Sly Flourish

Warning, this article contains spoilers for Tomb of Annihilation.

Tomb of Annihilation is a fantastic D&D adventure. It's an adventure of high fantasy in an interesting environment (the jungles of Chult). It has awesome locations to explore, cool NPCs to meet, a powerhouse villain, and the deadliest dungeon published in the fifth edition hardback D&D adventures to date.

Tomb of Annihilation isn't without its problems. For the most part, these problems are manageable. Let's take a moment to review two of these problems.

First, as written, the death curse (the main driver of the adventure) has too much urgency tied to it. If this urgency isn't tweaked by the DM, the best course of action the characters can take is to run as fast as they can to the Tomb of the Nine Gods to stop the curse from quickly killing off oodles of rich and powerful people all over Faerun (hmmm). Luckily, this problem is easy to deal with. We discussed a few options for managing the death curse in the Urgency of the Death Curse by using it as an urgency dial instead of a fixed countdown timer. Simply forgo the hit point loss-per-day and describe the progression of the curse in a way that better fits the pacing of the game you want at the moment. If you want the characters to feel free to explore Chult, mention that the curse is little more than a concern at the moment. A rash, really. If you want them to laser in on Omu and the tomb beneath, explain how the powerful curse has escalated.

The second problem comes with the many NPCs that can join the characters throughout the adventure. In most cases, these NPCs are just fine but in a few they can either overshadow the characters with their raw power (I'm looking at you Artus Cimber and Dragonbait) or they can end up steering the characters too far away and waste a lot of valuable time on errands that have nothing to do with the plot. We've discussed this problem in the article Handling Tag-Along NPCs. The best solution here is to be careful when introducing these NPCs, ensuring you have an exit plan for them, or skip them all together.

Both of those problems are easily managed. There is a third problem, however, and one not so easily fixed. When the characters actually enter the Tomb of the Nine Gods, the whole atmosphere of the adventure changes. Instead of being a character-driven narrative story of exploration and intrigue, this adventure becomes a puzzle and deathtrap killfest. That's the problem we're going to talk about today.

The Atmospheric Shift of the Tomb of the Nine Gods

It surprises no one that this adventure's dungeon is actually deadly. We all knew it. It says so right in the beginning and if our players are paying attention at all, they'll know it's deadly too. But we say that a lot when it comes to challenges the characters face and most of the time they can pull out of the danger and survive anyway. If you're a soft DM like me, you can probably count on one hand the number of times characters have died in your D&D games. If you're harsher, actually killing characters often, and your players don't mind, maybe this isn't a problem for you.

For some of us though this shift is a big problem. Here at Sly Flourish we take a "character first" approach to our D&D games. It's the first step in the preparation checklist in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. We follow the guidelines of Dungeon World and become fans of the characters. These characters have histories. They have arcs. We love them and we love watching them go on adventures. We don't love it when they get in a black box, a friend hits a button, and they're turned into dust. Literally. Well, I didn't love it.

Death sometimes comes to characters in our character-driven games but often it's part of their character's arc. In this dungeon, though, their arcs can come crashing down with no warning at all. Again, maybe you're cool with this. Maybe so are your players. If that's the case, you need not change a thing.

For many of us, though, it's a big change in the style of the game and one we need to manage.

Telling Them Isn't Enough

We might think that telling the players how deadly the dungeon is will be enough. We think they'll be ready for their characters to die. Sometimes this is the case. Sometimes they're even upset when they don't die. Often, however, the warning isn't enough. Hearing that a dungeon is deadly and actually watching your ninth level character get disintegrated are two very different things. Seeing a character actually die will feel very different to the player. Players might even say how much they love hard D&D adventures and love the threat of death—until it actually happens. At that point none of us know what to do.

When I ran Tomb of Annihilation and my groups got to the Tomb of the Nine Gods, I had everyone roll up secondary characters whose backgrounds had brought them to the tomb over the past century. Making them former members of the Knights of the Yellow Banner gave them a connection to other dead Banner members throughout the adventure.

Still, this wasn't enough. Even having secondary characters doesn't mean that shock and hurt will come when a beloved character gets cut in half by a giant grinning stone skull door.

Many players just aren't prepared for a character's death. I know I'm not.

Solution 1: Send in the B-Team

One way to potentially fix this problem in the adventure is to send in two separate teams of characters. The first characters aren't given the job to stop the death curse, their job is to open the Tomb of the Nine Gods. When the tomb is open, it's up to another group of dungeon delvers to go inside. The nearby wreck of the Star Goddess could be one way that a bunch of dungeon delvers have come to the tomb. The Red Wizards might also have their own group of dungeon delvers ready to go into the tomb. Even Ras Nsi might send his own Yuan-ti Pureblood characters in there as part of a team intending to stop the death curse.

These new dungeon delvers are the expendables. Our players know they might not last and that's ok. They've only had them since the beginning of the Tomb of the Nine Gods. If the die, they die.

Still, it can be hard to put aside characters the players love. Opening the tomb doesn't feel like the end of the adventure. They want to stay with their main character and send them into the tomb. From a story perspective, why should the characters who traveled all this way send some other poor saps into the death trap? If they're heroic at all, sacrifice is part of that heroism. That won't matter to the player when their character is crushed under a big door but it makes sense and it would be disappointing to do it any other way. Thus, switching to new characters at the tomb's door isn't a perfect solution.

Solution 2: Build the B-Team Switch In Early

One way to ensure your players don't get stuck on the decision to send in their main characters or switch to an alt is to wire in that choice from the beginning. Instead of giving the characters the quest to seek the source of the death curse and end it. The quest can be to seek the Tomb of Annihilation and open it. Those who send the characters into the jungle will know that the heroes who find the tomb aren't the same ones who will enter the tomb. Those who enter the tomb are better suited for tomb-delving, not jungle explorations. The main characters can become patrons of these tomb-delvers instead of the tomb delvers themselves.

If this switch is wired in from the beginning, players will feel less like they're abandoning their characters halfway through an adventure and understand that a character switch is built into the story. They'll know their other characters will be stepping out of the spotlight.

This too is not an ideal solution but it might be the best way to make the transition from a deep character-driven exploration adventure to a deathtrap dungeon.

Solution 3: Shaving Off the Sharp Edges

Here's a solution many DMs will hate: shave off the rough edges. Much of what makes the Tomb of the Nine Gods deadly are the situations where characters who drop to zero hit points are outright killed instead of simply rolling death saves and requiring a heal.

We can likely shave off the rough edges in a few different parts of the tomb to keep the characters alive, at least a little bit more alive, than they might be otherwise. We can still run a dangerous adventure where the players must make hard choices to stay alive without the direct threat of the one-button deaths that can be found in a lot of these chambers. The four elemental chambers are known to be quite deadly but they can be a little less so if we make it easier for players to navigate the puzzels as the characters flounder about.

Some of the more deadly rooms and traps to watch include:

• The onyx chest in Wongo's Tomb (room 16). Consider removing the instant death from the onyx chest.
• The elemental cells before Shagambi's Tomb (rooms 47A-D). Give plenty of clues about how to navigate the cells.
• Belchorzh the beholder (room 44). Play him sub-optimally. He's more interested in tormenting the characters than killing them. Get rid of the instant-deaths on his finger-of-death ray and his disintegrate ray. He wants to have fun, not turn them to ash. Maybe have those spells inflict permanent injuries instead of outright deaths.
• The gargoyle guardians (room 45). Give the characters a chance to flee from the room or lower the gargoyle's hit points. Like the beholder, play them sub-optimally.
• Any of the "if this damage reduces a character to 0 hit points, they die" effects. Ignore that line or add a permanent injury instead.
• The devil onslaught in the Hall of the Golden Mastodon (room 67). Put in fewer devils, lower their hit points, or play them sub-optimally. Embrace it when the characters cast save-or-suck spells on them. The deal the Erinyes offers doesn't have to kill a character outright. Instead, they could sign a contract for their soul when they die, after the threat of the tomb is defeated.

Frankly, this is my recommended method. People just don't like to see their characters instantly killed in my games. Maybe some do, but I haven't seen them.

Solution 4: Run As Intended and Come What May

Finally, you can ignore all of this and run the adventure as it is. I've seen a lot of discussions from DMs who have run the Tomb of the Nine Gods and described the dramatic shift in lethality. They talked a lot about how it hurt peoples' enjoyment of the game. That was the case in the two groups I ran it for as well.

Tomb of Annihilation is close to the best D&D hardback adventure Wizards has released. This tonal shift from fantasy exploration to deathtrap hurts it. Otherwise, this is a nearly perfect adventure. The exploration is awesome. The setting is fantastic. The story is solid. The tomb, setting aside its lethality, is incredibly well designed. This adventure hits the exact level of focus I love in published adventures. I can deal with the warts regarding the urgency of the death curse and the issues bringing in problematic NPCs but the deadly shift of the adventure can kill a lot of fun after months of play if we're not careful. That's a hard problem to get past. Hopefully this article has given you some ideas how to deal with this shift so you and your players can get the most out of this otherwise fantastic adventure.

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In the beginning of Hoard of the Dragon Queen the characters face off against Lennithon, an adult blue dragon, when the characters are likely level 1. It doesn't take any powerful encounter building to realize this isn't a fight the characters can win.

The same thing occurs in Tomb of Annihilation when the characters come into contact with Valindra Shadowmantle, a lich in service to Szass Tam of the Red Wizards of Thay. The characters are likely around level six at this point.

Putting the characters in the presence of powerful villains is common in a lot of adventures, published or not. Sometimes it's fun for the characters to actually face the true villain of the adventure early on, such as meeting Strahd in the beginning of Curse of Strahd. Other times, like when Demogorgon steps out of the Dark Lake in Out of the Abyss it serves as a powerful backdrop for the plot of the adventure.

There's a big problem with scenes like this, though: facing insurmountable foes removes player agency.

(Cover to Volo's Guide to Monsters by Tyler Jacobson)

When our characters face off against foes they can't beat, we've removed one of their options—combat. For some players, this is simply unfair. D&D games shouldn't pit characters against foes they can't beat. Many DMs who focus more on the story of D&D than the balance of encounters know that yes, sometimes the characters will face foes they can't beat. It depends on how things go.

However they got there, when the characters face these foes and combat is off the table, the players might find themselves limited in the options from which they can choose. Sure, they can negotiate, but how good is the negotiation when one side can completely obliterate the other? How well has it worked out for the goblin the characters captured after slaughtering fifteen of its friends? That goblin doesn't have a lot of options to choose from.

Neither do the characters when facing an adult blue dragon at level 1.

So we come to an easy high-level piece of advice for situations like this: give the players options when facing insurmountable foes. If the story has worked itself into a position where the characters face an insurmountable foe, it's up to us DMs to make the options clear. It's up to us to return agency to the characters so they can actually make some meaningful choices.

Agency Returned

What agency we can give depends on the story, as does the encounter in the first place. Perhaps the characters have some information the villains need but do not have. Perhaps the characters know where something is that the villains must have. For example, maybe the characters know of the location of a number of puzzle cubes in Tomb of Annihilation that the villains desire.

Perhaps the villains have a weakness the characters are aware of. For example, what if the characters know about a lich's phylactery or a vampire's coffin. Maybe they even have control of it, putting the two opposing sides on more even ground.

We can also expand the options for the characters in a few other ways. Maybe the characters learn of a traitor in the enemy's forces that they can exploit. Maybe they learn how they can steal what they want instead of needing to negotiate for it directly. Maybe they learn that, buried deep within that ancient black obelisk, is a nalfeshnee just waiting to burst forth. Should something go terribly wrong, a good crack on the obelisk will complicate things for the villains.

Example Character Angles

So what sort of angles might the characters have when facing an insurmountable foe? Here are some general examples:

• The characters have information the villain needs.
• The characters have possession of something the villain wants.
• The characters are aware of a traitor or weakness in the villain's forces.
• The characters have something vital to the villain's well being.
• The characters have a weapon that greatly threatens the villain.
• The characters have a powerful ally that the villain fears.
• The characters can bring the house down on top of the villain.
• Disrupting the characters or their actions would throw the villain's own plans in disarray.
• The villain needs the characters to perform some task that no one else is capable of doing.
• The villain has enemies worse than the characters and need their help to defeat it.
• The characters are able to steal what they need from the villain.
• The villain isn't aware of the characters' presence.
• The characters discover a weakness of their insurmountable enemy.

If a villain is on the horizon in our games; if we think they're going to come into play and there will be a stand-off between the insurmountable villain and the characters; it helps if we lay out perhaps three angles the characters can capitalize on when that confrontation occurs.

Bending the Story to Our Will

When we're building out a D&D game from the story that unfolds, sometimes these situations appear and we don't have a good or easy approach to give that agency back. If we're letting scenes unfold how they unfold, we might not have any options prepared ahead of time. It might turn out, as the course of events takes place, that the characters find themselves face to face with an insurmountable foe.

In cases like these, we have to remember that fun comes first, even before staying true to the continuity of a story. Stephen King fully expected to kill off Paul Sheldon in Misery until he realized that no one wants to read a novel only to have the main character killed off at the end. He must not have read No Country for Old Men yet (spoilers!). In any case, when it comes to our D&D game, no one will care if you stay true to the direction of the story if it's not fun for the players.

Therefore, moments like this give us license to alter the world. This is a good time to stop for a minute and think about how we can give agency back to the players when they face an insurmountable foe. We can manipulate the world to give them an edge. We can reveal a weakness. We can reveal a nearby doomsday device. We can have the villain realize that an ally of the characters is too important to anger. This is one of those times where tweaking the reality of the story is ok because we're doing it specifically to make the game more fun. Like adding hit points to a boss monster that's dying too fast we can bend space and time for the sake of the fun of the game.

Giving Characters Fair Warning

If we're used to previous versions of Dungeons & Dragons, particularly third and fourth editions; we're probably used to focusing on balanced combat encounters. It is hard for us to break away from clear encounter-focused D&D adventures and letting the story take us in directions we weren't used to. As we get used to letting the story go where it goes, situations like facing an insurmountable foe can become more likely.

As hard as it is for us to change our thought process when running fifth edition D&D games, so to might it be hard for our players. When the characters end up facing an insurmountable foe, it's up to us to telegraph the danger. We have to let them know that we don't expect they'll go toe to toe with a villain like this and kill it. They might very well die if they try. It's possible, even likely, that players will think they're getting manipulated. They'll think that it isn't fair that they're facing such powerful monsters. If there isn't a good story reason why they're facing such a foe, they might be right. The adult blue dragon in the first chapter of Hoard of the Dragon Queen felt like this to me. Why would an adult dragon need to go poke around at a village? Why not leave that to the cultists?

When the story does support a confrontation against an insurmountable foe, we have to make it clear to the players that the foe is indeed insurmountable and also telegraph the other options available to them. If they're a combat focused group of players, we may really need to make it clear what other angles they have available. If we took combat away as an option, what was that option replaced with? If the answer is nothing, we've probably railroaded the story too much. The characters really don't have a choice other than 100% capitulation. That's not our job. Our job is always to put fun choices in front of the players.

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This is the first in a new series of articles that focuses on how particular spells in D&D can tell stories all by themselves. The core D&D books are full of fantastic ideas for stories but sometimes its easy for us DMs to focus too much on the mechanics to think about what they mean in the worlds we share.

Each spell has its own particular story to it, it's own way that it alters the universe in some way that might have effects both small and profound. Consider the humble prestidigitation spell, a cantrip that keeps things clean. Imagine a whole business built by hedge mages, failed wizards, and sorcerer outcasts who make a living keeping things clean with this spell on its own. It's the world's best dry cleaning service. This simple spell can lead to a whole place ("Percy's Palace of Prestidigitation") that might find its way as a storefront in a game we run. We might even tie another story into it. Maybe that aged wizard who supposedly failed out of the academy isn't as frail as he appears, he's just been in hiding for the last two hundred years.

Spells can each tell an interesting story and we're going to explore this idea in articles to come where we look at a particular spell and the stories that might evolve from it when we look at them under a new lens.

Today we'll do so with the spell fireball.

Fireball is an incredibly common and popular spell. It's been in every edition of D&D since the 1970s. Fireball is one of the most basic spells we can imagine too. Players love it because it's so simple. You point a finger and things explode. But there's a story in there too. A story with many facets.

A Story Driven by a Fireball

The D&D adventure Waterdeep Dragon Heist has a whole chapter built around a fireball. The chapter is actually called "Fireball". Things are perfectly smooth in Trollskull alley, everyone's going about their business, and then boom. The world is in chaos.

