!)
2. When players decided to get in and later get out of the minecart, I
ruled they had half their movement range on a turn when they did
that.
3. The track sloped down, so when players entered or exited the cart,
then the player at the front of the minecart had to make a strength DC
check (which increased as more players entered, from 15 to 18).
4. The minecart became portable cover for ranged attacks against
troglodytes entering the mine. Treated as regular cover. (The wizard
minor-illusioned a cover over the cart!)
5. When one of the players hopped out, the cart started to move, so
another player slammed his foot on a brake outside the minecart
(which I had never described, but the players assumed would be there,
so there it was). I decided on the fly that the brake was rusty and that
I’d reverse the strength check for the fun of it – a high roll would break
the brake; he rolled a 3, so I ruled he engaged the brake successfully.
6. The half-orc missed the players talking about the narrow bridge over
the chasm and decided to shoot the cart over the chasm – she failed a
dexterity check (on trying to push the cart a certain way) and ended up
going on a roller coaster ride! Fortunately for her, the dwarves had
engineered the track to incline back up (improvised at the table) and
come to a gentle stop outside the new shafts the dwarves had been
digging before abandoning the mine.

55
Now “low prep” doesn’t mean “no prep” – you should prep what you enjoy
prepping and what you find hard to improvise at the table. Keeping in mind
that players are by their nature unpredictable.
In this case, my players had already had a session in this mine system and
had found the loot while purposefully avoiding the dragon they had all told
me back in Session 0 they wanted to fight. The troglodytes were just supposed
to provide a strong start to the session – I expected the players to use the
minecart to escape from the troglodytes and find another way out. Instead, of
course, the strong “start” became almost the entire session as they magicked,
battled, and then drove away the dozen troglodytes.
Sketching out rule subsystems for each feature of a fantastic location, such as
the minecart, would have just been too much prep, in my case. And had I done
it they would have probably spent all their time crawling along the trellis
instead!

A Combat Location
So I discovered Dungeon World originally through Sly Flourish’s blog, and he
is open about adapting techniques from other systems in his 5e games. He
recently blogged about zones in combat, lifted from Fate Condensed:
Zone-based Combat in D&D.
Prior to the COVID-19 lockdown, I had a lot of miniatures and terrain maps
that would come out for battle. In switching to online play for 5e, I found
maps (and icons for opponents) to become a huge time sink. Because battles
can look phenomenal in Roll 20, there’s an expectation that they should look
phenomenal. Prepping for battles that never happened, and then not being
prepared for battles that did happen, really made me sick of 5e for online play.
And maps were a metagaming cue: “Guess the DM expects us to fight this
one!”
One of the draws of Dungeon World, which encouraged me to switch, was
narrative combat. No more maps. No more initiative rolling and switching to
6-second rounds where all these things happen simultaneously.
So I like no-prep/low-prep combat, but I need some training wheels to get
better at it. My players have given me feedback, in Stars & Wishes, that they
want me to better describe a combat situation. One thing I wasn’t doing
enough was restating the situation when I moved the spotlight to the next

56
player; I’m doing that more. But my players often have a difficult time
envisioning where they are in relation to combatants.
So adapting to narrative-based combat has required using some new muscles.
I also need to add more items in the environment for players to react to
during combat, so it is not just a hack-and-slash HP grind.
For instance, a few weeks ago the players in my northern campaign ended up
in combat in a hallway of a keep, and I described the opponent, a member of
the guard on patrol, but nothing else. In retrospect I could have…
● Described zones:
● Outside an open doorway to a room
● A three-way intersection
● The far end of the hall
● Described items:
● A bronze statue
● A tapestry on the wall
● A ceremonial axe on a wall

My 7-3-1 prep had skipped all of this. Instead, it had described the NPCs of
the keep and the three princesses of a Triumvirate, cousins none of whom had
a firm claim to the throne when the prior queen died young. This prep was
because a star-wish from a player had been for “palace intrigue”. I hadn’t
expected this would escalate to battling palace guards in the inner bailey after
the wizard was detained because of a hard fail on casting a spell to impress a
princess!
But that’s the point of low-prep: battles come where you might not expect
them.
What I tried the next week, in my southern campaign (same world, different
players), was a checklist of creating three loci, where each locus has at least
one aspect that evokes a different sense and that players can interact with. I
don’t need the Fate-inspired rules related to zones; I’m more interested in the
idea of named locations to help me provide better narratives.
An example. In a prior session, when these players traveled north on this
road, they encountered a cave bear and gave it a wide detour. In a subsequent
session, when traveling back south, they encountered the cave bear beset by
wolf-clan half-orcs; the druid would consider the bear an ally, and the
paladin is a co-religionist of the half-orcs, who have sworn allegiance to the
queen, providing tension between the players.

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Here were the loci I prepped:
1. A half-orc prone on the road, putting pressure on the severed stump of
her recently severed right arm, the metallic stench of blood wafting
from the wound
2. The angry roars of a 12-foot tall cave bear off the road, among thick
brush and fallen trees, surrounded by three half-orcs attacking her
with spears
3. Two half-orcs taking cover among bushes bright red with berries,
readying their bows.
For improv, I’ve adapted a list from Jeremy Strandberg to my virtual DM
screen (a Google Sheet), adding senses, as a reminder to myself. When a battle
arises, I try to improvise three locations, each with an aspect and evocative of
a sense:
● Aspect
● Position (relative to each other, prone vs. standing, in the
doorway, etc.)
● Momentum and activity
● Visibility (lighting, cover/concealment, etc.)
● Obstacles (furniture, corners, low ceilings, pits, other
combatants)
● Threat (foes, their intent and intention, their capabilities, their
actions)
● Opportunities (“stored energy,” ledges, choke points, etc.)
● Senses (sight, smell, sound, touch, taste)
My mental shortcut for this is a 3×2 = 3 loci * (aspect + sense). I’m prepping
some of these in advance, with the intent to get better at doing them
completely in an improvisational way in the future. For instance, the
southern players may be headed to a swamp, so I’m thinking through loci that
would work in a swamp setting, regardless of combatants.
Hopefully, as I get better at this, I’ll just generate low-key loci on the fly.

