So, here I am getting ready to post this up for y’all. At least those of y’all who support me on Patreon since you guys get to see this s$&% a week before the rest of the world. And I just now noticed that I kind of, you know, forgot to write a Long, Rambling Introduction™. Now, some of you won’t give a s$&%. Hell, some of you will probably be happy to hear that. But some of you… some of you really love the Long, Rambling Introductions™. And you’ll feel cheated. So, I’m going to do what television shows have done since time immemorial whenever they don’t have a new episode to broadcast. I’m gonna do a rerun…

The problem with GMs – well, one of the many problems – is that they think they know so much better than absolutely everyone else. Well, that’s one of the many problems with most GMs. Obviously, that’s not a problem for me. I really do know better than everyone else. Which means there’s nothing wrong with thinking that. But you? You don’t.

Why am I saying that? Two reasons. First, I was reading through Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics rulebook. That’s a game I had initially been interested in but dismissed when it first came out because of some decisions the designers made that I didn’t take the time to understand and so assumed were just stupid decisions. Anyway, now that I’m reading it, I’ve discovered that the text is just full of remarks BEGGING GMs to try the game as written at least one time before they start changing absolutely everything because the game designers really did everything they did for a reason and if you’re after exactly the experience that DCC promises and you’re the type of fan who would buy it, you’re going to get that experience if you just follow their rules. Even if it isn’t immediately obvious. So, please, just try the game as it is before you screw with it.

That message would not be necessary if most GMs weren’t a bunch of twits who think they know better than game designers and don’t give anything a chance. Thank God I’m not like that. Could you imagine how useless my advice would be?

Second, I was discussing random encounters with a few people recently. And whenever the topic of random encounters come up amongst experienced GMs, all they do is smarm about how they don’t use random encounters and how they are a waste of time and how absolutely everything that doesn’t advance the plot should just be excised from the game. These same GMs then piss and moan that the game balance doesn’t work when there’s only one fight in a day and they don’t understand why traveling is boring and they can’t figure out how to create stakes during an adventure so that the players actually have to make decisions that count about how they explore and when they rest and all that crap.

The problem is that the elitist, know-it-all attitude of GMs leads GMs to make not one, but two stupid decisions. First, it leads them to refuse to try anything they don’t see an immediate use for. Second, it leads them to simply rip things out of the game rather than experimenting with them. Imagine if you got a recipe for a cake. But you assumed you knew so much better than Betty Jemima or whatever. So, when you see a teaspoon salt, you think “salt, what the hell is salt doing in a cake? Cakes are sweet, not savory. It doesn’t need salt. I’m not putting that in.” And so, you leave the salt out. And then the cake is crap and you don’t know why.

That’s because what the salt is doing isn’t obvious, but it’s extremely important.

What to Bring With You

Welcome back all you aspiring Angry Open-Worlders. It’s time for your second lesson. Assuming you want it. If you’re reading this, you either want to run an open-world fantasy adventure game like the one I bragged about running two months ago or because you’ll read any damned thing I post. Now, if you’re here for that second reason, I don’t have to do anything to appease you. Thanks for making my life easy. But if it’s that first reason…

Well, today’s lesson is about what I bring to the table with me so I can actually run a session of my open-world game. My AOWG. And since you want to run a game like mine, it’s also about what you should bring to the table when you sit down to run a session of your own Angry’s Open-World Game. But this s$&% only works if you follow the core AOWG principles I laid out last time. If you don’t, none of my advice today will help you. And meanwhile, you’ll weigh your gamer backpack down with all sorts of useless, stupid s$&% like carefully mapped, planned encounters with optional special rules and gorgeous maps drawn in excruciating detail showing the exact f$&%ing position of every damned stalactite in the Cave of One Thousand Glittering Speleothems.

