The Session Zero Kit is the first drop in Table-Ready, my new monthly premium series of done-for-you kits that go straight from behind the screen to your table. These are the areas I've found matter most and the whole packet is built around them. A full Session Zero usually runs one to two hours, depending on how deep you go into character creation and player backstories.

Here’s what you get in this twelve-page packet.

The “What is a Session Zero?” guide

A simple walkthrough of what a Session Zero is and why every campaign should have one. It lays out the full agenda, from your elevator pitch to safety tools to character creation, so you know exactly what to cover and why each piece is an important component to the session.

The Session Zero Checklist

This is the heart of the kit and it’s a set of fill-in worksheets that turn the agenda into something you can actually work through at the table. Below is how I run each piece and the why behind it. Fill them in as you go and by the end you'll have your whole agenda mapped out.

Elevator Pitch

The elevator pitch is the first thing I mention in the Session Zero about the campaign. It's the fastest way to give players a feel for the world they're about to step into. By this point you've already had the "what kind of campaign do you want?" conversation and landed on something together. The pitch just tells them what's going on in that world and what's at stake as spoiler free as possible.

Here's the pitch I opened my Vecna: Eve of Ruin campaign with while borrowing some text from the adventure itself:

Existence is in peril. For years, the lich Vecna has dreamed of remaking reality, and by the time our adventure begins, he's already a god. Never satisfied, he wants to become the most powerful being in the multiverse. To do it, he's devised the Ritual of Remaking: gathering powerful secrets, drawing out their energy, and weaving it into his own to rewrite history across every world. When we begin, he already has his secrets and the ritual is underway. You'll meet Vecna and his minions on a small scale at first, but this quickly becomes a multiverse-spanning adventure across the worlds of D&D. So get ready.

That short blurb sets the tone, builds the stage, and lets players understand the scale of the stakes before they build their characters. The whole universe is on the line and that sense of scope shapes the kind of heroes they’ll want to make. The more specific details you offer, the better understanding your players have about the campaign’s story.

One more thing I always fold into the pitch is the level range. Telling players that up front means they know where the whole thing is headed. In this case, it was levels 10-20.

Six Truths

After the pitch, I anchor the world with six truths. I first drew the idea from Sly Flourish’s The Lazy Dungeon Master, but I use it for more than a list of facts about the setting. For me, the truths are a filter for every idea that comes later.

A few from my Vecna campaign:

Read more

A Session Zero is the meeting where you set the tone and style of the campaign before anyone rolls a die. I think of it as a launch platform. It’s the thing everyone stands on so the whole campaign gets off the ground pointed the same way. As the DM, you share your vision for the story, your expectations, and how you like to run a table. Your players tell you what they want, where their boundaries are, and what they’re hoping to get out of the next several months (or years in my case, lol). Character creation and backstory usually happen here too.

My honest recommendation is to start every campaign, and every adventure, with one. One-shots can be too short to justify the time, though there’s no harm folding a lighter version in if it suits you.

Remember, it’s a conversation!

A Session Zero is not a checklist you grind through while your players sit quietly and listen. It’s a conversation where the topics matter and alignment is the goal. Everyone should walk away holding the same picture of the game you’re all about to play.

That conversation tends to drift through a few natural areas. You set the stage, you sort out the practical stuff, you talk about how the game is actually going to feel, and you build the characters together. None of it has to happen in a strict order, and you should cover whatever your table needs and skip what it doesn’t. Here is the process I often use in my campaigns.

Set the stage without spoiling it

Start with your campaign elevator pitch. This is where you tell your players what the world is about and what’s at stake, without handing over your secrets. Is there an invading army? A prophecy inching toward reality? Some ancient thing stirring after a long sleep? Clue them in. It doesn’t need to be long, either. A few bullets or a short blurb will do since these are just talking points.

I like to anchor that pitch with six truths about the world. These are the foundational facts that tell players what kind of place their characters live in and what they can expect from it. They also keep me honest, because they become the filter every later idea gets sifted through. One truth might establish history, like “the campaign takes place three hundred years after the Cataclysm, and most people just want to survive and forget.” Another might set the emotional register, like “the stakes are high and often overwhelming, but there is still plenty of room for levity.” Think of your truths as the appetizers that whet your players’ appetites for the world to come.

Handle the unglamorous stuff early

Scheduling isn’t exciting, but it’s where campaigns quietly live or die. Settle on a frequency, a session length, and an attendance threshold. The average game runs three to four hours, which is usually enough for roleplay, combat, and story without burning anyone out. Long sessions have their place for big moments, but they should be the exception.

One piece of advice I’ve learned to embrace over the years: decide what happens when someone can’t make it, and resist the urge to cancel every time a single player is out. Frequent cancellations kill momentum and also dedication. Unless a session truly needs everyone, play on. You can decide together what happens to an absent character, whether another player runs them or they slip through a “magic portal” and reappear when their player is back.

While you’re on logistics, set a few expectations for conduct too. Respect in and out of character, punctuality, and open communication go a long way. And keep one rule front and center: consent is law. Players should always seek it before leaning into anything sensitive at the table. If you know your group well, you can keep this light. With newer players, it’s worth spelling out.

Decide how the game is going to feel

This is where you tell players whether you're going to be their cheerleader or their antagonist, and everything in between. Talk about how strictly you run the rules, and whether you lean on the Rule of Cool when something is awesome enough to bend them. Talk about tone, from lighthearted to grim. Talk about the balance of roleplay and combat, how deadly encounters will get, and how you feel about PvP and romance. At my table we actually fill out a set of questions for this together.

A couple of those deserve extra care. PvP should always be settled before play, because it asks a lot of trust from everyone. Romance should always run on consent, and including it never means anyone is signing up for explicit content. When those moments come, fading to black is good form, but always check in.

This is also your chance to hear what your players actually want, whether that’s deep lore, intrigue, puzzles, or owning a tavern. Their wishes are pure fuel for future plots. You’ll notice styles too, from the “Chaos Goblins” who thrive on unpredictability to the “Murder Hobos” who solve most problems with violence. A good table usually holds a mix, and part of what we do is giving each style its moment.

With that said, it’s completely within your rights to say “no”. If a character concept, a homebrew ability, or a story request doesn’t fit the game, you can decline. Better yet, work with the player toward something you’re both happy with. You are allowed to protect the vibe of your own campaign.

The part DMs forget, and shouldn’t

When I first started DMing, running public games years ago, I had no concept of safety tools or boundary conversations. Sessions would sometimes wander into uncomfortable territory, and players would sit there quietly enduring it. It wasn’t until I watched a player get visibly upset during an intense interrogation scene that I realized something had to change.

Boundaries are simply a person’s comfort level with the topics and experiences that show up at the table. Rather than trying to guess them, you want to leave the door open so players can tell you. I’ve had the most success with a structured, private format. An anonymous survey before the game gives people room to reflect and answer honestly, without the pressure of saying it out loud in front of the group.

Then there are the tools you actually use during play. The X-card lets anyone signal that they want to pause and change the current content, no explanation required and no judgment attached. I also implemented what I call table talk cards at my table that allows my players to non-verbally signal when they want the DM’s attention, or ask to be included in a roleplay scene. I've turned these into printable cards, which are part of this week's kit. For more on other kinds of safety tools:

Build the characters together

A lot of the magic of a Session Zero is making characters in the same room. Doing it together builds cohesion you can’t fake later. As the DM, you might set a few guidelines: which species and classes the setting supports, any alignment expectations, and a nudge toward a party whose members actually want to work toward the same goal. Though an “Oops, all bards” party has its own chaotic charm.

Backstory is where buy-in really takes root. I work four things with my players: their backstory, the people in their lives, their hooks, and their connections to each other. The people are a handful of NPCs that matter to the character, no more than a few, since I’ll have to bring them to life. The connections are the threads tying one PC to another, which quietly solve a lot of “why is this party even together?” awkwardness before it starts.

Hooks are the part I’d most want to get right, because they drive everything after. A hook is a goal, and the trick is to leave it open-ended. Watch the difference:

• My village was destroyed by bandits, so I hunted them down and got my revenge. That’s finished. There’s nothing left to play.

• My village was destroyed by bandits, and they’re still out there, and I’ll do anything to stop them. Now there’s a thread to pull.

• My village was destroyed by bandits, I avenged it, and the emptiness never left. Now what? Now there’s a character.

An unfinished hook is a gift to your prep. Tie it back to the campaign and a personal quest suddenly belongs to the whole table.

Leave room to change your mind

If you’re running any homebrew rules, be sure to mention them too. They can always change later, but early communication keeps everyone on the same page. A good one I learned play at another’s table is a “buddy system” that grants a small bonus to attack rolls when an ally is adjacent. Nothing fancy, just a little something that makes the table feel like yours.

And that’s really the spirit of the whole thing. A Session Zero is an open dialogue, not a contract carved in stone. Rules shift, mechanics get tuned, some stories never get told, and that’s fine. Stay flexible and keep checking in.

You got this!

What’s Next: Table-Ready Premium Content

A little while back, in my One Year of Behind the Screen, I promised premium drops were on the way. Well, the first one is coming!

Starting this week, I’m launching Table-Ready: every month, done-for-you kits and drops that go straight from behind the screen to your table. No extra prep, just print it or fill it in and play.

Dropping this Wednesday is the Session Zero Kit: fill-in worksheets for your agenda, elevator pitch, and six truths, a Player Preferences Survey you can hand straight to your players, and a set of printable Table Talk Cards for signaling during play without breaking the scene. The article itself breaks down how to use these materials, and does a deep dive on how to run the session in a much more structured way.

Wednesday’s post goes out to everyone, so you’ll see exactly what’s inside. Paid subscribers get the download. And if you’re new here, Substack gives free readers a one-time pass to unlock a single premium post. Honestly, a kit you’ll keep for every campaign is a better use of that pass than an article you’ll read once!

The thing about a rainy day is that we don’t really want to go outside. We think of rainy days as an opportunity. To read or write. To catch up on something, watch a show, or maybe be a little creative and make something. In the hustle and bustle of our lives, a little rain gives us permission to take things slow. Oh, it’s raining, I don’t feel like going for a walk. I can’t lay in the sun or wander the streets with one of those travel umbrellas that can barely cover your body, so you get wet anyway.

The itch to create comes from that, I think. We use the rain as a way to look inward, or at least I do. The quiet gives us space for ourselves.

But there are times when the blank canvas just sits in front of you. You want to be purposeful about what you put on the paper, or the canvas, or the miniature in my case, or the computer screen. Everything feels like it has to serve a purpose. In order to work, whatever that means. In order to feel good, whatever that means. And it’s easy to get stuck when you don’t know where to begin. We can plan for rain because of the forecast, but when it finally arrives, you’re not always sure what to do with yourself.

Thinking about the weather got me thinking: how does weather actually fit into our lives?

Weather is how we fill the gaps

Mostly, we use it for idle conversation. It’s a way to fill the gaps when we’re talking to someone. How’s the weather today? Did you hear that thunder? What did you do during that storm last week? Man, the rain’s really coming down, but the grass and the flowers will love it.

At the D&D table, though, weather only matters when it’s in extremes. When you describe it, you say the party walks down the cobblestone streets and the rain patters against the smooth stone. That’s it. It’s window dressing. Do the players react? No. It’s just a word. Rain. Thunder. Wind. They set a tone, but they don’t carry much else. So the weather gets ignored most of the time. Because it’s weather, so who cares?

And that’s an interesting thing about a social hobby like D&D, or any TTRPG, where we play mostly through our words and the roll of the dice. Our words are conversation, and conversation at the table is purposeful. A player isn’t going to care about the weather unless it affects their ability to do a thing. How do I get this quest? How do I persuade this NPC to give me what I want? How do I attack this monster, or slip a spell past someone without it being noticed? That’s the real intention behind almost everything we say when we play. It’s how we know what to roll, whether it’s a hit or a miss, a success or a fail. We decide where our character moves, even though none of us are going anywhere.

And all the while, the weather is just there. Present. When you never mention it, everyone assumes it’s a normal day, whatever normal means for that region. Sunny, cloudy, overcast, a little drizzle. The weather isn’t obligated to do anything for you. Unless, of course, it’s in extremes. The torrential rain flooding the town. The tornado summoned by some mad weather wizard.

Sitting in the inconsequential

Those little details are the ones that get lost in our need to push the game forward. But sometimes it’s nice to sit in the inconsequential. It gives us room to think about what else is happening, and how it might change what we feel, what we do, or the world itself.

That’s what my rainy day reflection keeps circling back to: the purposeless details, and how they can make a world feel real. It’s worldbuilding in a small way. Do people here enjoy the rain because it’s rare? Is there a drought, and this is a relief? Or is it commonplace, like my partner’s family in Seattle, where it rains so often it’s just another day?

Here’s the distinction I keep landing on. The clues, the breadcrumbs, the secrets, the lore: those make the story feel real. The stuff that isn’t any of those things is what makes the world feel real. That difference matters, because it’s the seemingly worthless details that make a place feel lived-in and enjoyable.

It makes me think about the pointless details of my own world, and what the equivalent would be for people living in an imagined one. Faerûn, or Oerth, or Krynn, or any setting we can dream up. What do people eat for breakfast? How do they cook their eggs? Do apples exist? Does anyone bake pie? Do they talk about the weather to pass the time, the way we do? Where do you go on a first date? What color is the sky? How many moons hang over it? What’s the most popular curse word?

A lot of the time I forget to mention weather at all when I set a scene. Is the sky dark and ominous? Or is it bright and sunny while evil is quietly afoot, so the danger doesn’t wait politely for nightfall? Those things can matter. They can make a moment land a little harder. I hadn’t really thought to do it until now. Maybe I should start.

Mood, not mechanic

There are, of course, rules for weather. Cold weather survival, hot weather navigation, flooding, dehydration, drowning, damage from being thrown around by wind. But what about the parts that don’t need any mechanics attached?

If I were teaching a new DM how to establish mood, I’d start with the weather. And with the look on people’s faces as they go about their day. How drab or well kept the buildings are. Whether the streets are paved, and whether grass is growing up through the cracks. Whether you can see the sun, or whether there’s a haze of wildfire smoke hanging over everything, the way it has been here in New York, where the air smells like you just stepped away from a campfire. Those things matter, even when they have no mechanical connection to the story.

Details like this can and should be window dressing, because they’re the daily stuff of life. We carry an umbrella to deal with the rain, but we don’t have to. It’s fine if we don’t. Our hair gets wet, the things we’re carrying might suffer for it, and life goes on. The mundane is what makes a world feel real. Not everything has to be about action.

That’s how I tell the difference, actually. If a detail is mundane, simple, commonplace, it probably doesn’t need a mechanic. Temperature works the same way. Your food gets cold faster if you bought it hot from the tavern. You bundle up because there’s a chill in the air. Those are worth describing, and describing them just means leaning a little more into the creative writing side of the craft.

They’re easy to forget. A lot of the time a player will just say, I travel from here to here, and that’s it. Uneventful. As DMs, we do the same. And that’s okay. Sometimes you just need to get everyone from point A to point B. But sometimes those details help. Maybe it’s really just about slowing things down a little.

Trying to listen at 41

When I was a kid, I played a lot of video games, headphones on, and I never really heard the weather. So at 41, I’m trying to do a little more listening. I’m letting the mundane inspire me, the weather busy outside while I sit not so busy inside. It’s easy to ignore. It’s easy to say, ah, it’s a rainy day, and move on. But we can be just as dismissive of the mundane things in our worlds, and those are exactly the ripe opportunities for worldbuilding and storytelling.

I wonder what it would feel like to add a little real ambiance to the table. Not a soundtrack like some some canned dungeon or library loop, but a rainy-day-cafe kind of moment. It is raining and nobody’s outside. A couple of kids are splashing in a puddle. And then a dragon passes overhead. There I go, straight through the mundane and out the other side into the not-so-mundane. But sometimes a few words here and there are enough to make our worlds feel a little more real, instead of just playgrounds for our friends.

So if it’s raining where you are, listen to it. Sit with it. If it’s snowing, listen to that particular quiet snow lays down like a cushion over the world. What do you feel? What do you hear? Now imagine what someone in one of our invented worlds would feel or hear. The rain coming in. The wind off the ocean. The salt in the air that eats away at the paint on the town hall, so it has to be redone every year. Maybe there’s a paint shortage; aha, a breadcrumb.

Little things, true. But they’re the ones that make a world real.

One-shots are designed to be short and direct with a solid dose of railroading. In the scheme of open-ended games and stories, they represent the quickest, most straightforward experience out there. Yet they require more experience than we often give them credit for, precisely because of the name: this is expected to end in one sitting. On average, a session runs three to four hours depending on breaks, newer players asking questions, or character introductions.

One-shots are often the response to scheduling challenges in a long-term campaign. Or we want to introduce friends to an easy story that doesn’t require much overhead. Or we want to gain more DM experience ourselves.

All great reasons to roll the dice and play. Even the most well-written one-shot can have pitfalls that you don’t think can slow you down but do. When running any session it is super easy to get bogged down in several key areas.

Introductions

Sometimes we want to open a one-shot story the way we would a campaign: a broad introduction to what’s going on and, more specifically, character introductions. One-shots are not really the place for long, drawn-out backstory where a creative player recites the character’s entire history. Of course we love it when it happens, but what a one-shot needs is a character name, one to two sentences of flavor or backstory (for example, “My name is Grunk and I was bullied by goblin lepers”), and a mention of the character’s class. We don’t need players to go much further than that. In a multi-shot adventure, maybe.

Starting the One-Shot

Many one-shots (and adventures, of course) include some form of introductory meeting or scene where the characters receive a quest. There are a bajillion ways to give players this information, but it typically comes down to meeting an NPC or arriving in a town to learn what’s going on.

There’s nothing wrong with these introductions, but they often give players a choice in how to respond to the quest prompt. We already know this breadcrumb leads to the one-shot’s quest, so why lay it at all? Why not start where the story actually kicks off?

Overthinking Solutions

Encouraging players to solve the problems we throw at them is a good thing, and we know it. But it’s easy for players to overthink their options when they hit an unclear challenge. Say the one-shot requires them to sneak into a locked-down castle. If you don’t give them any tools to navigate it, they’ll ponder and debate approaches far longer than you’d like. “Do we try to persuade the guards? Okay, then what do we say? Should we scale the walls? Are there lookouts? Should we hop into a wagon and conceal ourselves in the hay? Okay, but what if they inspect it?”

It’s easy to get bogged down. One-shot challenges should build in a few solutions, some obvious and some not. Using that same example, make it clear that other groups of guards are patrolling (a disguise ruse, perhaps), or that a party is happening inside and the players need to find a way to get invited.

The point is this: if you veil every solution, the table bogs down in groupthink, trying to reach consensus before anyone moves. If players know about option A and option B, things stay simple even when they decide to do something else. If you say “do this thing” but give them no options, they might land on option H or Z. That’s great, but it can take a lot longer to get there.