We don't think much about a fireball but such an explosive spell can change lives in a city setting. A fireball in a crowded street is an event of great note, as it is in this adventure. It begins a great mystery. Who cast it? Who was in it? What did people see? Will it happen again? A single fireball like this can drive a whole story forward, bringing danger and mystery to an otherwise peaceful day.

Imagine a royal ball in which the characters are trying to uncover the assassin who plots to kill the local lord. What if that very assassin, to cover her escape, draws a bead from her necklace of fireballs and blows up half of the ball. Now the characters have to make a hard choice of chasing their quarry or saving the people who remain alive in the burning ballroom.

The Sign of a True Wizard

We can use fireballs in other ways in our story as well. If the characters are exploring a chamber and find a room with singed walls and dozens of dead charred goblins, they'll know what might have done it and they know what sort of being they might face. Not everyone can cast a fireball in the first place. Such a sign is a clear indicator that a wizard is near, and not just an apprentice but a seasoned mage.

The fact that fireballs are third-level spells cast by fifth-level NPCs means something important on its own. If we assume a rarity to wizards the higher they go up in level, fireball-casting wizards are not all that common. Even cult fanatics can't typically cast them. These are the spells of true and powerful villains.

Environment-Changing Spells

Fireballs can also do more than just blow up rooms full of kobolds too. We often forget how these spells can change the environment. A fireball cast inside a building or tavern will likely set it ablaze or blow it apart. We might watch buildings explode outward from a mage battle taking place within it. A fireball in a sealed area might suck out all of the oxygen and make the whole area difficult to breathe in or difficult to see through. In the right environment, fireballs can completely change a situation.

We can't forget about the noise either. Fireballs aren't quiet. Spellcasters who cast it are going to be heard and those who hear it may come running or might run away. The noise created by a fireball can dramatically change a situation in many ways.

An Explosive Shift in the World

Though a common, popular, and relatively simple spell, when used as a vehicle for the story, a fireball can cause a dramatic shift in a campaign. As we saw in Dragon Heist, it can be the catalyst for an entire arc of a campaign. The more we think beyond the mechanics; the more we look at how spells affect the world, the more those stories can drive the direction of our shared stories.

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One of the interesting things about Dungeons & Dragons is the incredibly wide range for its potential costs. The cost to play D&D can go anywhere from free to potentially thousands of dollars (look at Joe Magenello's dungeon if you don't believe me).

I expect most people spend one to two hundred bucks for the three core books including the Player's Handbook, the Monster Manual, and the Dungeon Master's Guide and maybe some secondary books like Xanathar's Guide to Everything, Volo's Guide to Monsters, and published adventures such as Curse of Strahd or Tomb of Annihilation. Some probably spend a few bucks on dice and a flip mat.

Then there are areas where the D&D hobby can get really pricey. The first is miniatures. We might drop $50 for a good set of player character miniatures at first but if we start to fill out our set of monsters, we're looking at hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars until we have a "full collection". Secret tip: there IS no full collection of miniatures. No one ever has enough of that one monster they need at the time.

Pathfinder Pawns, Arcknight's Flat Plastic Miniatures, Printable Heroes, and Trash Mob Minis can save us from this financial runaway train by giving us a lot of two dimensional miniatures for a lot less than it would cost us to get fully 3d plastic minis. The occasional Reaper Bones Kickstarters can get us a large pile of unpainted miniatures for less than we'd pay for them individually but even then we're going to be missing out on a few. They've been running these Kickstarters roughly once a year.

Another area where the sky is the limit when it comes to costs is in three dimensional terrain. My favorite is Dwarven Forge, the Ferrari of D&D terrain. Having quite an investment in it myself, I can attest to its incredible quality and "wow" factor. There are other terrain options as well such as card board 3d terrain, 3d printed terrain, and other options. As I mentioned, the price of this stuff knows no bounds. The average pledge for the latest Dwarven Forge Kickstarter was $1,000.

Luckily, the true joy of D&D is in sharing stories with our friends. Miniatures and terrain are really cool but they're not necessary for us to run some fantastic adventures. In fact, the more accessories we have, the more they can sometimes get in the way of that story. We'll talk about this more later.

Playing D&D For Free

How could someone go about playing D&D for free? There's actually an answer to that question. While Wizards of the Coast sells the core D&D books, they also give away D&D rules online. This includes a D&D Basic Rules and the Dungeons & Dragons System Reference Document. While these PDFs omit much of what you can find in the actual core books, they have enough to run a D&D game. The D&D Beyond website also offers these rules for free in the same interface used for the digital version of all of the other D&D books. One need not spend a dime to use these rules.

Online Resources for Campaigns and Adventures

What about campaigns and adventures? According to our 2016 Dungeon Master Survey, most DMs run their own campaigns in their own worlds and with their own adventures. If we follow these folks, we too don't need to buy expensive adventures and campaign worlds. We can spend some time thinking about our world and writing down what works.

If we do want to play in a world like the Forgotten Realms, we can use the excellent Forgotten Realms Wiki as our own sourcebook complete with a search and hyperlinks to connect it all together better than a big book.

There are numerous free resources for DMs to run great games beyond campaign specific material. The suite of Donjon tools gives us a host of dynamically created material including names, treasure, monster encounters, dungeons, adventure seeds, and more. It's a great place to spark ideas in our minds as we build out our own adventures. A nearly infinite supply of dungeon maps and artwork are just a Google search away. They work well for both inspiration for DMs as well as visuals to show players.

Wizards of the Coast has released a couple of adventures for free as well. Death House is one of my personal favorites, though themed specifically for Ravenloft and the Curse of Strahd published adventure. Wizards also released the first part of Princes of the Apocalypse for free which contains enough material to get characters to level 5 including a fight against some cultists of the elemental prince of air. It's more universal than Death House and easier to plop into your own campaign world. A Great Upheaval, the first chapter of Storm King's Thunder is likewise available for free.

Accessories

We're going to assume of the sake of this article that one can acquire something to write with and something to write on. Go raid a horsetrack for small pencils and a library for scrap paper if you need. For drawing out maps and descriptions of combat, we can use Theater of the Mind combat to save us a ton of money on miniatures and maps. According to the 2016 survey we mentioned earlier, about 40% of dungeon masters use either abstract maps or theater of the mind when running D&D combat so you won't be alone. Not only is it much cheaper than maps, minis, and terrain but it also gives us nearly infinite flexibility in our descriptions and in letting the game take turns we didn't expect when preparing for our game.

There are a number of online dice roller apps that can save us a few bucks buying dice but this probably isn't realistic. Instead, for the $12 of a D&D Starter Set we can get a set of dice, a set of pregens, a solid rulebook, and a wonderful D&D adventure. Sure, it isn't free, but its a low cost investment for the best entrypoint into D&D available. The maps and monsters contained in the starter set can keep a campaign going for months.

I'm a huge fan of the Pathfinder Flip Mat. It's cheap, lightweight, and super-usable in our gaming kit. That and a couple of dry-erase markers can build just about anything we can imagine for under $20. It's a great investment for our DM kit.

If you want to play D&D online, you can play for free at Roll20. They have the entire 5e D&D SRD rules in place there and access to lots of official D&D sourcebooks and adventures if you do eventually want to pay for it.

Pooling Resources with D&D Beyond

"My rule of thumb is that in a group of 6, 3-4 don't spend any money. But they enable a group to form & play. Free players enable spenders. Even if no one at a table is spending, there's huge benefits in simply making more D&D players and DMs."

- Mike Mearls, D&D Design and Development Lead

Being a game focused on a group of players, it makes more sense that the players might pool their resources together to get what they need. For example, a group can pool together to pick up a subscription to D&D Beyond and the core books through the D&D Beyond Marketplace. A single DM subscription can share all of its books with up to eighteen players in three campaigns. These digital books are often on sale and, when the cost is split up, they can be very cheap for each player.

A Focus on the Fun

There's another big advantage to keeping our D&D kits small: flexibility. The less stuff we have to run our games, the more we can focus on the game itself and the fun to be had with our players. Maps, terrain, miniatures, and all sorts of accessories look great but there's an overhead with them beyond money. They take up physical and mental space. They take up time. Instead, we can keep our materials down to the thinnest possible and focus on the fun of the game.

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In an interview on D&D Beyond, legendary adventure writer Chris Perkins describes the requirements for a solid adventure:

• Good villains and monsters.
• A location for the adventure to take place.
• A clear reason for the characters to take part.

It's this last one we're going to talk about today. Getting the characters involved in the adventure is likely the most important part. Why do they care? Why put themselves at risk? When running Tomb of Annihilation recently, I threw in a dream sequence so horrible that the whole group nearly abandoned the idea of stopping the death curse to return to the safety of Port Nyanzaru and leave the world's woes to someone else. That's not a great way to motivate them.

There are many possible motivations that drive characters to adventure. Chapter 3 of the Dungeon Master's Guide includes three tables full of adventure hooks for both overland adventures, dungeon adventures, and general adventures as well. They're worth a read. In fact, I'd recommend going back and flipping through the Dungeon Master's Guide every couple of months just to remember all of the awesome stuff that's in it.

I also culled a number of potential motivations from a Twitter discussion on the topic which you can see below.

• Recover lost artifact
• Stop a villains evil plot
• Rescue someone
• Hunt someone down
• Recover lost lore
• Prevent someone else from finding lost lore
• Release someone imprisoned
• Keep someone imprisoned
• Imprison someone
• Recover a powerful weapon
• Clear out monsters
• Destroy dangerous artifact
• Sanctify unholy site
• Escape
• Prevent war
• Uncover treachery
• Riches
• Fame
• Protect someone
• Cure someone
• Uncover mystery
• Solve murder
• Prevent apocalypse
• Restore artifact
• Fulfill prophecy
• Get gold
• Return gold to owners
• Give gold to needy
• Prevent gold going to villany
• Get rid of gold
• Hide gold
• Prove innocence
• Peculiar inheritance
• Missing friend or relative
• Trailblaze a new trade route
• Escort settlers
• Survive another day
• Save the lands ruler
• Murder the lands ruler
• Owe someone a favor
• Castaways
• Research
• On the lam
• Stop a terrible ritual
• Lift curse
• Researching an invention
• Overthrow a corrupt power structure
• Help a new ruler come to power
• Negotiate a trade deal
• Exchange prisoners
• Change the past
• Find a way home

These are all just models for the motivation an adventure might contain. We'll have to tune these for our particuar adventure and the characters within it. In fact, let's talk about characters for a moment.

Character-Driven Adventure Hooks

One of the easiest ways to sink in an adventure hook is to make it part of the character. There are a couple of ways to do this. The easiest is to tie in the hook during character creation. For single-session D&D games, like convention games, we can tie in adventure hooks right into the pregenerated characters. If players are making their own characters, we can give them a list of potential character hooks that tie them into the adventure or campaign as well. The earlier we tie in these hooks into character creation, the more these hooks will matter to the players.

We need look no further than the pregenerated characters for the D&D Starter Set. These characters have ties right into Lost Mine of Phandelver that give each of them a reason to care about what is going on in the town of Phandalin.

We can also flip this whole idea around and build an adventure from the backgrounds of the characters. Likely you'll still want to bring up a theme from your campaign's session zero but the players might build in interesting hooks into their characters that you didn't expect. You can use these hooks to build out connections to existing adventures or build entirely new adventures from those hooks alone.

The important part is ensuring that the characters have a reason to go on this adventure.

Anytime you're pondering the adventure you're going to run, ask yourself "why the characters care?"

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The fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons adventure Tomb of Annihilation has an interesting and wonderous structure. It begins as a city adventure in Port Nyanzaru, expands out into a large overland exploration sandbox as the characters travel through Chult, narrows down to the exploration of the city of Omu and a potential trek into the Fane of the Night Serpent, and then drills down deep into the dungeon crawl to beat all dungeon crawls, the Tomb of the Nine Gods.

In today's article we're going to focus on the characters' exploration of the city of Omu. How can we dungeon masters get the most out of running this section of the book? Let's find out.

A Refined Sandbox

When the characters journey to Omu they will be going from a large sandbox—the journey through Chult—into a more refined sandbox style adventure. Like Chult itself, Omu has a nice defined boundary to it but multiple ways characters can travel within and through it. To begin with, they can enter from either the south-west corner (a grand staircase) or the north east (down a large waterfall) so even their entry into Omu is their own.

Side tip: When creating sandbox adventures, include two entrances. If you, as the DM, don't know how the characters will enter a dungeon or other area, you're a lot less likely to railroad them overall.

Design two entrances.

Once in the city, the characters can choose how they want to approach the city and accomplish their goals. They won't be the only ones.

The Fronts of Omu

Here at Sly Flourish we like to steal the concept of "fronts" from the game Dungeon World. A front is a driver of the story of our game. It's an actor, often a creature but sometimes an environment or even a whole planet, that has its own goals and leaves indicators to the characters. These indicators are called grim portents. They show the progression of a front as it heads towards its goal.

In the city of Omu, we have two main fronts working alongside the characters. The first is the Red Wizards of Thay. Like the characters, they are trying to acquire the puzzle cubes from the nine trickster gods to get access to the tomb of the nine gods. The Red Wizards might be sending mercenary forces out to the various tombs to collect what cubes they can.

The second front are the yuan-ti from the Fane of the Night Serpent. Their leader, Ras Nsi, seeks the cubes as well because the death curse is eating away at him. His second, a nightmare speaker named Fenthasa, might not have the same goal as Ras Nsi and this can become a fun complication for the characters to explore.

Both of these factions offer opportunities for conflict within Omu but they offer something more interesting too. Their goals are not necessarily in opposition to the characters. The Red Wizards, led by Valindra Shadowmantle, seek to end the death curse but they also want to learn about the Soul Monger. It is possible the characters can work out a deal with them instead of just fighting them.

Likewise, Ras Nsi might be willing to work out a deal with the characters since he too wants to stop the death curse. Of course, Fenthasa might not like that idea which gives us multiple factions within the yuan-ti to work through. If the characters are willing to kill Ras Nsi, Fenthasa might be more willing to work with them.

This offers up an interesting observation for our D&D games. When we have fronts with motivations that can be potentially turned to fit the motivations of the characters, we can build in ways that the characters can use all three pillars to interact with these fronts. In this case, we can see how the characters might use subterfuge, stealth, careful conversations, or violence to work with these fronts. The characters have lots of potential paths and options to take when dealing with this front that aren't just combat. That's awesome.

Give players the option to interact with fronts using roleplaying, exploration, and combat.

The Other Actors in Omu

Beyond the Red Wizards and the yuan-ti, there are other actors in Omu that can come into play and bring some fun with them. The big one, both figuratively and literally, is the King of Feathers. This epic t-rex can be a continuing threat in Omu for the characters. In my game, I modified him a bit. First, I gave him legendary actions so he can have one action between characters' turns. I also gave him legendary resistances as well. I increased his hit points to 200. Finally, I gave him some psionic abilities unique in Chult. He had misty step and invisibility as actions he could take. This let him disappear from combat, shift to a new spot, and attack with advantage. As the characters traveled through Omu they learned more about his abilities and how dangerous he was. When finally faced, he was a real powerhouse villain.

Other actors include the three tabaxi hunters: Bag of Nails, Copper Bell, and Hooded Lantern. These are wonderful NPCs whose history, backgrounds, and motivations you can change for your own game. In one of the two Tomb of Annihilation games I ran, Bag of Nails was a fellow assassin to one of the characters who served Prince Jessamine in Port Nyanzaru. In another, the three taxabi were former companions of the taxabi rogue player character. Reskinning NPCs like these is a great way to bring some relevant stories to the characters as they explore Omu.

There are lots of other actors in Omu worth bringing up such as the kobolds in service of Acererak and the strange vegepigmies conducting a grung sacrifice at the lava pit. Read fully through the chapter and highlight the encounters you want to bring up in your game.

Gathering the Cubes

The primary goal of the characters in Omu is to acquire the nine cubes required to open up the doorway to the Tomb of the Nine Gods. Each of the nine cubes rest in one of the nine shrines to each of the Trickster Gods.

As the adventure states, the characters need not be the ones to collect all nine cubes. The Red Wizards may have recovered some. The yuan-ti might have some. Other random adventurers may have some.

This is a great opportunity to ensure that the characters interact with these other groups and they get to choose how. Maybe it's negotiation. Maybe it's theft. Maybe it's blinding violence.