Just remember, if you want to run a game like mine — a great open-world game — you’ve got to do things my way. That means being okay with whatever happens at the table and accepting that whatever you come up with is good enough. That means trusting yourself to invent s$&% as you need to and to adjudicate each action as it arises, one at a time. That means accepting that the game’s materials and the game’s rules are good enough because mechanics and stats don’t make the game. And that means knowing in the deepest recesses of your blackened husk of a heart that you can pull an entire session of gameplay out of your a$& if you have to with no prep required.

I don’t know if your heart is actually a blackened husk, but if you want to run a game like mine, you’ve got to have a heart like mine. So I guess having a blackened husk of a heart is a prerequisite.

The key here is to run an amazing open-world game without having to really work at it. That means you’ve got to think small. To plan only as much as you have to plan. And to treat your world as terra f$&%ing incognita. You’re not revealing a world to your players, you’re exploring it with them. Remember, the good, fun parts of the game emerge from the players’ interactions with the world, not your f$&%ing prep work. The fun part’s what happens as things play out, so all you have to do is get things rolling. Once you start a scene or adventure or encounter or side-quest or whatever, it’ll pick up its own momentum. Or else it’ll peter out really quickly and get out of the way of the next fun thing.

In the end, GMing is about getting things starting and then keeping up the narration and adjudication so they keep going. It’s like rolling boulders down hillsides at hapless adventurers.

Thing is, your time is immensely valuable. And if you don’t think every hour of your life is precious, there is something deeply f$&%ing wrong with how you’re living. There’s way better, way more fun, and way more meaningful things to do with your time than to spend it on hours of math and paperwork so you can run a four-hour game of pretend elves every week. And that’s true even if you consider running good games to be fun and meaningful. Prep-work doesn’t get you a better game and it won’t make you a better game master.

Thus, you want to prep efficiently. As efficiently as possible. Prep’s a necessary evil. It sucks up a lot of time and most of it doesn’t do you a damned bit of good. The key is to prep first what you absolutely need to run a game and prep it only until it is just good enough. And then prep whatever’s fun to prep with whatever prep time you’ve got left. And then stop prepping and go do something more satisfying and fulfilling. Like playing a video game or reading a book or socializing with someone or visiting a museum or taking up a non-gaming hobby or taking a class or sitting and brainstorming or sitting and daydreaming or even browsing through all those RPG books you’ve got. Because even the crappiest RPG book — like the 5E core rulebooks — has a lot of gold in there and most of you are woefully unaware of what’s actually in your books. And all of that s$&% will improve your GMing skills far more than over-preparing for your game will.

Fact is, if you spend more time in a given week preparing for your game than you do running it, you f$&%ed up. Bad. Hell, if you spend half as much time in a week preparing for your game as you do running it, you’re probably already approaching Planet F$&%-Up. And you’re coming in hot.

So, if you’re serious about minimizing your prep work and if you can treat your world as a secret to everyone — even you — and if you can obey the three core principles of Angry Open-World Gaming, I’ll tell you the three things you need to bring to every game session.

Books of Stats and S$&%

First things first. Grab your Monster Manual and grab your Dungeon Master’s Guide and toss them in your gamer backpack. You’re going to need them.

Look, I can go on and on and on about how mechanics don’t make the game and how any GM can just make up whatever s$&% they want to and still run a great game, but we all know that’s a lie. This is an RPG. And an RPG needs stats and mechanics. You can’t run a combat without some stat blocks and you can’t hide treasure in the dank, dark dungeons of your world if you don’t actually have a treasury of magical items to hide. Fortunately, there’s a whole f$&%-ton of stat blocks for monsters and magical items and diseases and traps and poisons and environmental hazards scattered throughout those books you paid way too much money for and never open because you’re too good to use them. You f$&%ing snob. Get down off your high horse and use that s$&%. Because it’s all perfectly fine and because crafting custom content is a waste of your precious time. I mean, most monsters don’t even live for three f$&%ing rounds. Fifteen minutes of game time tops. Where’s the margin in spending an hour crafting a custom monster?