Combat

I’ve written about this previously, but combat is often the single biggest source of getting bogged down when running a one-shot. Nearly every one-shot has a combat encounter, and some have multiple, especially if it takes place in a dungeon. It’s the most rules-heavy part of the game, and players will understandably have questions, especially if they’re new. Many one-shots don’t come with maps either, so you’ll need to decide between theater of the mind (faster) or a battlemap of your own design (slower to run, but more detailed).

If a one-shot is going to have combat, I think it should have just one encounter, usually the finale against a villain or monster. Many one-shots do exactly that, though some pile on a few more in the leadup.

Number of Players

It’s D&D. We wanna be inclusive and have fun with our friends. Totally fair! But the more players you have, the longer things take, because we want everyone to feel included. For a one-shot, I’d cap the table at four or five. With such limited play time, fewer players helps. And if you have a waiting list (the joy of everyone running games), you can run another one for them!

Using an Existing One-Shot? What to look out for.

If you’re running an existing one-shot, here are some signs it might take longer than you’d expect.

Is there a dungeon? If so, how many rooms?

Dungeons take a long time to run by their nature. They invite caution: treading carefully, checking for traps, analyzing every approach. A 10-room dungeon packed with content is a dead giveaway there’s too much to run in one go. Secret doors and hidden rooms slow things down too, especially if players must find them to progress deeper. Try to avoid requiring that. I’d say three to five rooms is plenty, but be mindful if every room holds an encounter. All combat? Ehh, that one’s tough to pull off. But an environmental challenge, a social challenge, or a puzzle that ends in a fight? That can be pretty reasonable if the encounters are straightforward.

How many encounters?

Echoing the advice on dungeon size, the number of encounters matters too. Three to five encounters is more than enough. Encounters come in three types: exploration, social, and combat. In my experience, exploration encounters like navigating terrain are the quickest, often solved with a few skill checks. Social encounters come next, because we all love to talk and role-play, but ending them falls on us; at some point you decide the conversation has run its course. Combat is the slowest. Puzzles, depending on complexity, fall between social and combat, unless there’s a quick solution like flying over a bridge puzzle (that’s happened to me more than once).

How complicated is the combat?

An effective combat encounter makes use of monster synergy, tactics, and terrain. Many one-shot combats amount to running up to the villain and beating them up. Those are the fastest, though they still take time. Others add depth with mechanics like legendary or lair actions, or special terrain like lava or cover. The more things you layer into a combat encounter, the more elements you’ll need to track, which can take time too. A few seconds here or there can and do add up. Just be mindful of how many individual stat blocks you have to track (two or three is the sweet spot).

What is the recommended level of the one-shot?

This one’s pretty self-explanatory. The higher the level, the longer things can take, simply because players have more solutions to the problems they face (for example, casting fireball at level 5 versus wall of force at level 10 to seal off an area or trap an enemy inside).

Where to find quick one-shots?

There are plenty of places to find one-shots, as most of us know, like DMsGuild and DriveThruRPG. But I’d also recommend content from the One-Page Dungeon Contest. And I’ll shamelessly plug one of my own: Dangerous Art: A Colorful Adventure (there’s a part two as well). It’s a focused adventure inspired by a quest in Elder Scrolls: Oblivion involving a mysterious painter and a magical painting you have to navigate from the inside.

Two things follow from that. First, a villain has to be built for the long haul, with enough staying power to keep generating trouble across an arc or an entire campaign. Second, the strongest villains are connected to the players in some way, whether through a shared goal, a thread of a character's backstory, or a piece of the larger story. A villain with no connection to your table is just a monster with a name. A villain who wants something your players care about becomes personal, and personal is what keeps them coming back.

It also helps to remember that every villain is the hero of their own story. They don’t think of themselves as evil. They have a goal that makes sense to them and a plan to reach it. So the central question you’re answering when you design one is this: how would this person make antagonists out of the heroes?

This process works whether you’re building a campaign-spanning big bad, the villain of a single arc, or the antagonist of a one-shot. The work is essentially the same, but what changes is pace. A campaign villain reveals their presence and methods slowly, in layers, across many sessions. A one-shot villain has to land all of it fast, so the players feel their weight and reach the confrontation inside a single sitting. Same design, different tempo.

This guide is a companion to my situational prep series. If you’ve read the situational prep articles, this will feel familiar. Designing a villain uses the same bones I use for any NPC, wants and methods and assets, just with more tools on the table and more reach in the world.

What You’ll Walk Away With

By the end, you’ll walk away with two things: a repeatable method you can run on any villain concept, and one complete villain built from scratch to show you every step in action. That villain is Montgomery Dorn, a necromancer with a very specific reason for raising the dead.

Step One: What They Want and How They Get It

Everything starts with the same two questions from situational prep: what does your villain want, and how do they get it? Those answers are the cornerstone. They tell you how the villain thinks, how they move, and what kind of trouble they make. The difference with a villain is that you can’t stop at the surface. A villain has to carry a story for weeks or months, and a vague want won’t survive that kind of weight.

“Power” isn’t a want but merely a placeholder. If your villain wants power, ask what kind, and why. If they want to raise an undead army, ask what the army is for. The more specific you get, the more the villain runs themselves, because every specific answer hands you the next situation. Better yet, make the want personal. A want you can feel is a want your players can feel, and that’s the thing that gives a villain staying power and pulls the table in.

This is also where “every villain is the hero of their own story” earns its keep. Somewhere underneath the schemes is an individual who believes they’re doing the right thing. Find that belief and the rest of the design gets easier.

While you’re making them human, give them a real flaw. A flaw is what turns a villain from an obstacle into a person, and it quietly hands your players a way in, something to exploit when the spells come out or something to press on when the talking starts. The best flaws grow straight out of the want, so the very thing driving your villain is also the thing that can undo them.

The example, applied. Montgomery Dorn doesn’t want power; he wants his daughter back.

• The want. A sickness swept his town years ago. The dead were burned to stop the spread, and his daughter went to the pyre over his objection. He’s not interested in dominion or revenge. He’s simply a father trying to make his family whole.

• The how. He’s raising the region’s dead. They’re workforce and shield, but also raw material for his real project: a body worthy of his daughter’s soul. The flesh golem on his slab is one failed rehearsal after another.

• What it generates. The dead stop staying buried, and it lands hardest when the townsfolk recognize the faces. Their miller shambling through the wheat. Someone’s mother at the treeline.

• Scope. In a one-shot, let the players connect the dots fast. In a longer game, keep him veiled and let the mystery breathe before they learn his name.

• The hook. You only need one: tie it to a character (a burned relative or mentor) or to a situation (drop the party into a town where the dead won’t rest).

Step Two: Assets

Assets are the tools your villain has on hand, but there’s a twist on the usual situational prep here. In a normal session you list the assets for the whole story: monsters, objects and items, traps and hazards, and social leverage. For a villain, you build that same list around one person and ask a sharper question of every entry: how does this become a challenge for my players? Everything flows from the villain outward.

Monsters

You don’t need statblocks yet, you need types. What does this villain surround themselves with, and why? Split it into the neutral and the loyal. A neutral monster is a threat the villain simply leaves alone, like a nest of giant spiders they’re strong enough to ward off but happy to let guard a back door. Loyal minions tell you more, because the kind of creature a villain keeps says who they are. Ask how that loyalty works too. Were they summoned, paid, bound, or ruled through fear? Then decide which of them are just monsters and which are real NPCs, the lieutenants and commanders worth a name and a voice.

Objects and Items

These are the tools of the trade: the books, reagents, relics, and curiosities the villain uses to do what they do. Some are practical, the raw materials of their craft, and some are personal. Either way, ask what the players could seize, break, or bargain with. An object the villain can’t afford to lose is a plot thread waiting to be pulled.

Traps and Hazards

Think in style before specifics. A villain’s defenses should feel like them. A goblin war band leans on numbers and shock. A careful schemer leans on misdirection and locked doors. Whatever their methods are out in the world, the same instincts show up in how they protect what’s theirs, and those are the challenges your players will run headfirst into.

Social Leverage

This is the optional one, and it’s worth saying plainly that not every villain needs it. Some don’t play the social game at all, and forcing it just waters them down. Scope matters here too. In a one-shot, a villain rarely has time to work a room. In a longer arc or a full campaign, their influence has time to spread, and even a villain who never lifts a finger socially can warp the NPCs around them: the frightened, the loyal, the desperate. Sometimes the social leverage doesn’t belong to the villain at all. It belongs to the people their existence has twisted.

The example, applied. Dorn’s assets all point back to the same grief.

• Monsters. The dead, all raised by him, so their loyalty is absolute. Ogre zombies and wights stand guard, an animated armor hides a wraith, and the half-finished flesh golem waits on his slab.

• Lieutenant. The exception is his wife, dead in the same sickness and his first success. She came back a revenant, colder than the woman he married, which is exactly why he’s so desperate to get their daughter right. The players likely meet her long before him.

• Objects. Two that matter. His daughter’s ashes, the heart of the ritual and the one thing he’d never risk, which makes them your real leverage. And his necromantic tomes, the how of everything: take them and you slow him and learn what he’s building.

• Traps. Quiet and everywhere. The dead that don’t stay down, ground that saps the living, ambushes from things the players mistook for corpses. His lair fights the way he does, patiently.

• Social leverage. None, and that’s right for him. He’s a hermit with one obsession. But scope changes it: across an arc, his influence still bleeds into the town, a grieving mother hiding him for a promise, neighbors turning on neighbors. The fear he creates does his politics for him.

Step Three: Environments

A villain’s environment is more than the room where the fight happens. Think of it in two layers: the lair they defend, and the footprint they leave on the world. You want both, because they do different jobs.

The Lair

The lair is the villain’s home ground, the place they’ve shaped to their own advantage and where a final reckoning often plays out. The trick is to make the lair express the villain. Every detail, the light, the layout, the defenses, the things kept close, should tell the players something about who lives here. A lair that could belong to any random monster is a missed opportunity. A lair that could only belong to this villain does half your storytelling for you.

The Footprint

The footprint is everywhere else the villain’s influence reaches: the roads, the villages, the wild places where their plans ripple outward. This is where the table feels the villain long before they ever stand face to face. Ask how the world changes under their hand. Where does their power press hardest, and who pays for it? Once you know the footprint, you never run out of scenes, because the villain’s reach is the adventure.

The example, applied.

• The lair. The Den of Despair, a cave pressed against the town graveyard, so his larder is always full. The torches don’t burn, they glow a cold purple, lit by continual flame. A man who lost his daughter to a pyre can’t stand a flame, so he’s written his own fear into the walls. The players learn something true about him before he says a word.

• The footprint. The whole grieving region around the cave. The dead won’t stay buried: a grave clawed open by morning, travelers avoiding the north road, a town watching familiar faces shuffle out of the dark. That dread does his work long before anyone learns his name.

I’ve gathered all of this into Dorn’s full dossier at the end of this guide.

Step Four: Presence and Staying Power

This is the part that separates a villain from a monster with a good backstory. Two questions carry it: how is the villain felt, and how do they last?

Making Them Felt

Every villain sits somewhere on a spectrum. On one end is the unseen hand, like Vecna, who your party might glimpse once and then never again, because a god has better things to do than trade blows with adventurers. On the other end is the ever-present cage, like Strahd, who could be watching from any shadow and step into the scene whenever he pleases. Those are published villains, but they’re the cleanest examples of the two poles. Decide where yours belongs.

Wherever they land, make them felt through influence instead of appearances. The players should feel the villain in the space between encounters: the aftermath they leave, the minions they send, the way the world bends around what they’re doing. The real question to answer is this: how do the players know they’re up against this particular villain and not some random threat? That’s what a calling card is for, a recognizable fingerprint, and it’s where breadcrumbs earn their keep, a trail of small, deliberate signs that all point back to one person.

Coming Back Changed

A villain you’ve made to carry a story shouldn’t die the first time the party corners them, at least not in a longer game. Give them a way to persist: a contingency, an escape, a return.

But the important part is this. If a villain comes back, they should come back changed. Not the same statblock with the same bag of tricks. A return that transforms them, costs them something, or escalates the threat is a story beat the table will remember. A return that’s just “surprise, he’s alive, roll initiative” is a cheat they’ll resent. And scope decides whether you need this at all. In a one-shot, the villain’s death is the ending, and that’s exactly as it should be. In an arc or a campaign, a good contingency is what earns them the title of big bad in the first place.

The example, applied. What gives Dorn presence and longevity?

• Calling card. His dead. The corpses that rise are people the town recognizes, and every grave torn open from the inside points back toward the cave. The purple light is a nice touch once they arrive, but out in the world it’s the walking dead that announce him. That keeps him near the Vecna end early, unseen and inferred, looming larger as the trail tightens.

• Coming back changed. He’s a necromancer, so of course he’s planned for his own death. In a longer game he doesn’t stay gone, and he doesn’t come back the way he left. What returns is colder and less human each time, until the thing still reaching for his daughter is barely a person at all. That tragedy is why he lasts. In a one-shot, skip all of it: his death is the point.

  

Step Five: Mechanics

Here’s a fair question, and one I asked myself while writing this: does designing a villain really need a mechanics step at all? Statblocks, damage math, and save DCs feel like session prep, not character work. That’s fair, but it misses something. Mechanics aren’t separate from character. Done well, they’re one more way to say who the villain is.

Think of it as character expressed through mechanics. A villain’s signature abilities should reinforce everything you’ve already built, so the way they fight tells the same story as their wants, their lair, and their minions. When the players finally trade blows with them, the rules themselves should feel like an extension of the person. You don’t need a full statblock at this stage, just the handful of signature moves that could only belong to this villain.

The example, applied.

• Lair actions. He pulses necrotic energy through the cave and raises fresh dead from the corpses around him, so the fight itself keeps restating his identity: death answers to him, and it never runs out.

• Activation runes. The runes around the flesh golem turn his greatest experiment into a ticking clock the players can race to stop. His obsession, made playable. None of it is generic monster math but villain himself expressed via the rules.

You’ll find all of it pulled together in Dorn’s full dossier at the end of this guide.

Closing: Give It a Try

That’s the whole method. Five questions, asked in order, and a villain assembles themselves out of the answers:

1. What they want, and how they get it. Start personal and specific. The want is the engine that generates everything else.

2. Assets. Monsters, objects, traps, and social leverage, all built around one person and aimed squarely at your players.

3. Environments. The lair that expresses who they are, and the footprint where their influence is felt long before anyone sees them.

4. Presence and staying power. How the villain is felt between encounters, and how they come back changed when the story needs them again.

5. Mechanics. Signature moves that say who they are, not just numbers on a page.

The best way to make all of that click is to watch it happen once, start to finish. So here’s Montgomery Dorn, gathered into a single dossier just below, along with a handful of plot threads he throws off. Read him as a worked example, then take a villain of your own through the same steps.

And if pulling a finished villain straight off the shelf sounds better than building your own, I’ve got something in the works on that front. More on Drag & Drop Villains soon.

The Full Build: Montgomery Dorn

The whole method, run start to finish on one villain. Copy the shape for your own.

• Want. To bring his daughter back, lost years ago when the town burned its plague dead over his objection. Not power, not revenge, just a father trying to make his family whole.

• How. Raising the region’s dead as workforce, shield, and raw material, all bent toward building a body worthy of her soul. The flesh golem on his slab is his latest failed rehearsal.

• Assets. Ogre zombies and wights for muscle, an animated armor hiding a wraith, and his wife raised as a revenant lieutenant. His daughter’s ashes are the heart of the ritual and his one true weakness. His necromantic tomes are the how. He plays no politics, but the fear he creates turns the town against itself.

• Environment. The Den of Despair, a cave pressed against the graveyard that feeds him, lit by cold purple continual flame because he can’t stand a fire. His footprint is a whole grieving region where the dead won’t stay buried.

• Presence and staying power. His calling card is the recognizable dead and the graves torn open from the inside. In a longer game he’s planned his own return, and he comes back colder and less human each time.

• Signature mechanics. Lair actions that pulse necrotic energy and raise fresh dead, plus the activation runes racing his flesh golem to life. Every rule restates the same idea: death answers to him.

Plot Threads He Generates

A good villain hands you adventures so here are a few that fall straight out of Dorn:

• The familiar dead. A grieving family begs the party to put down a loved one who won’t stay buried, then begs them not to.

• The hidden benefactor. Someone in town shelters Dorn because he promised to return their child, forcing the players to decide what to do with a sympathetic accomplice.

• The ashes. Word spreads that the necromancer guards a small urn above all else. Whoever holds his daughter’s ashes holds him.

• The first success. His revenant wife moves through the region on her own errands. She found the players’ problem long before Dorn did, and she doesn’t need his permission.

• The offer. Dorn doesn’t want to fight. He wants help, and he’ll trade for it. What will the party give a man who can return their own dead?

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Why I Started This Substack

I started here on Substack because I wanted to write more often for myself, and to fold in my love of teaching and talking about my favorite hobbies. It’s a passion project, plain and simple. I work full time, and D&D has been a big part of my life for years. I always intended this platform to be the home of my work and writing, and a way to connect with fellow enthusiasts, authors, and future readers.

The other reason was to promote my upcoming book, Behind the Screen. I want it shared far and wide. (Secretly, I’d love for it to come up whenever folks ask for a good book on how to DM. Right now The Lazy Dungeon Master is the top recommendation, and it deserves to be.) I didn’t write this book to make money. I don’t expect it to make a bajillion dollars, let alone a few thousand.

Writing here, and writing this book, taps into something more personal. For many years I never really wrote for myself. Most of my writing is tied to my teaching and my D&D tables. It’s for other people to enjoy, even if I’m enjoying it right alongside them. Both of these outlets finally gave me a way to share and to write for myself at the same time.

I wrote more about that here:

How are things so far?

I have to say, Behind the Screen is doing really well. Posting once a week for 72 articles straight (and 115,264 words, if you’re like me and count that) has brought in almost 300 subscribers. Far more than I ever thought I’d get, and I’m extremely grateful for it!

The book aside, the early days of my writing journey really struggled to find an identity. If you were an early reader, you’d find my work focused mostly on advice, since that tied back to the book. I tried experimenting with different ideas, and plenty didn’t pan out the way I hoped. My DM Mistakes series was fun to write, but it got repetitious once it was all I wrote about for weeks. It was just easy to lean into a mode and not really deviate.

After writing so much advice-driven content, I had a nagging feeling that I wasn’t being very creative, like I wasn’t creating a thing. So I made some small pivots toward worldbuilding, and now I bounce between that and DM advice, which has been a breath of fresh air. That gave me the headspace to write in depth about the topics I actually wanted, instead of overthinking what to write at all. My 3-part situational prep series became my most popular work because of it, and I’m hoping to build on that momentum. Finally sitting down with a long-term content plan helped too. Can’t believe it took me that long to do that on purpose, lol.

One of my goals for the next year is consistency. Consistency in scheduling my work ahead instead of writing in the moment to hit a personal deadline, and consistency in actually doing the things I say I’m going to do. Concretely, that means leaning into the threads where I’ve enjoyed flexing my creative writing. More Cozyvale as that setting fills in, and more of the in-world “fake textbook” writing I started in A Book Your Players Just Found, my Fundamentals of Dungeon Architecture series. I’d love to grow that one into something bigger down the road, maybe even an anthology or second book.