You can choose how many of the cubes have already been recovered or decide that, as the characters uncover one cube the other fronts acquire another. One good way to choose this is to read through each of the shrines in the adventure and if any of them don't resonate with you as a DM, you can make that one a shrine whose cube has already been pilfered. How may cubes have been recovered also shortens the time spent in Omu so it's a nice dial to turn if you want things to move forward faster. You'll have to ensure the characters learn that the cubes have been recovered before they waste a lot of time trying to get them.

The Ruins of Omu

As the characters travel through Omu, it's likely they'll want to explore some of the notable ruins of Omu, either to take a rest, escape a pursuer, or just take in some of the dead culture of Omu.

Here is a list of twenty notable ruins the characters might encounter while exploring Omu. If you're not running Tomb of Annihilation, you can use this same list for other ruined cities as well.

The Collapsed Cellar. A floor of one of the buildings has collapsed into a strange cellar. The cellar contains a small shrine to a trickster god (roll to randomly determine the trickster god), a sacrificial stone, and scrawlings in old Omuan begging for the life of a sick child.

The Ashen Family. This ruin contains bodies of ash still standing with looks of horror on their face. An ashen body of a mother cradles her doomed child. All of them appear to have been hit with a disintegrate spell.

The Noble Treasure Vault. A house of nobility has trapped bronze door in the cellar guarded by two animated armors. The door has two DC 15 glyphs of warding including a fear glyph and another glyph that animates the statues. If the trap is defeated, the adventurers find the noble house's treasury. The treasury includes 832 cp, 3490 sp, 2087 gp, 28 pp, 2 x Chalcedony (50 gp), Citrine (50 gp), Jasper (50 gp), 3 x Moonstone (50 gp), 5 x Sardonyx (50 gp), 3 x Zircon (50 gp), Potion of Resistance (thunder) (uncommon, dmg 188), Spell Scroll (Sleet Storm) (uncommon, dmg 200), Potion of Water Breathing (uncommon, dmg 188), and a Rope of Climbing (uncommon, dmg 197) Use the treasure tables in the Dungeon Master's Guide to determine the treasure instead if you prefer.

Desecrated Shrine to Ubtao. This ruin contains a shrine to the god Ubtao. The statue's head has been removed and lies in the corner covered in rubbish. Dark sigils have been etched into the statue's surface. Examining the glyphs begins to fill the examiner's visions with the people of Omu destroying effigies of Ubtao after he turned his back on them two centuries ago. The cacophony of blasphemy fills the investigator's head with madness. The character must make a DC 14 Wisdom saving throw or suffer a short-term madness effect.

The Crystal of Calling. The basement of this ruined building contains an arcane circle. In the center of the circle is a large violet cracked crystal. A DC 14 Intelligence (Arcana) check reveals that the crystal was used by arcane spellcasters to call across the multiverse to help find a god who would save them from their downfall. Any creature that touches the crystal can see visions of the Omuians using the crystal to call out across the Astral Sea and then later witnessing the arrival of Acererak.

Access to Underground Sewers. Deep cracks in the basement of one of the ruins reveals access to narrow sewer passages that lead to various areas of Omu including the palace, the flooded rivers to the east, the amphitheater, and the enclave to the south-west. Traveling through the sewers has a chance to encounter monsters. Use the random encounter table for level 1 to 4 swamp monsters in [Xanathar's Guide to Everything] re-rolling if the monsters make no sense for Omu.

Altar to Dendar the Night Serpent. The ruins of this building contain a carving depicting a massive serpent eating its own tail surrounding a globe that looks like Toril. The rotting remains of a female dwarf lie on a bloody stone altar, her ritually dissected innards in a series of clay pots surrounding the altar.

Abandoned Red Wizard Refuge. This ruin contains the remnants of a campsite for roughly one dozen people. The signs of a conflict litter the area including the bodies of Thayan mercenaries, mercenaries of Port Nyanzaru, and dead yuan-ti purebloods. A cracked silver mirror with arcane glyphs surrounding its edge used for scrying remains in the area. The broken mirror is worth 200 gold pieces.

Ruin of Grasping Vines. Thick yellow throned vines fill this ruined house seeming to come from a central stalk in the center that throbs like a heartbeat. The stalk itself (a yellow musk creeper with double the normal hit points and a reach of 15 feet) grows from the ruins of the basement below and only there can it be truly destroyed. The remains of a dead adventuring party lay within the ruins possessing a Philter of Love (uncommon, dmg 184), a Potion of Animal Friendship (uncommon, dmg 187), and two Potions of Growth (uncommon, dmg 187). 1d2+1 yellow musk zombies rise from the thick vines when someone enters.

The Trapped Incubus. The characters fall into a ruined pleasure den where an incubus has been trapped for nearly a century within a summoning circle. The incubus begs for its release and will give the characters a clue about Acererak's arrival and the building of the Tomb of the Nine Gods in return for his freedom.

Your Own Mini-Campaign

Tomb of Annihilation is an amazing adventure for a bunch of reasons but one of them is because it contains all sorts of sandboxes within sandboxes. Omu is itself a full sandbox adventure packed within Chult, a much larger sandbox adventure. And, of course, Omu leads to the Tomb of the Nine Gods which is its own evil sandbox.

Above all, keep the options open and let the characters interact with the forbidden city however they wish.

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I love the roleplaying game 13th Age by Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet. Written as a love-letter to D&D by two designers who worked on two different editions of D&D, 13th Age has some of my favorite rules for running great roleplaying games. Like Dungeon World, it's a RPG that often gets pilfered for great ideas DMs can bring into our own games like the "one unique thing", the escalation Die, and their method of abstract combat.

I also love the monster design of 13th Age. As a simplified version of 4th Edition D&D's monster design, monsters in 13th Age are easy to use and are some of the most well-balanced monsters in any d20 game I've played.

It also has a really cool feature that, like the others mentioned above, we might pilfer and use in our 5th edition D&D games: the nastier special.

Many monsters in 13th Age include a way to beef them up to build a really tough challenge if the GM wants one. Here's an example for the Hezrou:

The fifth edition of D&D doesn't have clear dials like this we can use to change the threat of a monster. The system, however, is flexible enough that we can come up with our own, often improvising them right on the spot if we want. Once we have some experience built up, if something feels right, we can drop in our nastier specials without any work at all.

We've talked before about building stronger encounters and how to improve boss fights. This article goes hand-in-hand with both of those.

A List of Nastier Specials

The following is a list of a few potential nastier specials we might add to our monsters. My hope is that these are simple enough that we can keep them in our head and use them when the time feels right for it. We shouldn't need to write them down. Above all, these specials need to make sense within the story. Why are these specials in place? We're not doing it to be mean to our players, we're doing it to add fuel to the fire of the story.

Maximize damage. One of the easiest ways to dramatically increase the threat of a monster is to maximize its damage output. Monsters suddenly start hitting for a lot more, sometimes nearly twice as hard, when their damage is maximized. Are you worried that your high level characters are going to kill Tiamat when they face her? Not if she's breathing for 156 damage as a legendary action! Ok, that's an extreme example, but you get the idea. If you really want a monster to be dangerous bordering on lethal, max it's damage output.

Add extra attacks. Along with or instead of increasing damage, we can give a monster extra attacks. Maybe it attacks faster than others of its ilk. Maybe it's hastened. Maybe it has more appendages available for such attacks. More attacks increases the number of times a monster will hit so you can spread its damage around to multiple targets instead of hammering on one target all the time. This is a good nastier special when a creature is fighting by itself against a full party of adventurers.

Maximize or double its hit points. Bigger nastier versions of a monster could have significantly more hit points than the average listed in the Monster Manual. We are free to change these hit points as much as we think fits the story within the range of the hit dice. We can also just ignore it and double a monster's hit points if there's a good reason. One dirty trick that helps us maintain pacing is to keep in mind the maximum hit points a monster might have and, if it fits the story and the pacing, change those hit points during the fight so a monster sticks around a little longer or drops at the right moment. Yes, it's cheating, but it's for the good of the pace of the game.

Add Legendary Actions and Resistances. We can make any monster a legendary foe by giving it legendary actions and resistances. Typically legendary actions will let a monster attack or move up to three times between its opponents turns. Keep in mind that the power of a legendary version of a monster will be much stronger than it otherwise would be. Legendary resistances also help monsters, particularly monsters fighting alone, to break out of nasty save or suck effects like hypnotic pattern or dominate monster. Again, these should be used sparingly and only when they make sense within the fiction of the story. Why are these monsters legendary?

Damage shields. The spell fire shield is powerful on its own but it's really powerful if it's on a monster that everyone is going to hit. Put it on a dragon and that dragon becomes a lot more dangerous. We don't need to stick to fire or cold either. We can add any element we want to the damage shield. A lich might have a necrotic damage shield or a demon might excrete poison or acid. We can also increase the damage on this, maximizing it to 16 or more if we think it's right. Note that this is particularly hard on monks who attack about seventy times a round and will take damage every time.

Give Monsters Spell-Like Abilities. If you're looking for a nastier special, look no further than the hundreds of spells at our disposal in the Player's Handbook. These spells aren't just for player characters. We DMs can build entire stories around the spells found in that book. And they make fantastic ways to customize monsters. Spiritual weapon, shield, misty step, wall of fire; the list of useful spells for monsters goes on and on. We can reskin and reflavor these spells to fit the theme of the monster as well. A powerful devil might invoke a wall of screaming souls that acts very much like a wall of fire except it does psychic damage instead of fire damage.

We can make these spells more useful by making them part of a monster's attack action instead of using up a whole action for the spell. A drow spellblade might be able to hurl a lightning bolt right after slashing with its own lightning-enhanced scimitar, for example.

We can also give monsters spells that might not otherwise be in our game, like spells from third-party publishers. Unlike giving them to characters and potentially changing the face of our game permanently, a monster with a spell like this will only hit the table once and then be gone. My current favorite monsterous spells are the Blasphemies of Bor Bwalsch by D&D writer and creator of Shadow of the Demon Lord Rob Schwalb. They're awful spells that are perfect for lichs, vampires, demons, devils, hags, and any other hideous spell casters.

Give Monsters Exotic Potions. Monsters don't always have to have access to spells to gain some interesting new abilities. Instead we can give intelligent monsters access to potions or scrolls with some interesting and dangerous abilities. Potions of displacement could give a monster the same trait as a displacer beast. Potions of greater invisibility could give an assassin a seriously dangerous edge. Potions of giant strength can turn monsters or NPCs into mountain-crushing horrors. It makes sense that powerful NPCs like the gladiator or champion would have access to a potion like this. A champion with a potion of storm giant strength is a true foe to be feared. It doesn't hurt if the characters get access to reserve potions like this so they can gain the same benefit even if it's only for a few minutes.

Building Your Toolkit of Nastier Specials

All of these are just examples of the sorts of ways you can tune monsters to be something interesting and unique. New armor, magic weapons, potions, scrolls, and spell-like-abilities are ways to change monsters within the fiction. Simple mechanical effects like increasing it points, increasing damage, and adding attacks are easy to implement and turn a normal monster into a brute.

Build your own mental list of nastier specials that make sense for the situation and are relatively easy to implement. With a good set of nastier specials you can turn the hundreds of monsters in the Monster Manual into tens of thousands of monsters your players will remember their whole lives.

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Note, this article has been updated since the original written in 2012.

Many DMs like to use tent cards hanging over a DM screen to run initiative and this is a fantastic way to do it. There are a few small businesses out there who sell very nice tent cards for characters and monsters to use this way and custom character cards look great when printed nicely.

There's a lazier way, though. It's one I've been using for the past six years or so and, though it isn't nearly as beautiful and elegant, it's fast and easy. It requires very little preparation, no upkeep, and you don't need a DM screen to use it.

I first learned of this technique from Teos Abadia (Alphastream on twitter) who learned it from Paul Ellison, one of his long-time players back during the Living Greyhawk days. I've since had the opportunity to meet and play with Pual at a couple of gaming conventions. His fan-dance larping is second to none.

But I digress. Here's how these easier initiative cards work.

Preparing the Cards

Take nine or so 3x5 note cards and fold each one in vertically in half. Then number them on both sides with the biggest black marker you can find, numbering them from 1 to 9. When you're done, you should have a set of folded 3x5 tent cards numbered 1 to 9 written on both sides.

Rolling for Initiative

When it comes time for initiative, have everyone roll their initiative result and then hand out the cards, with the highest initiative winnner starting at 1 and counting down. Each player puts their initiative card in front of them at the table. Now everyone can see who goes in what order.

Monsters too get their own initiative card which goes in front of the DM. The nine cards will cover six players and up to three different monsters. Any more than that and you have far bigger problems than how to handle initiative.

When you begin combat, look around the table to see who has card 1. After that person takes his or her turn, look for the next card down the list and so on.

At the end of the battle, have the players throw in their initiative cards to prepare for the next battle.

Delegating Initiative

One way to make your life easier and help keep your players' attention on the game is to delegate the handling of initiative. At the beginning of your game, ask for a volunteer to handle initiative. If no one is forthcoming, ask someone in particular to help you. With the initiative cards in the player's possession, he or she can call for rolls and pass out the cards. This makes it easier for you to roll monster initiatives and give your scores to the delegated lord of initiative. It also spreads around responsibility for the management of the game which has side benefits as well. Players may be less competitive with the DM when they're helping to manage things outside of their character.

No DM Screen Needed

Unlike previous initiative card systems, this one requires no DM screen. Some DMs, myself included, now forgo the screen to keep dice rolls open and knock down the physical barrier between DMs and players. Letting go of your DM screen also keeps your DM kit small.

Caring for your cards

To keep your cards always standing upright (*snort*), use a binder clip to bind them together when not in use. Make sure to bind them in the folded position, not flattened, so they'll hold their shape over time. If treated right, this single set of cards could last the rest of your life. These cards are an excellent accessory to throw into your DM walk-away kit.

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There is only one real wandering monster in the Tomb of the Nine Gods in Tomb of Annihilation, the Tomb Guardian. These armored flesh golems are no joke but they can get stale if we run them again and again.

Today we'll offer a generator to create enhanced tomb guardians. Each of these still uses the default statistics for the flesh golem with an armor class of 18 for the armor bolted onto its body, though some might be more dexterous and wearing leather armor but we can still give them an AC of 18. Each of them is also empowered beyond the normal tomb guardian as Withers enhances his creations, all with different races, with enchanted weapons and armor.

A Random Enhanced Tomb Guardian Generator

Here are twenty randomly generated enhanced tomb guardians. Reload the page for a new set.

var guardian = {origin:[""], weapon:[""], element:[""], spell:[""]}; guardian.origin = [ "dragonborn", "dwarven", "elven", "abyssal", "orcish", "dark elven", "demonic", "human", "gorilla", "ogre", "giant", "hobgoblin" ]; guardian.element = [ "flaming", "icy", "electrical", "thunderous", "poisonous", "necrotic", "acidic", "forceful", "psychic", "radiant", ]; guardian.attack = [ "dagger", "mace", "spear", "battleaxe", "flail", "longsword", "morningstar", "scimitar", "shortsword", "warhammer", "spiked gauntlet", "spiked chain" ]; guardian.spell = [ "shield", "lightning bolt", "fireball", "spirit guardians", "cloudkill", "sleep", "fire shield", "cone of cold", "improved invisibility", "haste", "globe of invulnerability", "glyph of warding" ]; function GuardianGenerator(origin, element, attack, spell) { function shuffle(o){ //v1.0 for(var j, x, i = o.length; i; j = Math.floor(Math.random() * i), x = o[--i], o[i] = o[j], o[j] = x); }; this.generate = function(length, targetDiv, write_out){ var output_list = []; for(var i = 0; i < length; i++){ shuffle(origin); shuffle(element); shuffle(attack); shuffle(spell); output_list.push("A " + origin[0] + " tomb guardian armed with a " + element[0] + " " + attack[0] + " and a " + element[1] + " " + attack[1] + " empowered with a " + spell[0] + " spell.") } if(targetDiv && write_out) $("div#" + targetDiv).html("

• "+output_list.join("
• ")+"

"); } } $(document).ready(function() { var count = 20; var output = true; var guardianGenerator = new GuardianGenerator(guardian.origin, guardian.element, guardian.attack, guardian.spell); guardianGenerator.generate(count, "guardianlist", output); $("#reload").bind("click",function(){ trapGenerator.generate(count, "guardianlist", output); }); });

Each enhanced tomb guardian uses the statistics of a flesh golem with an armor class of 18. Enhanced tomb guardians add 7 (2d6) damage onto each weapon attack of the damage type defined by descriptors on the weapons. You can use the proper dice for each weapon, doubling the normal dice and adding the flesh golem's strength bonus, or, if you're lazy, you can just use the default damage the flesh golem already inflicts plus the bonus damage.