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Area-Based Prep
Sometimes you need to prepare more than a single location. You’ll have a lot
of choices for dungeons and towns.

Dungeons

Here are some ideas for when you need a dungeon—

● Maps - Sometimes you just want a map, and you’ll flesh out what’s in
the different locations that it shows. Dyson’s Dodecahedron has a rich
collection of free maps, many of which are free for commercial
purposes.
● Five-Room Dungeons - Maybe you're more interested in the content
than the map. Five-room dungeons share a basic structure:
Entrance/Guardian, Puzzle/Challenge, Trick/Setback, Climax/Boss,
Reward/Revelation. Here’s a collection of 87 five-room dungeons.
● One Page Dungeon Contest - These contest entries pull it all
together: maps with keyed locations, where you can see the entire
dungeon and its contents at a glance on a single page. My own attempt
for the Dungeon Contest was thematic but probably unoriginal,
though it did lead to three great sessions in my Melvaunt campaign

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 and the rise of a new Big Bad (you can download Catacombs of the Lich
Queen here).
● Perilous Wilds - This is the most popular Dungeon World supplement of
all (used by 53% of DW players) and is now used for many different
PbtA and OSR systems. A 2022 revised edition updates its methods of
randomly generating dungeons.
● Hex Describe - This hexcrawl generator, described below, will
generate hexes containing dungeons. Or you can use it just to
randomly generate dungeons.

Hex Describe Dungeons

Hex Describe didn’t always support dungeons. In fact, I was disappointed
when I ran Hex Describe for the first time and realized it lacked any
single-page dungeons in its hexes. I suggested to the team building its tables
something quite simple, providing five bullets built from three types of
rooms (entrance, interior, final):
● Natural cavern
● Mushroom farm
● Kitchen
● Guardroom
● Throne room

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Well Ktrey Parker ran with it, adding themes and adapting his tables, and
Alex Schroeder built a dungeon-map generator, and together we iterated and
iterated, ending up here:

Check it out! You can generate your own random dungeons, varying in size
from 5 to 14 rooms.

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Towns & Other Areas
The Watabou Fantasy City Generator produces great city maps, like this one:

Donjon has its own map generator as well as a Medieval Demographics

Calculator, which will provide the number of tradespeople by trade for a
given-sized city.
Or you can roll up a settlement’s properties, using the tables from The Perilous
Wilds below. The supplement also offers many more tables and suggestions
for creating your own homebrewed fantasy world.

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Steading Generator
Roll 2d6 to determine the type of steading, then roll 2d6 to determine attributes of the
steading and another 2d6 to determine a key problem faced by the steading.

1-5 Village
Poor, Steady, Militia, Resource (GM choice) and has an Oath (steading of GM’s choice).
If the village is part of a kingdom or empire, choose 1 or roll 1d12:
1-3 Natural defenses: Safe, -Defenses
4-6 Abundant resources: +Prosperity, Resource (GM choice), Enmity (GM choice)
7-8 Protected by another steading: Oath (that steading), +Defenses
9-10 On a major road: Trade (GM choice), +Prosperity
11 Built around a wizard’s tower: Personage (the wizard), Blight (arcane creatures)
12 Built on a site of religious significance: Divine, History (GM choice)
Then, choose 1 problem or roll 1d12:
1-2 Surrounded by arid or uncultivable land: Need (food)
3-4 Dedicated to a deity: Religious (that deity), Enmity (steading of opposing deity)
5-6 Recently at war: -Population, -Prosperity if they fought to the end, -Defenses if they lost
7-8 Monster problem: Blight (that monster), Need (adventurers)
9-10 Absorbed another village: +Population, Lawless
11-12 Remote or unwelcoming: -Prosperity, Dwarven or Elven or other non-human

6-8 Town
Moderate, Steady, Watch, and Trade (with 2 places of GM’s choice).
If the town is listed as Trade by another steading, choose 1 or roll 1d12:
1 Booming: Booming, Lawless
2-3 At a crossroads: Market, +Prosperity
4-5 Defended by another steading: Oath (that steading), +Defenses
6-7 Built around a church: Power (divine)
8-10 Built around a craft: Craft (your choice), Resource (something required for that craft)
11-12 Built around a military post: +Defenses

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Then, choose 1 problem or roll 1d12:
1-2 Outgrowing a vital resource: Need (that resource), Trade (a steading with that
resource)
3-4 Offers defense to others: Oath (GM choice), -Defenses
5-6 Outlaw rumored to live there: Personage (the outlaw), Enmity (steading preyed upon)
7-8 Controls a good/service: Exotic (that good/service), Enmity (steading with ambition)
9-10 Suffers from disease: -Population
11-12 Popular meeting place: +Population, Lawless

9-11 Keep
Poor, Shrinking, Guard, Need (supplies), Trade (someplace with supplies), Oath (GM’s choice).
If the keep is owed fealty by at least one other steading, choose 1 or roll 1d12:
1-2 Belongs to a noble family: +Prosperity, Power (political)
3-4 Run by a skilled commander: Personage (the commander), +Defenses
5-6 Stands watch over a trade road: +Prosperity, Guild (trade)
7-8 Used to train special troops: Arcane, -Population
9-10 Surrounded by fertile land: remove Need (Supplies)
11-12 Stands on a border: +Defenses, Enmity (steading on the other side of the border)
Then, choose 1 problem or roll 1d12:
1-3 Built on a naturally defensible position: Safe, -Population
4 Formerly occupied by another power: Enmity (steadings of that power)
5 Safe haven for brigands: Lawless
6 Built to defend from a specific threat: Blight (that threat)
7 Has seen horrible bloody war: History (battle), Blight (restless spirits)
8 Is given the worst of the worst: Need (skilled recruits)
9-10 Suffers from disease: -Population
11-12 Popular meeting place: +Population, -Law