What’s the Book’s Status?

The book is set to release at the end of the year, and I am formally submitting my manuscript with all completed materials to my publisher, Play Story Press, by September 1. Why that date? Art, mostly!

When I was writing Behind the Screen, the intention from the beginning was to make it colorful, inviting, and artful. I really, really didn’t want it to read like a textbook or a paper you’d just print out. I wanted it to look the part, and that takes both time and art.

The cover is in the works right now with a very talented artist. When it’s done, I’ll share it. But for me, a lovely piece of art every 20 to 30 pages isn’t enough. I want the book to have personality. More than that, I want to give the illusion that the book has seen use and feels present in a fantasy world. So it’ll feature hand-drawn doodles, little scenes of adventuring stick figures fighting equally poorly-drawn monsters, and little notes scattered throughout. I’ll never use AI art, and I’m excited to see what gets cooked up.

What Comes Next

A year in, I want to lean in even more. That means writing more often, going deeper on the topics I care about, and spending more time with this community of fellow DMs and authors. I’d love to connect with more of you, and more creators, too.

I fully intend to keep writing weekly nonstop and always making that content freely available. The free articles aren’t going anywhere, and all old content stays free too. Paid subscriptions have always been here, but I never viewed them as a way to make money. I viewed them as a way to support the work.

This summer, I’ll start sharing premium drops: deeply researched pieces, downloadable “table drops” you can use right away, one-shots, dungeons, written assignments, and more. I have so many ideas, but my main goal is to keep them optional and “nice to have”. The free weekly articles will keep doing what they always have: walking you through concepts and how to do X, Y, or Z. The premium drops are the same spirit, just with the work already done for you.

Right now I’m developing a Session Zero package since it was cut from the book due to length/space, and a “drag and drop” villains idea too. I’ll share more as each one’s ready.

Onward and Upward!

Behind the Screen is here to stay, and I can’t wait to keep growing it with all of you. Here’s to year two! And if you’re ever in NYC and want to grab a coffee, let me know!

Before you go, I’d love to hear from you. What would you most want to see in a premium drop? Drop a comment and let me know.

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Mortimer was a ghoul. The tarts were blood pudding. The finger sandwiches were, well, fingers. The grapes were eyeballs.

On paper, that’s a gross-out gag and not much else. I’d written the whole stall out ahead of time, ingredients and all, and reading it back it isn’t really funny. What made the table lose it was me. I stood up and gesticulated. I cradled each horrible little dish like it was my newborn child and pressed the players to guess the secret ingredient, beaming the entire time. The food wasn’t the joke but the love was.

You can’t prep funny

Here’s the thing I keep running into. I run serious games. High fantasy, high stakes, real consequences, the kind of table where players argue tactics because their characters can actually die. That’s the tone I love, but in real life I’m a goofy guy who likes toilet humor, and that side of me wants in.

The trouble is that funny doesn’t respond well to effort. I liken my ability to be funny to my ability to flirt. If I’m trying, it’s not good. The second the table feels you reaching for the laugh, the laugh is gone.

So I stopped thinking about it as writing jokes. I learned you really can’t prep funny, but what you can do is prep for it. Set up the conditions where something silly has room to happen, then stay loose enough to grab it when it shows up. Mortimer worked because the prep was just a setup. The comedy happened live.

Let the unplanned stuff breathe

Most of my best comedic moments were never planned at all. A wizard duck I voiced on the fly. Two merchants who came out of my mouth as Will Good and Sal Vation before I could stop myself. A poop elemental in the ruined sewers of a lost city that I still don’t fully understand.

None of that was on a page because it came from the room, and half the time it came from my players. Somebody mishears an NPC’s name, or decides a perfectly ordinary shopkeeper is now the love of their character’s life, and the whole table is laughing.

When that happens, my instinct is to embrace it where I can, even if it bends the tone a little. The players are having fun. That’s the actual win. There’s always time for silliness when the spells start flying and the stakes climb back up, so let them have the moment. Give the moment a chance to breathe.

You can even lean into it in character. Mispronounce my NPC’s name and you might get a wounded, theatrical “How dare you. My mother would be most upset with you.” Now the flub is canon and we’re all in on it.

The thing to resist is the urge to snuff it out. Don’t be the DM who says “come on guys, this is serious.” Honestly, a little humor in a tense moment can release the pressure without breaking the mood. A good laugh right before the door creaks open makes the dread land harder.

Planting silliness on purpose

Sometimes you do want to build something in ahead of time, and that’s fine. The trick is knowing what kind of thing actually works.

The best candidate is small. So small and insignificant that it makes you question how it could possibly be true. Turn one dial and leave everything else completely straight. Like a name!

Boblin the Goblin lands because it’s a tiny play on words, not a whole bit. Or pick one habit, one preference, one way of doing things. I love the idea of a werewolf raised by cats, so he sits strangely in chairs and scratches the furniture instead of the door. A wizard who casts every spell through interpretive dance. The character is doing one thing with its own internal logic, and that logic is what sells it.

Why “weird” isn’t enough

Here’s the part people get wrong, including me: weird isn’t inherently funny.

You can’t bolt strangeness onto a character and call it comedy. Why does this orc only eat pancakes? Why is the gnome allergic to snails? Do your players ever actually encounter a snail? If the answer is no, then the allergy is just a fact sitting there, and “why does that exist” is not a laugh.

Now compare that to the werewolf raised by cats. That one has a grain of truth in it. We all know how an animal picks up the habits of whatever raised it, so the joke almost makes sense, and almost makes sense is the whole game. The funny isn’t the weird thing itself. It’s the logic underneath it.

And keep it small. A character who only speaks in rhymes gets old fast because it’s so in your face. Turn just one dial while keeping the rest grounded. The contrast is what makes the silly thing pop.

So what do you actually do

If you want to bring more of yourself into a serious game, don’t force it. Pick one thing to accentuate and let everything around it stay straight. Build the setup rather than the punchline, then watch your table and grab the moments they hand you.

Mortimer is still my favorite example because he’s both halves at once. The prep was one ghoul and a tray of awful food. The comedy was a grown man standing up at his own table, gesturing wildly about how much he loves his finger sandwiches. I couldn’t have scripted that second part. I just had to be willing to do it.

Not everything needs to be funny. Not everything needs to be serious. Keep it light when it wants to be light, turn one dial, and the rest takes care of itself.

Why is this of interest to us in TTRPGs like D&D? In a collaborative storytelling game, a quest cut off from the main story is a harder sell than it is in a single-player video game. If the ‘goal’ of a side quest is to offer rewards and show a different side of the world, is there a way to simply achieve that as part of the main story? After all, when we hear the word “side quest” we think “skippable”. Most of my players prefer focusing on the main campaign story. They’ve also told me that anything side-quest related should in some way connect back to the main story, tie to one of the character’s backstories, or connect to the world and story as a whole.

If that’s the case, is there ever really such a thing as a side quest in these contexts? Storylines and quests that are truly diversionary run the risk of affecting player buy-in, because players may end up asking what the point is and wanting to skip it altogether.

Why DMs Make Side Quests

After a string of heavy sessions, it’s not uncommon for players to ask for a lighter diversion or some downtime. Sometimes we might make that call ourselves too. For example, a major villain was just defeated and the next arc needs room to breathe. Side quests are easier to prep, lower in stakes, and a clean way to hand out rewards. That’s certainly why I’ve made them in the past.

Side quests have a place in every gaming format, but the original mold comes from videogames. However, a videogame side quest is often a shorter commitment (e.g., several hours or less), contrasted to the weeks or months of commitment needed for our sessions. The Waterclock Crypts dungeon I built for my players ran five sessions, or five weeks at the table. Roughly 18+ hours in total. The whole thing was rooted in one player’s backstory, and even with that hook driving buy-in, I worried I’d lose the rest of the party along the way.

This is because my worry came from experience. An earlier campaign arc involving Valindra Shadowmantle, the famous D&D lich, had puttered out because I was more focused on consequences than connection. Valindra existed because the party crossed her in a much earlier session and I wanted her to be an antagonist that moved against the party. However, her connection to the main story was undercooked and she felt like a side villain who existed only to be annoying. In essence, a mostly disconnected side quest. Unfortunately that didn’t help carry an arc and my players eventually grew bored of her.

So when I prepped the Crypts, the risk was lower but the apprehension was the same. I planted some insurance: a seed connecting the side dungeon back to the main campaign. Tucked into the villain’s desk was a signed bill of service. The leader of the city had paid him 200 gold a day for thirty days to cast Nystul’s magic aura, a spell that hides the magical qualities of items. And that piqued their interest because my players are hunting for a very special magical item stolen from them. The dungeon was still a backstory payoff for one player, but every other player at the table walked out with a name and a breadcrumb.

Make One Connection

If you’re building a side quest, find one thread that ties it back to something the players already care about. One thread is typically more than enough but there’s no harm in having more. Players don’t need every detail to connect, they just need to feel like the diversion belongs to the same campaign. Now when I prep my side quests, I think of four places to look for connections.

Connecting to the Main Story

This is the most direct connection. The side quest reveals something new about the main villain, shows the consequences of the players’ choices, or raises the stakes of the central conflict in a smaller frame. The trick is to keep at it and remember that these connections need consistent tending to remain relevant.

If the campaign is about stopping a lich whose armies are marching south, a side quest doesn’t have to be the army. It can be a missing artisan in a border town whose disappearance turns out to be a recruitment effort (of the undead persuasion). The players don’t fight the lich today but they do learn how far its reach has already spread. The main story moves forward even though they took a detour from it.

Ask yourself: What does this side quest let the players discover about the main plot that they couldn’t see from taking it on directly?

Connecting to One or Several PCs

A side quest pinned to a PC’s backstory gives that player ownership of the arc. They get a spotlight and the rest of the table gets to learn something about a person they’ve been adventuring with.

The caveat is that it’s easy to stop at the backstory. I’d advise taking things just a little bit further by tying it to something the rest of the party also cares about. The Waterclock Crypts worked because one player’s backstory led the party into the dungeon, but the bill of service waiting at the bottom belonged to everyone. The spotlight player got their resolution, while the rest of the party got their next clue and course of action.

Ask yourself: Whose backstory is this serving and what does it give the other players to chase afterward?

Connecting to Known NPCs

The players already trust the tavernkeeper, the quirky wizard, or the talking duck vendor named Mr. Jenkins. When that NPC asks for a favor or shows up as a victim, the buy-in is automatic.

The trick is to use the familiar NPC as a bridge and not necessarily a destination. The tavernkeeper’s missing brother is a starting point. What the players find when they track him down is what makes the side quest stick. Maybe he’s been working with the main villain’s smugglers. Maybe he saw something he wasn’t supposed to. The familiar face opens the door, while the unfamiliar thread on the other side keeps the campaign moving.

Ask yourself: Which NPC do the players actually care about and what bigger thread can their problem expose?

Connecting to the World Itself

This one’s slower-burn, but it’s where worldbuilding can be really helpful. A side quest can show the players how this world actually works: what a wedding looks like, how the harvest gets in, what people argue about at the market. The lore stops being something the DM tells the players as part of description and becomes something they actually experience.

The strongest version layers the worldbuilding underneath an actual mechanism. Helping a small town prep for a harvest festival is the surface. The reason the players are helping is to keep eyes on a suspected fence working the crowd. In that way the side quest becomes the stage the main story uses to move forward. The players learn how the town celebrates and they advance the main story at the same time.

Ask yourself: What piece of the world am I trying to show them and what main-story task can ride underneath it?

Try This Out

Before your next session, take any side quest you’ve been planning and run it through one filter. Pick one of the four connections: main story, PC backstory, known NPC, or the world itself. Find one thread, no matter how thin, that ties the diversion back. A name on a piece of paper, a shared NPC, a custom the players have to navigate.

If you can’t find a thread, the side quest might not be a side quest at all. It could just be filler and that is where we risk our players’ buy-in.

In fantasy worlds like D&D where monsters roam in abundance and the need for adventurers is high, there’s this vaunted belief shared by the players that adventurers are an influential group and a necessary element to living and thriving in the multiverse. In reality, it’s both a dangerous and dirty job, the pay is low, and their status is lower. After all, the ruling class isn’t interested in having their power threatened.

The life of an adventurer often sees a lot of fame in famous stories and poems, but in reality it’s a relatively dull and underpaid existence. Clearing out goblin caves, or removing a pack of carrion crawlers, is a messy and dangerous business. Most people would rather not risk their lives for a few silver when they can hire someone who treats their life with a little less priority.

Why the Ruling Class Designed It This Way

Soldiers and guards are the pieces a ruler moves across the board. They deal in humanoid problems and they’re funded by the local government, a regional leader, or a high-ranking general. Adventurers are different, as they deal with monsters, and they’re typically hired by contract rather than kept on the payroll. The ruling class certainly wouldn’t feel comfortable with bands of armed mercenaries outside of their control roaming around villages causing all kinds of mischief and murder.

Second, most monsters are far more dangerous than an overconfident soldier would give them credit for. A local band of goblins are more than just a nuisance; they’re a clever menace that could burn and pillage nearby towns with ease. The abilities that monsters possess are typically beyond what the common guard or sellsword can handle. They’re more concerned with the people of the world rather than the creatures within it.

In that vein, it is better to hire someone specialized like an adventurer. Yet, adventurers can be likened to a temp employee rather than full-time staff, and that means they can be paid reduced wages. So the status of adventurers is always kept relatively low, focused on completing grunt work.

Why would adventurers desire reduced wages? Well, they wouldn’t, but adventurers typically only band together in groups of four to six. Such a size has low regional influence and many cannot withstand the might of an army or regiment that employs their own magic users and tactics. Sure, they’ll try to barter for higher rewards but typically within a logical threshold. Besides, there’s always another adventuring group willing to take on the work. The other side of the coin is they crave the freedom of the road; a wanderlust that prevents them from settling down. Always looking for the next payday, the next monster to slay, or the next town to grift.

As players achieve higher levels they become a wandering challenge much like mercenary companies in medieval Europe, or the ronin problem in feudal Japan. When adventurers become far too powerful for their own good, influential individuals might seek to hire them (so they don’t become targets themselves), or unsavory folk try to take them out.

So how does the ruling class keep these wandering challenges in line without ever putting them on the payroll? They give them a ladder to climb. Drawing on anime like Overlord and Goblin Slayer or games like FFXIV, I call this institution the Adventurer’s Guild.

What Is the Adventurer’s Guild?

In world, the Adventurer’s Guild was created by the ruling class to let adventurers battle over their own levels of status, but still find themselves far below governments and nobles. It’s a way to give them a hierarchy to climb, keep them focused on each other, and they won’t organize against the people actually in charge.

Above table, it’s a vector players can track that ties both to (a) accomplishing goals, (b) feeling rewarded, and (c) a way for them to play the part in a wider world beyond their periphery. Could be a fun and motivating way for players to enjoy their levels. This can tie into Bastions, too.

The Adventurer’s Guild Ranks

The guild formally tracks five active ranks, corresponding to the first two tiers of play (levels 1-4 and 5-10) and represents a character’s growing experience and reputation. Flavor wise, we can say that most adventurers spend their entire careers somewhere in this range. Drawing inspiration from the shows and games I mentioned, I also liked the idea of this guild possessing ranks:

1. Copper (Levels 1–2): The most basic rank is assigned to novices and new guild members. Dirty jobs like rat-clearing, runaways, and the occasional monster hold. Represents the lowest pay and expectations to complete the task.

2. Iron (Levels 3–4): Characters have some low-level tasks under their belt and survived long enough to be considered reliable. Work remains unglamorous but it’s also more dangerous.

3. Bronze (Levels 5–6): Reaching tier two, an adventurer’s competence is no longer in question, and are trusted with regional threats. Locals are relieved to see a bronze ride in to offer aid.

4. Silver (Levels 7–8): Represents a seasoned rank with a real reputation. The guild starts consulting you rather than just posting your jobs, while NPCs have heard their name.

5. Gold (Levels 9–10): The ceiling of what the guild formally administers and most never survive to reach it. A gold-rank adventurer is as powerful as the system is designed to handle. By this point, the players are practically demi-gods anyway.

Beyond this rank, the guild’s bureaucracy starts to break down in fun ways! And it can also make your players feel powerful:

1. Platinum (Levels 11–12) Are political ranks and the guild acknowledges these adventurers because ignoring them would be worse. No local rep has the authority to assign this rank; it comes from guild leadership.

2. Mithril (Levels 13–15): Dipping their toe into tier 3, they’re basically semi-mythical. Most guild reps have met exactly zero Mithril-rank adventurers.

3. Adamantine (Levels 16–17): The guild tracks these adventurers the way a town watches a volcano: with great attention and quiet hope they don’t become a problem. They’re basically A-list celebrities.

4. Obsidian (Levels 18–19): Almost entirely honorary at this point and awarded to those who typically perished. If any are alive, they exist outside any system. The guild sends correspondence but they never reply.

5. Dragonsteel (Level 20): The guild has a record of perhaps a dozen Dragonsteel-rank adventurers across all of recorded history. Most of the entries are incomplete with several having footnotes that say “whereabouts unknown.”

Of course there is competition and brouhaha between the lower-ranked members. As characters ascend the ranks they’re less interested in the paltry pronouncements of the inexperienced and prefer circles that share in their influence. Higher-ranked members can often be hired to protect VIPs like kings and queens, or receive free room and board + free meals wherever they please.

Those in the lowest ranks can enjoy the dirtiest and most cumbersome tasks. A local farmer may need their hired help to find a lair of trespassing monsters with nary a lead on how to find them.

The Local Economy Adapts

Since adventuring is always in demand depending on the city or town, local economies often adjust to service the occupation. Towns sell weapons, magic items, and potions. Specialty stores crop up, and it’s not uncommon for larger cities to possess multiple apothecaries, smiths, and more to cater to this clientele.

Even these crafts have their own ranking systems. A typical blacksmith who makes horseshoes and tools represents the lowest rank despite its necessity in daily living. You’d walk into a basic apothecary and could walk out with something that resembles a healing potion; a viscous red liquid of questionable purity, while quality increased alongside price and reputation.

Also cropping up are inns and taverns specifically dedicated to serving adventurers. Inns on the outskirts often serve as meeting points for adventurers looking to hire on to adventuring parties. Inns closer to the center of town, near populated areas and the well-to-do, serve adventurers with more notoriety seeking greater compensation.

This is a fun way to think about how adventurers live in a fantasy world. We often cut from play the doldrums of living in these worlds to focus on the adventure.

Where to Find the Guild

Every town, no matter how small, often maintains a signpost of various jobs and who to see. These are backed and maintained by the Adventurer’s Guild, who staff a representative at each location to investigate the accuracy of the tasks themselves. Certain jobs are noted as “rank up” jobs, where the reward for completing the task is a higher rank in the guild itself. Above table, the guild rep can be a face to the guild the players routinely interact with. That gives you NPCs with staying power.