Lean heavily on pre-made content. Really, really heavily. Like lay down on top of it and ride it around like a f$&%ing rabbit sled in a crappy Tolkien prequel movie. A good GM can build a good game out of anything. And you can’t afford to have standards. Just make sure you lean on it efficiently. If you have to put your game on hold for ten minutes so you can dig out the right edition of the right Monster Manual or make everyone wait while you tap-tap-tap your way through hyperlinks and bookmarks and search fields, you’re running a s$&% game. Having ten thousand monsters and six thousand different magical items doesn’t do you a lot of good if it takes you forever to find the one you need. Or even if you’re using a tablet or a laptop and think you’re really good at using it fast. You’re not. And when you’re running a game, fractions of a second count, bucko.

You need to know what’s actually available. What’s in your bestiary? What’s in your DMG? What traps do you already have stats for? What diseases exist in the game? And what’s their deal. That’s why it’s really useful to thumb through your monster books and magic item lists between games. Just browse. See what’s there. Read whatever looks interesting. See, it’s funny how most GMing snobs who refuse to use crappy, clichéd, published monsters and magical items can’t even list a half-dozen of each. See? I took a lot of s$%& for claiming that I made up that whole blink dog encounter on the fly. People said, “sure, Angry, you made that up at the table, but you have an encyclopedic knowledge of everything in every edition of D&D ever! It’s easy to invent an encounter with crusading blink dogs who fight evil if you know blink dogs exist and that they fight evil.”

Well, guess what? First, you know how I got that supposed “encyclopedic knowledge of everything D&D?” I leaf through my books. All the time. I sit down and leaf through my books just to remind myself what’s there. And you can too. Take one of the hours you waste on over-prepping your game — or one of the hours you spend pissing and moaning in my comment section — and use it to pull a random D&D book off your shelf and find out what’s in it.

Second, wrong. No. I didn’t know that blink dogs exist and they fight evil. I mean, sure, one time, I probably did. But do you have any f$&%ing idea how much stuff there is in “every edition of D&D ever” and how much of it keeps changing? I stumbled over blink dogs while browsing through my Monster Manual looking for s$&% to fill out a list of “things that might be wandering across the grasslands of southern Aelyn’s Vale.” This brings me to another point about leaning on existing game content…

Short. List.

Shortlist s$&%. I mean, below, I’m going to talk all about the importance of lists, but shortlisting is its own separate thing. Shortlisting is skimming with a purpose. It’s looking for ten beasties in the Monster Manual that a group of low-to-mid-level adventurers might run into — or have to run away from — in the temperate grasslands of Aelyn’s Vale. Or trolling the DMG for magical items that the heroes might find in the ruins of the Temple of the Queen of Sea and Sky. Or for traps the barbarians of old might have built into their barrows. Shortlisting’s what led to me saying, “blink dogs… I kinda remember them as teleporting dogs that fight displacer beasts like dogs fighting cats, but what’s their deal?” And then I read two paragraphs and said, “okay, you’re on the list.”

So, browsing and shortlisting. Because it’s more important to be able to pull out just the right option than to have hundreds to dig through. When sit down to run my AOWG, I’ve got just the D&D 3.5 core Monster Manual and the Dungeon Master’s Guide near at hand. I’ve got plenty of monsters, traps, magical items, diseases, poisons, and weird adventuring hazards that way and I know what I’ve got. I also have a little folder of selected monsters, magical items, and other doodads I’ve compiled from other sources that I like and want to have in my world. Which I found by skimming my library.

Crap Maps

On top of your DMG and Monster Manual, you’re going to need at least one map. You’ll probably have several, but you have to have at least one. And I’ll tell you which one you absolutely need below.

A game of open-world explorationy adventure is about going from one place to another. And what happens along the way. There’s no real plot to speak of. The travel is the plot. Well, it’s part of the plot. So, you’ve got to be able to handle travel and exploration. And that means you’ve got to have some maps.