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12 City
Moderate, Steady, Guard, Market, Guild (GM’s choice), 2+ Oaths (steadings of GM’s choice)
If the city has trade with and fealty from at least 1 steading, choose 1 or roll 1d12:
1-3 Permanent defenses, such as walls: +Defenses, Oath (GM’s choice)
4-6 Ruled by a single individual: Personage (the ruler), Power (political)
7 Diverse: Dwarven or Elven or both
8-10 Trade hub: Trade (every nearby steading), +Prosperity
11 Ancient, built on top of its own ruins: History (your choice), Divine
12 Center of learning: Arcane, Craft (your choice), Power (arcane)
Then, choose 1 problem or roll 1d12:
1-3 Outgrown its resources: +Population, Need (food)
4-6 Designs on nearby territory: Enmity (nearby steadings), +Defenses
7-8 Ruled by a theocracy: -Defenses, Power (divine)
9-10 Ruled by the people: -Defenses, +Population
11 Supernatural defenses: +Defenses, Blight (related supernatural creatures)
12 Occupies a place of power: Arcane, Personage (whoever watches the place of power),
Blight (arcane creatures)

The Perilous Wilds Steading table is the work of Jason Lutes, 2015. Published under a CC
BY-SA 3.0 license.

Brainstorming Moves in Advance

My normal session prep uses the Lazy RPG Prep checklist described above,
though sometimes I turn to specific techniques for different session genres.
When my players in a Dungeon World campaign told me (in Stars & Wishes)
that they planned for their PCs to return for a third time to a tunnel to search
for the McGuffin, I decided to mix it up. I needed to think differently about
this setting, which they’d already visited twice. And I’d been wanting to get
better at thinking through and improvising moves, so on my lunch break I
made a list of all the moves. Then I thought of an example for each move for
this tunnel they would be exploring again.

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GM Moves
Use a monster, danger, or location move: Your footsteps echo off the
narrow mine walls. Each step seems to resound down into the distance.
Reveal an unwelcome truth: You see a bloodstained rag of cloth, which
looks like it came from a sailor. [The PCs thought he had been killed
elsewhere.]
Show signs of an approaching threat: The air smells rank and rotten,
humid with decay. You’re not sure if you hear flies buzzing nearby or a snake
hissing. [poison trap]
Deal damage: A light mist moistens your skin, which suddenly begins to
bubble and boil. Take 3d4 damage.
Use up their resources: A swarm of emaciated, famished rats crawl towards
you. (Can be distracted with Rations.)
Turn their move back on them: The fireball ignited the wooden mine cart,
and billowing smoke has enveloped you, so that you can no longer see where
the enemy is.
Separate them: A thick iron grate slides noisily down, giving you enough
warning to jump out of the way. But you’re now on the other side of it from
the rest of the party.
Give an opportunity that fits a class’ abilities: Wizard, you feel a well of
magic swelling up, giving you vertigo. This is a place of power!
Show a downside to their class, race, or equipment: Druid, the left side of
your body has changed, but the right side hasn’t; you are Confused.
Offer an opportunity, with or without cost: A gleam of light from your
torch reveals high up the cavern wall, among loose rock, a star gem!
Put someone in a spot: The other two are stricken, gasping for air, unable to
move. You can pull one of them out of there: who will it be?
Tell them the requirements or consequences and ask: You can carefully
examine the walls looking for more gems, but it will take much more time to
do it the less light you have.

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Dungeon Moves
Change the environment: A narrow stairway leads down.
Point to a looming threat: You hear the grating of stone on stone, and the
sudden bleating of goats.
Introduce a new faction or type of creature: This goblin has a beard, wields
an axe and a crossbow, and is less scrawny than the others. (Bearded goblins,
which have dwarven ancestry.)
Use a threat from an existing faction or type of creature: The cyclops has
wandered back and is blocking the entrance, poking in with its pike.
Make them backtrack: A band of these bearded goblins bars the way and are
raising their crossbows.
Present riches at a price: You hear a faint echo, far away, of a steel hammer
repeatedly striking an anvil. A smith works away at some weapon or piece of
armor, you imagine.
Present a challenge to one of the characters: The iron grate itself is too big
to bend or break, but you see hanging near the ceiling of this cavern the
counterweight.

Discussion
I got all but three moves brainstorms over lunch, then filled in the others later
in the day as they occurred to me. I grabbed a map from the Neutral Party
Patreon for use on Roll 20.
This is where I’m supposed to tell you it worked great.
However, one of the players decided that rather than go back to the tunnel he
wanted to confront the cyclops instead, so off they went to do that. Bummer.
But fortunately I had already had in my head what was in the cyclops’ cave so
that session went off well (with some great gameplay from failed rolls). But
then they ended the session saying they’d try the tunnel again next time.
So the next session I got to use this prep, which I hadn’t touched in the prior
week, other than deleting the two moves relating to the cyclops.
And I felt like it worked like a charm. I used seven of the moves and felt like I
did a better job of improvising other moves. For instance, when the druid cast
Elemental Mastery for the first time, and failed, I used “separate them” – she
caused a cave-in that separated one player from the rest. Had I not just

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prepped an example move of each type, I might have just had rockfall damage
her; so this helped me align the fiction better with the moves.
I don’t look at the prepped moves that I didn’t use as wasted; they were like a
training or visualization technique for success. I’m not going to use this
method for every session, as I typically run a sandbox where players have a
lot of agency to go in very unanticipated directions. And this group already
zigs after telling me they will zag. I do plan on turning to this prep method
again when I feel like I could use a review of all the moves and an upcoming
session will be more constrained — I have a climatic battle coming in a few
weeks, which I think it would be great for.
And I’ll use the technique when I’m prepping for a first session using a new
PbtA system.
If you’ve got an upcoming PbtA session where you could use some inspiration
and you have a good sense for the environment your PCs will be in, I
encourage you to try it out.