The spells the enhanced tomb guardian can cast do not require any components and are cast at 5th level. They have a DC of 15 and a +7 spell attack bonus. Spells with a duration are cast before combat begins and the enhanced tomb guardian does not need to concentrate to keep a spell going.

Want to build your own enhanced tomb guardians at the table? Use the tables below to roll for your tomb guardians.

Origin

What creature or creatures make up the tomb guardian? Roll 1d12 and consult the following:

1. Dragonborn
2. Dwarven
3. Elven
4. Abyssal
5. Orcish
6. Dark Elven
7. Demonic
8. Human
9. Gorilla
10. Ogre
11. Giant
12. Hobgoblin

Weapons

Roll 1d12 twice on this list to determine what weapons the tomb guardian wields.

1. Dagger
2. Mace
3. Spear
4. Battleaxe
5. Flail
6. Longsword
7. Morningstar
8. Scimitar
9. Shortsword
10. Warhammer
11. Spiked Gauntlet
12. Spiked Chain

Elemental

Some tomb guardians might have an elemental bond. Roll 1d4, on a 4, roll 1d10 on this table to determine what elemental condition it might have. If Withers feels like the characters are having too easy a time, he might send more tomb guardians with these bonds.

1. Fire
2. Cold
3. Necrotic
4. Poison
5. Acidic
6. Thunderous
7. Lightning
8. Radiant
9. Force
10. Psychic

Spellbound

Withers has implanted spells on some tomb guardians as well. If the characters are having an easy time, he might send these spellbound tomb guardians to thwart the party.

1. Shield
2. Lightning Bolt
3. Fireball
4. Spirit Guardians
5. Cloudkill
6. Sleep
7. Burning Hands
8. Cone of Cold
9. Improved Invisibility
10. Haste
11. Globe of Invulnerability
12. Glyph of Warding

Adding Flavor to Tomb Guardians

These enhanced tomb guardians are intended to change up the threat the characters face when facing one of these thematic tomb guardians. We add these interesting abilities not to punish our players (that's Acererak's job) but to keep things interesting. Each time our players see one of these enhanced tomb guardians coming for them, they'll know they're going to be facing something unique and chaotic.

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In a previous article on Sly Flourish we talked about the value of randomness and creativity in D&D and breaking conventional thought with random tables. Randomness is obviously a big part of the gameplay of Dungeons & Dragons. We're rolling dice all the time while the story unfolds during the game. We might even think of the die, and randomness in general, as an additional player in the game, one who steers the direction of the game in ways we could not have expected.

So we all take it for granted that randomness is a core component of the game (ability checks, attack rolls, and the like), but we might not consider how randomness can affect larger parts of the story as well, like the potential scenes that take place.

Random encounters go back to the beginning of D&D. Against the Giants and Descent into the Depths both published in 1978 included wandering monster tables that made these adventures feel alive and unpredictable. Even the DM didn't know where things were necessarily going to go.

Nearly all of the fifth edition D&D hardback adventures include robust random encounter tables with encounters for many environments and detailed descriptions of what the characters might find in the encounter. Xanathar's Guide to Everything includes a bunch of random encounter tables based on environments that we can use for our own adventures. I've also included a set of random dungeon encounters in the Lazy DM's Workbook.

Criticism of Random Encounters

While many DMs are fine with random encounters, some DMs don't like them at all. Criticisms against random encounters include, generally, two main themes: they take away from the main story of an adventure and they take up valuable game time. These criticisms aren't necessarily wrong but there are ways we can incorporate random encounters that make them an interesting and exciting part of the story instead of a distraction. We can steer how we use random encounters to stay true to the story, expand the world, and liven up the game for both our players and ourselves by introducing the unexpected. Today we'll look at some of the ways to get the most out of random encounters in our D&D games.

Cooking At The Table

Why would we want to use random encounters at all? Why not plan out all the encounters that the characters will face so we can tune them very carefully around the story? As we talked about in the article Randomness and Creativity we recognize that sometimes random elements can make us more creative. We'll avoid stereotypes. We'll push our minds towards new ideas we might not have seen otherwise. Just as the dice we roll for a character affects the outcome of a story, so can the dice help us see what scenes might take place.

Rolling for random encounters is a bit like cooking at the table instead of in the kitchen. We have the ingredients all set up for us but a couple of die rolls might change things up in ways we didn't expect.

For some DMs, this is scary. We like to have control over the game and might even feel like that control is critical to ensure the game will be fun. Sometimes, though, we have to just let go. For others, though, it can be a great way to sharpen our ability to improvise right at the table. We don't roll random encounters to divert the story of the game. We roll random encounters to find new and interesting ways to expand that story.

Use Theater of the Mind

The fact that random encounters add time to our games is hard to get past. If our games are already constrained, random encounters are likely the first thing to go. One way we can manage the time is to skip the battle map and handle the scene all in our conversations. First off, the random encounter might not end in combat anyway. Characters might sneak by, negotiate their way past, or find some other way to get out of the situation without drawing a sword. If we pull out a mat, we're telegraphing to our players that combat is the likely way out. If we keep it aside, the players might try other ways to navigate the scene.

If it does come to combat, we can stay with our narrative approach by running combat in the theater of the mind. This keeps things moving fast and keeps the players in the story instead of worrying about tactical positioning. Even if you use the grid for big battles, running smaller battles in the theater of the mind is a great approach to keep on hand, particularly for random encounters.

Situations and Undefined Scenes

When we introduce a random encounter, it works well when we think of it as a situation the characters are going to get involved in. We don't have to consider what type of scene it is: exploration, roleplaying, or combat. Instead, we can focus on the fiction. Even if it's a horrible monster, the characters might find another way out of the situation than sword and spell. The less we define an encounter, the more freedom the players have to navigate it. This works well for the whole game, really, but it works particularly well for random encounters.

Tying Secrets and Clues to Random Encounters

I'm a huge fan of secrets and clues as an improvisational aid and preparation technique. It's the cornerstone of the checklist in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. The keys to a great secret and clue is that it's relatively short, it matters to the characters, and we don't know how it will come up during the game.

Random encounters are a great way to use those secrets and clues we prepared. Often we can reveal a valuable clue through a random encounter. When this works well it feels like magic. Suddenly something we couldn't anticipate came true at the table and tied directly into the story. We had a secret but didn't know where it would come up. We have an encounter we didn't expect but rolled the dice and there it is. Put the two together and we have the very example of how the story unfolds at the table.

Don't be a Slave to the Dice

Sometimes you roll the dice for a random encounter and it just doesn't work out. You either roll an encounter that already happened or that just doesn't make sense for the situation. We need not accept such weird answers. It helps to take a moment and really think about how it might make sense. The dice, after all, are helping us break out of our current creative shell and think differently. If it really doesn't work out, roll again or let your eyes wander up and down the list of random encounters and pick one that makes sense.

The Right Tool for the Right Job

There are circumstances when random encounters really don't fit well at all. If you're running a single-session time-focused game, like a convention Adventurer's League game, you probably don't want to throw in a random encounter. I don't think many Adventurer's League adventures include random encounters for this very reason.

If you're running a homebrew single-session adventure, however, you can account for the extra time within the structure of the adventure. If the characters are navigating an old crypt to find the remains of the Blood Prince, you might account for a random encounter within the tomb as they seek the villain.

Avoid Building Your Own Random Encounter Lists

Here's a bit of a controversial statement. As DMs, I don't think its a valuable use of our time to come up with our own random encounter lists. Instead, we can just come up with encounters. Leave the random encounter lists to publishers and random encounter generators. Game designers get paid to make large lists of random encounters, knowing that many of them will not get used by any single player but that, overall, they will have a high impact on the games played among many groups.

When we DMs write out random encounter lists, we're not likely to use it very often and thus a lot of our effort is wasted. Our time is better spent designing actual situations we know the characters will face and using random encounter lists to help us think outside of our own mind a little bit. Others may likely argue against this, and that's fine, but consider how much impact the whole random encounter list you write affects your actual game and decide if it's worth the time or if that time is better spent elsewhere. That is, after all, the number one lesson of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master.

Prepare what matters.

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As part of the work we did on the Lazy Dungeon Master's Workbook, I surveyed the Kickstarter backers of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master and asked them which references, charts, and tables they found most and least useful while preparing and running their 5e games. The three madness charts trended towards the bottom of the list.

I'm not completely surprised but a little sad at this. I love the madness charts. Ever since using them in Out of the Abyss, I've used madness here and there throughout my D&D games and always found them to be an enjoyable addition. Today I'm going to dig into why I love these charts so much and what they can bring to their game.

Regardless of the results, I stuck the madness tables in there anyway. Hell, it's my book. Today I'll talk about why.

(art by Walter Brocca)

The Great Equalizer

Madness is a strange effect. It isn't technically a status effect but when it hits a character, it acts very much like one. We don't know exactly what that effect will be should a character fail a madness check but it sure won't be good.

When we have high power characters, it can be hard for us dungeon masters to challenge them all the time. Many times that's perfectly fine. It's fun to carve through all sorts of monsters when you're a high level and high power character. Since D&D isn't tuned around magical items, the items characters acquire push them outside of their expected power level and that feels great.

Sometimes, however, particularly for really powerful monsters, we want to show the danger. We want players to be scared of things. If Demogorgon rises out of the black waters of Dark Lake, we don't want the characters to just start preparing their attacks and jumping in.

That's where madness comes in. Some creatures are just too horrible to behold. Their very presence pushes the mortal mind outside of the bounds of sanity. The walls of reality crack and in seeps the horror of worlds beyond.

It doesn't matter how many attacks a round you can dish out, a DC 24 Charisma saving throw will turn just about any fighter into a slug-eating buffoon, at least for a few seconds.

The round a demon prince comes out and that aura of madness hits the characters, that's the most dangerous round in D&D. And that danger can be really fun.

When To Use Madness

Madness is an effect we should keep in our back pocket and not use all the time. The appearance of a demon prince or lord of hell is a great time to drop in madness. The arrival of a powerful entity of the Far Realm might be another. Should Slarkrethal the kraken rise from the depths of the seas, it's psionic wave will crash on them like water tearing down mountains.

Other circumstances might also warrant a madness check. Opening up and gazing upon a book of terrible rituals, maybe the Book of Vile Darkness itself, could crack the minds of the strongest wizards. Staring into the shifting planes of a portal to an outer world might invoke madness. Some Fantastic Features containing the depths of evil and studied too rashly might drop waves of terror upon those who gaze upon them.

Again, madness should be used infrequently but, when the situation is right, it's a powerful effect.

Tuning Madness for Fun

As written, madness might be too powerful. The biggest reasion is that it offers no saving throw at the end of a turn to get rid of the effect. We can easily add this end-of-next-turn saving throw when a character is hit with a short-term madness effect during combat.

If the saving throw is too high, though, as it might be for characters who have poor charisma scores, this might not even help. A fighter is going to have a hell of a time beating a DC 24 Charisma save even if they get it at the end of any round. A number of spells can remove madness, as described in the Dungeon Master's Guide including calm emotions lesser restoration, remove curse, dispel evil and good, and greater restoration. We might also argue that damage done to the character can snap them out of their daze or at least give them advantage on the check.

The Creativity and Improvisation of Madness Effects

One of the reasons I love the madness effect so much is that it's full of flavor. While a stun is generally just a stun, madness carries such flavorful effects as "the character experiences an overpowering urge to eat something strange such as dirt, slime, or offal." Hard to beat that for flavor!

Other status effects too have such flavor but it's tied to the way it hits the character. When a drow mage casts web on a character, we know more than just that the character is incapacitated. We know that they are cocooned in a magical sticky web, stuck to the wall or ground and gasping for breath. We might forget this when we're deep into the mechanics of the game but it behooves us to go there and remember what is really going on in the game's fiction.

Likewise madness brings flavor to the game beyond its mechanical effects, which are substantial. Think about the source and describe what happens. One of my favorite questions is to ask the player to describe their happy place when they retreat into their own mind due to a madness effect. A player will describe a nice leatherbound book, sweet pipesmoke in the air, and the familiar softness of a leather chair in front of a warm fire while the rest of the party is being shredded by the tentacles and mental probes of a cyclopean titan risen from the depths. Oh what fun!

Though we tend not to use it often, short-term madness is a wonderful flavorful effect to add into our games from time to time. The next time a character witnesses something outside the bounds of the mind, time to hit that madness chart.

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The more we focus on the story of D&D, the more ability checks become the main mechanic as characters interact with the world around them. Asking for checks and getting the results sounds easy. Ask the player for a roll, add the appropriate modifiers, and match it up against a DC. Simple.

When we're running our game, though, it isn't always as easy as it sounds. It isn't always clear how we should call for checks, to whom, and how we should adjudicate the results. What if a player does a particularly good job roleplaying an encounter with an NPC but rolls poorly on their persuasion check? Is all that good roleplaying lost? What about when a character wants to examine a door, rolls a 2, and everyone else at the table wants to jump in and check the door as well?

In today's article we're going to dig deep into how we use ability checks in the story of our D&D games.

A Summary of Ability Check Options

This is a big article so here's a summary.

• Read up on the intent of ability checks in chapter 7 of the Player's Handbook and chapter 8 of the Dungeon Master's Guide. Freshen up regularly before you start changing how you run things.
• Consider how randomness fits into the world and the situations in which we might call for an ability check. Does this check warrant a roll or is a passive ability check enough?
• Roll secretly for a character's ability check when the character might not know if they succeeded or failed such as when searching for a trap.
• Offer advantage on checks in which players roleplay particularly well or when an aspect of their character gives them an advantage in the situation.
• Allow full table rolls if the circumstances allow for it. The highest roll learns the in-game results first.
• If needed, curb full-table rolls by determining if only one character can reasonably perform the check or by accepting only the first roll.
• Be prepared for an entire table to fail a check. Make sure it doesn't halt the game.
• Ask for rolls only from those trained in a skill when a particular level of expertise is required such as decoding magical runes.
• Ask players to describe how they aid an ally or guide them with guidance.
• Build your own toolbox of methods for adjudicating ability checks.

Understanding the Rules As Written

Whenever we're going to dig deep into any mechanic in D&D, it's best to read the rules and understand their intent. In the case of ability checks, we have chapter 7 page 173 in the Player's Handbook and chapter 8 page 237 in of the Dungeon Master's Guide to give us the written rules and some solid advice on how best to use ability checks. If you're going to monkey around with ability checks or find that things get confusing at your game, spend a few minutes reading both of these sections to reinforce how the designers intended for ability checks to work.

One thing of note, particularly for DMs who have played older versions of D&D, there are no skill checks. In the fifth edition of D&D, there are only ability checks. Skills are subjects in which characters are proficient and add to an ability modifier when the circumstances allow it. This sounds pedantic but the distinction matters, particularly in the vocabulary of the rules.

These sections in the Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide give us the basics of using ability checks including group checks, aiding another character, and using advantage and disadvantage based on the circumstance of the check. It's worth reading and refreshing ourselves on these rules regularly, particularly once we've seen how they actually play out for the group at the table.

The Random Chances of the World Around Us

The real world around is is constantly and continually moving based on random chance. Very likely the reason I am writing this and the reason you are reading it are based on very slim random occurrences that happened over our lives and the lives of our ancestors. When we interact with the world around us, random chance plays a big part in those interactions as well, even if we don't see it or choose not to.

The same is true in the world of our D&D games. In the Dungeon Master's Guide, we're given the advice that we need not worry about asking for ability checks when the task being done is either so easy that it's almost assured or so hard that it's nearly impossible. There's another way to think about this, though, and it's by considering how much randomness exists in the situation itself.

If the characters are talking to a town guard, maybe there's randomness in the response of that guard. Maybe he ate something bad earlier that day or got in a fight with his husband before work. Maybe we want to account for that potential random circumstance when our charismatic sorcerer decides to ask him about the secret tunnels beneath the ruined watchtower.

But maybe we don't. Maybe, for the sake of the story, its just easier of the guard tells the characters what they want to know. Regardless of any digestive or domestic issues the guard has, he's still likely to tell a charismatic sorcerer about the tunnels. We don't need to roll for this.