Besides, it’s f$&%ing D&D. Maps are almost as central to D&D as stat blocks and Mountain Dew.

So, you need maps. But you don’t need nice maps. You don’t need fancy maps. You don’t even need detailed maps. Remember, most of the world’s unexplored. Even you don’t know where everything is. And your maps are just tools. You use them to run games. You don’t hang them on your wall and admire them. Get used to vague, spotty, ugly maps. Maps that look like you slapped them together in ten minutes. For example, here’s the “starting map” for my AOWG. At least, it’s kind of like my starting map. I can’t show you my actual starting map because there’s things on there I don’t want players to see. I slapped this map together in ten minutes so I’d have something to show you.

Look at that s$&%. It’s just a bunch of blobs and dots and stolen names. On a hex grid so I know how far everything is from everything else. And yeah, I use special hex paper so I can easily make a zoomed-out map later when the players walk off the edges of this map. And there’s a lot of blank space so I can add things as the players discover them.

Now, there’s going to be GMs who’ll point out that there’s software out there that’ll give you nice, pretty looking maps that you can add all sorts of details to and scale out and keep notes on and stuff. And I will counter with ten f$&%ing minutes. I didn’t just make a fake copy of my starting map in ten minutes, I made the real map of my campaign world in ten minutes with four fine-tipped Sharpie® markers, an excellent memory for stolen names, and a printed piece of hex paper. But, hey, you do you.

Now, this style of crappy mapping won’t always fly. For example, you might want to create a prettified player-facing map. And that’s actually a good use of your time if you want to do it. And also a good use of artistic skills or fancy mapping software. Whichever tool you like best is fine. Here’s the actual player-facing map from my game which I basically traced over my crappy map.

Point is, if you want a pretty handout for your players, make a pretty handout for your players. But your working maps? The ones you hide behind the screen and use to run your game? They’re utilitarian tools no one but you is ever going to see. S$&% them out and move on. Doesn’t matter if it’s an overland map, a town map, or a dungeon map. Crappy line drawings, hasty scribbles, and incomprehensible notes are all good. In an upcoming article about building crappy dungeons, I’ll show you an example of a crap dungeon map that takes fifteen minutes to draw and gets you four to eight hours of dungeon adventuring fun.

Now, there is a tricky issue regarding maps when it comes to running encounters. Because D&D exists on a five-foot grid. Position, range, area of effect? They’re all things. Thus, encounters of even moderate complexity benefit from maps or battlefield diagrams or other visual aids. You know what I mean. And with lots of people running games online these days where it’s a lot harder to just whip out a dry-erase marker and cobble together a functional battlegrid, mapping’s become a lot bigger than it used to be.

Now, you can use fancy mapping software or art skills and scanners. Or you can do what I do and point a webcam down at a wipe-off battlegrid. But there’s two things to remember. First, you don’t need to map your entire f$&%ing dungeon just to get some encounter maps out of it. You can just map the rooms where the fights happen. Second, you also don’t need a battlemap for every f$&%ing fight. Seriously, you can run most combats without any visual aid at all. It’ll take some time to get used to it — and some more time to get the players used to it — but it can be done. And if you don’t try to build too many ridiculously complex set-piece encounters, you can handle a lot without ever breaking out the virtual minis. In short, just like you learned to get by without prepping, learn to get by without mapping too. It’s a really useful skill.

Slapdash Lists of Things That Exist

Along with your reference books and your crappy, utilitarian maps, you’ll want to bring along a bunch of lists. And before you comment, let me be absolutely f$&%ing clear what I mean by a ‘list’ in this context.

First, don’t shove the word ‘random’ in front of the word ‘list.’ Just because s&$%’s on a list, that doesn’t mean you need exactly 20 entries and you’re going to pick one randomly. Yes, a random encounter table is a list, and you will roll randomly to determine which encounter happens when you use it. But there’s lots of other kinds of lists too.