Running This at Your Table

Running this at your table does not need to be complicated. The guild can represent the quest giver for any adventure and it gives flavor into the world. Here are simple steps for working this system into your games:

• Step 1: Decide where the guild lives in your world

• Step 2: Create an NPC representative the players can routinely engage with.

• Step 3: As you generate quests with undercurrent plotlines, decide what ‘rank’ and reward they call. You can base this on the CR of the foe too. A ‘cluster’ of quests (2-3) can feed into each other with the final one acting as a rank up and level up.

• Step 4: Decide on the consequences of being higher ranked / leveled. Does that include meeting local authorities? Other adventuring parties? New types of jobs?

• Optional: Create 1-2 additional NPCs that represent other adventuring groups the players can encounter.

An easy way to get started is to drop a single guild rep in the town your players are already in and use only the five active ranks, Copper through Gold. Add the legendary tier the day someone actually reaches it. If you’re running Bastions, guild rank is a natural unlock condition for new facilities or followers. You can also use such rankings to have the guild employ tradespeople and crafters too as a value-add.

All of this exists to add weight to your world and to the things your players do. The guild gives them a ladder to climb, the economy gives them a reason to care about coin, and the day they outgrow the whole system is when they feel they can take on the world.

This week, I’m sharing the dungeon itself: the Waterclock Crypts. My players named it as their favorite, and I’m proud of how it came together at the table. I hope you get the chance to run it at yours. It’s a level 15 dungeon balanced for

The PDF is relatively unformatted but contains everything you need to run the dungeon for one of your sessions. I’ve included statblock modifications where appropriate. Later, I’d like to format it and include the maps I used and make it look more official.

This dungeon is designed for 6 level 15 players.

Background and Story

The Waterclock Crypts sit beneath the Neverdeath Graveyard in Neverwinter. They were once the burial site and hidden research facility of the Waterclock Guild, a canon Forgotten Realms organization of artificers, geomancers, and artisans who built beautiful, incredibly accurate waterclocks powered by water flow and bound elemental magic. Founded in the 13th century DR by the elf wizard Lucan Greenharrow and the clockmaker Saborn Rendel, the Guild collapsed sometime after the Spellplague (1385 DR), and the city above has largely forgotten it exists.

The dungeon ties to one of my players’ backstories. The antagonist is Kazzan, a former Waterclock Guild apprentice turned mad wizard, borrowed from the Neverwinter MMORPG and reflavored to fit my campaign. With the help of a Far Realm Shard, Kazzan channels his magic through the artifact to contact the Elder Evil Hadar, the Dark Hungerer. Much of the crypt has been converted into his laboratories and experiment chambers, layered on top of the Guild’s original defenses. The dungeon culminates in a portal reaching out to Hadar (a cinder-red star in some distant corner of the void), an avatar of the Elder Evil called the One of Many, and a host of star spawn drawn through from the Far Realm.

Building the Dungeon

When I was building out the dungeon, I kept coming back to two questions I lean on whenever I’m prepping situations instead of plots: what does this faction want, and how do they get it?

The Guild wanted to build the most precise waterclocks in Faerûn, and they got there by binding elemental magic to flowing water. Everything in the Crypts (the pipes, the pump room, the elemental statues, the boiler) falls out of those two answers. Once I could answer these questions, I had a better idea of the rooms the dungeon could contain.

Kazzan came from the same questions, just pointed at a different goal. He wants to call Hadar into the world and end it before someone else does. He gets there by hijacking the Guild’s old infrastructure and channeling power through a Far Realm Shard. So the dungeon is two architects with their own agendas in one space. The Guild’s clockwork on the bones, Kazzan’s experiments grafted on top, soft pulsing flesh creeping over old copper pipes.

Kazzan himself is a reskinned villain from the Neverwinter MMORPG. For his personality, I leaned on my academic background to flesh out an antagonist who greets you politely and walks you through his thesis before trying to kill you. I enjoy finding a villain I can perform with confidence and steal the wrapping where I need to.

Link to the PDF

Here you go and I hope you enjoy! Have comments or feedback? Please comment below!

Download the Dungeon!

Design Choices I’m Proud Of

I’m very proud of the dungeon as a whole but there were some areas I had a lot of fun building.

Pump Room

The Pump Room is a nest of puzzles and traps. I’ve been collecting puzzle ideas from so many sources and the Pump Room is where I wanted to put some. What I cared about was making sure every single one of them was something the Waterclock Guild would have actually built. So that included water under pressure, heat exchanges (a dungeon has to be warm for people to live there!), clockwork gears, and elemental binding.

A puzzle that exists because of who built it is a piece of worldbuilding the players solve with their hands.

The Silent Corridor with Invisible Blades

W8 is sixty feet of corridor with a permanent silence effect on it and six sets of invisible arcane blades sweeping through chest-height at irregular intervals. For some reason, I never thought about combining traps together to create a more devious effect. And silence + invisibility really cancels so many tools the players rely on. I also homebrewed that the players didn’t ‘feel’ the damage until a few seconds after receiving it (so they would travel further into the hallway!).

Boss Battle

Kazzan runs on the Larva Mage statblock with a homebrew signature spell, and two Legendary Resistances. The One of Many uses the Elder Brain with a fly speed. On Initiative Count 20, two parallel tracks of lair actions kick off at once, one from the Elder Brain and one from Hadar itself. Ten enhanced star spawn grues, a hulk, and a seer fill out the rest of the room.

Combining lair actions from multiple monsters, having AOE spells and effects every round, and stacking minions and terrain in between, made the Kazzan fight memorable and kept the players on their toes. When I unleashed the homebrew spell, tried to pull a player through the portal, or fired off the devious lair action that made them shed powerful class abilities and spell slots, it was a fun way to really up the challenge without solely relying on damage.

I’d been sitting on this dungeon for over a year. It was tied to one player’s backstory and planned for much later, after I’d actually built it. I improvised the entrance at the table (after some faux hesitation of “checking my notes”) with some pretty damaging traps to try and dissuade them. But when it was clear they were committing to exploring the place, I called the session early so I could go build the rest.

This post is about how I built it. The next post will share the dungeon itself, written up as a one-shot you can drop into your own games.

The Story That Led to the Dungeon

One of my players has a backstory rooted in trauma. His character was experimented on by a mad elven wizard named Kazzan, a former member of the old Waterclock Guild of Neverwinter. Kazzan’s experiments unlocked something dormant in the character: the Spellplague, a magical pandemic from the Forgotten Realms timeline that warped a person’s connection to magic in strange and often violent ways. That’s where his powers came from.

Over the course of the campaign, the party stumbled into the wake of Kazzan’s work. They investigated disappearances and kidnappings, which helped them locate an abandoned Waterclock lab filled with failed experiments. Kazzan had been using a stolen Spelljammer helm on a connected NPC named Nigel to pierce the boundary between our world and the Far Realm. They found notes suggesting he’d perfected the process and moved his work somewhere new. Kazzan himself stayed out of reach.

I knew this thread would eventually pay off. I figured I had time, but I was wrong about the timing. I also had advantages I’d cashed in over previous sessions. I’d run a smaller Waterclock lab about six months earlier, so the aesthetic and faction tone were already locked in. I’d also just finished reading How to Defend Your Lair by Keith Ammann, which had reshaped how I thought about the way intelligent inhabitants actually use their space. When the dungeon was needed unexpectedly, I wasn’t starting from zero.

Questions to Address When Building a Dungeon

Building a homebrew anything from scratch is hard and I often find myself getting stuck when it comes to dungeons. How big they are, what traps they possess, and how many encounters they need are just some of the dilemmas that come up. When the canvas is blank and infinite, these are paralyzing possibilities, at least for me. As a chronic overthinker, I’ve had to learn how to structure my own creativity, and it’s the same lesson I teach my students in my game design and digital storytelling courses. They too get stuck when they can make anything.

The trick I’ve learned is starting with direct, answerable questions. Like getting into a Q&A discussion with ourselves. Each answer narrows the canvas and makes the next question easier. By the time I’ve worked through a full pass, I have a skeleton I can flesh out. I’ve tried writing it, recording myself and parsing through the transcript, and I’ve even tried talking to my friends about it. It all helps and the approach is often dictated by mood and timing. Sometimes today just feels like a stream of consciousness day, while others might feel better to type it out; once the caffeine kicks in of course.

Another thing I often do is categorize my questions, since trying to ask them in a void can be a challenge in its own right. When it comes to dungeons, I group them into three types: Story, Inhabitants, and Structure.

Story

In essence, what is the story of the place I’m building and how does it fit within the world and overarching campaign narrative. I don’t mean writing pages of worldbuilding / lore either. I just mean, what is its purpose to the game.

• What is this place, and why does it exist in the world?

• What plotline, character arc, or session beat does it tie to?

• What would naturally bring the players here?

• What is happening here right now, and what is its current purpose?

Inhabitants and Assets

Making a catalogue of what’s in here (i.e., monster types, NPCs, traps, and loot) helps me create rooms and encounters from them. I often just list things out depending, or write a few sentences description if the mood strikes.

• Who lives, works, or hunts here, and what do they want?

• Who are the antagonists, and what are their actual goals beyond “fight the party”?

• What assets does this place offer the people inside it? Traps, defenses, terrain, allies, loot?

• How would the inhabitants actually use those resources if intruders showed up?

Structure: Rooms and Encounters

Filling rooms and creating challenges is where I tend to overthink the most. I try to limit myself to five to eight rooms total and include a mix of encounter types, rather than relying on combat. The “final boss” encounter is usually the exception. Defining rooms (and leaning on what resides in them) does help me piece together the challenges and monsters that would make up the encounters.

• What rooms would naturally exist in a place like this?

• Have existing rooms been co-opted in some way by the current inhabitants?

• How many rooms total? (While resisting the urge to overbuild of course)

Building the Waterclock Crypts via Q&A

This is where I want to walk through how I answered each question above for this specific dungeon. Rather than dropping the entire dungeon into one post, I’ll provide the framework and my answers, while next week’s article will feature the dungeon in full.

Story

What is this place, and why does it exist in the world?

The Waterclock Crypts are the burial site for the old Waterclock Guild of Neverwinter, a defunct order that once worked at the intersection of clockwork engineering, water elementalism, and binding magic. The guild interred its high-ranking dead in clockwork sarcophagi beneath a hidden mausoleum in Neverdeath Graveyard. Most of Neverwinter has forgotten the guild exists. That obscurity is exactly what made the place useful to Kazzan when he needed somewhere to disappear with his work.

What plotline, character arc, or session beat does it tie to?

This dungeon relates to a PC’s backstory: Kazzan is the wizard who experimented on him and many others like him. I connected this story to the campaign at large which focuses on Vecna looking to remake the universe. Kazzan’s work involves tapping into the Far Realm, and he’s using that connection to reach Hadar, the Dark Hungerer, and call it into the world.

What would naturally bring the players here?

The original plan was that the players would bump into Kazzan’s recruiter and that trail would lead to his lair in Neverdeath. However, the party was hunting a stolen piece of the Rod of Seven Parts with locate object and chanced upon the lair instead.

What is happening here right now, and what is its current purpose?

Kazzan has finished his research and is using the crypts as a launch site. He’s calling out to Hadar, the Dark Hungerer, trying to draw the entity into our reality and use it to remake the world in his image. His logic: if Vecna is going to unmake the multiverse anyway, Kazzan would rather it end on his terms first. The place doubles as his home now, with a hidden study, vat-grown experiments, and a permanent stable of Star Spawn guarding the deeper rooms.

Inhabitants and Assets

Who lives, works, or hunts here, and what do they want?

Kazzan lives and works here. He’s an ancient elven wizard treating his own research as a calling rather than a job. The One of Many, a special monster that is an avatar of Hadar, projects into the deepest chamber. A small army of Star Spawn live in the flooded cavern and the labs as both subjects and security. The crypts also have an older, unwanted tenant: a clutch of wraiths and shadows that Kazzan disturbed when he tried to loot the original guild sarcophagi for treasure. He gave up looting and now leaves them to their dead.

Who are the antagonists, and what are their actual goals beyond “fight the party”?

Kazzan thinks he’s the hero. He believes Vecna’s ascension will unmake reality, and he’s racing to remake it under Hadar’s influence before Vecna can. He greets the party like a lecturer welcoming students into a lab. He even offers the PC a place at his side, complete with a vial whose specifics I’ll keep to myself, since my players read this. The One of Many wants the portal stabilized and a foothold in our world. Neither of them is interested in fighting the party until the party is in the room interrupting the ritual.

What assets does this place offer the people inside it? Traps, defenses, terrain, allies, loot?

The Crypts give Kazzan a lot to work with.

• The guild left behind functioning clockwork infrastructure (pumps, gears, steam, water flow) that he turned into hazards.

• Kazzan is a spellcaster and can layer over these hazards with his own magical defenses in the form of glyphs of warding, trapped chests, and neutral enemies. He also sabotaged clockwork infrastructure to turn into environmental hazards.

• Star Spawn monsters of multiple types fill the cavern and the labs: grues, seers, hulks, manglers, and larva mages. The One of Many was a special monster I cooked up based on the gibbering mouther I painted. I felt a reflavored Elder Brain statblock would be appropriate for this, with some influences from Hadar.

• Wraiths and shadows serve as the neutral undead inhabitants.

• I calculated a loot hoard based on Kazzan’s challenge rating (CR 16).

How would the inhabitants actually use those resources if intruders showed up?

I designed the dungeon’s defenses in two layers.

• First: how would the original Waterclock Guild have defended its crypts? Second: how would Kazzan bolster those defenses with his own additions? The crypt had its own defenses in the form of Waterclock spider defenders, water jet traps, and a flooded cavern.

• Second: Kazzan enhanced base defenses by adding more. Every door leading deeper into the dungeon was trapped, while individual rooms were protected by glyphs of warding, arcane lock, and a few puzzles. Every treasure chest was locked and trapped as well. Some cast fear, scattering PCs deeper into the crypt’s mazes. Others dealt thunder damage that alerted the dungeon’s defenders.

Monsters would be spaced throughout but not in every room. I wanted variation so no encounter felt like a repeat. I wanted environmental hazards and monster encounters to land as separate experiences first. The last few rooms would combine them into one overall challenge. On top of that, I wanted to layer in Hadar’s influence. This took the form of environmental storytelling and some of the mechanics encountered in the final boss room.

Structure: Rooms and Encounters

What rooms would naturally exist in a place like this?

For a guild burial complex, the natural choices came to mind first: an above-ground mausoleum, a descending staircase, a reinforced secondary entrance, sarcophagus halls, a pump room to handle the guild’s water-and-clockwork infrastructure, and a deep ritual chamber that was originally a water-elemental basin. Add storage and a chapel-dormitory for whoever maintained the place. I pieced together a ‘logic’ to the place in this way.

Have existing rooms been co-opted in some way by the current inhabitants?

I worked on converting the deeper rooms into ones changed by Kazzan and his experiments. The chapel and dormitory became his vat labs, while the elemental basin became his portal chamber. A former private lab became his hidden study and bedroom. The storeroom still holds guild platinum bars next to his fresh supplies. Only the sarcophagus halls stayed mostly intact, because the wraiths made looting them not worth the effort. The contrast between old guild aesthetic and new Far Realm corruption does most of the atmospheric work in the dungeon.

How many rooms total?

The total number of rooms with interactive content was nine. A bit more than what I typically create but I made peace with the additional complexity because I had a lot of fun creating the dungeon.

The Atmosphere and the Mechanics

A week after this session, one of my players told me this was their favorite dungeon I’d ever run. I believe it worked because the answers to why does this place exist and who lives here dictated the answers to what’s in the room. NPCs, assets, and encounters came out of the place itself and the person currently living in it. And then the atmosphere came with it as a byproduct.

Next week, I’ll share the full Waterclock Crypts dungeon as a one-shot you can drop into your own game. If you want to try the same approach on something you’re cooking up, answer all eleven and the dungeon mostly builds itself.

Player choice is the thing nearly every DM says they want to prep for and the thing most of us prep around. Doing it well takes more than offering options but also understanding why a choice feels real in the first place.

How Game Design Steals (Successfully!) from Psychology

Psychological theory and game design go hand in hand. Business schools teach game theory to help students make strategic decisions and spot new opportunities. The same thinking drives game design itself. Designers borrow from psychology to figure out what keeps players coming back, whether that’s randomized rewards, gacha pulls, flow states, or the elusive “fun factor.”

I teach my students similar foundations. I bring in Pavlov’s classical conditioning and Skinner’s operant conditioning so they can see how stimulus associations and reward loops shape player behavior. I touch on Self-Determination Theory (SDT), which explains the psychological needs that drive motivation and engagement. And I always include Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory, the state of focused immersion that kicks in when challenge and skill line up.

Once they see how mechanics and story coalesce, they understand why a good game feels good. These theories underpin every game today and TTRPGs are no exception. Stats, encounters, leveling up, rolling dice, roleplay and more all create a satisfying gameplay experience meant to entice.

Self-Determination Theory

SDT, developed by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, explains what makes any activity feel motivating and worthwhile. It boils down to three basic psychological needs that have to be met for a person to feel engaged and fulfilled: competence, autonomy, and relatedness.

That matters at the table because every session is a steady drip of those three needs in action. Competence shows up in two ways: the satisfaction of completing encounters and leveling up, and the slower confidence that builds as players get fluent in the system over many sessions. Relatedness is our ability to connect with others. Players bond with one another, fleshed-out NPCs, the world itself, and the shared lore of a campaign. And then cooperative play stacks on top of that.

Then there’s autonomy, the need to feel like your choices actually belong to you and feel meaningful. That’s the component this article focuses on, because a DM oftentimes preps situations where choices are intended to feel the most meaningful, or maps out challenges that encourage multiple solutions. Players on the other hand can leverage their own agency, which is our ability to make choices at all, to decide how to overcome those challenges.

Knowing Your Players

Combining our knowledge of psychological needs with what we know about our players means more than knowing what they find fun. That matters, but we can go deeper. It’s about making a mental or written catalog: what each player finds irresistible (stories about romance, treasure chests, or a library), what they reflexively avoid (body horror, political intrigue), and what kinds of rewards they enjoy (roleplay, completing a story, treasure, power). How do we learn this information?

Well, we can directly ask our players what entices them. “What do you look for in a story?” “What do you find irresistible at the D&D table?” “What does your character absolutely love to experience?” In terms of what they avoid, we can learn that via our safety tools.

The other way is by observing our players during the game, especially in long-term campaigns, because the more you play the more you learn. Keep an eye out for nonverbal signs of joy, moments where the whole table is leaning in, or what they say about the encounter. “Oh wow that was cool!” reactions, how they portray their characters, and what they find empowering and fun. Observing that can lead you to ask questions and check in about what landed. You may also know your players outside the game from playing together before, which makes your life much easier. The challenge with any table, though, is making sure everyone vibes together. That’s a separate thing.

Translating What You Know Into Prep Decisions

Cataloguing these aspects creates an inventory to use and levers you can pull during prep. It can help you decide what kinds of stories to develop and which NPCs to build. It can shape the tone of the session or the overall campaign. It can guide how you reward players and which backstories to flesh out. If you’re running content from a campaign book, it can even help you decide what aspects to use, change, or cut. Harkening back to the castle Ravenloft article I wrote, it can help you decide what locations to prep too.