NPC Prep
Even the most improvisational GM typically has a list of potential names for
NPCs to use and cross off (more on that below).
But most other GMs like to prepare even more about NPCs:
● Faces - Lady Sapling draws her NPCs, but if you lack artistic
talent, you can use one of Alex Schroeder’s face generators.
● Drives/Instincts - I’ll sometimes roll up two drives at random
for an NPC.
● Loyalty/Connections - This might be the god they worship, the
guild or faction they serve, the contender for power whom they
support, or simply their friends and families.
● GM moves - How might an NPC react? Some sample GM moves from
Impulse Drive:
○ “Call for reinforcements when things get bad.”
○ “Intimidate with an overwhelming display of force.”
○ “Lord your superiority over others.”
○ “Stalk them from cover.”
○ “Hint at a strange truth.”

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 ● System-specific Detail - Some systems have elaborate templates for
NPCs, with information useful for combat or negotiation.
Check out the chapter “NPCs & Followers” in Stonetop for much more.

Drives

A popular feature of hacks of Dungeon World is replacing alignment (Lawful, Good,

Neutral, Evil, Chaotic) with drives. Worlds of Adventure, Unlimited Dungeons, and Homebrew
World all use drives. Some examples:

● Above the Law (for Paladins in Worlds of Adventure, by Cameron Burns) – “Punish
unbelievers for your own gain or to further your goals.”
● Accord (for Elves in Unlimited Dungeons) – “Find virtue in others not of your own
kind.”
● Ambition (for Clerics in Homebrew World, by Jeremy Strandberg) – “Gain recognition
from or hold leverage over an NPC.”

Here’s a list of 100+ drives for your PCs to choose from, taken from games with Creative
Commons licenses. I’m thankful that Cameron Burns, Jeremy Strandber, and the author
of Unlimited Dungeons (name omitted by request) licensed their text in a way that we can
all adapt and use their ideas.

Names

5e Names
The Player’s Handbook has lists of suggested names for dwarves, elves,
halfings, humans, dragonborn, gnomes, half-orcs, and tieflings. For humans,
there are lists of names by eight of the ethnic groups from Faerûn, the default
setting for D&D. If you don’t own the PHB, you can check out the free D&D
Basic Rules for the names for dwarfs, elves, halflings, and humans. Other
books, including Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, Volo’s Guide to Monsters, and the
various setting books, add additional names.

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Being a geek, I analyzed the names from the PHB to determine what gender
they indicated (binary genders only, unfortunately). Here’s the likelihood a
name is male or female based on its final sound:
● -a: Certainly female
● -b: Either
● -c: Possibly male
● -d: Possibly male
● -e: Probably female
● -f: Either
● -g: Probably male
● -h: Probably male
● -i: Probably female
● -j: Either; doesn’t occur
● -k: Almost certainly male
● -l: Either
● -m: Possibly male
● -n: Probably male
● -o: Probably male
● -p: Either
● -q: Either; doesn’t occur
● -r: Almost certainly male
● -s: Probably male
● -t: Possibly male
● -u: Either; doesn’t occur
● -v: Either
● -w: Either; doesn’t occur
● -x: Either
● -y: Possibly female
● -z: Either; doesn’t occur
Keep these tendencies in mind when naming your own 5e NPCs. You can go
against the grain, of course, but these tendencies might color other players’
first reactions to an NPC’s name.
If you want to differentiate your names from Pan-Faerûnian names, lean into
ending them with letters that don’t occur at the end of such names (-j, -q, -u,
-w, -z) or occur less than 1% of the time (-b, -c, -f, -p, -x).
A Rose, if it were like any other name ending in –e, would have a 70% chance
of being the name of a female. (See The Phonotactics of 5e Character Names.)

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Lists of Names
If you are playing in a specific setting, most likely the setting book provides
lists of potential names.
For homebrew, you can lift 5e names, names from other languages, or just
build your own list of potential names over time.
In The Perilous Wilds, Jason Lutes gives examples of adapting names and words
from four languages (Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, and Yoruba) to create
culturally distinct place names and names for NPCs.

A Naming Language
In my book Langmaker: Celebrating Conlangs, I have a chapter on creating a
naming language. Namelangs are small languages intended primarily for
naming people and places in an imagined world. As such, you don’t need to
create a grammar or extensive vocabulary, just a short dictionary. Heck, you
don’t even have to be formal about what sounds are included in the language
and how they are combined (phonotactics).
Now much conlanging is for fun and private amusement, but I ran into a
problem with Denju, my naming language that I use for RPG campaigns,
because the players have to use the names in play. My names were too long,
hard to pronounce, and often had silly associations to English words.
So what are the things to keep in mind when creating a naming language for
use by players?
1. Make sure the names are easy to pronounce.
2. Make sure players can tell the names apart.
3. Avoid “false friends”, words that have unfortunate or funny meanings
in English.
4. Differentiate a little from English, rather than a lot.