Second, don’t assume that a list is just a list. You can put a lot of details on a list. And it’s still a list. Obviously, I’m going to suggest you don’t put a lot of details on most of your lists, but since when do you f$&%ing listen to me anyway. I mean, these all qualify as lists. Well, elements from a list.

• Orc Patrol

• Orc Patrol: 1d4+2 orc warriors, 1d2 wargs, 1 orc barbarian officer (Krugmuk the Always Evil)

• Side Cave: Resting in this small cave are five orc warriors with a warg and a barbarian officer; they will attack the PCs on sight but if the battle goes against them, an orc warrior will blow his warhorn to raise the alarm

Point is, that lists come in lots of shapes and sizes. They can be vague or specific, detailed or brief. Random encounter tables are lists. So are the encounters keys that pair up with a dungeon map. So’s the list of interesting inhabitants in Perrin’s Mill. Or the list of all the locations in Perrin’s Mill. Or the timeline of major events that have happened in the past year in Perrin’s Mill. Or the list of hazards that might kill the heroes in the Howlwind Hills. Or the list of treasures in Barrow Hill. Those are all lists.

Know what aren’t lists? Lists of random names, random plot ideas and adventure seeds, lists of random personality traits, and other piles of descriptors and details to affix to s$&%. A proper list isn’t something you use to fart out an adventure, it’s a list of things you know exist somewhere in your world. You might not know much about them and you might not know where exactly they are or when the players will trip over them, but you know they’re out there somewhere. Hell, even a random encounter is basically an encounter that’s somewhere in the world. It’s just a matter of whether that somewhere is wherever the heroes happen to be.

The point is that any item on any list is something you’re ready to drop into your game the moment you need it. Or the moment it comes up. You decide how much detail to include. But remember you can pull an entire session out of your a$& with no prep so you don’t need much detail. Which is good, because game prep is a waste of your precious time.

See, almost everything you already bring to the game is just a list. Lists of encounters, lists of mechanics, lists of events, they’re all just lists. But you don’t think of them as lists. You think of them as notes. But when you think of them as lists — and when you accept you can run a game without any prep and when you acknowledge your time is valuable — you’ll keep them brief. You won’t write any details you don’t actually need.

Between your lists and your pre-published, good-enough stats, you’ll find that most of running an AOWG is just throwing a bunch of simple building blocks together right in front of the players, making up any details you have to make up to fill in the holes, and then letting the game emerge from that.

That said, there’s one extra special kind of list that needs to be called out. It’s not a list of game elements you can just fling into the world. It also happens to be the most important list you’re going to make when you prep for a session of your AOWG. And I’ll tell you about it after I tell you about the most important map in your gamer bag. And after I tell you about the second most important list in your bag. And after you wait two weeks for the next lesson to come out.

The Most Important Crap Map in Your Bag: The Overworld Map

As I said above, this is D&D. And D&D stands for Maps & Stats. So you’re going to have a lot of maps. But one map’s way more important than the rest. You can get by without town maps, without dungeon maps, and without pretty player-facing artsy maps. But you can’t live without an Overworld Map.

The crap map I showed you above? That’s an Overworld Map. It shows the area of the world the players are currently exploring. It’s how you keep track of where they are, where they’re going, and how they get there.

Now, the Overworld Map doesn’t need a lot of detail on it. Especially not to start with. The less detail you put on that map, the better off you are. Because, remember, your world’s unexplored territory. Even you don’t know where everything is. That’s why your Overworld Map ain’t a static thing you draw once and forget about. It’s something you keep updating. Keep adding s$&% to as you make new “discoveries.”