Whether those locations contain devious traps or treasure, secret doors, or just room types in totality like libraries, extra-planar environments, or a tavern. In essence, helping you decide what specific players gravitate towards and reward them for leaning into that.

By building prep with these elements in mind, we can anticipate player paths without scripting them like a plot. This is where situational prep does its real work. Focus on how locations invite exploration, how NPCs carry wants and methods that clash with the players, and how story threads exist and unfold without the players’ involvement. Doing that creates a compounding effect. The more you understand your players, the easier it becomes to guess what they’ll do. The relationship gets sharper over time, and your craft sharpens with it.

So, as we work to do situational prep backed by a breathing storyline, how can we leverage the choices our players make at the table?

Psychology of Choice and How We Leverage It

As we prep for our campaigns, we have to think about our narrative, encounters, the mechanics that support both, and how we can balance it all together to create a fun (and meaningful) experience for ourselves and the players. Because of that, we inadvertently think about psychological theory and how that factors into the choices our players make in the session.

Players face countless choices at the table and they tend to fall into three primary categories:

• Narrative choices: how players progress the story and the means they use to do it

• Tactical choices: how players leverage their character classes, spells, and abilities in and out of combat

• Roleplay choices: how players bring their character’s persona to the table

When we prep, we think about creating situations where players make these kinds of choices.

Prep that Supports Narrative Choices

The groundwork for creating narrative choices lies in prep related to the session story. I’m not talking about individual plots (remember our goal is to create situations) but the overarching story you want to tell for the session. This can be: the players are investigating town for a cult, the players are completing a dungeon, or going on a shopping trip. It’s figuring out what’s happening or what’s about to happen, and the situations where the players could engage with it.

Story’s other half is the NPCs. As covered in my practical guide to prepping situations, it comes down to two questions about each NPC: what do they want and how do they get it?

Putting characters and story together lends insight into the kind of narrative choices players can make. Then, you can decide what situations develop when the players’ motivations clash with the NPCs’ and the session story. These can include deciding who to speak to for information and how, or if they decide to save one hostage over another.

Prep that Supports Tactical Choices

Creating opportunities to leverage tactical choices most often takes the form of encounters. D&D has three types of encounters: exploration, social, and combat. Encounter design isn’t just about putting the pieces you need to run them in place. It’s about how we elevate our encounters to support meaningful, tactical choices for our players.

The lever underneath all three encounter types is the same: turn a default action into a choice with real tradeoffs. When players have one obvious move, there’s no meaningful choice. When prep introduces opportunity cost, whether that’s a competing objective, a resource burn, or information they don’t yet have, the move becomes a decision.

For combat encounters, you can make the choices of a combat encounter more meaningful by creating multiple objectives such as stopping a countdown, preventing an enemy from calling reinforcements, or choosing to save an NPC at the cost of a penalty. You can also incorporate terrain height, cover, or similar hazards that force players to choose how to deal with the enemies they battle.

For exploration encounters, the tradeoff is resource cost vs. information gain. Players usually want to move on to the next thing, especially during travel. Offering enticements gives them a reason to stop, especially if the plot feels pressing. Can you connect the exploration encounter to the session’s story, or an aspect of it? Maybe offer clues about what’s coming or about the world at large? If the players are exploring a ruin, what can they learn for free, and what can they learn more of by spending resources?

You can do this via traps and environmental challenges (e.g., reaching an inaccessible area or crossing lava), or by offering something to study or discover (e.g., identifying a plant species beyond just a nature check, reading a scroll protected by illusory script). Monsters work too, but there are plenty of avenues.

For social encounters, you can leverage your NPCs’ wants and methods, flavored by their personality and backstory. I’ve seen plenty of moments where my players simply “tell the NPC what they want” just to move on, but NPCs don’t always hand everything over. They can have conflicting motives, especially when other NPCs are in the room, or they have their own requirements before helping the players. That kind of nuance gives players levers to pull.

If the king is hesitant to help the PCs because they’re unknown, does that open the door for someone to cast charm person? Or offer a bribe? Or perform a service to earn his trust? It doesn’t always have to be a binary of persuade or throw hands.

When NPCs push back instead of folding immediately, players stop trying to solve the scene and start performing in it. That invariably leads to roleplay.

Prep That Supports Roleplay Choices

Leveraging narrative and tactical choices does invariably encourage players to make roleplay choices too. However, we can hone in further by building prep around situations that invite roleplay. The goal is to make sure not every encounter defaults to a battle, not every NPC just agrees with the players, and the players don’t drift through a session without bumping into the story. As mentioned a few times already, situations encourage response and invite interaction. This isn’t about building binary paths, or even a straight line.

Every encounter or room you prep stands on its own to support the story, but none of them are required for the story to land. The story isn’t set per se. It shifts based on what the players do, even as the villain keeps moving and the world keeps turning without them.

Giving players reasons to speak in character is one of the best things that can happen at the table, but it doesn’t come out of thin air. Account for backstory hooks seeded in the world, NPCs who relate to the PCs or carry distinct voices and quirks, and story elements that reward in-character investigation. That gives you the chance to prep two or three moves ahead.

Giving NPCs flair beyond being quest givers or exposition machines pulls players in too. For example, rather than the typical villain monologue, they could probe for character responses rather than player ones. This can include taunting their fighting style, threatening specific NPCs tied to them, and so on.

The False Choice Trap

Choices aren’t all the same. Sometimes a single option is clearly the right one, and offering choices just for the sake of it isn’t necessarily fun. If the story requires an important NPC to help the party, it doesn’t make sense to give the players a choice whether to trust or mistrust that character when the trust was supposed to happen anyway. If the campaign hinges on the PCs trusting a mentor figure, prepping a “do you trust them?” beat isn’t really a choice. Choices like that fall flat.

If something is supposed to happen, even in situational prep, it’s often best not to frame it as a choice at all. If the king is going to die because that’s locked in for the arc to kick off, don’t taunt the players into thinking they can prevent it. They’ll feel railroaded when it happens anyway. Either let them actually stop it and adjust the arc, or don’t frame it as a choice and just let it happen.

Instead, save the choices that can shift the story for the moments they matter. Or better yet, don’t prep those choices at all. Leave those areas blank so the players make them for you and the world responds in kind. The other side of that coin is making sure choices have consequences. Does failing the lockpick roll alert the guard? Does taunting a monster mean it focuses on that character until they go down?

Seeding clues and information into your prep also helps choices feel like choices instead of guesses. Three unmarked doors is a shot in the dark, a roll of the dice and nothing more. In the players’ minds it doesn’t matter which door they pick because they’re all the same. A particular clue, a smell, or a sound gives them something to evaluate before they commit. Remember that moment when the Fellowship was in the Mines of Moria and Gandalf couldn’t decide which way to go because he couldn’t remember?

His decision came down to which way smelled less foul.

Build the Situations, Not the Choices

Prepping for player choice isn’t about engineering decisions. It’s about building the conditions where real decisions can happen. Know your players well enough to know what they’ll chase and what they’ll dodge. Prep situations instead of plots, so narrative, tactical, and roleplay choices all have somewhere to land. And stay honest about which choices actually move the story, so your players never have to wonder if theirs was the real one.

I introduced the core idea: in-world scholarly books on subjects that exist inside a D&D world, written in the voices of the characters who would have actually written them. The first volume gave us our two narrators: J.P. Sherbert, chief architect of the College of Hollow Things, and Archlich Siraxis the Undefeatable (defeated once or twice), who handled the foreword.

This time, we pick up where Sherbert leaves off. As he is fond of reminding us, the architect’s first job is to know what he’s building on. We’re starting with how he learns that.

Chapter One: Reading the Land

For the purposes of this chapter I will use the word land to mean any and all surroundings that bear upon the choice of a site. This includes the obvious (forests, hills, rivers, the lay of the watershed) as well as cities, oceans, settled kingdoms, unsettled wildernesses, and in the rarest of cases certain reaches of nothingness such as the Far Realms. The Far Realms are not recommended.

To read the land is to take an inventory of what stands upon it, what runs through it, what lives in it, and what is conspicuously absent from it. The cooper notes the strength of the wood and the species of the tree. If he is a particular sort of cooper, he notes how many. The mason notes whether the surrounding hills offer durable limestone, sandstone, or granite, and at what distance from the proposed site. The architect notes both, and several other things besides. If circumstance permits, he may even consider whether the local fire elementals can be coaxed into the furnace of an underground forge. While this architect supports the notion, they generally cannot; the point is the consideration.

Reading the land is more than wandering it with a notebook. The competent surveyor wants detailed knowledge of the region, its weather, its inhabitants, its terrain, and its landmarks. The honest one will tell you that no single source provides all of this, and that a wise commissioner triangulates between several.

Sources of Information

Books and archives.

Where they exist, histories, almanacs, and prior surveys are the cheapest source of information and the most often outdated. They are most useful for what does not change quickly: the bedrock, the watershed, the position of a mountain. They are least useful for what changes constantly, which is most everything else.

The local population.

A farmer can tell you with great accuracy the layout of his own fields, the temper of the river in spring, and the names of every hill within a day’s walk. He will rarely have walked further than that. Most villagers leave their village only for festivals or for the harvest, and travelers between settlements are not as common as the romance of the road suggests. What passes for local lore is in equal measure observation, embellishment, and the misremembered claims of someone’s grandfather. Take what is offered. Then verify it.

It is occasionally suggested that one solve this problem by hiring a powerful spellcaster. I would gently correct the impression that such persons are common. The casters one meets in a tavern can on the whole clean a tunic. Some can light a candle. A magician of the second order is far more easily found than a demigod, and the demigod, in any case, has no interest in your survey.

Hired scouts.

The most reliable general option, and the option most often skipped on grounds of expense, is a properly trained scout. A scout does not merely know the lay of the land. He knows what to look at, which is a different and considerably more valuable skill. He measures distance reliably, recognizes signs of recent passage, and is aware of holdings and hideouts that a passing traveler would not register. Two competent scouts working a region for a season will produce better intelligence than a hundred farmers questioned over a year. They are worth the cost so pay them.

Diplomats.

Where the inhabitants of a region are sentient but unfriendly, the question is one of communication, not coercion. A myconid releases spores that permit telepathic exchange and is in my experience an unusually patient interlocutor. An ogre is unlikely to engage in conversation at all, and is best approached, if at all, through a third party who has done so before and survived the experience (or not). A properly briefed diplomat can convert a region’s hostile inhabitants from an obstacle into one of three more useful things: a source, an ally hired for the season, or a buffer between your dungeon and the more troublesome traffic of the surface world.

A note on maps.

Detailed maps of any region are rare, valuable, and rarely surrendered. Few cartographers part with their work cheaply, and fewer still part with it to a stranger who has just expressed interest in every approach to a particular valley. Most regional knowledge is accordingly transmitted by word of mouth. Write it down. Memory is the least reliable archive in any architect’s toolkit.

A Word on Difficult Country

The methods above presume a region with at least some friendly or neutral traffic. Sites in genuinely hostile or inhospitable territory such as high crags, deep wastes, or the lower glooms of certain underground realms, afford fewer of these options. The motives are predictable: the protection of something dangerous enough to require remoteness, or the protection of someone irritable enough to require it. Both are legitimate and neither shortens the survey.

Coming Up Next Time

Sherbert turns next to the question of water, which he takes more seriously than most things, and which the Archlich has opinions about. Here’s a small preview from a sub-section near the end:

This is a “wrong answers only” interview. It is not a judgment on her though! It is a love letter dressed up as a bit. (Love you, Mom. Thanks for subscribing.) Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there.

A quick bio for context. My mom is a retired paralegal and the former president of the women’s club in her 55-and-over community. She’s been retired for nearly four years, she’s an active jazz tap performer, and she is unfailingly supportive of whatever weird dragon-shaped thing I’m doing this week.

The Monsters

Beholder

Me: When you hear the word “beholder,” what do you think of?

Mom: Beholder? I think of, like, endearment. Like beholding someone. That’s a term of endearment.

To be clear, she is describing one of the most aggressively hostile creatures in the game. A floating sphere with a giant central eye, a fanged mouth, and a bunch of smaller eyes on stalks that fire magical death rays. When I asked her to picture it as a creature, she paused and said, “Oh God, he would not be a nice-looking creature.” She was so right she came back around to being right.

Owlbear

Me: What percentage of an owlbear is actually owl?

Mom: Maybe twenty percent. The facial features look like an owl, but the body type is a bear.

Ten out of ten on that answer! It’s way more bear than owl, although the percentages are debatable. She reasoned it out using nothing but the compound word and vibes. Frankly, this is more rigor than some monster manual lore.

Displacer Beast

Me: What is a displacer beast?

Mom: A character that, if you have one, can move or take over somebody else’s game person.

Technically a displacer beast is a panther-shaped predator with two whip-like tentacles that visually appears a few feet from where it actually is, which makes hitting it absurdly difficult. But her version sounds like a pretty solid homebrew subclass. Honestly, “Displacer” as “moves you around the table” is elegant.

Vecna

Me: What comes to mind when you hear the name Vecna?

Mom: Maybe a fantasy woman character. Not a creature. Evil, based on the name. Maybe seductive. She wins characters over.

As we know from Stranger Things, Vecna is canonically a withered lich with one hand and one eye who ascended to godhood and is currently trying to rewrite reality. My mother heard the name once and built a complete femme fatale antagonist on the spot. I would absolutely read her version of the campaign.

The Game

Rolling a 20

Me: What happens if I roll a 20 on the dice?

Mom: Maybe you get to fight somebody. Or maybe you get the opportunity to take over somebody else’s gifts or things that they have.

Loot on a nat 20… she definitely gets it. I’ll just try not to tell my players that’s always possible.

Roll for Initiative

Me: What does “roll for initiative” mean?

Mom: You probably get to roll the dice, not to make the next move, but to further your campaign with your character.

Genuinely, that is what playing D&D is. Every roll furthers the campaign. She accidentally summarized the entire hobby in one sentence while trying to guess what the words meant. Go mom!

Initiative, Ability Check, or Attack Roll?

Me: Would you rather roll for initiative, an ability check, or an attack roll?

Mom: I go right to attack. If I don’t attack, somebody else is going to attack me down the road.

Mom rolls for initiative by going first emotionally. She is a barbarian and has always been. I am only now realizing this.

Campaign Length

Me: How long does a campaign last?

Mom: Weeks. It sounds like a continual week-after-week thing. Months, probably.

And sometimes the campaign is still going when your kid is asking you about it on Mother’s Day!

Does Satan Make an Appearance in D&D?

I was ready for some solid tongue-in-cheek on this one!

Me: You remember Satanic Panic in the 80s?

Mom: I don’t think Satan is part of this game.

A direct, calm dismissal of an entire decade of moral hysteria. After watching the 80s happen in real time she simply opted out of the bit and I totally respect it. I love my mom so much!

The Real Answer

I saved the last question for last ;)

Me: Would you recommend other moms and their kids get into D&D?

Mom: I think it’s a great family way to share thoughts and imagination. To develop their imagination, make them think out of the box. With games, since they love games anyway, it makes it easier for them to use their imagination.

And then, unprompted:

“I don’t understand the game. I don’t know anything about it. All I know is there’s a lot of people into this. And you spend a lot of time developing these stories and all these campaigns that you do.”

She doesn’t know what a beholder is. She does know that the thing I love takes time, and that the time is worth it, and that the imagination underneath it is worth passing along. Somehow, that is the most accurate thing anyone has ever said.

Hope you had a wonderful Mother’s Day

So happy Mother’s Day, Mom. Thanks for sitting through this and for guessing! Thanks for not asking me to define “displacer” before answering.

And to every mom who has helped drive their kid to game night, washed dice off a kitchen table, or sat patiently while someone explained, with a great deal of feeling, what a paladin is: this one is for you.

Next week, stay tuned for the upcoming article on the psychology of TTRPGs!

I was recently inspired by a new game on Steam called Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library. It’s a very simple, cozy game where you literally pick up books in a virtual library and organize them on the shelves. That’s it. What makes it great is that it’s fantasy themed, and all of the books have very silly, fantasy-oriented titles. Books on magic casting, bestiaries, spells, dungeons, romance, the whole gamut. All of it fantasy.

I was struck with an idea. What if these books were real? What if you could actually read them, or at the very least hand one to your players when they pull it off a shelf in one of your games? That would be a lot of fun to write, and it gives me a chance to experiment with different characters and different voices.

So I settled on my first choice, because I love dungeon design: my first “book,” Fundamentals of Dungeon Architecture. It’s meant to be a multi-book “series,” and every post is going to be an excerpt from one of these books, written in the style and voice of the in-world characters who wrote them. I really enjoy writing this way, where the prose feels real-world but in-world, if that makes sense. It’s also another way I can turn these pieces into supplements down the line, or fold them into a new book project.

Here’s what you can expect whenever a post like this drops. It’s similar in spirit to the way Matt Dinniman handles Dungeon Crawler Carl: every post will include excerpts, or pieces of excerpts, from an unedited draft. You can read it, enjoy it, and use it as you wish. Some of these are going to be long, so I want you ready for that.

For the record, I still plan on writing the usual Behind the Screen stuff. This is just another creative outlet alongside it. So stay tuned for more, as always, and I hope you enjoy it.

Excerpt from the Introduction of Fundamentals of Dungeon Architecture

Your party has just slain the evil wizard. Picking through the library they’ve left behind, you find a heavy volume bound in leather and iron. You crack it open. The title page reads:

Fundamentals of Dungeon Architecture, Volume I by J.P. Sherbert, chief architect of the College of Hollow Things, with a foreword from Archlich Siraxis the Undefeatable (defeated once or twice).

Perhaps it could be useful.

Introduction by the Author

I trust by now that you’ve finished reading the foreword. After all, you have turned the page and found yourself here.

I extended the invitation to the Archlich named Siraxis with eyes open, and was, I confess, prepared for some measure of theatrics. Most major antagonists are full of themselves, given to flaunting their ‘superior’ will and pressing it upon whatever realm has had the misfortune to house them. However, I was not prepared for the implication that I have somehow contributed “tongue-in-cheek passages” to a manuscript I have spent six years drafting. I would do no such thing. I was, at the time of writing, up for tenure, and I approach matters of tenure with the utmost seriousness. The work is precisely as serious as the subject demands. The subject, on occasion, demands very little.

I will say this in the Archlich’s defense. On the question of real estate, he is entirely correct. The greatest single failure I have observed in two decades of consulting on fortified structures is not poor masonry, poor planning, or poor warding. It is poor site selection. A magnificent dungeon or lair in the wrong place is a magnificent way to die in the wrong place.

In the volumes that follow you will find the principles I have tried to systematize over a long career: site, form, function, and failure, in that order, because that is the order in which they are tested. Aesthetics has its own volume, despite the protests of certain colleagues in the Tactics and Bestiary fields who continue to insist it is decoration. So does the unglamorous work of keeping a dungeon running once it stands. So does the matter of how dungeons end, which is, in the end, the only question every dungeon eventually answers.