Make sure the names are easy to pronounce

If you find in play that the same name is pronounced differently by different
players, it’s probably too hard to pronounce. Perhaps you can use a nickname
instead—or just retcon the name altogether to something simpler.
To make names easy to pronounce, you’ll also want to keep them short. I tend
to like compounding roots to produce names with meaning, but that meant

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that many of the names I came up with were too long to be practical, such as
this particularly bad example: R̥chostmontwa (meaning “bear-cub music”).
While letters aren’t the same as sounds, they’re easier to measure and closely
correlate to the number of sounds: at one point, my average name was 8.2
letters long, compared to just 5.6 letters long for the top 600 names in the US.

Make sure players can tell the names apart

When creating names, it’s easy to centralize the words themselves rather
than the experience of the players—or readers. That’s how Tolkien ended up
with Saruman (from Old English roots meaning “man of skill”) and Sauron
(from varying Quenya etymologies from different stages of manuscript
development).
Those two names were so confusing that, when I read Fellowship of the Ring as a
kid, I didn’t even realize Sauron and Saruman were two different antagonists –
I thought they were the same person! (This was before any of the movies,
even the animated Lord of the Rings movies.) That mistake on my part as a
reader may have been because, according to one theory, people index words
in their brain using the first sound and the last sound (/s/ and /n/ in both
those cases).
When creating my own lists of names, I often try to have a different starting
sound for each major NPC. However, it’s often harder to have a different
ending sound for names, given perceptions of final sounds on expectations of
gender (e.g., half the feminine names in the Player’s Handbook for Dungeons &
Dragons end in –a).
Don’t introduce synonyms and group names, just a single name at a time.
Avoid the Silmarillion effect of going into too much detail on names: e.g.,
“And above all the mountains of the Pelóri was that height upon whose
summit Manwë set his throne. Taniquetil the Elves name that holy mountain,
and Oiolossë Everlasting Whiteness, and Elerrína Crowned with Stars, and
many names beside; but the Sindar spoke of it in their later tongue as Amon
Uilos.”

Avoid “false friends”, words that have unfortunate or funny meanings

in English
When I’m thinking about the language and its speakers, I can forget English
conventions altogether. That is how I ended up in one of my Dungeon World
campaigns with NPCs named Zeroxcr̥do (“bear shirt”) and Snotatexon (“hat

72
maker”)! I had not realized Zeroxcr̥do sounded like Xerox-kurdo until
actually saying it out loud during a session. Pretty quickly in the conversation
the players were calling him Zar. (I ended up redoing both roots, going with
Zaro + sr̥do, because—again—it becomes easy to take a desire for internal
consistency too far.)
But that pales in comparison to Tolkien’s classic awkward name, Teleporno!

Differentiate a little from English, rather than a lot

Another challenge when creating names to be used in play is that you often
want a language that sounds differently than English does, but doing so can
violate rule 1 and make the names too hard to pronounce.
The sounds that English distinguishes are a small subset of the thousands of
possible sounds that the human mouth can make. But embrace too many
exotic phonemes and you’ll put off your players.
One approach is to use English sounds but with consonant clusters that are
rare or don’t occur in English (e.g., /sf-/ in /sfaro/ or /mr-/ in /mrek/). For
Denju, I went with syllabic consonants, such as the aforementioned
R̥chostmontwa, a half-orc NPC from L̥pcelev; as you can see, these are
marked with a ring diacritic. Denju has four syllabic consonants that can
occur anywhere a vowel can. In English, such sounds typically occur only in
the final syllable, and often alone, although written with a silent vowel: e.g.,
bottle, bottom, button, butter. Contrast that with Denju: ̥lp (“wolf”), ogm ̥
(“rune”), n̥d (“stone”), sr̥ (“protector”).
Don’t use contrasts that are hard for players to discern. Perhaps just use /zh/
never /sh/, for instance, or /th/ never /dh/. If you have a more complex sound
than appears in typical English, standardize on it: for instance, if using the
Scottish /kh/ of loch at the end of syllables, perhaps never end a syllable with
a normal /k/.

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Example

I revised this table quite a few times. I made sure every initial sound was
distinct. I shortened quite a few roots. Despite my advice of going for unique
ending sounds, I didn’t follow it. Because these are for NPCs’ names, I wanted
to lean into common name endings (-a, –r, –n). If these had been place names,
I’d probably have gone for unique final sounds.
The added constraint is that these are all “real” words, derived from
Proto-Indo-European according to regular rules of sound change, so I
typically don’t just make up a sound.
I got rid of false friends. A prior version had the –bal ending for “dance”, but I
had to drop it because it was comical: Redbal, Tocobal, Curbal. I could anticipate

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my players’ jokes! How did I figure that out? I created a “multiplication table,”
and I read every single word aloud.
While the above table is for use in play, I actually have a bigger table with
completely different morphemes (no overlap at all), which I use when doing
prep and world building. (I don’t want to accidentally create an NPC on the fly
with the same name as one I’ve prepped.) That one’s messier: 86 prefixes and
97 suffixes.

Conclusion
The goal of a naming language for a game is to increase the verisimilitude of
the world. After one of our campaigns, doing a debrief before planning our
next campaign, players definitely praised the worldbuilding, and the naming
language was a key part of that.

