If you find yourself skipping over one of the big areas, it's probably not that interesting to you and likely won't be for your players. Even if you have no idea who the hell Xarak is, it helps you get some neurons fired up thinking about it. ![]() The "Altar of Suffering" evokes more than "Evil Altar" and "Xarak's Tomb" is better than "Old Tomb". Use specific names even though you're writing down big chunks. With your head full of fantastic imagery, start writing down the big areas you see the PCs potentially exploring. Spend some time surfing Deviant Art and you're likely to find something to fire up the imagination. Fantasy art, in particular, can give you some great ideas for adding the fantastic in a fantastic location. There is no such thing as theft with this idea. Use everything you can to help you model the location you want to create. Good ideas come from everywhere, both in the real world and from the minds of other creative beings. We've discussed the importance of filling your skull with fantastic ideas before in Develping Your DM Brain Attic and Getting Ideas. Let's dig into these steps in a bit more detail. Like many of the tools of the lazy dungeon master, it's designed to give you enough material to feel comfortable without so much that you can't let intersting things happen spontanously at the table. Jotting down the large chunks and the specific details of your area is a lot faster than trying to absorb an entire dungeon from a published adventure and gives you a lot of room to fill it in with your own interesting details. ![]() Let it fill up by you and your players as the game plays out.īesides step one, this sounds deceptively simple, but it's really not much harder than you think. Draw lines between these locations so you know what connects to what.This might be the names of individual rooms or specific locations. Fill in some specific locations for each of these large areas.They might be locations around a small village. They might be floors in a haunted castle or levels in a big dungeon. Jot down the major areas of your adventure.This step will take you the rest of your life. Fill your head with inspirational ideas from books, movies, art, and published adventures. ![]() Here's a brief summary of this method for developing fantastic locations. More importantly, this method for developing fantastic locations fills your head with ideas that will spill out at the table without smothering the creativity spontanously combusting during your game. It's more work than three bullet points on a 3x5 card but a lot less than you might think. Today we're going to look at designing interesting locations the lazy DM way. Whether you run an adventure as written or improvise everything right at the table, we must always develop and describe fantastic environments to fuel our players' imaginations. There are as many ways to design a D&D adventure as there are DMs to run them. New to Sly Flourish? Start Here! Designing Fantastic Locations
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