I recommend reading the volumes in order. Architecture, like every discipline worth practicing, rewards correct sequence. One cannot build the second floor before the first, and I have, regrettably, been called to inspect three buildings that attempted otherwise. Consider also that I have written five hundred and seventy-eight drafts of this volume, which makes it, in the most literal sense, the strongest foundation currently available. Like mithril, or adamantine, or whatever else it is that the Bestiary author keeps insisting cannot be properly mined.

Once you have completed a careful reading of this series (and given the material sufficient time to settle), I recommend turning to the companion volumes, with healthy skepticism for any author who tells you that their subject is the most important one. Including, I suppose, this one.

A word, before we begin, on the word itself. A dungeon, from the inside, is never called a dungeon. From the inside it is a tower (or, in the older usage, a donjon), a castle, a mausoleum, a sanctum, a bastion, a manse, a cloud castle run by djinn, a research facility, or a temple. Dungeon is what the people coming to clear it call it. It is a label applied in retrospect, after the place has ceased to be whatever its builders intended. The residents of any well-designed work would call it something more dignified. However, dungeon is the term my readership knows better than the alternatives my colleagues at the College prefer (the hollow, subterrane, or, in the most regrettable of recent fashions, negative architecture), and so, despite my reservations, it is the word I have used throughout this volume and will continue to use. After all, the architect’s task is to design the thing; not to name it.

Part One: Site

The first decision in dungeon architecture is, in nearly every case, the only one made carelessly. The siting of a dungeon governs what may be built upon it, what may defend it, what may supply it, and what may, in due course, take it from you. Every principle in the volumes that follow assumes that this one was settled with care.

Site selection is, in equal measure, a matter of tactics and a matter of terrain. Whether you intend to raise a new structure or to claim and improve an abandoned one, you must understand what surrounds the location before you commit a single stone to it. A solitary tower in an open field is, of course, an excellent way to declare your intentions to your neighbors. Most of my clients prefer a quieter introduction. Above ground, below it, upon it, or in some plane adjacent to it, the principles do not change, but the inventory does. A wooden palisade is, regrettably, of limited utility in a volcano.

The matter of how an enemy might approach the site is treated separately in Chapter 2. For the present, it is enough to observe that the choice of site decides which approaches are even possible. The terrain, in this sense, is your first wall.

…And then the rest is saved for later! :)

What’s Coming Next

Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed it! It was a lot of fun to write. Here is a slight teaser to the next section from Fundamentals of Dungeon Architecture: Reading the Land:

There’s also a ‘psychology’ of choice article in the works. The seed came from a reader comment on the I Ran Castle Ravenloft as Situations and My Players Made the Story: they described assessing the paths players might take in a given situation and checking that their prep covered those paths, and asked if I’d write more on that aspect. I’d love to, so thank you for the nudge. It picks up where the Prepping Situations, Not Plots series left off: how we read our players’ wants and desires, and prep the things we know they’ll latch onto.

And expect more Cozyvale, too. I’m still building out the setting and want to keep sharing pieces of it as the world fills in.

Crafting neurodivergent characters requires careful consideration regardless of your own neurodivergency. It’s a topic that comes up often in D&D and TTRPG spaces, and it’s one I hear frequently from my game design and storytelling students: how do you represent neurodivergent characters so that people can connect with them, feel empowered by them, and feel good about seeing things close to their identities or lives reflected in the stories we tell?

I’m neurotypical. I want to be upfront about that. A few years ago, some friends of mine attended a panel at PAX Unplugged about representation of neurodivergency in TTRPG spaces. The panel featured licensed therapists, psychologists, and scholars discussing how neurodivergent people experience the hobby, what they enjoy about it, and how the space has grown to include more of those experiences. One question from the audience stuck with my friends enough to bring it back to me: “I’m a neurotypical individual. Is there anything wrong with wanting to make my characters neurodivergent?”

That question inspired a section of my book on NPC creation. It also inspired this article. And it’s exactly the kind of question I can’t answer alone. The best way to think about incorporating neurodivergent characters into your stories is to talk to those who are close to that experience or who possess their own.

Dr. Alan D’Aiello is a lecturer and professor at Fordham University, where he teaches classes on digital media, media advocacy, social responsibility, and LGBTQIA+ issues. He’s also someone who’s played at my games for years, an experienced D&D player who has shared quite a bit about his love of character representation and storytelling. Alan talks openly about his own neurodivergency and how he incorporates those elements into his characters, his teaching, and his conversations with students. I asked him to co-write this article because I felt like he would be the perfect person to share insight on this important topic.

I asked Alan: if a neurotypical DM came to you and said, “Should I even try this?” Here’s what he said:

I’d strongly encourage it! …it is something that would really help players at the table feel like they are being seen. It also will help the DM to be able to develop creative, culturally complex and “complete” worlds. It allows the DM and table to get beyond the “power fantasy, high middle-ages, high fantasy” trope of “powerful warriors and damsels in distress” towards a world that is complicated and nuanced; thus more real. Further, I’d tell them to be open to critique and to making mistakes. The biggest thing the DM can do is go into this with an open mind and open heart because it’s almost inevitable that mistakes with these things will happen, particularly if they are not neurodivergent themselves or are trying to portray one that they are less familiar with.

The Intention Matters

Before you build a neurodivergent character, ask yourself one question: why? Sit with the question for a second. “Because representation matters” is a bumper sticker. It’s not wrong, but it’s not a motivation either. The real answer has to go deeper than that.

If you’re a neurodivergent DM, the answer might be personal. Character creation can be a way to explore your own experiences through the safety of fiction. You get to examine how your brain works, build that into a character, and play it out at a table full of people who are there to engage with it. You’re working with your brain, not against it. That’s powerful.

If you’re neurotypical, the honest question is harder. Why portray experiences you don’t share? And the answer has to come from genuine curiosity and a willingness to do the work. Not from wanting a quirky NPC. Not because you saw something in a show and thought it would be interesting flavor. If the motivation starts and ends at “I want a character who’s a little different,” that’s where harm starts. The intention behind the character shapes everything that follows.

Alan on spotting the difference between care and flavor:

When the DM is able to portray a neurodivergent NPC without the portrayal necessarily resorting to stereotypes or, especially, not resorting to tropes. For example, if an NPC has a form of Tourette’s Syndrome, immediately having them exhibiting that condition by something like the swearing tic, or by making noises, would be an instant red flag that the DM did not flesh the character out but is rather using the neurodivergence as a center of their reason to exist as a character. A DM who has thought this out would have neurodiversity be a part of the character, not the character’s whole raison d’etre. This isn’t to say that the neurodivergence can’t come up as a plot point or complication, but rather that it is subtly handled, like finding out a character is left-handed or LGBTQ as a form of difference.

Alan on what it feels like when it’s reduced to a quirk:

It is something that honestly happens so often that I find I fail to notice it. When I do I tend to lean towards the laughs to “not make a big deal of it” because I am very non-confrontational myself. It isn’t a great feeling that I get when it happens and it’s marginalizing if it isn’t dealt with.

Where It Goes Wrong

There are a few ways this goes sideways, and they all come from the same root: the neurodivergence becomes the character instead of being part of the character.

The first is the diagnosis-as-identity trap. You assign ADHD or autism like a character tag and build the whole personality around it. Think about it this way: would you describe a neurotypical NPC as “the normal one”? No, because that’s not a character. It’s a label. Same thing applies here.

The second is stereotypes played for laughs or drama. The scattered wizard who can’t focus. The anxious NPC whose anxiety is an obstacle the party has to manage. These reduce real experiences to punchlines or plot devices.

The third is assuming one size fits all. ADHD doesn’t look the same in two people. Neither does anxiety, depression, or autism. If your NPC’s neurodivergence looks like every TV portrayal you’ve ever seen, you haven’t done enough research.

I asked Alan what he’s seen go wrong, and his answers hit harder than anything I could write from the outside.

Alan on the worst portrayals:

I’ve seen characters who are utterly flat, or a trope where the character’s neurodivergence is the whole character. Just as people who need mobility devices argue that their device is not them, the neurodivergence cannot simply stand in for proper character development. It is far better if the character is not going to be fleshed out that any implication of neurodivergence should be left out. This kind of character portrayal is the worst possible thing that can happen because it makes the character their neurodivergence. It’s harmful because it literally makes the character become opaque and one-dimensional; the opposite of being “seen” or visibility insofar as it tells others at the table that the DM, this world, or both, is directly hostile to that neurodivergence and it has a chilling effect on everything else that happens at that table.

Alan on the most common well-intentioned mistake:

I think that inserting a single character can be problematic because it could smack of tokenism. It has to feel natural as part of the world vs just a single add otherwise it risks feeling like adding the character is being done for diversity’s sake. It’s a very nuanced issue because representation and visibility is extremely important. At the same time, a well-informed DM could be risking trading visibility for realism in that it feels like the character is just there for representation. DMs also have a habit with NPCs of trying to give that character a good, compressed exposition in order to avoid lore dumping or slowing the plot too much. When this happens with a neurodivergent character, there’s a high risk that the character’s neurodivergence is just expressed and comes across as a trope. The character has to really appear as a natural part of the story and of the world. Other NPCs would need to see this as just “how the (NPC) is” and the PCs should be able to look at the NPC in the same way.

When It Works: Ddewiniaid the Wizard

When Alan told me about his wizard character, Ddewiniaid, something clicked about this whole topic.

Alan had been building composite versions of himself into his characters for years. His personality, his quirks, his way of engaging with the world. And his characters came across as complete people because of it. Then he was formally diagnosed with ADHD, and he had this really big aha moment. He realized he’d been creating a character in a similar likeness to himself without even knowing it. In thinking about that, he learned something about himself, but he also learned something about the importance of not just intention, but impact.

Having said that, the quirks can and should come up if that is part of who the character is! The main difference is if there is no depth being brought to the character. I have recently been diagnosed with ADHD. Many of my characters in the past have been composite versions of myself, so my own personality characteristics will come out and thus my characters come across as a complete person, quirks and all. Only recently did I realize that I actively portray the more ADHD side of myself in my characters. My wizard character, Ddewiniaid, is very disorganized and easily distracted by technical rabbit holes that can cause him to wax eloquently about the most mundane parts of academic lore or spellcasting, much like myself. Other characters know this and will often use it for a laugh, or an eyeroll, but it’s part of a broader role-play arc that shows an appreciation of Ddewiniaid for who he is and how the party gets along.

That’s what authentic portrayal looks like. The party doesn’t laugh at the ADHD. They roll their eyes at Ddewiniaid’s academic tangents the same way you’d roll your eyes at a friend, and then they move on. It’s part of who he is, not the reason he exists.

Because Alan took the time to build composite versions of himself into characters for years, he brings a deep insight into this. Not just from his PhD and his background in scholarly work, but from how he represents his characters at the table. That combination of lived experience and academic rigor is exactly why I asked him to write this with me.

Alan also pointed to a character in media who gets this right:

Lisbeth Salander from the Millennium series by Stieg Larsson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). I feel that her portrayal of someone who is ambiguously autistic (it’s never outright stated in the books but implied by one of the other protagonists) is excellent. It has her personality just being accepted and interacted with throughout the series and when her neurodivergence causes a plot complication, the reader feels like this is what they would expect from the character that they’ve grown to understand. Larsson never makes the neurodivergence a center of the plot but also doesn’t sugar coat how the other characters react to Salander either. Sometimes her neurodivergent attributes cause other characters to be frustrated with her or worse and this is explored as a normal human interaction. I feel it’s the sense of normal that is the most important part of the portrayal.

The sense of normal. That’s the key. Not erasing the neurodivergence, not spotlighting it, just letting it exist as part of who someone is.

How to Do It Well

So how do you actually do this? Here’s what I’ve found works, both from writing about it and from the conversations that shaped this article.

Show, don’t label. You don’t need to announce a diagnosis. Focus on how neurodivergence shapes the character’s traits, their coping strategies, how they engage with the world around them. Let the behavior speak for itself. If you’ve built the character well, players will recognize the depth without you ever naming a condition.

Build them as a full character first. Every NPC worth running has three layers: physical, psychological, and social. Neurodivergence lives in the psychological layer. It’s one part of who they are, not a replacement for the rest. If you strip out the neurodivergence and the character falls apart, you didn’t build a character. You built a label.

Talk to your players. Open communication before and during the game. Ask if anyone at the table has experiences or boundaries related to this. Be receptive to feedback. This isn’t a one-time conversation. It’s ongoing.

Do your research. Listen to neurodivergent people. Read personal accounts, not just clinical descriptions. There’s a great resource called Limitless Heroics: Including Characters with Disabilities, Mental Illness, and Neurodivergence in Fifth Edition, written by therapists and people from diverse communities. It’s worth your time.

When in doubt, ask. Humility is the whole game. You’re going to get things wrong. That’s not a reason to avoid trying. It’s a reason to stay open, stay curious, and keep listening. Alan said it best: go in with an open mind and an open heart.

Closing: Try With Care

If you have an interest in representing neurodivergency at your tables, talk to your players. I’m not suggesting you ask anyone to out themselves if they haven’t shared. But talk to them about what you want to do and why. If you feel an inkling to try this, do your research and put in the work. Look at other media and how these kinds of characters are represented and showcased.

Remember that a person’s neurodivergency is not their whole identity. It’s a small piece of who they are. If we make it the core of every challenge they encounter, we run into tokenism and generalizing.

If you’re neurodivergent and you want to represent characters as a way to express yourself, that’s wonderful. If you’re neurotypical, like me, we have to answer other questions. Why do we want to do this? Why is it important? And how can we do it respectfully? We do that by doing our research, by making our characters multi-dimensional, by making them feel authentic and living and breathing in the worlds we create.

The real world is neurodiverse. A fantasy world can be too. But it must be done carefully.

It was the second and final day of the con. I’d spent the weekend listening to authors talk about worldbuilding, strong female protagonists, and how to write morally grey characters. One theme kept surfacing in panel after panel: cozy. What cozy means. How it works. The insistence, over and over, that cozy is here to stay.

I’d written about whether D&D can be cozy a while back. That’s Can D&D Be Cozy?. A simple thought experiment. But sitting in a panel on the future of high fantasy, listening to authors name dark academia, grimdark, and cozy as the genres defining the next few years, I stopped thinking about frameworks. I wanted to build something.

I got home, opened a blank page, and spent the next three or four hours doing serious worldbuilding on Cozyvale, a place I’d been carrying around in the back of my head since that original article. This post is what came out of it.

Why Cozy, Why Now

I’ve been in a creative rut for a few months. Not a block exactly. I’ve been shipping. I write a lot of articles here on Substack, and I prep often for my weekly Vecna: Eve of Ruin campaign. But it’s been a while since I felt like I was creating something that was just mine, something that wasn’t for anyone else.

Cozyvale is for me.

One of the panelists made a point that stuck. Horror and cozy hit the same nerve. They answer the same need. People want to escape, and they want to feel safe. Some of us escape by turning the dial all the way up on dread. Some of us escape by turning it all the way down.

My Vecna campaign is the horror dial cranked high. Multiverse monsters, all-powerful gods, stakes that could unmake reality. I love running it. But if you’re living in the US in 2026, you probably don’t need me to tell you that things feel uncertain right now. A lot of us are looking for somewhere soft to land.

That’s what cozy games give people. Stardew Valley. Palia. Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale. Coffee Talk. Books where the stakes are smaller and the light is warmer. Cozyvale is me asking the same question those games ask. Can the worlds we build, and the worlds our players play in, be more relaxing than stressful? Can they be about achieving small things instead of saving the world?

A Tour of Cozytown

Before I thought about regions or geography or history, I thought about a town.

Cozytown is the beating heart of the Vale. A cosmopolitan village dotted with cafes, blessed with sunny days and welcoming of rain. The main challenge on any given day is figuring out what’s for dinner. Most folks would rather read a book and mind their own business.

Here’s what’s there so far:

• Boulder Hill. An oversized boulder sitting right in the middle of town. Nobody knows if it’s the eye of a long-buried giant, or its kidney stone. Children scrawl chalk drawings on it. The rain rinses the canvas clean. I love it because it’s so low-stakes it loops around to being delightful.

• The Cozytown Museum. Held open by a quiet, old magic that responds to what’s inside. Donate an artifact and a wing blooms. Sell one off and the walls crack. Oswald Tealeaf, the curator, has had to sell pieces off to pay rent, and the place has started falling apart. He’s looking for adventurers willing to help him rebuild it by bringing things home.

• In Bean We Trust. Cozytown’s coffeeshop, run by a giraffe named Juniper Demaia. Famous for filthy chais (extra espresso shots softened by the Vale’s magic beans so the spice stays bold). Seasonal bean rotations tied to the weather. A corkboard of found bookmarks, love notes, and grocery lists that customers leave for other customers to pick up or fulfill.

• Munstrous Bakery. Run by an ogre couple, Mister and Melanie Munster. Their cakes and pies are ogre-sized by default, though you can ask for one cut down to human. Mister keeps a journal of failed bakes. Melanie spins cotton candy in flavors like thunderstorm, peanut butter and jelly, and coffee.

• Lots-a-Books. A bookstore built in the shape of an open book. Run by Lots-o, a werebear man in glasses who’s hoarding a private collection he secretly plans to donate to the museum once the set is complete. The top seller right now is Romantasy, of course. A tea station sits in the corner, because Lots-o insists books and tea go together.

None of these were designed. They accreted. I leaned into my silly side and stopped second-guessing. A lot of what I write for my table is serious: end-of-the-world stakes, death around every corner, fate in the players’ hands. But I’m actually a pretty silly, goofy guy in real life. Cozytown is the first place I’ve built that sounds like me when I’m relaxed.

The Kinds of People in the Vale

The Vale has three kinds of people. They are all people.

Humanoids are the D&D you already know: humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, the whole lineup.

Talking animals are the second group. Sentient, bipedal, fully themselves. Raccoons, rabbits, frogs, otters, giraffes. I don’t know how you resist talking to a gopher, or a beaver named Billy. I don’t want to resist it. So they’re here.

Monstroids are the third. They’re the monsters of traditional fantasy, except they’ve been allowed to have personalities. I love monsters in D&D, and it bothers me how rarely they’re allowed to be people. Orcs are vicious. Ogres are stupid. The undead hate the living. That’s the default.

In Cozyvale, the orcs run bakeries. The ogres bake ogre-sized cakes and also regular cakes, because they’re thoughtful. The undead mostly keep gardens.

Coffee Talk pointed the way here. In that game, you pour drinks for orcs and merpeople and werewolves, and none of them are there to fight you. They’re there to talk. Cozyvale runs on that premise.

For the specific cast of Cozytown, I used a structure I’ve been practicing in the last few articles: less physicality, less personality, more Wants and Methods. A few examples:

• Juniper Demaia wants the Vale’s magic beans. Her method is charm. She pulls gossip out of her customers and leaves surprise gifts for regulars.