Item Prep
Sometimes you simply don’t have time to do much prep. On those occasions,
just brainstorm a list of items.
Jason Cordova, author of Brindlewood Bay and other RPGs, has a widely copied
prep technique he calls 7-3-1:
Before a session, I come up with 7 total NPCs, locations, and
encounters. I give each of these a motivation. I then come up with 3
sensory details for each that I can describe at the table (sights, smells,
sounds, and so forth). Finally, I think of 1 way I can physically embody
each at the table (a distinct noise, voice, verbal tic, body posture,
mannerism, etc.). I write all these things down.
Here are a couple of examples for a zombie apocalypse setting (2 of my
7 items that I’m going to write):
● Charlie Steele, leader of the Decatur survivors
○ Motivation: to convince the player characters to join him
in his campaign against the Mohawks
○ Sensory details: the smell of old cologne; an ill-fitting,
frayed suit; the sound of his boot heels clacking on the
concrete
○ At the table: a soft, lispy tongue

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 ● Willowbrook Mall, a makeshift refugee camp
○ Motivation: to remind the player characters of what used
to be
○ Sensory details: towering, plastic palm trees; children
playing and crying; refugees dressed in fine clothes
scavenged from the department stores
○ At the table: loud, boisterous “Ho, ho, ho!” of the man
wearing a Santa suit trying to cheer up the children.
Mike Shea does something similar, but simpler, with his 10-item prep:
Everyone has creative habits that work well for them. Today I'm going
to share one of mine.
Write down ten things.
Write down ten notable locations in your fantasy city. Write down ten
dungeons the characters might discover in their journeys. Write down
ten encounters they may run into while traveling through the ruins of
Talondek. Write down ten interesting NPCs they might meet. Write
down ten monuments that might serve as the backdrop to a scene
when the characters explore those old ruins….
There's a secret power in writing down ten things. Three things are
easy. Six things aren't so bad. We can hit seven things before we start to
struggle. Ten requires thinking hard about those last three. We've
gotten all of the easy stuff out of our heads and how we have to work.
Those final three things are often painful. They're also often the most
interesting ones….
Give it a try next time you're stuck in a boring meeting (ugh) or out for
a nice walk (much better). Ask yourself to define ten things about your
game.
When time doesn’t allow for longer prep, just brainstorm some items.

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Different Genres of Sessions
For some sessions, you might want to prepare a mystery structure, a party
plan or social event, or one of the structures shared here: Monty Hall Prep
(three choices, foreshadowed), Mysterious Monsters, and Political Prep.

Monty Hall Prep

You’re GMing an RPG game tonight, and you haven’t done any prep.
Normally I use the Lazy RPG Checklist or the 7-3-1 technique or hexcrawl
prep, but when I’m crushed for time I use what I call Monty Hall Prep: I read
up on three different monsters, either from the Monster Manual, the bestiary
of the system I’m playing, or from Keith Ammann’s blog or books. I write
down three “doors” (locations) to choose from, foreshadowing but typically
not naming which monster is “behind” each door. In play, I’ll give some
details immediately, while others will require further investigation.
Examples:
● Recently the PCs were traveling out of a swamp back to the capital. I
decided an unnatural fog would fall when they passed a graveyard on
the edge of the swamp, obscuring their vision, and presenting the
three “doors.” “You see a lantern off to the right [will-o’-the-wisp].
From ahead you hear the clops of a horse’s hooves [Black Rider]. Now
you hear a woman sobbing in the graveyard [banshee] and speaking, in
words almost recognizable.”
● In another session, I doodled caverns exiting the chamber they ended
the last session in. One is natural limestone, carved by an ancient
river, now full of stalactites and stalagmites [one of which is a roper].
Another is an old mineshaft, little used, and cobwebs cover rusted
equipment [giant spiders]. The third is an ancient tunnel heading
down, square and true representing the finest of ancient dwarven
craftwork; PCs can hear murmuring and shuffling echo up from the
depths [might find bits of decayed flesh from the zombies].
● In one of my campaigns, the druid was always shapechanging into a
bird and scouting out everything. So I used less foreshadowing and
more mysteries or hidden enemies. Example— To the northwest, the
end of the mountains, the most direct route to the capital, is a hydra

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 and elsewhere bands of kobolds on the move [unseen: winged kobolds].
In the pass that PCs have taken before through the hills, feasting on a
sandworm is a band of ogres and another creature [a humanoid with 4
trunks, trunks like a wooly mammoth but hairless: a mindflayer]. To
the east is a pass between the hills and mountains that leads directly to
the swamps southwest of the capital: two hill giants, each with a wolf,
on the prowl.
● The imprints of the feet of a giant [stone giant], heading upland into
rocky ramparts lined with caves and cavities towards a carved
entrance among the openings, like a mine entrance. A winding path
down out of the mountains, with a nice view of the lake, exposed to the
sky [risk of the wyvern they had seen last session]. An ancient winding
stairway chiseled into the side of the mountain, curving up out of sight
(elvish work; ends abruptly in rockfall); the baying of goats from up
the stairs [satyr].
The lower the prep, the greater the need for improvisation. For the fog
scenario, the PCs ended up investigating the graveyard, and I improvised the
banshee as an elvish maiden, part of a love triangle, and how the PCs could
put her soul to rest. For the banshee’s backstory, I kept open the Wikipedia
article and the Monster Manual entry on banshees in D&D Beyond. I ended up
leaning on my past hexcrawl prep, which had some details about the village,
and relying on my pre-generated list of common NPC names. When stumped,
I asked the PCs questions and integrated their answers into the story. Their
tactics also provided clues on what they thought had happened.
As GM, you can also leverage the unopened “doors” as appropriate, especially
if using a PbtA system where failure leads to hard moves against the player.
The PCs in the fog ended up leaving the banshee to go search the village for
clues, and I could have had the Black Rider approach and act as another
threat.
It’s always humorous when the players pass on all of the “doors.” Initially, the
players caught in the fog decided to make camp in the fog and wait for it to
pass! I definitely should have had the Black Rider approach and force the
choice. In the Monty Hall Prep of caverns, one of the PCs investigated a deep
pit in the room, which had been described the prior session; this was a 5e
campaign so on failed investigation checks nothing happened; had this been
Dungeon World, the zombies or spiders might have attacked.