A good Overworld Map’s got a dot right in the middle. That dot’s the place where the players come from and go back to and sell their loot and talk to people and train. Their hub world. Their home base. Their current home base. They might move on to another dot later. Maybe even sooner. That’s fine. But right now, today, at the start of the game, that dot’s the closest thing the PCs have to a home. It’s where their hearts are. Where they hang their hats. Where they park their carcasses.

A good Overworld Map’s also broken down into a bunch of different geographical region things. Big, blobby areas of the world with names. Forests, hills, wastelands, swamps, savannahs, steppe lands, moorlands, all that kind of crap. My Overworld Map, for example, Southern Aelyn’s Vale, has a few geographical locales. There’s Carrow’s Forest, the Howlwind Hills, the shores of Lake Helagh, and the Skirlin Wood.

Good Overworld Maps are also drawn to scale. Don’t you groan at me. Just put a f$&%ing scale on it. Print some hex paper and call a hex six miles. Or put it on graph paper. Or just make it 24 miles to the inch. The scale doesn’t actually matter very much. What does matter is that there is a scale. Because, as I noted, it’s the travel — and the s$&% that happens on the way — that provides the emergent story of an open-world adventure. Well, half the story. The other half is what happens inside the dots. But I’ll get to that another time.

And yes, I know the scales on my Crap Overworld Map and my Pretty Player-Facing Map don’t match up. Don’t worry about that. It’s partly because I can’t show you my real map and I just grabbed any old piece of hex paper to trace a fake Crap Overworld Map for this article. And partly because I screwed some things up when I was figuring all this open-world s$&% out but I don’t want to confuse you by talking about it.

Incidentally, if you want a more detailed article on making some cool, low-work, useable-at-the-table overworld maps that are easy to update and expand, you know what to do, kids. Grab your tap shoes and your flamenco hats and cut a rug.

Anyway…

Beyond the blobby regions and the dot in the middle of your map, there shouldn’t be too much on your Overworld Map. It should mostly be blank space that’s easy to add dots to. Take, for example, Barrow Hill. You can see it on the Pretty Player Map but not on my Crap Overworld Map. That’s because it wasn’t ON my Crap Overworld Map when I started. It was a name on a list. A place I knew existed somewhere in the world. Specifically, somewhere in Howlwind Hills. Then, one day, my players were in the market for an antique weapon and did the researchy-gathery-informationy thing. And so I told them about Barrow Hill — caves where ancient warrior clans buried their warlords and heroes — and decided it was within a day’s walk of Perrin’s Mill. And that’s when I plonked it onto the map. Theirs and mine.

You’ve got to be able to edit these things quickly and easily. At the table even. That’s why mine is just a piece of hex paper with hand-drawn blobs. I can pretty easily just add dots and labels or even entire new blobs. If it turns out there’s a swamp south of Lake Helagh, I can add that. If the players get lost in Skirlin Wood and stumble on the Thornchoked Ruins, I can add that too. The Pretty Player Map is a little trickier to edit, but I can update it between sessions thanks to some of the amazing, modern technologies we’ve been blessed with in this day and age. Such as tracing paper, an eraser, and a scanner.

And that whole Barrow Hill thing brings me to the second most important slapdash list of things that exist that you need in your bag.

The Second Most Important Slapdash List in Your Bag: The Regional List of Things to Find

As you might have gathered, I’ve got a list — a slapdash list with varying levels of detail and specificity — I’ve got a list for each region on my map — including the catch-all entire region depicted on the Overworld Map — I’ve got a list for each region on my map of s$&% that exists in that region. And those lists are broken into five basic sub-lists: Points of Interest, Encounters, Travelers, Lairs, and Hazards.