Page 236 of chapter 8 of the Dungeon Master's Guide has a whole section called "The Role of Dice" that discusses when DMs should consider rolling or ignoring dice. The section called "The Middle Path" likely offers the best option: use the dice when a bit of randomness makes sense for that situation or ignore it when the characters approach the situation in a way that makes failure unlikely.

It's important for us to understand why there is a random component when it comes to interacting with the world overall. This randomness isn't there to take some excellent roleplaying and throw it away on a shitty roll. It's there to help the world feel as unpredictable as any realistic world would feel. It's also there to make the story more interesting. If everything were simply comparisons between static ability scores and difficulty classes, we could predict every interaction before it occurred (hello Leplace's Demon!). With the roll of the die, mysterious things happen and that's fun for both players and DMs alike.

How we inject this randomness into our games and how we tweak it based on the context of the story takes some deeper understanding.

Passive Checks

There's a whole interesting discussion to have about passive checks; particularly how passive perception and passive insight work. Jeremy Crawford talked about this on a previous episode of Dragon Talk. Here's a clip from the episode where he goes into details.

In short, passive scores (perception and insight) are always on as long as you're conscious. Players don't get to say that they're using it. Passive perception is intended to be the floor of a character's perception. They might not notice anything specific but they'll know something is going on. If a player rolls perception, they might roll lower than their passive perception but the passive perception is still going on. Anything they would see with that, they'd see anyway.

We can use passive scores for just about anything if we want to but they're most likely to be used for these sort of "always on" skills. As mentioned above, if we feel like the random elements of a situation don't exist in a particular situation, we can opt for a static check on anything. If a rogue has +7 to stealth we can consider it having a general stealth of 17 if they're sneaking through a whole area and we don't want to roll on it all the time.

We might use passive checks instead of rolls in the following circumstances:

• When randomness isn't a meaningful factor in the situation.
• When we'd normally have to make a large series of checks.
• When a skill is "always on" as the characters explore. These skills might include Arcana, History, Insight, Investigation, Medicine, Nature, Perception, Religion, and Survival.

DM Rolls and Hidden Checks

There are times when the results of a situation might be a mystery to the characters regardless of a success or failure. The ability to detect a trap, for example, might be known or not regardless of the results of a roll. Yet when we ask a player to roll to detect a trap, they will know the result because they can see the result.

Instead, we might ask for a character's Wisdom (Perception or Investigation) bonus and make a hidden roll to see how it goes. This gives some mystery to the results. If they detect the trap, they know it's there. If they did not detect a trap, though, it could be because there isn't one there or they missed it. That's exciting.

There aren't many circumstances where we'd roll an ability check for a character and keep the results hidden but it can be useful and fun when it does happen. Here are a few circumstances when rolling a hidden check might be appropriate:

• Detecting a trap
• Negotiating with an NPC who hides their responses
• Checking for secret doors or hidden compartments
• Detecting whether a liquid is poison or not
• Recognizing the traits of a monster

This technique can be fun but should be used sparingly. It's almost always best for players to roll their own checks.

Awesome Roleplaying, Poor Rolls

Sometimes, and we can see this in a lot of streaming games like Critical Role, players do quite a bit of awesome roleplaying when interacting with an NPC. Sometimes, however, their character actually isn't particularly good at that type of interaction. The character has an awesome bit of dialog intimidating the goblin but has an intimidation bonus of -1.

Sometimes we might ask for the check after such a narrative exposition and then see a terrible roll come up. All of us know, based on what was actually said, that it should have gone better than that.

There are a couple of ways we can handle this. First of all, we're within the intention of the game to offer advantage to the player for a fine bit of roleplaying. We can even give them inspiration if they want to hang on to the advantage for another check.

We can also lower the difficulty class on the fly based on the particular approach that was taken with the NPC. We might even use our shades of gray on the roll to turn a bad roll into an interesting divergent path in the situation.

We might even let the roll go away completely and, based on the awesome roleplaying, determine that there's basically no way the interaction will go against the character when they take the approach they're taking. No matter what, we are not slaves to the dice. If the approach and the situation are stronger than random chance, we can judge it a success and move forward.

Full Table Rolls

Invariably we sometimes get into a situation where a character wants to spot something, announces their intention to look around an area, rolls a 2, and then the whole rest of the group jumps in and wants to make the same check.

This can happen in both wide circumstances, like keeping an eye out for monsters while resting or something small like checking a door for traps. When the players see another player fail a check, they want to leap in to make the same check.

The circumstances of such a roll matter a lot in how we adjudicate this. We might, in our minds, have a clear idea that only one character may see or miss seeing such an event only to realize that if everyone tries, someone is bound to make the check.

If the task at hand is something only one character can reasonably do, we can simply veto the checks when the rest of the group wants to roll. We might argue that only that one chance could work and subsequent attempts won't succeed. Other times, however, we might shrug and go with the group check.

Here are some circumstances when only one character can reasonably perform a check:

• Detecting a trap
• Disarming a trap
• Picking a lock
• Forging a document
• Manipulating an object
• Reading arcane energy off of an object
• Climbing a wall

And here are some example circumstances when a whole group can reasonably check.

• Investigating a room
• Scouting an area
• Foraging for food
• Forcing open a door
• Studying a written document

If we do find circumstances where the whole group can participate, we might instead call for a group check. See page 175 of the Player's Handbook for details. We use a group check when the whole group acts together and succeeds or fails together. The most common group check is the group stealth check to avoid being seen as a group travels through an area but we can use it in other circumstances too. In a group check, all participants roll for the check and more than half of them must succeed in order to succeed at the roll.

If things seem too easy when the whole group would roll on a check, we can use the group check to even things out a bit.

Full Table Failures

Sometimes we want to pass some information to the characters and we ask for a full group check expecting that someone will pass. Sometimes, however, the dice work against all of us and no one succeeds. If the information was vital, we might find ourselves stuck in a corner of the story. We expected someone would pass. Now what?

Even when we're calling for a group check in which only one member of the group must succeed, we must be ready to handle it if no one succeeds at all. In these circumstances it might be best to give the highest rolling player the required information and "fail forward" with a complication of some sort such as giving away their position or not noticing the arrival of another group of creatures before it's too late.

Only Those Trained Can Succeed

The fifth edition of D&D expects that all checks are "ability" checks, not "skill" checks. Thus, when a DM calls for a check, they ask for an ability like "give me a wisdom check" to notice something coming closer in the distant sky. We might also tag on a skill with it and say "give me a wisdom check and add your proficiency if you're trained in perception". I imagine most DMs skip this and go straight to "give me a perception check" and players know to roll flat wisdom if they aren't trained.

One way to ensure that an entire group doesn't try a particularly narrow skill is to ask for only those trained in the skill to check. For example, understanding arcane runes protecting a vaulted door might require that it be checked only by those trained in Arcana. Understanding the intricate information stored in a religious text or recognizing the origin of a buried statue might require someone trained in Religion.

Requiring proficiency in a particular skill goes outside the bounds of the intended D&D rules, but it is a good way to make those proficiencies count during the game. We might stack on other backgrounds, races, or classes onto this list as well. If the characters come across a mystical tome, maybe only those trained in Arcana or those able to cast spells can attempt to decode the book's secrets using their spellcasting ability score to understand it. Perhaps only someone trained in Religion can recognize the ancient buried statue except for dwarves who might recognize that the statue is of a dwarven deity lost long ago.

Here are some example circumstances where we might only ask those who are trained to make a check:

• When decoding powerful arcane runes
• When investigating ancient religious artifacts
• When picking a difficult lock
• When hunting a deceptive beast through the jungles
• When digging through formal histories for a particular nugget
• When attempting to brew a particular poison
• When seeking the particulars from the wounds found on a corpse

Again, this method for ability checks goes outside the expected rules and, as Jeremy Crawford says, it should be used sparingly.

Offering Advantage for Character Traits and Backgrounds

It's always nice to reinforce a character's interactions with the world through that character's race, class, background, or any other trait of the character that gives the character an advantage in a particular situation. In these circumstances, we can give a character advantage for a particular check based on this trait.

If the characters are examining an ancient fresco buried underneath centuries of moss, the high elf character might get advantage on the check since the fresco depicts elements of the ancient elven struggle between Corellon and Lolth.

The Dungeon Master's Guide specifically discusses when to use advantage and disadvantage on ability checks. Page 239 includes circumstances when one or the other makes sense with one particularly interesting statement: "Consider granting advantage when circumstances not related to a creature's inherent capabilities provide it with an edge."

When a rogue is disarming a trap or picking a lock, we don't give them advantage for being a rogue. Their proficiency is already wired into being a rogue. Picking locks and disarming traps is what rogues do. We already know that barbarians are particularly athletic, they don't get barbarous advantage for bending bars or lifting gates. They actually get it anyway if they're raging at those vexing bars.

Backgrounds already offer skills so we might think of that as an inherent capability already but if the details of a background can aid a character beyond a skill proficiency, we can consider that enough to offer advantage on the check.

Here are some examples where we might offer advantage on an ability check based on a particular trait of a character.

• When a sailor is examining a wrecked ship
• When a sage is reading through an old tome
• When a dwarf is investigating the construction of an underground citadel
• When an Warlock serving a Great Old One patron peers into a portal to the far realm
• When an assassin investigates a potential poisoning

Describing Aiding and Guidance

The aid another action is a great way for two characters to work on a problem with one of them giving advantage to another. The most common problem I've seen with this is that the player of the aiding party grabs a d20 and rolls without thinking about the fact that they aren't the ones supposed to be rolling. If this happens, we can tell the partners that this second roll counts as the advantage roll and add whichever modifier is higher between the two characters.

We can apply a small cost to this aid as well by asking the player to describe how they're aiding. This is a nice trick to get players into the story. It isn't enough for them to say "I'll aid them", the question is how they'll offer that aid. Fun stories can come from such questions.

The same is true with the cleric's spell guidance which offers 1d4 to any ability check. When a cleric casts this spell, we can ask the player to describe what that aid looks like. Is it a holy light that fills in the nooks and crannies of a difficult lock? Is it a small glowing halo that surrounds the rogue as she talks her way past the town guards? Is it a tiny glowing light in the eyes of the wizard as she decodes the magical glyphs embedded in the wall?

Getting players to answer these in-game story-focused questions is a great way to get them outside of their character sheet and into the world you're creating together.

Ability Checks: The Primary Mechanic between Players and the World

When we think about it, ability checks may be the biggest mechanic of D&D. In our more story-focused games, these ability checks guide nearly every challenging interaction between the characters and the world around them. The basic mechanic of ability checks; rolling a d20, adding a modifier, and matching against a difficulty class; seems so simple but how we actually implement these checks into the game can have a big impact in how the game is played and how it turns out.

Read the rules, see how they play out at your own table, and build a toolbox of methods for calling for and using ability checks in your own game. Let these checks act as the chaotic vehicles for the awesome stories that unfold at your table.

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Reading Volo's Guide to Monsters, along with the Monster Manual is a fantastic way to fill our head with D&D lore that helps us plan our games and improvise while we're running them. If you get nothing else out of this article, consider how much value you can get by reading these books cover to cover to steep yourself in D&D lore.

Reading the section on gnolls in Volo's Guide got my head spinning around the idea of a full level 1 to 20 fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign built around gnolls. I had in my head an image of a hyena twitching in the remains of a half-digested corpse of a villager (gory, I know). As the characters watch in horror, the hyena starts to twist and break like the best scene in American Werewolf in London. The party witnesses the full transformation (or maybe partial transformation if they decide to blast it to pieces before it finishes) of a hyena into a gnoll.

A whirlwind of events would take them from that single scene all the way into the Death Dells where they will hunt—or be hunted by— Yeenoghu the demon prince of gnolls and the most powerful minions on Yeenoghu's home plane of existence in the Abyss.

Can we build an entire campaign around this central pillar? I believe we can! Of course it won't JUST be gnolls. We'd have lots of side threads going on too, but building a full level 1 to 20 campaign arc focused on Yeenoghu's Hunger sounds like a lot of fun to me, so let's dig in.

The Campaign Elevator Pitch

Following the steps in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master for building new campaigns, we start with a central theme for the campaign. The shorter the better, so here is my campaign pitch in three words:

End Yeenoghu's hunger.

That's simple but it's a good central pillar around which to build the campaign. It's a quest the characters can get early on in the adventure and work towards all throughout their characters' levels.

Six Truths of the Hunger

Next we come to the campaign's six truths. What sets this campaign apart from others? Here we list the six things that make this campaign unique among campaigns. These are truths we will share with the players so they know what to build their characters around.

• A blood moon rises in the sky each night and has for a full month with no sign of stopping.

• Signs of a twisted new cult have begun to appear. Some whisper of cannibalism.

• Trade between smaller villages and towns have begun to cease. Some say entire villages have been found slaughtered and devoured.

• Hobgoblins from a warband known as the Black Fist have sprung up in greater numbers.

• Cities of the lands have begun to close their borders and seal their walls. Even they do not know exactly why.

• A great black and green storm swirls over the mountains of Shattered Teeth. Sages say the very atmosphere over the mountains has changed.

This is going to be a campaign of overland exploration and dungeon delving and will have all three pillars of play. We can reinforce to the players that they will will want to build players with the following goal:

"My character wants to work with their fellow adventurers to find the source of the bloody hunger that grips the land and end it."

The Fronts

We don't have to build out an entire campaign from end to end here, but we will outline the major story drivers of the campaign. We've borrowed the idea of Fronts from the excellent RPG, Dungeon World.

• Front: Yeenoghu and the gnoll hordes
• Goal: Devour all humanity in the world.
• First Grim Portent: Packs of gnolls in great number stop trade between the major cities of the land.
• Second Grim Portent: Yeenoghu and his gnoll hordes attack a smaller settlement.

• Third Grim Portent: Yeenoghu and his greater horde attack one of the larger cities.

• Front: The Cult of the Hunger

• Goal: Pave the way for Yeenoghu's cleansing.
• First Grim Portent: The cult grows larger as it recruits from disenfranchised towns on the outskirts of major cities.
• Second Grim Portent: The cult steals the powerful Tome of Savagery from the greatest library of the land and uses it to open a second portal to Yeenoghu's realm, the Death Dells.

• Third Grim Portent: The Cult of Hunger assassinates the leaders of a major city and sends its armies into chaos.

• Front: The Black Fist hobgoblin mercenary army

• Goal: Let the gnoll horde weaken the defenses of the cities and then sweep in and take over.
• First Grim Portent: The Black Fist hobgoblin army takes over a ruined castle within striking distance of two major settlements.
• Second Grim Portent: Black Fist scouts track Yeenoghu's trail of destruction.
• Third Grim Portent: The Black Fist stands outside of a major city, waiting until both sides are weakened before sweeping in and taking it over.

We hold these fronts loosely. New fronts might pop up and old fronts might change drastically. Volo's Guide includes a wonderful section on hobgoblins as well as gnolls so we can add them as a third party that might end up as allies of the, enemies, or both for the characters and their goals.

When it comes to the selection of monsters we might choose or this campaign, Volo's Guide has an excellent section on the Anatomy of a Warband and on Gnoll Allies that works as a great checklist of potential monsters we can sprinkle throughout our campaign.

A Loose 1 to 20 Outline

While we don't need anything more than the above to run a decent start to a campaign, it might be fun to write a loose outline of the places the characters might visit and the events that might occur as they go through the campaign. I picked twenty such places and events, one for each level of the game. I have no illusion that these will all get used at exactly the right level but it gives me a loose outline of ideas I can go through when running adventures. I am happy to throw any or all of these away as the campaign progresses.

Level 1: The Dying Hyena. The party encounters a dying hyena that turns into a gnoll in front of their eyes. More hyenas howl in the distance.

Level 2: Slaughter at the Village of Nix. The party sees the slaughter of the village of Nix and hunts down those that committed the act.

Level 3: The Charnal Pit. The party witnesses the gnoll's feast at the charnel pit outside of Nix.

Level 4: Assault on Fort Kellum. The party arrives at Fort Kellum to see it under assault by the gnolls.

Level 5: The Dead Gate. The characters explore the ruins of a planar gate previously used by Yeenoghu four hundred years ago and the ruins of dwarves and deep gnomes that surround it.

Level 6: Citadel Gallax. The party explores, infiltrates, or is invited into a ruined citadel now rebuilt by the Black Fist hobgoblin warband.