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Monty Hall Prep has become a valuable tool in my toolbox as GM, and I hope
you’ll find it helpful. Let your players find out what’s behind door #3!

Mysterious Monsters
I lifted one of my prep techniques from the mystery countdowns of Monster of
the Week by Michael Sands. These aren’t “whodunit” mysteries but instead
mysterious monsters with mysterious agendas and mysterious weaknesses.
As the book puts it­—
Each mystery has a countdown: this is the sequence of the terrible
things that will happen if the hunters don’t stop the monster. The
countdown will be your guide to what will be going on off-screen as
the hunters investigate. To create the countdown, think about what
would happen if the hunters never came to help.
● Who would be attacked?
● Who would die?
● What is the monster’s ultimate plan?
Once you have an idea, divide it into six events in the order they will
occur. Then allocate them to the steps in the countdown. Countdowns
always have the following six steps: 1. Day. 2. Shadows. 3. Dusk. 4.
Sunset. 5. Nightfall. 6. Midnight.
The names of each step are metaphorical: the “sunset” step of a
countdown doesn’t have to happen at sunset, the names are picked to
give a sense of things getting worse. As the countdown is what would
happen if the hunters didn’t interfere, it normally won’t play out how
you wrote it. But even when the monster’s plan has been derailed, it
will still be trying to achieve its goals and the countdown is useful as a
guide (or something to adapt) to determine what happens next.

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Example
For my Stonetop campaign, I used a mystery countdown to prep for the
players encounter with a hagr, which Jeremy Strandberg describes thus:
Misshapen brutes with sagging flesh and one bulging eye so filled with
hate it’ll stop you dead in your tracks. They spend their days collecting
fallen branches, looking for just the right one to add to their home of
rotting logs. The others they pile neatly, reverently. Perhaps they were
servants of the Green Lords, once bred to build, and now long ages
hence, building still.
Given this description, they seemed like the perfect antagonists when the PCs
set up a logging camp. I decided this hagr also had some crinwin minions
(crinwin are like tree goblins who live in giant wasp-like nests).
Here was my countdown for the hagr interfering with their logging mission,
which occurs after they’ve met two NPCs (Jamya and Wanchu).
● Day - The PCs find a tower of large rocks and small boulders stacked
one upon another. Little houses built of sticks are arranged in a circle
around it, comically small compared to a larger log building. (It
reminds them of the Stone and Stonetop, like it was built in imitation.)
● Shadows - They hear the horses whinny in the night. They find all
four wheels have been stolen from the wagon.
● Sunset - They hear Jamya’s screams from the forest. (They will find his
remains, torn limb from limb, with some crinwin gnawing on
whatever the hagr left.)
● Dusk - Crinwin try to kidnap Wanchu.
● Nightfall - Some of the logs the PCs cut down have been dragged into
the forest. If they follow the track of the logs, they will see that four
have been planted as end posts in imitation of the Pavilion of the Gods,
with bushes used as the roof.
● Midnight - The hagr seeks to steal and drag off the wagon for its
construction.
What do I like about this better than Dungeon World’s fronts? The names of
each step are good mnemonics (and they are figurative, not literal, as the
mystery does not need to occur within a single day). The names help build
towards a climax. Contrast a rhyme scheme with free verse – both are fine,
but sometimes the constraint of a form inspires creativity. I like the labels,
the structure, and the set length of the mystery countdown compared to

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fronts. Another point of contrast, though, is that fronts are often for
long-term developments and campaign arcs, while the countdowns were
clearly meant for use within a session or two.
I do run mystery countdowns a bit differently than described or than how I
run fronts: I try to make each step in the escalation PC facing rather than just
something that happens offscreen.
Prep is there to make it easier to run a session, while recognizing that players
will often go in different directions, and that other ideas will occur in play.
For instance, on the first night they took watch, they heard the hagr crashing
through the brush, and the next night coming close and snuffling, upsetting
the horses. Some added foreshadowing I hadn’t planned on.
When Jamya was attacked and carried off, they immediately gave chase –
except for the Would-Be Hero, who was a stableboy and was adamant (after
agonizing) that his job was to stay behind and protect the two horses. The
other PCs succeeded at every move in tracking and finding the hagr, but not
before it had dismembered Jamya and started devouring him. All their
volleys hit it from a distance and, to my surprise, it died before it could run
away (the Ranger hit for 11, which was 10 after armor).
So later I added a second hagr, who nearly killed the Fox before dying. They
saw some of the hagr’s constructions, not all I had prepped, as they did not
explore the woods— even though I tempted them.
Altogether, though, the technique provided me with a useful enough
framework that I’ve used it to prep and run other antagonists.

Best Practices
One mistake I made running with a countdown in a different campaign was
not fleshing out the monster fully. I was adapting a monster from an existing
module, but it really wasn’t monstrous enough given the countdown I’d
created for it. As a result, the final confrontation fizzled out rather than
ending with a bang.

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I should have downloaded the Mystery Worksheet from Evil Hat’s site as
inspiration, and I encourage you to do so. This template provides space for
recording—
● Type (e.g., Monster/Minion/Phenomenon)
● Powers
● Weaknesses
● Attacks
● How much armor it has and how much harm it can take
● Space for custom moves.

Political Prep
Even though Hex Describe is powered by nearly 2,000 tables (!), I found
myself missing the cast of characters that populate a town. I came up with a
design goal of, within a single page, emulating the keep from the classic
adventure The Keep on the Borderlands as a useful starting location for the
adventurers, but adding more elements of intrigue. Since Hex Describe is
open source, and you can append your own tables to it, I did so and shared my
tables with Alex Schroeder and Ktrey Parker. Ktrey suggested I add more
professions; Alex suggested it could be used for more than just one town, but
if so it would need more options and more variability.
Here’s example output from what we came up with.