A location that’s worth a dot of its own on my map is a Point of Interest. POIs are destinations. Places the heroes will want to visit. To explore. Places they might even return to again and again. Cities, towns, villages, strongholds, roadside inns, monasteries, shrines, monuments, and s$&% like that are all Points of Interest. But so are dungeons, sacred groves ruled by magical spirits, ancient ruins, and s$&% like that. Now, as I said, the level of detail varies from POI to POI, but most of them just have names. Some have a single sentence that tells me a little more about them. Greybridge, right now, is just a city. Because it’s got ‘bridge’ in the name and because it sits alongside a river, there’s probably a bridge in it. And it’s probably a major trade hub. But I don’t really know. Barrow Hill? Well, it had a little note indicating that it was a place where ancient warrior clans buried their honored dead.

Encounters, on the other hand, are transient. They’re not destinations. Instead, they’re things the heroes might stumble over while they travel to a destination. Or while they explore. Or while they wander lost because they followed some blink dogs halfway across the countryside and then pissed off the dogs badly enough that the dogs abandoned them to their fates. Mostly, they’re just wandering critters. But there’s also references to other lists sometimes. Like, instead of tripping over a wandering owlbear in their travels, they might stumble into a natural hazard or end up in an owlbear lair.

Travelers are specific NPCs — though that word ‘specific’ varies a lot — that might be found wandering around the region. Usually someone friendly. Or at least inclined to be. Or at least not inclined to be hostile. At least not inclined to be hostile until the PCs open their mouths. They’re basically just passing through, just like the heroes. Why aren’t they just random encounters? I don’t know. Because I’m old-fashioned enough to remember when every random encounter table included ‘NPC Party’ as an entry. But usually, a traveler is someone more interesting than just a numbered orc or even a good-aligned numbered blink dog. For example, Plumcloak, Human Explorer and Treasure Hunter. And even though I say ‘specific,’ some of my travelers are just archetypes until the PCs meet them. Examples include guide, hunter, hermit, traveling elf minstrel, or god disguised as old man.

Lairs are something between an Encounter and a Point of Interest. They’re places where monsters live, but they’re small, generic, and easy to improvise. They aren’t enough to constitute an entire dungeon and they’re one-and-done affairs the party will likely clear quickly and never think about again. Examples include wolf dens, bandit camps, owlbear caves, goblin villages, or dragons’ dens. Sometimes, I’ll even figure out what lives there in advance. As in:

Wolf Den: 2d6 wolves plus 1 alpha

Other times, I’ll just wing it.

Hazards are natural or supernatural obstacles the party might blunder into. Or things I can add to a random encounter or lair or whatever to add some extra “fun.” S$&% like quicksand, sinkholes, landslides, flash floods, fairy rings, profaned ground, bloodweed patches, flame spurts, and so on. They’re, again, incidental to travel. They aren’t worth putting on the map and won’t fill a whole adventure, but they’ll f$&% up a party while they’re on the way somewhere.

I can’t show you any of my real Regional Lists of Things to Find because I don’t want to ruin any fun surprises like bloodweed and dragon lairs for my players. But here’s a list I crapped out for this article in about ten minutes that I definitely could use in my AOWG.

Note that the lists are pretty thin on details? Note the space I left so I could add more elements to the lists or add more details as I ‘discovered’ them? Note how I basically just shortlisted a bunch of crap from the Monster Manual and s$&% out some evocative names and random gibberish? Yep. That’s the fine art of populating an open world right there.

Now, the Regional Lists of Things to Find are the second most important lists in your AOWG arsenal. But the most important list is…

The Most Important Slapdash List in Your Bag: The Presumed Player Itinerary

The Presumed Player Itinerary is a list you’re going to make before every one of your AOWG sessions. Or after. Depends on how you want to look at it. It’s not a list you’ll use while running your game. It’s a list you’ll use to guide your between-session prep.

And it’s the most important tool you’ll use to present a world full of adventure and opportunity.

Coincidentally, Presenting a World Full of Opportunity and Adventure is the title of the third lesson in this four-lesson tutorial. Which is why you’ll have to wait two weeks to find out what the Presumed Player Itinerary actually is and how to use it.

And that’s how I keep you all coming back for more. Always end on a cliffhanger.