• Oswald Tealeaf wants his museum whole again. His late wife gave him a stone. He keeps it in his pocket. He’s an otter, and otters collect what their loved ones give them. He hires adventurers and always has a fact at the ready.

• Mister Munster wants to bake the perfect, impossibly large tiramisu. His method is ingredients, experimentation, and a journal of failures (the Avalanche, the Last Resort). Melanie prefers smaller things and spins cotton candy like weather.

• Lots-o wants to complete a set of rare books called Mortimer’s Treatise. His method is buying, quietly. He tells no one about the donation plan.

When I prep a character this way, the hooks write themselves. Oswald needs help. Juniper knows everything. Mister and Melanie are the reason half the town is happy on any given afternoon. Lots-o and Gustopher are already in a running feud over borrowed books that never come home.

Building the Bones

I wrote a chapter on worldbuilding for my upcoming book, and I realized while drafting this post that the chapter was the last time I actually did any worldbuilding. I’d written about the practice without practicing it.

So this weekend I tried to put my own chapter to work.

I went broad first. The Vale as a region. A few pieces of terminology. I didn’t write paragraphs. My background is in writing, and my instinct is to keep editing the first sentence until it sounds finished. That’s how I end up with nothing on the page. So this time I typed the name of a place, three bullets of what made it interesting, and moved on.

I love the phrase filthy chai and had no idea what it meant when I wrote it down. I thought about it later. That’s the order I want. The name or the image first. The explanation second, if at all.

When I hit a gap, I didn’t fill it with prose. I asked a question. How do you get from one side of town to the other? There’s a river. What’s the river called? River Tam. Where does it start? Misty Falls. Where does it end? Beaver Lake. What do people do at Beaver Lake? Swim. Have picnics. Cause low-stakes mischief. Good enough. Next question.

Some sections are still just flags. Geography is a stub. The Vale’s history is a stub. I haven’t figured out what the monstroids’ cultures look like or where the other settlements are. I left big yellow TO DEVELOP notes in those places and walked away. They’ll get filled in when I’m ready. Not before.

The process felt good. Slow, methodical, generous with itself. No pressure to make any one piece load-bearing.

What Comes Next

Eventually I’ll think about mechanics. How cozy play actually runs at the table. How bastions, to-do lists, spells, and gear shift when the genre shifts. That’s a different article, and I’m not there yet.

For now, I just wanted to build a place and share it. Thanks for reading.

Quick Review

A plot is a sequence of events you expect to happen. A situation is a set of circumstances that will play out differently depending on what the players do. The stuff you need for situations is mostly the same stuff you were already prepping: the locations, the NPCs, the environments. You just stop chaining them together in a fixed order. In my first article, I gave you four questions to start with. In my second, I showed what happened when I ran Castle Ravenloft that way. This article is the deeper process behind all of it.

What You’ll Walk Away With

By the end of this article, my goal is for you to take any session concept and break it into situational prep that you can run at the table. We’re going to build a simple example from scratch, step by step, so you can follow along with your own prep and see how it works.

The quintessential D&D monster: goblins. Goblins are great. They’re fun, they’re low-level threats, but they can turn into complex enemies the more things we give them. So here’s our scenario: a goblin warband has moved into the area and taken over an abandoned silver mine. They’re extorting a nearby village where a blacksmith has been quietly feeding the goblins information. Pointing them at competitors and businesses he wants gone. The village doesn’t know that yet.

Simple concept to teach with, one hidden thread to pull on later, and complex enough to show you every step.

Step 1: NPCs — What Do They Want?

The core of situation prep. Every NPC that matters gets two questions:

1. What do they want?

2. How do they get it?

Answering these two questions helps you build situations based on those ambitions. While backstory and personality can help you flavor those aspects, they emerge by answering these two questions.

Deciding which NPCs matter:

Because deciding who or what is important can be challenging on its own, here are some questions to help guide you to your decision.

• Who are the antagonists? (the goblin boss, the shady blacksmith)

• Are there allies or neutral parties? (the village elder, a trapped miner)

• Want a wild card or silly NPC? (an NPC whose goals don’t align with either side)

The running example applied:

• Shengis (goblin boss)

  • What do they want? Riches, gold, and military influence. They just moved into this abandoned silver mine and they want power.

  • How do they get it? Extort the nearby village for tribute. Send scouts. Raid when it suits them. Steal weapons to arm the warband.

• Baird McNutt (village blacksmith)

  • What do they want? To be the only business in town. Not great scruples.

  • How do they get it? Feeds the goblins information about which areas of town to raid; areas that happen to be his competition. Leaves caches of weapons for the goblins so his shop doesn’t get hit. Always seen crafting weapons but never actually selling them.

• Joel Oxen (village mayor)

  • What do they want? The goblins gone. Cares about the village and its people. A decent person in over his head.

  • How do they get it? Tries to hire adventurers with whatever meager coin the village has. Willing to overtax the village to scrape together a reward. Might offer favors, land, or future trade agreements if gold isn’t enough. Desperate enough to accept help on bad terms.

Three NPCs, a few bullet points each. Their personality can grow organically from what they want and how they get it. That’s enough to run them. If you desire to go deeper on NPC design, recurring or important NPCs get the full treatment. A random guard at the gate gets a want (”keep my post, go home alive”) and nothing else.

Step 2: Assets are the Pieces on the Board

Assets are everything that exists in situational prep that can be used, deployed, or interacted with either by the players, the monsters, the NPCS, or all of the above. They’re your inventory and it helps to know what you’re able to play with.

Asset categories:

• Creatures: Monsters, minions, allies. Not simply just deciding on stat blocks but also choosing what role they play. (The goblin wolf riders are scouts. The dire wolf in the mine is chained as a guard.)

• Objects and items: A MacGuffin, a trapped chest, a magical artifact, spell scrolls hidden in a library. Things players and NPCs can use.

• Traps and hazards: Collapsing tunnels, alarm bells, poisoned food. Things that create consequences.

• Social leverage: A hostage, a secret, a debt owed. Things that create pressure without combat.

Assets are levers you can pull. Some belong to the villain. Some belong to the environment. Some the players can claim for themselves. Who controls them should shape your list: their nature and resources suggest what items, traps, and support they can realistically field.

The running example applied:

Creatures:

• Shengis — Goblin Hexer stat block. The boss.

• Grik and Vassk (lieutenants) — Goblin Boss stat blocks. Shengis keeps the coin away from them in hidden jars and stashes. They’re loyal but not trusted.

• 30 goblins — Goblin Warrior stat blocks. 10 guard the mine entrance, 10 patrol the nearby vicinity on watch for threats, 10 in reserve or sleeping.

• 8 wolves — Wolf stat blocks. Split into two patrol packs of 4, ridden by goblin scouts on wolfback.

• Mother wolf — Dire Wolf stat block. Chained deeper in the mine as a guardian. Not roaming. You have to go to her.

• Baird McNutt — Commoner stat block. Not a fighter. His danger is information, not combat.

Objects and items:

• Stolen loot: 250 gp, 75 sp, 55 cp. Shengis keeps the gold in a trapped chest (poison dart trap). The silver and copper are scattered in jars and hiding places throughout the mine, to quench the greed of his underlings and lieutenants.

• A scroll of fireball, stolen from a wizard in town. Shengis is trying to figure out how to use it. Also in the chest. This is a ticking time bomb if the players don’t find it first.

• Mayor Oxen’s reward money — whatever meager coin the village scrapes together.

Traps and hazards:

• Chicken alarm — A cage of chickens covered by a cloth, linked to a tripwire at the mine entrance. Trip the wire, the cloth lifts, and the chickens go ballistic. Every goblin in earshot knows you’re here. It’s dumb and it’s perfect.

• Poison dart chest — Shengis’s treasure chest. Open it wrong and you take a needle to the hand.

• Concealed tunnels — The mine splits into multiple passages. The goblins have disguised which tunnel leads deeper into the lair and which ones are dead ends or trapped. A pit trap with sharpened stakes covers one false route.

Social leverage:

• McNutt’s weapon caches — Hidden stashes of goblin-sized weapons tucked in or near the blacksmith’s shop. If the players search his shop, they find weapons that clearly aren’t for sale: dusty display stock, blades that haven’t moved in months, and a suspicious lack of inventory for a supposedly thriving business.

• McNutt’s information trail — The goblins know which shops to hit and which to skip. If the players talk to enough villagers, the pattern points back to the blacksmith.

Every item on this list is a lever you can pull. The chicken alarm means the goblins can prepare if the players aren’t stealthy. The scroll of fireball means Shengis might use it in desperation, or the players could claim it. McNutt’s dusty weapons are evidence the players can find if they’re looking. Each asset exists so you can do something with it when the moment comes.

Step 3: Environments — What Locations Do Your Situations Need?

Once you know what the NPCs want, how they get it, and what assets are on the board, the environments you need to design become obvious. You’re not inventing locations out of thin air. You’re looking at your prep and asking: where does this stuff happen?

This is Justin Alexander’s dirty secret in action. The locations you need for a situation are mostly the same ones you’d need if you were plotting the adventure sequentially. You just stop chaining them together in a fixed order. Instead, you design each location as a place the players can interact with however they choose.

For our goblin mine example, the NPCs and assets tell us what we need:

• The silver mine itself — Shengis’s lair. Where the goblins live, where the loot is stashed, where they keep the wolves. The tunnels, the traps, the concealed passageways.

• The village — Where Oxen is trying to hire help, where McNutt runs his shop, where the extortion payments are happening. The players’ temporary base of operations and their source of information.

• McNutt’s blacksmith shop — Where he hides the evidence. The weapons, the goblin caches, the trail that leads back to him.

• The surrounding area — Where the wolf patrols ride. A potential combat encounter. The road between the village and the mine, anywhere the players might scout, get ambushed, or set up an ambush themselves.

I looked at Shengis, McNutt, and Oxen and decided: this is what I need to prep for my session to happen. I’m only focusing on the details that matter, and by details I mean specific environments. If something in town doesn’t impart a major decision or interaction, I don’t need to flesh it out beyond a basic note or a sentence.

The question for each location is: what can the players do here? Not what you want them to do but simply what’s possible.

Step 4: What Happens If the Players Do Nothing?

The idea of fronts, borrowed from Dungeon World, is that NPCs advance their agendas while the players do other things or do nothing at all. Shengis doesn’t freeze in place waiting for the players to show up and fight him or attack his lair. If the players spend a day in town, maybe the goblins raid the village. Maybe the villagers spot goblin scouts riding wolves on the outskirts. Maybe someone finds a mysterious cache of weapons just laying around that has no reason to be there. McNutt keeps feeding information. The world moves forward whether the players act or not.

Write down the things that can happen if the players don’t intervene. Not a fixed schedule. A list of elements you can deploy when the moment is right. The goblins’ plan. The NPC agendas playing out. The villain winning. These don’t have to happen in order. They’re things that can happen, and you pull from them as the session unfolds.

This gives you:

• A clock. Things are moving. The players feel urgency because the world doesn’t wait.

• A fallback. If the players go somewhere unexpected, you know what’s happening in the background.

• Consequences. If the players delay or take a long rest, the situation escalates.

The running example applied:

• The players arrive in town. Some buildings are burned down. The people are scared. They point the players to the mayor’s office. Oxen makes his pitch.

• Goblin scouting parties appear on the horizon. Wolf riders on the outskirts. This hints that the lair is nearby and gives the players a chance to follow them back.

• A cache of goblin weapons appears in town, placed near a building that hasn’t been raided yet. McNutt is positioning the next target.

• The goblins raid the village. More aggressive than before. Buildings burn. Oxen is desperate. A villager notices the pattern: the blacksmith’s shop is never touched.

• Shengis sends an ultimatum. Pay double or the village burns. McNutt volunteers to “negotiate,” positioning himself as a hero while protecting his arrangement. He quietly moves his most valuable stock out of the shop.

None of these are locked to a specific day. They’re elements you have ready. If the players spend time investigating, you drop the scouts on the horizon. If they ignore the village and head straight for the mine, the raid happens while they’re gone. You pick from the list based on what the players are doing, and the world feels alive because it’s reacting around them.

Step 5: Mechanics — The Nuts and Bolts

Everything up to this point has been narrative. Now we make it playable. Situational prep front-loads the narrative work so that when you get to mechanics, you already know what you’re building encounters for.

What to define:

• Combat encounters: How many creatures are in this fight, what types, what’s the terrain like, and what’s their objective?

• DCs for traps and skill checks: Based on the player’s level and specific situations. Sneaking past the chicken alarm? Harder if the lookout isn’t killed. Convincing Oxen to give you more than he’s offering? DC lowers the more desperate he becomes. The situation imparts guidance on what the DC could be based on the rules in the DMG.

• What happens when the players fail a check: Failed the stealth check? The alarm goes off. Now every goblin in the mine knows you’re here. Failed the Investigation check at McNutt’s shop? You don’t find the weapon caches, but maybe you notice the dust on his stock and get suspicious. Failed the Persuasion check with Oxen? He doesn’t give you extra resources, but he still wants the goblins gone. Failure has a consequence, but it doesn’t end the adventure. It changes what happens next.

The running example applied:

The mine has four rooms connected by tunnels, with false passages branching off to dead ends and traps. The players won’t face all 30 goblins at once. It just helps to know what you have available to deploy.

Mine Entrance

• Chicken alarm tripwire. DC 15 Perception to spot. The goblins set it off themselves a few times, so they didn’t make it too hard. Just hard enough.

• 7 goblins lounging or on guard. They come at once if the alarm trips. They fight to delay, not to kill. They want to trigger the alarm and retreat deeper into the mine. If they lose 3-4 of their group, the rest scatter.

• False tunnels branch off from here. DC 16 Investigation to identify the correct path before walking into a dead end. The goblins did a good job disguising which tunnel leads deeper. One false route ends in a pit trap: cloth covering over sharpened stakes.

Wolf Den

• During the day, the wolves are out on patrol. Only the mother wolf is here, chained. At night, 3 wolves are sleeping alongside her.

• Leads to Shengis’s chamber. The mother wolf is the last line of defense before the boss.

Goblin Sleeping Area

• Not a barracks. More of a messy communal space where the off-duty goblins rest.

• The lieutenants Grik and Vassk have their own smaller alcoves near Shengis’s chamber. Their spaces have scattered silver and copper in jars and hiding spots. DC 14 Investigation to find most of the stashed loot.

Shengis’s Chamber

• Shengis and his two lieutenants with a cadre of 5 goblins. Adjust encounter difficulty using XP thresholds from the DMG based on the party’s level.

• The trapped chest. DC 15 Thieves’ Tools to pick the lock. DC 17 Sleight of Hand to disarm the poison dart needle. The lock is goblin-quality. The trap isn’t. Shengis stole it off someone who knew what they were doing.

• Contains: 250 gp, the scroll of fireball.

McNutt’s Blacksmith Shop - Separate Location

• DC 15 Investigation to find the hidden storage area where the goblin weapon caches are stashed.

• The shop itself is a clue even without finding the hidden room. Dusty display stock, weapons that haven’t moved, a blacksmith who’s always crafting but never selling.

How Situations Chain Together

If you’ve done the work above, the chains happen at the table, and they’re not scripted in order. You anticipate the most likely approaches and trust your prep to handle the rest.

• If the players investigate the village first, the trail leads to McNutt before they ever reach the mine.

• If the players follow the wolf scouts, they find the mine entrance and have to deal with the alarm.

• If the players try to negotiate with Shengis, the lieutenants’ greed becomes a lever.

That’s really all the anticipation you need and the rest can happen as the session unfolds.

Give it a try!

If you’re having difficulty re-aligning your sequential prep into situational prep, run it through these steps:

1. NPCs: Who’s here? What do they want? How do they get it?

2. Assets: What’s on the board? What can you, the NPCs, and the players use?

3. Environment: What constraints does the space create?

4. Advancing Events: What happens if the players never show up?

5. Mechanics: What are the DCs, encounters, and consequences?

You don’t need paragraphs for any of this. A few bullet points of short sentences, list of assets, and things that can happen. That’s prepping situations!

The 88-Room Problem

Castle Ravenloft in Curse of Strahd is 88 rooms. Eighty-eight. There are random encounter tables, hidden treasure rooms, secret doors, trapped hallways, and enough named NPCs to fill a small village. It is a masterpiece of dungeon design and it is completely unusable at the table if you try to run it as written.

Not because it’s bad. Because your players don’t experience 88 rooms. They experience the handful they choose to walk into, the one NPC they decide to talk to, and the single moment where everything goes sideways.

So I didn’t run Castle Ravenloft as written. I rewrote it in situations.

My players had been in Barovia for five sessions at this point, searching for the fourth piece of the Rod of Seven Parts. They’re level 14. They’d already dealt with Strahd in Death House, where I’d prepped him as someone interested in the Rod piece, believing it’s his by right of domain. But he’s too proud to just take it. He wants it given to him willingly.

In my last article, I talked about how when the conversation in Death House was stalling, Strahd created an opportunity. He invited the party to stay at his home. Castle Ravenloft. Sleep there. Explore. And decide by breakfast whether they’d hand over the Rod piece, fight him, or find another way.

He wasn’t being generous. Bringing them to his castle meant he controlled the environment. His home, his minions, his rules. Another way to toy with his food before the inevitability of it all… at least from his perspective.

Coming out of Death House, I was nervous about repeating the same experience. Death House is a massive dungeon with a lot of rooms that don’t do a whole lot. Ravenloft is also massive, but there’s a lot more the players can actually do in it. The vibe going in was that the players most likely expected a fight. I prepped for that. But I also knew that if they spent the night in Castle Ravenloft, they were going to want to explore it. They’d been asking to.

So I had to make 88 rooms into something I could actually run in a single session.

What I Cut

The original module has a random encounter table with 20 entries. Brooms of animated attack. Crawling claws. A mannequin on a pulley system dressed as Strahd. I cut all of that. But honestly, the random encounters were the easy part.

What I actually did with them was repurpose the random encounter roster as Strahd’s combat inventory. If a fight broke out, these were his assets. Zombies, ghouls, wolves, shadows. They stopped being random and became deliberate tools Strahd could deploy.

The real cutting happened with the rooms and the plotlines.

I knew I never wanted my players to go into the cellars, the lower parts of the castle where Strahd’s casket is. Easy cut. I knew that the bedrooms where his wives and consorts are, the Barovian witches’ cauldron, and a bunch of other self-contained encounters weren’t going to do anything except overcomplicate what I actually had going. Cut those too.

What I focused on was knowing my players and knowing the kinds of rooms they’d want to see.

One of my players likes finding and hoarding treasure. So: is there a treasure room already in the castle? I don’t have to homebrew it. Another character is obsessed with books and libraries. Is there a room for that? Another player loves interacting with NPCs because they want to create a ruse. Are there NPCs worth having to make that fun?

This is the thing. It didn’t feel weird cutting published content because this is what DMs do. We cut and adjust things to suit our tables. The campaign book is a way to run something, not the way. The real challenge was getting the remaining pieces to fit together so it felt streamlined and manageable.