This is Selwick, a town of 200 humans (HD 1 AC 8 1d6 F1 MV 12 ML 7

XP 100). The wooden houses are protected by a large keep, a wooden
palisade and the river. The outer bailey of the keep houses the richest
tradespeople of the land, under the rule of Duke Félix the Lucky Khan.
The inner bailey houses the castellan and the guard. Entering the outer
bailey is by paying 1sp per person. These tradespeople work there:
1. The crier Darwin is an excellent source of rumors. (A member
of Fellowship of Pale Fortune Tellers.)
2. The herbalist Ève buys rare flora. (A member of Perfect Disciples
of the Archaic Victory.)
3. The jeweler Loan acquires up to 1,000gp of gems. (A member of
Beautiful Folk of the Keep.)

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 4. The merchant Allyson buys bulk quantities of spices, metal
ingots, and other trade goods. (A member of Beautiful Folk of the
Keep.)
5. The moneylender Hristina will convert coins from one
denomination to another (10% surcharge). (Prays to Odin.)
6. The provisioner Tamira sells all types of equipment.
7. The rat catcher Kashfia, a devoted follower of Mitra, travels
around singing hymns. (Surreptitiously favors Duke Alesch.)
8. The smith Besart sells new – and refurbishes old – weapons
and armor. (Surreptitiously supports Duke Alesch.)
9. The tavern owner Henos runs the King’s Swan here, frequented
by the well-off and the rabble-rousers. (A member of Fellowship
of Pale Fortune Tellers.)
10. The trader Aaron buys old equipment and rare finds. (A
member of Perfect Disciples of the Archaic Victory.)
11. The watchman Thalea frequents the shops the PCs visit and
keeps an eye on them. (Second-in-command of the Fellowship of
Pale Fortune Tellers.)

(For a rumor about allegiances, roll a d10 and a d6. On a d6 of 1-3, tell
the truth about the tradesperson corresponding to the results of the
d10; on a 4-6, lie about them.)
The inner bailey is open to the select few and houses these noteworthy
personages:
● The castellan Courtney. (Trusted confidant of Duke Félix the
Lucky Khan.)
● The corporal of the watch Alisha.
The local secret society Perfect Disciples of the Archaic Victory is being
infiltrated. It is led by the wizard Gentjana (level 3). The spells known
are based on The Book of Songs by Xoralfona the Wordsmith: 1.
empathy, calm, 2. mind blast. They believe that the ruling class has
been taken over by vampires. They prepare for the big fight by
studying ancient books and training with silver daggers.
The Fellowship of Pale Fortune Tellers have been plotting to overthrow
them, led by the wizard Diell (level 5). The spells known are based on
The Book of the Warp by Korokoro the Mad: 1. recoil, mishap, 2. ooze,
plague touch, 3. warp mind. A potion of strength (deep red, smelling

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 like tree resin, 20min, strength 18). To believe in the current order of
things is what servants are trained to do. They believe that another
world is possible.
Yet another secret society waits in the wings.

And, of course, this is built into the full hexcrawl generator, if you select Alex
Schroeder’s set of random tables.
You can take the generator for a spin here: Hex Describe Town Rule (about
half the towns have the keep with personages).

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Conclusion
I once got two hours of O5R play out of one sentence of my session notes!
That sentence—
A dead man, an arrow in his eye: you find no food or weapons but a
saddle and shield.
Reacting to my players’ actions, I ended up roleplaying the dead man (thanks
to Speak with Dead), the grass (!) that his body was found in (thanks to Speak
with Plants), and his murderer.
The key resource I used during play was a random name generator I had
written at the start of the campaign, when the situations arose and I needed
to name the dead man (Zerbal), three of his enemies (Ayuhrono, Himingel,
Orjeromen), and his murderer (Osad).
As one of the players pointed out, I tend to turn Speak with Dead into a game
of Monkey’s Paw, technically answering the questions but in an often-useless
way: when the cleric asked about enemies, Zerbal complained about fellow
tribesmen.
I hadn’t thought too much about who the murderer was but realized it was
related to conflict between three factions in that part of my campaign world.
This led to a long fascinating debate among the PCs as they weighed the pros
and cons of avenging the murder victim vs. allying with the murderer’s
faction.
The best part is that their actions in that session reverberated across future
sessions!
Why does low prep work? Because you just can’t anticipate what players will
react to and be interested in. The players ignored clues about a chimera and
other nearby happenings to focus on this particular detail.
What should you read next? The key resources that got me comfortable with
low prep were Sly Flourish’s Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, Justin
Alexander’s The Alexandrian, and Alex Schroeder’s Hex Describe.
Another tool to go low prep is to rely on Google. Last year I switched from
paper notes to a laptop, originally to use D&D Beyond during play. But then I
started using Google for other details during play. For instance, when one
player rolled a 1 in combat three times in a row (!), I found a critical fumble
table to use for the last two rolls. When he later decided to harvest body parts

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from the chimera, I Googled “5e dragon body” and found a Google Doc on
Dragon Harvesting.
Now sometimes low prep can be the result of a good return on investment on
high prep. August is usually a slow month for me at work, and that month I
invested time in creating my hex map, my one-page pantheon, random tables
for names, terrain encounters, even random tables for common landmarks
(temples, towers, barrows), and prepping the Session Zero. This was knowing
that during most other months I’d be too busy to spend more than an hour a
week on session prep: for my “one-sentence session,” I spent about a half hour
during lunch two days in a row coming up with one page of notes.
I’m pretty sure I’ll need more than two sentences for my next RPG session,
but I’m comfortable that low prep will continue to pay dividends. Happy
prepping!

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