Level 7: The Tower of Fangs. The party faces the cult of Hunger at one of its temples and discovers their dark portents.

Level 8: Mountain of Broken Teeth. The party backtracks to the Mountains of Broken Teeth where Yeenoghu first came to the world.

Level 9: The First Portal. The party finds and close the portal Yeenoghu used to enter the prime plane.

Level 10: Dragonspear Castle. The party goes to Dragonspear Castle where the Black Fist warband wages war against a huge gnoll army.

Level 11: The Temple of the Hunger. The party faces the cult of Hunger and its high priest to recover the Book of Savagry.

Level 12: The Demon Rift. The party discovers and must close a rift spilling out scores of maw demons like an infected wound in the world.

Level 13: The Hunters at the Twisted Shrine. At a long-forgotten shrine, the party must survive an assault by a war band of gnolls specifically born and bred to hunt them down and slay them.

Level 14: The Assault on Baldur's Gate. The party arrives at Baldur's Gate to find Yeenoghu and his army waging an assault on the city.

Level 15: The Prince of Savagery. The party faces Yeenoghu and his army in order to save Baldur's Gate.

Level 16: The Gateway. The party faces Yeenoghu's gatekeepers and enters the gateway to the Death Dells.

Level 17: The Death Dells. The party begins their exploration into Yeenoghu's Abyssal plane.

Level 18: The Maw. The party travels through a huge sinkhole consisting of the rotten corpse of a single huge maw demon.

Level 19: The Hunting Grounds. A twisted maze of brambles surrounds Yeenghu's lair in which the mightiest gnolls of the demon prince eternally hunt their prey.

Level 20: Yeenoghu. The party faces the Prince of Savagery on his throne of corpses.

A Loose Outline and a Fun Exercise

When we sit down to plan a campaign like this, we need not plan too far. Things are going to go off the rails from the very first session and that's what makes these games so much fun. We can, however, get our minds working by thinking about what might happen and have some fun diving deep into the lore of the game to see where our minds go. Such exercises keep our minds limber and keep us ready to run some great games even if we never get around to running a campaign like this.

When you think of your own campaign, where does your mind go?

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In the Dungeons & Dragons adventure Out of the Abyss, the party has the potential of grouping with a number of NPCs as they all attempt to escape from their captors in the depths of the underdark. In Storm King's Thunder, the party can be accompanied by Harshnag, a powerful frost giant wielding an incredibly powerful magical axe. Finally, in Tomb of Annihilation, the characters have the potential of grouping with assassins, a Couatl, or an artifact-donning hero and his lizard companion wielding a holy avenger.

Some DMs may not have any problem handling these tag-along NPCs in a game. These NPCs find their place in a group and work their way into the story as it unfolds. Other DMs, myself included, have trouble with tag-along NPCs. Here's why.

First, tag-along NPCs make our lives harder as DMs. Running a whole world is already hard work, even for the lazy. Adding tag-along NPCs gives us a whole other set of variables to handle.

Tag-along NPCs also make combat take longer since there's another character in the mix. Sometimes we can hand this off to one of the players but not if the NPC has a secret identity. If you hand Dragonbait over to a player, I bet that sword is getting traded.

These tag-along NPCs also skew the balance of power in a group. Challenges that the party might have had a hard time with suddenly got easier. That extra NPC adds to the overall synergy to the party and that synergy is a huge power boost. If we want to challenge the characters, we're going to have to account for it.

Probably the worst offense of tag-along NPCs is that they draw the spotlight off of the characters. Our attention should be on the characters and how they interact with the world around them. Now we have this new character that doesn't belong to anyone but who also takes some of that spotlight away. This gets exacerbated if the NPC overshadows the characters in power, like Artus Cimber, Dragonbait, or Harshnag.

How do we handle it when tag-along NPCs become a burden to a game? Many DMs discussed the problem and potential solutions in a Twitter thread on the topic. The following includes ideas they discussed as well as some of my own.

Don't Let them Tag Along in the First Place

If we know these tag-along NPCs might show up in our adventure, we can head them off before they actually join the characters. Maybe we just don't have them show up at all. What is their reason not to join the party? I hinted at Artus Cimber and Dragonbait in my Tomb of Annihilation game but never pulled the thread on them and never had them show up. Maybe I would have if they came up in a random roll of the dice but maybe I'd simply roll again. This is certainly likely after hearing how difficult these high-level NPCs can be when they join a game.

The easiest way to deal with tag-along NPCs is simply not to. Don't let them become tag-along NPCs.

Have an Exit Strategy

If an NPC does join the party, it always helps to have an exit plan for the NPC. When will the NPC leave the group? What circumstances will lead to their departure? How do you steer things to ensure that circumstance actually takes place?

Harshnag in Storm King's Thunder had an exit plan; getting crushed under a million tons of ice in the Eye of the All Father. I don't know that Artus Ember and Dragonbait had much of an exit plan but they might come to either fear the characters or fear for the characters and head out during the night. The various NPCs in Out of the Abyss might eventually betray the characters or leave for other reasons. The guides in Tomb of Annihilation might get sick or might have another tangential agenda that leads them away from the party.

Keep your options open when considering how to get an NPC to leave the party and be ready to enact it if you find the NPC is overstaying their welcome.

Limit Their Utility

What the NPCs do while their with the party can also make a huge difference in how things play out. If an NPC agrees up front to stay out of combat, that makes things easier. This works best if the NPC clearly isn't much of a combatant to begin with. It's harder when you see a lizard with a holy avenger sword who's standing back while you fight ancient crocodiles by yourself. There are few reasons why a combat-focused NPC wouldn't fight but, if there's a good reason within the context of the story, that can work out. Lets pretend Jarlaxle joined the group. He has a clear reason to disappear every time things get dangerous even though he's a hell of a combatant. It's a lot less likely Drizzt would stay out of a fight, though.

Instead, we have another way we can keep them out of the way.

Make them Background Scenery

One way we can have a combat-focused NPC in a party and still not causing much trouble is to make them part of the background. If the party is facing three ogres, maybe they're actually facing four and our combat-focused NPC is taking care of the fourth. We pull these two combatants out of the actual battle and simply describe the battle taking place between them in the narrative. No dice need be thrown, no damage needs be tallied; we just make it part of the scenery going on while the main battle takes place in the foreground.

This has limits, though. This style will likely get stale if you do it over and over. This problem points back to getting them out of the party as soon as you can so it doesn't get that stale.

Let Players Run Them

In the case of an NPC who isn't seriously outclassing the rest of the party, let one of the players—maybe the player with the simplest character—run the NPC. You can give them a copy of the stat block, maybe taking a picture of it with their phone, and let them run the NPC on their same initiative. This is usually quick since monster stat blocks aren't terribly difficult.

If the NPC has a secret identity, say like Eku from Tomb of Annihilation secretly being a Couatl, you can instead give the player the stat block for the NPC they're pretending to be, say a spy or a veteran. These characters are likely to pull their punches anyway so as not to expose their true selves and that can be accounted for in the false statblock. It also keeps their power under control.

Be Aware of the Spotlight

Beyond adding extra power to the characters that might make potentially challenging situations trivial, NPCs in the party can have a tendency of pulling the spotlight away from the other characters. No one wants to watch DMs play with themselves. This can get tricky if the NPC is clearly the right person for a particular job, either because of what they know or the skills they happen to have. Why wouldn't the NPC who already knows the king be the one to negotiate for the party? This is something you'll want to noodle through before it starts to happen in your game. The spotlight should always be on the characters and tag-along NPCs should always be in the background. We might have to fudge the story a little bit to get them there but its important enough that it's worth bending the story to make it happen.

Player-Provided Tag-Along NPCs

So far we've been talking about NPCs in the adventure who, through the purposes of the story, end up tagging along with the group. Sometimes, however, players will bring their own tag-along NPCs as part of their characters. Maybe they hired a hireling or maybe they summoned a pet. Maybe they have their own simulacrum walking around with them or some sort of intelligent pet. This is a slightly different situation because you can't simply route the NPC out of the group. If a character's NPC starts to hog too much of the spotlight, it might be worth having an out-of-game conversation with the player to determine how you can ensure their NPC isn't stealing the joy from the rest of the table. Mabye that shield guardian of theirs wanders off unexpectedly. Maybe that hireling quits. Maybe the simulacrum goes back to protect the characters' airship.

Other times these player-provided tag-along NPCs aren't that much of a problem. You can always account for them when determining the challenge of a fight if a challenge is what you seek by adding one or two monsters to balance them out. They also often make juicy targets.

One nice house rule you might incorporate is the rule of mutually-assured destruction for tag-along NPCs. This works well for delicate pets and familiars. If a character's NPC doesn't come out in a fight, you won't target them; even with area of effect spells. This helps them keep their delicate NPCs without worrying about them getting killed in every fireball that happens to target the party.

Just Say No

Many of these problems and potential solutions go away if, when you have the chance, you simply forgo having tag-along NPCs at all. If an adventure calls for an NPC to follow the party, consider whether it really needs to happen and, if it does, how they will exit out again. Be particularly careful with high power NPCs like Artus Cimber, Dragonbait, and Harshnag. They can completely unbalance an adventure if they stick around too much.

The easiest thing is to simply avoid such NPCs. That's what us lazy dungeon masters do.

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Note: This article has been updated since its original version published in November 2012.

Published in 1983, the classic D&D adventure I6 Ravenloft, was ranked in 2004 by Dungeon magazine as the second greatest adventure of all time. Five years before its publication, Tracy and Laura Hickman ran the classic D&D module every Halloween. Ravenloft contains one of the best open-ended randomly determined adventures produced for Dungeons & Dragons and it's perfect for a Halloween one-shot game.

With the release of Curse of Strahd, we have a fully updated 5th edition D&D version of Ravenloft. Though intended for a long campaign, we're going to strip Curse of Strahd down to a single five-hour game for 8th level characters perfect for us to run on or around Halloween every year.

Let's take a look at how to run Curse of Strahd in a single session Halloween-themed adventure.

The Party's Goals

We'll start by stripping down the goals of this adventure to one single goal: Kill Strahd. Expanding this a bit, we're killing Strahd to prevent him from enthralling Ireena Kolyana and making her his dark bride.

To help them kill Strahd, the characters must seek out three powerful artifacts hidden within the castle. These three artifacts include the Sun Sword, the Icon of Ravenloft, and the Tome of Strahd.

You'll notice that we replaced the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind with the Icon of Ravenloft because the Icon's abilities better fit with the theme of the game. A paralyzed Strahd isn't much fun. That means the Icon of Ravenloft does not sit on the altar in room K15. We can replace this with a large bowl of clear water suitable to restore the vitality of the party once, giving them the equivalent of a short or long rest depending on how hard a time the characters are having.

We're also going to add a trait the Tome of Strahd that helps streamline this adventure. If Strahd is defeated, the Tome of Strahd can be burned to destroy him within his coffin regardless of where the characters are when they set it ablaze. In truth, this is the only item the characters actually need assuming they can defeat Strahd without the Sun Sword or the Icon.

Ireena

Ireena accompanies the group into Ravenloft. She isn't putting up with his stalkerish ways and is taking the fight right to him. Ireena is a veteran and can be controlled by a volunteer player who is already running a simple character.

Alternatively one of the players can play Ireena. She is human but otherwise can be any class the players choose and is the same level as the rest of the party.

Ravenloft Character Bonds

We're going to keep the bonds between characters very simple. Instead of a whole slew of interconnecting bonds, every character has the following bond for this one-shot adventure:

By blood or by deed you and your companions are sworn to aid and protect Ireena from the devil Strahd.

Now every character has a built-in motivation to group together, go to Ravenloft with Ireena, and destroy the vampire once and for all.

Intro: The Carriage Ride to Ravenoft and the Drawing

When the characters begin the adventure, read or summarize the following:

The ornate black carriage roars along the narrow winding road that leads to Castle Ravenloft. As you peer out one window, you watch rocks from the road fall one thousand feet to the river below. Looking ahead you see the carriage master, his cowled face turned your way and staring at you with invisible eyes shrouded under his tattered leather tricorn hat. Reaching back impossibly far with an arm too long for his body, he gently pushes you back into the carriage and locks the door.

A raspy laughter rattles the glyphed coins that make up Madame Eva's veil. Sitting across from you, she draws an ancient worn deck of cards from her colored robes and begins to place them on the small table in the center of the inside of the carriage.

We will be using the simplified fortune drawing described in James Introcaso's Guide to Running Curse of Strahd as a one-shot adventure with one minor exception: we're going to skip the ally and just stick to the three artifacts and Strahd's location. Remove all but the following cards from the common cards in the Tarokka deck:

• Paladin (2 of Swords/Spades)
• Mercenary (4 of Swords/Spades)
• Berserker (6 of Swords/Spades)
• Dictator (8 of Swords/Spades)
• Warrior (Master of Swords/10 of Spades)
• Transmuter (1 of Stars/Ace of Clubs)
• Evoker (6 of Stars/Clubs)
• Necromancer (8 of Stars/Clubs)
• Swashbuckler (1 of Coins/Ace of Diamonds)
• Merchant (4 of Coins/Diamonds)
• Guild Member (5 of Coins/Diamonds)
• Miser (9 of Coins/Diamonds)
• Shepherd (4 of Glyphs/Hearts)
• Anarchist (6 of Glyphs/Hearts)
• Priest (Master of Glyphs/10 of Hearts)

Ireena places out four cards, three from the common deck (one for each artifact) and one from the high deck which represents Strahd's location. With those cards placed, the adventure is ready to begin.

Strahd's Invitation

The characters arrive at Castle Ravenloft under the invitation of Strahd as described in the book. Instead of an illusion of Strahd playing the grand organ, it is Strahd himself. As they dine, Strahd lays out the rules of his "game" which, in short is the following:

"Defeat me and you save Ireena. Perish and she is mine."

In his unfathomable cruelty he asks Ireena a simple question:

"Give yourself to me now, my love, and you can save their lives."

Ireena looks to the party for guidance. If she appears as though she will give herself to Strahd, he turns to them and asks:

"and you would allow this?".

Should they choose to hand her over, Strahd looks very disappointed.

"They are obviously not worth your affection. Let them rot in this castle. Let you walk with them and see the results of their cowardice first hand."

Strahd then departs from the dinner as the room grows cold.

Should the characters decide to confront Strahd there and then, Strahd is accompanied by two vampire spawns and has an additional spawn for every character above four. They're not likely to survive.

Recover the Three Artifacts Before Facing Strahd

The party must find all three artifacts before facing Strahd. 45 minutes before the end of the game, Strahd attacks the characters wherever they are and with whatever they have. If the party does not have the Tome of Strahd, they cannot defeat the vampire. Depending on how difficult you want the fight, he might come with his three brides, each a vampire spawn. One of these vampire brides has the casting capabilities of a mage. One has the fighting capabilities of a veteran, and one has the capabilities of an assassin without the poison.

Strahd's Interjections

Throughout the session, Strahd might decide to jump into a situation to harass the party if they have been having too easy a time. Strahd will arrive in his hybrid bat form or his hybrid wolf form, poke at the party, and then leave. Each time Strahd arrives, his entrance is foreshadowed by his children of the night.

Facing Strahd von Zarovich

45 minute before the end of the game, Strahd arrives and unleashes his full power. Take a few minutes to read Strahd's full entry in the book before the game to remember all of his intricacies.

If we want to run Strahd on "hard mode" if the characters have been having too easy a time of it, we can use our "nastier specials" from our Running Strahd article. This includes the following:

Use the following changes to increase Strahd's difficulty:

• 200 hit points
• 19 AC (mage armor from a scroll)
• Unarmed strike does 11 (2d10) bludgeoning and 21 (6d6) necrotic damage.
• Bite does 9 (2d8) piercing and 14 (4d6) necrotic.
• Switch out the following spells: shield instead of comprehend languages, counterspell instead of nondetection, lightning bolt instead of fireball, and dispel magic instead of nondetection.
• Add Beguiling Gaze.

Beguiling Gaze. As a bonus action, the vampire fixes its gaze on a creature it can see within 30 feet of it. If the target can see the vampire, the target must succeed on a DC 17 Wisdom saving throw or the vampire has advantage on attack rolls against the target. The effect lasts until the target takes damage or until the start of the vampires next turn. For that time, the affected creature is also a willing target for the vampires bite attack. A creature that cant be charmed is immune to this effect. A creature that successfully saves against the vampires gaze is immune to it for 1 hour.