The other challenge was the maps. The battle maps that come with Curse of Strahd are enormous. So I didn’t show my players any maps at all. I had them roll survival checks to navigate the castle. If there was a logical way to get somewhere without bumping into a trap or a thing, a survival check got them there. The rooms were the situations. Getting to the rooms wasn’t.

That cut the travel time and let us focus on what mattered: what happens when they walk through the door.

NPCs Who Want Things

The module gives you Strahd, Rahadin, and some minor motivations with the wives and consorts. But most of the castle’s NPCs are either monsters to fight or victims to rescue.

I needed NPCs who would create situations through their own desires. So I kept Rahadin and brought in three supporting vampires. These three had already appeared at Death House when Strahd first encountered the players, so their motivations were established:

• Strauss (butler): Wants pomp and circumstance. The station of his position matters to him. Hates impropriety.

• Karina (servant): Hates Strahd. Hates cleaning up after his “toys.” Would betray him. But would betray the players too if threatened.

• Vaust (bodyguard): Wants all fellow vampires defended. Craves order and the status quo.

None of them are allies. None of them are enemies. They’re people with agendas that sometimes align with the players and sometimes don’t. Every interaction with one of these three creates a decision.

And then there’s Beltraud.

Beltraud is a homebrew NPC. Earlier in the campaign, my players wanted a guide to Barovia, and I thought it would be funny to have this very silly, mall goth-style poser whose every other word is “darkness” and who only speaks in lyrical poetry when he can manage it. He’d only ever read about Barovia. Never actually been there. I kept that secret for a while.

My players forget NPCs constantly. They forget names, faces, entire characters. But Beltraud was the one they all remembered. He was funny. He tried to romance one of the player characters, a gothy wizard named Lyra, because she wore a lot of black too. Clearly a match made in heaven (or the veiled darkness), at least in his mind.

The party’s relationship with him grew over sessions, but I wouldn’t say they cared about him. More that he was funny and interesting, which as a DM is sometimes the best you can hope for. They still treated him like a nuisance. We’re way more powerful than you, dude. Stay out of the way. But when Beltraud got hurt in Death House, they healed him. Saved his life.

I didn’t plan for Beltraud to matter as much as he did. He was a throwaway NPC, a few sentences in my notes. But when your players latch onto a character, you now have another tool. Another lever to pull when you’re running situations and looking for ways to make interesting things happen.

Rooms as Situations

Every room I kept was a standalone situation. I didn’t prep them with specific outcomes in mind. I didn’t design paths to combat, escape, or conversation. I just prepped the rooms and whatever happened, happened. The rooms’ only connection to each other was the overall theme: Strahd’s castle, Strahd’s rules, and the undercurrent of what the players were going to decide by morning.

I also framed the whole visit around three possible objectives for the players: fight Strahd directly, deal with Strahd and be let go, or find an alternative pressure point. That third option was the Heart of Sorrow.

The Library

Strahd’s library has over a thousand books worth a fortune, a portrait of Tatyana hanging over the fireplace, and a secret door behind that fireplace. It’s a focal point not because of lore but because of what it offers. A book-obsessed character gets a room full of rare tomes. I hid spell scrolls throughout the collection at varying DCs, so a curious wizard gets rewarded for digging. And the secret door leads directly to the false treasury.

The library is also where the players can learn about Tatyana, about who Strahd was before he became what he is. Not because I told them to look. Because the portrait is right there, and players ask questions.

The False Treasury

Piles of coins on the floor. A big, innocent-looking treasure chest. Classic adventurer bait. The room is dark, so darkvision picks up coins but can’t distinguish gold from copper. The chest releases sleeping gas. DC 18 Constitution save. Anyone who goes down gets found.

Strahd told the party not to steal from him. This room exists to see if they’ll listen.

The Accountant’s Office

Lief Lipsiege, chained to a desk, scratching away on an endless scroll. He’s been Strahd’s accountant longer than he can remember. Grumpy. Not interested in the players or their problems. But if treated with kindness, he’ll talk. He knows where things are in the castle. He can sketch a map to the Heart of Sorrow.

This room works because it rewards a different kind of player. Not the treasure hunter, not the book lover. The player who talks to everyone and treats NPCs like people.

The Heart of Sorrow

A 10-foot-diameter red crystal heart floating in a tower. It absorbs all damage meant for Strahd. Destroy it and he becomes vulnerable. Leave it and any fight against him is hopeless.

The players never actually got there this session. But it was prepped as a potential objective, a pressure point they could discover through the accountant, through the ancestor spirits in the Hall of Heroes, or through Karina if they built enough trust. Three different NPCs, three different relationships, three different paths to the same critical intel.

That’s situation prep. You don’t need the players to find everything. You need the things to be findable.

How One Situation Created the Next

This is the part that situation prep is actually about. Not the rooms. Not the cuts. The chain reactions. How one thing creates the next, and how the pieces on the board shift based on what the players do.

I knew when it was time to explore that my players would go to the library. I knew the library connects to the false treasury. One of my players loves gold. We know psychologically it’s impossible to resist a treasure chest.

So the gas knocks him out. He misses the save by one. DC 18, rolled 17. In my prep, I had Rahadin as the consequence. He’d find the open door, find the player, and take them prisoner.

But the player who went to explore the treasury had brought Beltraud along. Not for any strategic reason. Just “bring him along, just in case.” And when the other players realized through their psychic link that this player was unconscious and not responding, Lyra, the book-loving wizard, headed to the library to check on him.

She found Beltraud pacing in front of the fireplace, panicked. He hasn’t come out. I don’t know what to do. I just worry something’s going to happen.

Lyra went into the treasury. And that’s when I realized: Beltraud is sitting out here alone, and Rahadin is coming.

So Rahadin arrives. Sees the treasury door open. And Beltraud, this goofy mall goth who’s been trailing after the party for sessions, who Lyra’s character tolerates and the others have saved twice, does something I hadn’t planned. He covers for them. “It was me! I did it! I was just roaming around the house and bumped into this. Just looking around.”

That’s a new situation. I didn’t prep it. Beltraud’s motivation created it. He’s fond of these people who showed him kindness. Of course he’d cover for them.

Strahd, of course, knows everything happening in his castle. But he loves the way this is playing out. A character sacrificing themselves for the party? That’s juicy. He lets it happen.

Now we get to breakfast. And breakfast, which I’d originally prepped as a simple “what’s your decision?” scene, suddenly has weight. Because Strahd has Beltraud strung up from the chandeliers in the dining hall. Blood dripping from his neck into a large bowl. The vampires eventually drinking from it. This is what happens when you steal from me.

I kept calling out the blood. Every time there was a lull in the conversation, every time the players paused to think: drip, drip, drip. From the ceiling. Off Beltraud’s foot.

The tension split the party. Lyra wanted to kill Beltraud out of mercy. The other players said immediately: if you do that, we fight Strahd. Right here. Right now. So that option’s off the table, or it starts a war.

And then the players did something I truly did not expect.

They appealed to Strahd’s humanity. What little might be left of it. They’d heard about Ireena from the NPCs. They’d seen the portrait of Tatyana in the library. They knew about his obsession, his loneliness, the prison he’d made for himself. And they made a play: this is a land without love. Have you tried to be better?

Strahd is irredeemable. He is a monster. He cannot be saved. And I wasn’t going to pull an enemies-to-lovers moment or have him tearfully reconsider his ways. Instead, I played it as boredom. “How droll. How romantic. How utterly boring.” He’d heard enough. He was done.

That lull of being bored was its own kind of response. Whatever. Just go.

But I wanted to give the players something. A tiny piece of reward for a genuinely creative play. So Strahd asked them: “Can I hold the Rod piece? Can I try to use it before you leave?”

The players were terrified he’d just take it. Ten insight checks later, they handed it over. The Rod piece casts regeneration. And I had Strahd try to cast it on himself, knowing it wouldn’t cure his vampirism. He tried. It didn’t work. He handed it back, nonplussed.

“I guess this doesn’t work.”

A smidge of a redemption arc. Barely there. Present for a moment and then gone. Because that’s who Strahd is. He wanted to see if magic could fix what he’d done to himself. It can’t.

None of this was plotted. The NPCs had desires. The rooms had consequences. But I didn’t prep the party appealing to Strahd’s humanity. I didn’t prep the Rod piece moment. I could riff on it because the foundation was there. That’s the whole point.

Situations Create Moments

This helped me pick and choose locations and characters that create conflict. And conflict doesn’t have to mean combat. Conflict is talking, fighting, reasoning, bartering. Conflict is the encounter itself.

Picking the rooms that I knew my players wanted to explore created tension, and it created multiple situations when the undercurrent of the whole session was one thing: Strahd wants the Rod piece and he wants it given to him.

When you prep situations rather than plots, anything can happen and you’re more ready for it. You’re able to reposition the pieces on the board when the unexpected shows up. Compare that to the alternative: I know the players are going to explore, I know they’re going to get captured, I guarantee that happens, and then breakfast is a boss fight I’ve spent three hours prepping that they now avoid because they talked their way out. That version feels less fun for everyone.

We’re always going to change published material. That’s just what running a game looks like. But treat the elements, pre-written or otherwise, as opportunities to create situations and moments. Not scripts to follow. Opportunities.

For years, every session I prepped looked like that. I thought my writing background was making me a better DM. Turns out it was quietly shaping my prep in ways I hadn’t thought to question.

The dinner that broke my brain

My players are in Barovia looking to collect the fourth piece to the Rod of Seven Parts. And after fighting demons and cultists, they were meeting Strahd face-to-face for the first time. Not in combat. At dinner.

I wanted this to be more than “you fight the vampire.” I wanted tension, diplomacy, manipulation. So I prepped a full evening: dinner with Strahd and his supporting staff, a dessert course with a cake-cutting puzzle (the knife could only cut thirds, but Strahd wanted half because he’s a hungry vampire), a stroll around Barovia so Strahd could show off his domain, and finally the pitch. “Give me the Rod piece. It’s mine. Everything in this realm is mine.”

I had a lot of fun with the concept; since the book originally said, “Players must fight Strahd to leave.” I wanted to try and elevate the finale of the chapter. One problem: I’d prepped it like a screenplay.

Dinner. Then dessert. Then the walk. Then the pitch. In that order. Like a restaurant’s tasting menu nobody asked for.

And the moment I wrote it down, the what-ifs started filling my brain:

• What if the players don’t sit down and just attack him? All that prep goes to the wayside.

• What if they want dessert first, or a walk before the meal so they can find an avenue of escape?

• What if they ignore Strahd entirely and fixate on the butler who’s this ghoulish vampire spawn carrying a skull?

• What if I’m just railroading them into an inevitable fight, and all of this is window dressing?

I’d built a beautiful sequence. But remember that adage, no plan survives contact with the players.

The literary brain struggle

Here’s the thing about having a writing background: It’s easy to think in acts. Everything builds toward one inevitable conclusion with the players as the main characters. It’s how I was trained. Inciting incident leads to development leads to confrontation leads to resolution. Clean. Linear. Literary.

It works great for novels. Not so great for D&D.

And I didn’t just do this with sessions. I did it with entire character arcs. Here’s an actual example from one of my PCs, Azrothar:

• Inciting incident: Blood moon birth establishes infernal heritage and unknown devil father connection

• Development: Signs of Ilmater’s interest manifest; Helson’s condition worsens in Azrothar’s presence; Lyra discovers Helson’s private writings

• Confrontation/choice: Azrothar must confront the truth about his devil father and choose between infernal heritage and divine intervention

• Resolution: Resolve Helson’s deteriorating condition and determine the nature of Ilmater’s involvement

I wrote that super long ago. Re-reading it now, I’m struck by how vague it is. The opening comes from the player’s backstory, sure. But what signs of Ilmater (the God of Endurance) manifest? What if the player chooses not to confront that truth, or doesn’t care about helping Helson? What truth?? How does the character confront any of this?

See how literary it is? And how little of it is actually playable?

There are huge gaps between each beat. I always told myself I’d fill them in later. I rarely did, because there was always some other plot to develop or flesh out. Meanwhile the actual sessions kept happening, and I kept improvising through the gaps anyway.

That’s what plotting looks like. A sequence of events with holes you hope to fill, and a destination that’s locked in before anyone rolls a single die.

A blog post from 2009

A few years back, while browsing advice threads on r/DMAcademy, I kept seeing the same phrase: “Prep situations, not plots.” It pointed back to a blog post by Justin Alexander on The Alexandrian, written in March 2009. Seventeen years ago.

I read it, thought “huh, that’s smart,” and promptly forgot about it. Then I hit that wall with the Strahd dinner. And the phrase crept back into my mind since I was getting frustrated why it felt like so much work to plot everything out.

Alexander’s argument is straightforward. A plot is a sequence of events you expect to happen. A situation is a set of circumstances that will play out differently depending on what the players do. When you prep a plot, you’re writing a script for actors who haven’t read it. When you prep a situation, you’re building a playground and letting the kids loose.

He puts it better than I can so let me summarize: Plot-based prep is like handing your players a map with a route drawn in invisible ink and requiring them to follow it. Situation-based prep is handing them the map and saying “figure out where you’re going.”

The part that really got me was what he calls “the dirty secret.” Every step in a plotted sequence is a potential point of failure. If the players skip a scene, do something unexpected, or simply don’t care about the thing you assumed they’d care about, the prep breaks. You either throw it out or you start railroading. But here’s the thing: the stuff you need for situations is mostly the same stuff you were already prepping. The locations. The NPCs. The environments. You just stop chaining them together in a fixed order.

Less work and more flexibility but the story still happens. It just emerges from play instead of from your outline.

Where I got stuck

Reading about it is one thing. Actually doing it? That’s where my literary brain threw a little bit of a tantrum.

My first confusion: so things don’t happen... in order? Where do the game mechanics come in? Is this really just “give your NPCs motivations and call it a day”?

No. A situation isn’t just motivations. It’s the whole board. It’s knowing that a fight could happen, so you prep where it could happen. It’s knowing your NPCs have goals, so you think about what challenges, traps, terrain, or complications their actions might create. A situation can absolutely be “something happens, and it’s happening here. Or maybe over there.” It’s also thinking about what assets these individuals, groups, and factions have at their disposal. Like an inventory.

Sometimes when you’re trying a new technique, you forget the processes you already know. Like, of course the next thing after writing NPC motivations is thinking about the environment and the encounter design. That part of my brain didn’t disappear. It just needed a minute to reconnect with the new framing.

The other thing that tripped me up was the transition itself. I’ve been prepping sequentially for years. Rewiring that instinct doesn’t happen in one session. My brain kept wanting to put things in order. Dinner then dessert then walk. I had to consciously stop myself and ask: does the order actually matter here? Or does it just feel like it should because that’s how I’ve always done it?

Can D&D prep be like a stew?

Here’s the metaphor that made it click for me.

Sequential prep is like following a recipe. Step one: sear the meat. Step two: add the vegetables. Step three: simmer for forty minutes. Skip a step or do them out of order and you ruin the dish.

Situation-based prep is like building a stew. You’ve got your broth. That’s the core situation, the central conflict. Everything else is ingredients. And it doesn’t particularly matter what order you toss them in, because they’re all going to cook together.

For the Strahd dinner, the broth was simple: Strahd wants the Rod piece.

Everything else — the dinner, the dessert puzzle, the walk, the NPCs — were ingredients I could add whenever the players created an opening for them.

So I prepped it that way:

Strahd’s goals

• He wants the Rod piece because it’s in his realm, and everything in his realm is his

• His pride means he won’t just take it. He wants it given to him

• He wants to test and entertain himself with these new playthings (the PCs)

• He wants to demonstrate his absolute authority over Barovia

The supporting cast (not just stat blocks, people with wants)

• Strauss (butler): Wants pomp and circumstance. The station of his position matters to him. Hates impropriety.

• Karina (servant): Tolerates Strahd. Tired of cleaning up his “toys” after he gets bored. Delights in giving false hope to victims who mistake her annoyance for genuine sympathy.

• Vaust (bodyguard): Wants all vampires defended because they are the superior species. Craves order and the status quo.

The environment

Death House. A dinner table. A cake with a puzzle. Barovia outside for a potential stroll (description and lore). A castle that Strahd controls completely (backup plan).

If the players do nothing

Strahd continues his pitch. In his mind he’s already won but he’s patient. He has eternity.

No sequence. No script. Just pieces on a board, ready to move in whatever direction the players push them.

What happened at the table

I ran this last Thursday. Because Strahd’s goals were clear in my head, not a script, just what he wanted, he could be completely open with the players. He told them exactly what he was after. He was diplomatic. Charming, even. And the players could feel that a fight wouldn’t break out unless they forced it. So they leaned in. They sat down. They talked. They listened.

And then the cake happened.

Once the puzzle was out of the way, Strahd asked whoever cut the cake to give two slices to their favorite people at the table. One player gave a slice to a fellow PC. And then, instead of giving the second to another party member, gave it to Karina the servant girl.

Now, because I knew Karina’s motivations, I knew exactly how to play this. She looked at Strahd uncertainly. This wasn’t part of the plan. See, the cake was poisoned. Or rather, it would kill whoever ate it, and Karina’s job was to cast gentle repose on the bodies afterward so Strahd could give the players scrolls of revivify. A little demonstration of Strahd’s power and his “generosity” in bringing them back.

But now Karina was holding a slice meant for her.

She hesitated. Strahd commanded her to eat it.

And then, because I knew how this whole situation worked, not a script but a machine with moving parts, Strahd turned to the players and said:

“Well. She was the one who would have cast Gentle Repose on your friend’s corpses. But no matter.”

He forced the players to wait the agonizing 50 seconds (revivify cannot resurrect after one minute) before he tossed scrolls of Revivify across the table.

“I am nothing if not magnanimous.”

None of that was scripted. All of it was possible because every person at that table, NPC and player alike, had a goal, a motivation, and a role in the situation. The story wrote itself from the collision of those pieces.

The rest of the evening played out the same way. Strahd made his diplomatic case. The players tried to barter. When things started to stall, Strahd offered them a choice: take some time, rest if you need to, but you’ll do it at my castle. Because if you’re just stalling so you can recover your strength and fight me? I choose the battlefield.

And now I have a castle to prep. Because my players’ choices made that the next situation.

Try this with your next session

Take whatever you’re prepping right now and ask yourself: am I writing a sequence, or am I building a board?

If you catch yourself thinking “first this happens, then this happens, then this,” take a moment. Instead, write down:

1. Who is here? Not just names and stat blocks. What do they want?

2. What’s the environment? Not just a map. What opportunities, dangers, or secrets does it hold?

3. What happens if the players do nothing? This is your default timeline. The story that unfolds without interference.

4. What are a few things the players might try? Don’t plan for all of them. Just get a sense of the space so you’re not blindsided.

That’s your situation. The story comes from what your players do with it.

This isn’t about throwing away everything you know. It’s about changing the container. Instead of a recipe, you’re building a stew. The broth is the core conflict. Everything else is an ingredient. And it doesn’t matter what order they go in.

Alexander’s original article is worth reading in full. It’s been around since 2009 and it’s still one of the best pieces of DMing advice on the internet. I just wish I’d actually listened the first time I read it.