A Halloween Tradition

With Curse of Strahd in hand and our streamlined plans in place, we can make Castle Ravenloft our very own Halloween tradition. Give it a try!

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Note: This article is reposed with permission from the original posted to D&D Beyond on March 2018. It is the sixth in a six-part series of articles focused on helping new D&D DMs put together and run great games. The full list of articles includes:

• Finding and Maintaining a D&D Group
• Starting Strong at your First D&D Game
• Tools for the New D&D Dungeon Master
• Improvisation in D&D for New Dungeon Masters
• A New Dungeon Master's Guide to Miniatures
• A New DM's Guide For Building Combat Encounters (this article)

In this article we're going to dig deep into one of the most challenging aspects of running a D&D game: building combat encounters.

This article goes hand-in-hand with my original article on Building Encounters in Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons. That article contains charts and tables to help you choose the right number of monsters for a given situation.

Here's a quick summary of this article's approach towards encounter building:

• Let encounters develop from the story, the situation, and the actions of the characters. We don't have to pre-define encounters as "combat", "roleplaying", or "exploration". We only have to set up the situations and let the players decide how to interact with them.
• Choose the type and number of monsters that make sense given the situation. Sometimes this might be two sleepy guards at a cave entrance. Other times it might be an entire hobgoblin warband. Give the characters openings to take different approaches towards the scene.
• Keep an eye out for unexpectedly deadly encounters. Understand the loose relationship between monster challenge ratings and character levels. Remember that fewer monsters are generally easier than lots of monsters. Use a tool like the tables in Xanathar's Guide to Everything if you're not sure. In particular, be nice to level 1 characters. They're really squishy.
• Adjust the encounter as needed during the game. Vary hit points within the hit-dice range. Increase or decrease damage. Add or remove monsters.
• Mix up encounters to keep things fresh. Add interesting terrain or fantastic features. Throw a mixture of easy and hard encounters at the characters. Use waves of monsters.

We're going to dig into all of these things throughout the article.

Develop Encounters from the Story

Dungeons & Dragons breaks down scenes into three different types of gameplay: NPC interaction and roleplaying, exploration, and combat. In the vernacular of D&D, all of these types of scenes are considered "encounters".

We don't have to define any scene as being a roleplay scene, an exploration scene, or a combat scene ahead of time. Instead, we can set up the situation and let the players choose how to approach it. Maybe they attack the bugbear leader of the goblins directly. Maybe they try to bargain with them. Maybe they sneak up the garbage chute and try to listen in to the bugbear's plans. We don't necessarily know what choices the players will make when they leap into an encounter and not knowing is half the fun.

It's common to break up our game into a set number of roleplay encounters, exploration encounters, and combat encounters but consider setting those categories aside and simply developing situations. These situations have interesting things going on in them that the characters can get involved with, but we don't have to know how they will interact with it. Sure, some scenes lean one way or another. When a horde of goblins attacks a wagon filled with friendly farming families (FFFs), the player characters are not going to go investigate rocks. Many times, however, we DMs can simply set the stage and let the players act within the scene as they want. That's a big part of the fun of D&D.

Choose Monsters that Fit the Situation

As we described earlier, the story and situation drives what encounters takes place. The same is true when we select monsters. Choose the monsters that fit the situation. A hobgoblin war camp might realistically have twenty-five hobgoblins and fifty goblins in it. They might not all charge the characters at once but that's the size of the war camp. A single hobgoblin patrol might consist of six hobgoblins and a captain. A war party might consist of twenty goblins, twelve hobgoblins, two hobgoblin captains, and a hobgoblin warlord.

We don't try to balance this war camp with the characters. This is the size of the war camp, the patrol, and the war party regardless of the characters. How the characters decide to deal with a small patrol or approach the war party is up to them.

Sometimes the characters might corner off two hobgoblins who went to examine an old dwarven statue. Other times the characters might find themselves overwhelmed with two dozen hobgoblins and two captains riding on scarred worgs. The story drives the encounter.

Determining Deadly Encounters

Most DMs want to have a vague idea of how difficult an encounter will be. A group of level 17 characters won't have much of a problem blowing this war camp off the face of Faerun but a group of level 4 characters running up against an entire war party at once could be deadly.

Before an encounter turns to combat, it helps if we know it's rough potential difficulty. Doing so helps us steer the situation and offer other options to the players before it becomes a surprise total-party-kill (TPKs). Understanding encounter difficulty is tricky and can cause real problems for new DMs. Most commonly, a new DM will pit the characters against monsters that are way too hard and inadvertently kill the characters.

Accidental TPKs are much more likely to happen at level 1 than any other level in D&D. Anyone who thinks a battle between a group of level 18 characters against Tiamat will be rough hasn't seen what happens when level 1 characters fight too many rat swarms.

Above all else, be gentle with level 1 characters. However squishy you think they are, they're squishier. If you want to throw some monsters at your level 1 characters, choose fewer monsters than characters (maybe one for every two characters) and make sure they have a challenge of 1/4 or less. Even two or three challenge 1/2 thugs can wipe the floor with level 1 characters. Be nice to these poor young adventurers and you'll have 19 more levels of delightful pain to inflict.

The Dungeon Master's Guide has detailed instructions for building encounters at various difficulties. These are the guidelines that Wizards of the Coast themselves use to design monsters and balance combat encounters. I suggest that you ignore these guidelines. They're too complicated, take a lot of time, and don't usually give us the results we're after anyway.

In a wonderful episode of Dragon Talk, lead D&D Designer and rules sage Jeremy Crawford goes into detail on these rules and explains that the main goal isn't to "balance" encounters but to help DMs gauge the difficulty of a combat encounter, particularly if it's deadly. The math in the Dungeon Master's Guide can give us this rough gauge but so can a number of other easier methods. I'm going to offer three different methods for determining whether an encounter is deadly or not and you are free to choose the method you like the best. Two of these methods use the same underlying math of the Dungeon Master's Guide but are easier to use.

First, Xanathar's Guide to Everything includes a much-improved set of guidelines and tables for determining encounter difficulty. Instead of attempting to calculate encounter balance based on experience budgets, difficulty, and the number of monsters, Xanathar's Guide includes charts we can reference to determine the equivalent number of monsters to characters at a given character level and monster challenge rating.

Second, I'll offer some rules-of-thumb you can keep in your head to give you a rough idea of whether an encounter is deadly or not. This takes a little work to memorize but once it's wired into your head, you'll need no other tool or chart to gauge an encounter's difficulty. This method compares the challenge rating of monsters to the levels of characters.

Third, you can just wing it. The more experienced you get with D&D; the monsters, the mechanics, and the capabilities of the characters; the easier it will be for you to judge the difficulty of an encounter on your own. There is, of course, a lot of variance during a fight, but as you run games you'll become better at judging the difficulty without any sort of forumlas or tables. Many experienced DMs ignore any sort of encounter balance rules and take an estimated guess at the difficulty of any given encounter.

Comparing Challenge Rating to Character Level

It's important that we understand what the challenge rating of a monster represents. According to the Monster Manual, a group of four characters should be able to defeat a monster with a challenge rating equal to the level of the characters. Thus, a group of level 2 characters should be able to defeat a challenge 2 ogre.

If we reverse-engineer the encounter building math used in the Dungeon Master's Guide, we can figure out a few other relationships between challenge rating and character level. These comparisons assume a fight that is not quite deadly, but close.

A single monster is roughly equal in power to a single character if its challenge rating is roughly 1/4 of the character's level. This increases to 1/2 if the character is above level 4.

A single monster is roughly equal in power to two characters if its challenge rating is 1/2 of the character's level. This increases to 3/4 if the character is above level 4.

Two monsters are roughly equal in power to a single character if the monsters' challenge rating is roughly equal to 1/10 of the character's level. This increases to 1/4 if the character is above level 4.

Here's a small table that might help. This comes from the upcoming Lazy DM's Workook, the Kickstarter stretch goal for Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master

Any encounters above these amounts, in the quantity of monsters and the challenge ratings of monsters compared to the level of the characters, will be potentially deadly.

This system can't give you a perfectly accurate view of how a battle will go, however. Too many variables determine the difficulty of a combat encounter. These variables include the experience of the players, the synergy of the character classes, how many battles the characters have already encountered, what spells the characters have, what magic items the characters have, the environment they're fighting in, and, of course, the roll of the dice.

Thus, any guidelines you decide to use to help you understand encounter difficulty won't be perfectly accurate. Instead, you'll have to judge for yourself by seeing how the characters fair against various types of fights throughout an adventure or a campaign. Sometimes you'll need to ease back and make battles easier. Other times you'll need to increase the number of monsters to challenge the characters.

The more experience you get under your belt running combat in D&D and the better you understand the capabilities of the characters, the easier it becomes to see what the characters can handle and adjust accordingly.

Adjusting Encounter Difficulty on the Fly

There's a dirty secret among DMs. We're all cheats and liars. We do, however, cheat and lie for the fun of the game and the enjoyment of the players. We can, for example, vary the hit points of a monster depending on how the battle is going. If the battle is becoming a slog or is simply too hard, we can reduce the number of hit points a monster has. If the characters are carving through monsters too easily, we might increase them to add to the challenge. As long as we're varying hit points within the hit dice range of a monster, we're technically not cheating.

For example, an ogre has an average of 59 hit points and its hit dice are 7d10 + 21. Thus, any ogre could have between 28 and 91 hit points. A bigger brute might have 90 hit points but the weaker ones might only have 40. We don't have to make these changes ahead of time. We can change their hit points during the battle to keep up the high energy pace of the game.

We can likewise tweak the damage of a monster. Like hit points, we're given an average amount of damage and a damage equation. If we want, we can increase the damage the monster inflicts up to the maximum of that dice range and still be within the rules. Likewise, a hit might be less if we find that the monsters are inflicting way more damage than we expected.

Finally, we can add or remove monsters to tune a fight. Maybe six more hobgoblins rush in when they hear their fellow soldiers being attacked. Maybe two of the hobgoblins flee to get help or become distracted by a third party.

All three of these techniques give us dials we can turn to change the difficulty of a fight while it's happening. We don't want to do this sort of thing all the time, but the options are there if things aren't going well and the game's fun factor is dropping.

Add Interesting Terrain and Fantastic Features

Six hobgoblins in an open field isn't that interesting. Four hobgoblins and their four worg mounts camping out around an ancient dwarven archway is more interesting, particularly if that archway is swirling with eldritch energy.

When we're developing the scenes in our adventure, we can add texture by throwing in interesting terrain or fantastic features. Chapter 5 of the Dungeon Master's Guide includes two tables of monuments and weird locales we can use as inspiration for some fantastic features to include in our combat encounters. Appendix A of the Dungeon Master's Guide also includes similar tables for dungeon features. Describing them can give our players ideas about how to use these features in combat which makes the whole battle more dynamic and exciting.

Features like this add an element of exploration and mystery to our scenes.

Final Thoughts on Building Great Encounters

Building great encounters is a skill, like improvisation, that gets better the more we do it. It's a skill we can improve on for the rest of our lives. By keeping some general guidelines in mind and experimenting from scene to scene, we can learn what works well, what does not, and what things we want to try out in the future.

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Dungeons & Dragons is a game full of choices. From running campaigns to running characters, from steering world-shaking events to choosing an approach while having a conversation with a merchant, players and DMs make all sorts of choices when playing D&D.

Choices are also the root of what makes D&D fun. How should the characters interact with an NPC? How will they accomplish their goal? Who gets the fancy new magic sword? All of these choices, and the consequences of them, bring life to the game.

Sometimes, though, the best choices aren't easily made. Sometimes all of the options are reasonable and other times, all of them are fraught with consequences. Today we're going to look at these hard choices and see how we can make the most of them in our D&D games.

Which Front to Face

In the campaign building advice in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, I recommend using Fronts from Dungeon World as a way to see what major movers and shakers are changing the face of the world. When these fronts all become visible to the characters, the characters will have to make a hard choice about which front they want to stop.

For example, in the D&D adventure Legacy of the Crystal Shard, the characters have three potential factions they have to deal with: the ice witch Hedrun, Akar Kessel the undead mage, and Valish Gant the schemer of the Arcane Brotherhood. When the characters navigate this adventure, they must decide which of these three villains they wish to thwart knowing that the other paths will move forward unhindered.

If we're not careful, these always-moving fronts can be frustrating for players. While focusing on one villain, the characters find they're two steps back with the other two. If the players begin to feel screwed no matter which direction they go, perhaps slow down on the progression of the other fronts.

Making Deals

"You can hit four enemies with your fireball, or eight if you're willing to hit the fighter and rogue..."

One of the fun design elements of the excellent RPG 13th Age is how it includes deals made between players and the GM. A fireball in 13th Age can hit 1d3 enemies in a group or, if you cast it recklessly, an extra 1d3 enemies, but it will hit any of your friends engaged with those enemies. That's a great way to get fireballs to work well without a grid.

Making deals are a great way to put hard choices in front of players. Do you want advantage on your next attack? All you have to do is swing from that chandelier up above? A failure, of course, could result in a nasty fall.

Advantage, disadvantage, and inspiration are three currencies we DMs always have on hand to sweeten deals and put hard choices in front of the characters. Waving an inspiration token at a player is a great way to get them to accept some risk when things would otherwise feel too safe.

Here are some example deals we can put in front of our players:

• Turn a failed ability check into a success but at a cost.
• Give the character advantage on their next check by putting themselves in a risky position.
• Give a character additional targets in a spell's area but only by putting something else in that area at risk.
• Giving a single-use ability or power but with a chance of corruption, damage, or arcane feedback.
• Give a character some vital information but only by guaranteeing the safety of someone the characters desperately want to slay.

The Curse You Don't Want to Get Rid Of

What if a fungus-cursed hydra bites one of the characters and that character contracts some sort of hideous disease? That's not a hard choice. Go find the nearest caster of cure disease or greater restoration and get that thing cleaned up!

But what if this infection did something to the character, something interesting. What if this character could start to see through other plants? What if it gave them access to new powers they could cultivate such as entangle, spike growth, and grasping vine? What if the strange infected would knit itself closed with tendrils of vines and roots? What if, on their death, they are returned in their original form but inside they're all plant stuff, a physical vessel sworn to Zuggtmoy?

Simple curses are easy. Characters certainly want to get rid of them and will do so. If we turn those curses into hard choices, though, maybe they'll live with the curse.

Maybe an abolith is willing to impart the vast knowledge of the abolithic sovereignty to your character, giving them a history as old as the millennia and current intelligence all over the Sword Coast? What if all it cost was the character's own mental independence? Hmmm.

Choosing Villainous Factions

Often, when we're prepping our D&D games, it's hard for us to see villainous organizations as anything other than a big pile of monsters for the characters to kill. If the characters go into a thieves' den, it might end up being room after room of bandits getting slaughtered.

One way we can turn monstrous lairs into opportunities for roleplaying and hard choices is to ensure there are multiple factions within the band of monsters or among the villainous organization. This way the characters can work within or against these factions. If both factions are purely hostile to the characters then it might end up as a slaughterfest anyway so we'll need to ensure the factions have reason to talk to the characters and vice versa.

For example, in Tomb of Annihilation, the characters can go into the Fane of the Night Serpent. There are two factions in there; those loyal to Ras Nsi and those loyal to Fenthasa. Ras Nsi has no intent at going into the Tomb of the Nine Gods to stop the Soul Monger so he has a reason to talk to the party: convince them to go into the tomb itself and stop the Soul Monger. Fenthasa might have another goal. She wants Ras Nsi dead and the obsidian dagger from the Tomb returned to her. She might aid a party willing to end Ras Nsi and return to her the dagger within the tomb.

Now, instead of the characters just going in and slaughtering all the yuan-ti, they might get involved in the rift between two factions and have to choose which faction they want to support.

These factions might be rivals within a group or subordinates who no longer want to work with their superior. Any rift like this is an opportunity for the characters to get involved and a hard choice for them to make. Which faction, if any, will they support?

Here are some examples of factions within villainous groups:

• Each of two rival factions want to usurp the other.
• A subordinate secretly plots against their master.
• Two monstrous groups are separated by a valley and neither group can get the upper hand on the other without the characters' help.
• A powerful leader actually wants to leave the gang they're in.
• A spy for a rival group has infiltrated a villainous group.
• The characters possess an item that makes a faction in a villainous group covet and worship them.

What Would Make Them Choose Differently?

Whenever we want to throw a hard choice in front of the characters, we can, when the choice in front of the characters seems inevitable, we can ask ourselves "what would make them choose differently?"

For example, if the yuan-ti want to open a huge door into the realm of the Night Serpent and they need one of the characters to actually open the door, what would convince them to do so? How could the yuan-ti convince the characters that opening the door is the better option? Maybe only the Night Serpent can stop the horror Acererak feeds in the depth of the Tomb of the Nine Gods. Maybe the only way to stop the Night Serpent is to face it. Maybe something the character loves more than mortal life lies beyond those gates.

When a choice seems too easy, what might steer the characters to choose a different way?

A Game of Choices

D&D is a game full of choices, some of them small and some as big as the multiverse. One of our jobs as dungeon masters is to put meaningful and interesting choice in front of the characters whenever the pace of the adventure calls for it. Without putting too much decision fatigue on them, we can insert hard choices so the players can see the true impact of the choices they make. Use hard choices to make your game unique and fun.

Special thanks to Taylor on Twitter for the suggestion to write this article.

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Note: This article is reposed with permission from the original posted to D&D Beyond on March 2018. It is the fifth of a series of articles focused on helping new D&D DMs put together and run great games. The full list of articles includes:

• Finding and Maintaining a D&D Group
• Starting Strong at your First D&D Game
• Tools for the New D&D Dungeon Master
• Improvisation in D&D for New Dungeon Masters
• A New Dungeon Master's Guide to Miniatures (this article)
• A New DM's Guide For Building Combat Encounters

In a previous article we talked about the tools we need to run our D&D games. We glossed over one giant topic, however, the topic of miniatures.

When we say "miniatures" we're really talking about the physical objects we use to represent the characters and monsters in our D&D games. The options are vast.

Groups don't actually need to use anything to represent monsters or characters in Dungeons & Dragons. We can use a gameplay style known as the "theater of the mind". When running D&D in the theater of the mind, the DM describes the situation, clarifies it from the questions of the players, listens to what the players want their characters to do, and describes the outcome. It is the same for combat as it is for exploration or roleplay.

Ever since D&D game out forty years ago, however, players and DMs have often used some sort of miniature to represent their characters or monsters. Back then it was often lead or pewter war game miniatures, sometimes painted and sometimes not. The use of miniatures has evolved in the four decades since, but even today there is no perfect solution for representing monsters and characters at the table. We have a wide range of options, from no cost at all to thousands of dollars, but none of these options are perfect.

No matter which of the paths we take or products we buy for D&D miniatures, we'll always make tradeoffs. Sometimes it's money, sometimes it's time, sometimes it's physical space, sometimes it's the flexibility of our game. Even if we spend thousands of dollars on miniatures, as some veteran DMs have, finding the right miniature can take too long to make it useful when running a game. No matter how many miniatures we own, we still will not have exactly the right one or exactly the right number for every battle. While no perfect solution exists, we can mix and match a few ideas together to design our own personal best-case solution for representing characters and monsters in combat.

The Free Options and the Theater of the Mind

As mentioned, we can describe combat and use the occasional paper sketch to help players visualize what is going on. This method is fast, free, and doesn't break the flow of the game from scene to scene.

Running combat in the theater of the mind means we can run any sort of battle we want. With a zero cost comes infinite flexibility. We can run a battle atop a massive titan's skull surrounded by a thousand screaming ghouls if we want to. We can run a ship battle in the depths of the astral sea fighting against a pair of githyanki warships. Whatever sort of battle we can imagine, we can run. Even if we do choose to use miniatures, keeping this gameplay style in our toolkit gives us the option when we want it.

Combat in the theater of the mind isn't for everyone. When battles get complicated, some representation of the characters and monsters helps. We can start by representing them with whatever we have on hand. Game pieces from other games, dice, coins, glass beads, LEGOs, and a any roughly one-inch-square object can serve as tokens for characters and monsters. This is a fine option when starting to play D&D that may serve you well for your entire D&D career. Even if you do end up getting more miniatures and better representations, keeping some generic tokens on hand can help set up an improvised battle and save you a lot of time.

Low Cost Do-It-Yourself Options

Some crafty DMs learned how to print paper versions their own miniatures either as tokens or as stand-ups. This is a low-cost solution but does take time to build them out. Enrique Bertran, the Newbie DM, wrote a popular guide to making tokens with print-outs, a one-inch hole punch, a washer, and some glue. More recently he posted a great trick of making one token per monster type and then using generic tokens to represent the rest of those monsters. These hand-made tokens are a wonderful and scalable solution that won't break the bank.

The folks over at Alea Tools have a wonderful suggestion for making tokens out of old Magic the Gathering cards. They suggest punching out the card art you like with a one-inch punch, and sticking adhesive one-inch epoxy stickers to the top to make it feel like a hard plastic token. I spent a weekend making about one hundred such tokens and the look and feel great. The epoxy stickers, originally designed for bottle cap necklaces, work just as well on printed artwork like in NewbieDM's solution above. The one-inch punch and epoxy stickers can make just about anything into a great usable D&D token for pennies. A few generic tokens made this way can also augment our miniatures collection by representing additional monsters whose miniatures we don't own.

Many other creators have published PDFs of tokens and stand-up paper miniatures. Trash Mob Minis and Printable Heroes are two such creators. These print-out miniatures require your time and the right equipment, which can get expensive if you don't already have it, but offer a nice pocketbook-friendly solution that gives you the exact type and number of miniatures you want.

Pawns and Flat Plastic Miniatures

For those who would rather save time and are willing to spend more money, we come to cardboard pawns. The most popular of these are the Pathfinder Pawns Bestiary collection which offers a large number of cardboard stand-up monster tokens for a low price. Though designed for Pathfinder, these tokens work just as well for D&D.

Other producers like Arcknight Games have come up with flat plastic miniatures that cost more but, in my opinion, look much better on a table and pack light since they're considerably flatter than cardboard stand-ups (full disclosure, I have a curated set of Flat Plastic Miniatures available through Arcknight Games).

These flat stand-up miniatures are a great way to build a large collection of monster representations without breaking the bank.

The Wide World of Plastic Miniatures

We now come to the large topic of plastic miniatures which come both painted and unpainted. Pre-painted miniatures often come in random booster boxes while specific unpainted miniatures can usually be purchased in non-random blister packs. Some sets of individual painted miniatures exist for heroes which is a great way to build up a small collection of hero miniatures without resorting to random selections.

Unpainted miniatures can be used as-is or painted. Painting miniatures, of course, adds the cost of paints, brushes, and other painting accessories on top of the time it takes to paint them. Painting miniatures is a fun hobby all on its own but it isn't for everyone. Backing the occasional Kickstarter by Reaper for unpainted "Bones" miniatures is one way to get a large collection of miniatures for a relatively low cost-per-mini.

Pre-painted plastic miniatures are, by far, the most common solution. Wizards of the Coast and their partner, WizKids, released thousands of miniatures over the past fifteen years. They've almost always been in randomly assorted packs but the price per miniature has changed dramatically over the years, and not in the direction we'd hope for. DMs collecting for many years might have large collections but building one today costs more than it did ten to fifteen years ago. If random boosters aren't your bag, you can buy miniatures on the secondary market but the cost per mini will be about $3 to $4 per mini on the low-end. Miniatures for our heroes and boss monsters might be worth it but it's probably not worth getting a warband of twelve orcs together for $36.

An Evolving Marketplace

The world of tokens, stand-ups, and miniatures continually changes. New ideas, like printable paper stand-up miniatures, pop up quickly and become very popular while older solutions like cardboard tokens or cheap pre-painted miniatures tend to fall out of production. Sometimes one can buy cardboard stand-ups easily and other times they're out of print and selling for four times the cost. This all points to the same core truth of miniatures: no miniature solution is perfect.

Terrain

If you thought miniatures were the end of the D&D money sink, you are mistaken. The top of the line D&D accessories include 3D terrain to go with all of those miniatures. These fantasy terrain arrangements look absolutely stunning, showing off full three-dimensional maps and areas including dungeons, cities, towns, and castles. The most popular vendor for these accessories is the venerable Dwarven Forge and their creator Stefan Pokorny. These are the setups that everyone drools over on Pinterest and Twitter. Matt Mercer uses Dwarven Forge on Critical Role.

The costs for these elements of terrain are as high as the sets are beautiful. A table-sized representation of a complicated castle or dungeon can run thousands of dollars.

There is also a hidden cost with this terrain. The time to set up such an arrangement leaves little flexibility for the game to go anywhere else. If you set up a castle, the characters are definitely going to that castle. Likewise, the terrain takes up a lot of space to store and time to set up. I am a huge fan of Dwarven Forge and own many sets myself, but it is not a requirement to run a great D&D game.

For now, admire the pictures people put on the web but stick to your blank battle-mat for a lightweight, cost-effective, and flexible alternative.

Some Final Recommendations

Given the imperfection of the D&D miniature market, I have no clear solution but a few recommendations.

First of all, even if we don't use it all the time, running combat using the "theater of the mind" offers us infinite flexibility and no cost. Even if we do have a collection of miniatures, we don't have to use them all the time. Keeping this style of play in our DM toolbox keeps our game fast and flexible.

Players love to have nice miniatures for their characters. Character miniatures can show their marching order when heading down a hallway, who is on watch, and a variety of other non-combat situations on top of their obvious representation in combat. They're also just plain fun to play with. Investing in a good set of character miniatures, either as full miniatures or stand-up tokens, can help bring the characters to life.

As far as monsters go, sticking with cheap representations of monsters with whatever objects you have on hand is just fine. Hand-made tokens are fast, flexible, easy to transport, and cheap. Plastic and card-board stand-up miniatures give us a large collection of monsters for a reasonable cost. Painted or unpainted miniatures look great at the table but the costs are high. Choose which ever of these options best fits your budget and the type of game you want to run.

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The Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Starter Set includes an adventure that exemplifies the pace and feeling of the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

As the introductory adventure to the fifth edition of D&D, Lost Mine of Phandelver is likely the most-played adventure of D&D 5e. It's also one of the best. In this article we'll discuss tips and tricks for getting the most out of running this wonderful D&D adventure.

If this is your first time running Dungeons & Dragons, you may want Starting Strong at your First D&D Game.

Use the Pregen Backgrounds

The backgrounds included with the pre-generated characters in Phandelver are written to hook characters into this adventure. Even if your players bring custom-built characters from the Player's Handbook, you may want to recommend that they choose backgrounds from the Starter Set pre-generated characters to better tie them to the story. You can email these pre-generated characters to your players before your game so they can use them as the seeds when building their own custom characters.

When your players have chosen backgrounds, read them over and write them down, perhaps on a campaign worksheet. These backgrounds can help you choose which hooks to highlight in the rest of the adventure. The town of Phandalin is packed with quests, many of which are tied to these character backgrounds. Instead of piling quests on them that may or may not be relevant, only expose the hooks that tie to the backgrounds of the characters.

Start Strong

Lost Mine of Phandelver begins with a goblin ambush against a caravan protected by the characters. Before the battle begins, this is a good chance to help you tie the characters together, if they aren't already with some loaded questions:

• Athrund, how did Celvak save your life previously?
• Teraman, who among the Red Brand bandits do you and Yeshta hunt and why?
• Gormun, what debt do you and Uthar owe to the Rockbottom brothers?

Questions like this help tie charaters together early and move some of the storytelling over to the players. You can use Fiasco-style relationships to get all the characters tied together if you have the time. You might also have all of the characters tied to a single faction such as the Harpers, Lord's Alliance, Zhentarim, Order of the Gauntlet, or Emerald Enclave. This is a built-in group connection and ties them to a specific NPC in the town of Phandalin when they arrive.

Now on to the battle!

The first thing to remember in this battle is that level 1 characters are extremely fragile. It would suck for new D&D players to start their D&D experience with a total-party kill (TPK) so be careful.

This first battle is a great chance to try your hand at Theater of the Mind combat instead of using maps and minis. It will get both you and your players used to battles that don't use a grid or miniatures. It's good practice and will help you with many of the other battles in this adventure.

You'll also want to stick to the static damage output of goblins at level 1 to ensure you avoid any major damage spikes that drop characters in a single hit. Dropping on the first shot is a lousy way to experience a new edition of D&D.

If you want to complicate the battle, add an NPC driver of the cart the party can protect. Use your handy random name generator and whip up a character archetype from your most recent favorite movie or TV show. Have the goblins harass this poor soul to give the characters something else to protect than their own hides.

Get Them to Level 2 Fast

Level 1 is brutal in the fifth edition of D&D. You may want to get your characters to second level as soon as you can, even as early as the middle of the Cragmaw Hideout. There's also nothing stopping you from starting them at second level. Those extra hit points and hit dice of healing will help them significantly when facing off against the foes in the first chapter of this adventure. You can level them to third level when the story dictates it normally and everything works out well after that.

Hone Your Lazy Dungeon Master Skills

Lost Mine of Phandelver is a series of small sandboxes stacked together. This is a fantastic opportunity to practice the art of the lazy dungeon master. Part 1, the Cragmaw Hideout, is a great dungeon sandbox with multiple paths and multiple ways to defeat its enemies. Instead of pushing the players down one particular path, relish in their discussions about which way to go and improvise as they take their chosen path.

You'll likely want to avoid any elaborate battle maps for this dungeon and instead use a blank flip mat to draw out rough locations as the players choose a direction. If you pre-build parts of the dungeon, you're more likely to consciously or subconsciously lead them that way. Instead, relax and let them choose whatever path they want.

You will also want to consider how the goblins react to the approach taken by the characters. It's a great time to see through the eyes of the goblins. As the characters invade their secret headquarters, the goblins act as they would in reaction to this.

Part 2 and part 3 of the adventure expand the sandbox considerably. There are tons of things to do both inside and outside Phandalin. Feel free to let the group decide whether to stay inside the town and deal with the Redbrands or to leave the city and deal with some of the interesting locations found in part 3. The characters should be free to leave and return to Phandalin as they choose, though the plots of the Redbrands may escalate if not taken care of.

Part 4 returns us to a sandbox dungeon delve. Again, give your players the freedom to choose whatever path they want to explore the dungeon. Wave Echo Cave is big so don't feel like the characters have to explore every nook and cranny. If it starts to get stale, cut off certain passages or remove redundant monsters to keep the pace moving well. If they happen to go straight to the boss, let them do so.

Weave In the Dopplegangers

There are two dopplegangers in this adventure, Vhalak and Vyerith. Both of them work for the Black Spider and are written in at specific locations in the adventure. Both of these, however, make for fantastic reoccurring villains you might bring on early in the adventure. Give characters the feeling of being watched. Let them see shifting shadowy figures lurking in the background. Maybe one of them actually attacks the characters if the timing is right. These two foes should be smart villains who won't engage if they don't have an escape plan, so don't let them simply walk in and get killed. If the characters do manage to kill one of them early, they might see them again as the second doppleganger changes its shape to match the first one.

These two dopplegangers are your chance to add in a whole new variable to the villains in the adventure. Make use of them.

Watch Out for Venomfang

There is one single villain in Phandelver that stands a significant chance of wiping out the characters—the green dragon Venomfang. When you introduce Venomfang, make it clear that the characters face a significant foe. Give them plenty of chances to realize that a simple stand-up fight might not be the right way to go. There are also many opportunities available to aim Venomfang at other enemies than the characters through subtle manipulation of Venomfang and the cult who courts him.

A Useful D&D Kit

Beyond the adventure itself, the books in the D&D Starter Set are extremely useful. They're a perfect companion to your DM kit, containing maps, rules, adventures, and monster stat blocks to run many adventures outside of the pages. The pre-gen character sheets are also extremely useful, mainly for their ability to level up from 1 to 5 right on the sheet. The various maps of the locations in Phandelver also fit very common locations in many adventures such as ruined castles, rogue dens, ruined villages, monster-infested caves, and dwarven mines. We can easily repurpose these locations to fit our own adventures. While this Starter Set gives us roughly a 12 hour adventure, we could make adventures for hundreds of hours with the materials we have inside.

At $20 MSRP, the Starter Set is a real bargain.

A Fantastic Adventure to Start your D&D Campaign

Phandelver is a great adventure full of opportunities for you to relax, play loose, and let the story evolve from the choices of the players and the actions of the characters. Take your time, understand the material, go with the flow, and get ready to spend a bunch of hours having fun with your friends.

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