Because of the way it was written, this article doesn’t have a Long, Rambling Introduction™. The whole thing was kind of written like a Long, Rambling Introduction™. It’s pretty stream of consciousness. A mix of me explaining s$&% and thinking through s$&% and showing you the results. I didn’t outline it. I just started writing. And I hoped something good would come out of it.

So, I hope it provides enough of a glimpse into my mess of a psyche to satisfy your need for random, nonsequitoid bulls$&%. Because the next article, being a continuation of this article, probably won’t have a Long, Rambling Introduction™ either. Sorry.

Anyway…

Let’s Make a Dungeon

Let’s do something fun today! Let’s make a dungeon!

That’s right. I’m walking you through the quick-and-dirty way I make quick-and-dirty dungeons.

Note the repetition of keywords there. Did you spot it? This is quick-and-dirty dungeon design. It’s for GMs who can’t spend every hour they aren’t running a game preparing to run a game. It won’t produce a masterpiece of game design. It won’t give you a complex, interconnected, sprawling dungeon. It won’t give you a self-contained underground fantasy biome that will stand up to the most intense scientific scrutiny. It’ll just give you a nice, simple dungeon that’s fun to explore. Something you can bang together in a couple hours and torture your players with for two or three sessions.

See, the goal here is fun. I know a lot of you newbies haven’t heard of fun before. Fun’s what games used to be about. We used to have fun all the time. Back before games became serious business and players became aspiring YouTube thespians and GMs became self-loathing, over-critical perfectionists.

The problem’s that GMs overthink this dungeon s$&% in a thousand different ways. They put a lot of pressure on themselves and bury themselves under huge workloads. And, in the end, none of it improves the play experience one f$&%ing iota. And if you’re not improving the play experience, what the f$%& are you even doing?

So, I’m going to show you how to make a quick-and-dirty dungeon that’s perfectly fun to play. Which is great if you’re running an Angry’s Open World Game. Or if you have a day job and would prefer to keep your hobby a hobby. Or if you’re just starting out with this whole homebrew dungeon thing and aren’t yet a master of the craft.

While I’m emphasizing quick-and-dirty fun dungeons, I’m not going to advocate for the old kitchen sink dungeon crap. You know, the sprawling complexes drawn to fill every square of graph paper and stocked with a random assortment of monsters? A good dungeon doesn’t need an extensive backstory or a complex plot or a well-designed ecology. But it can’t just be a hodgepodge of random crap either. It’s got to look like a brain was involved somewhere in the creation process. A brain that knows the difference between a playground for pretend elves and a graduate thesis for an evolutionary biology degree. Or a best-selling epic fantasy novel series.

And now let me show you how to make some fantastic s$&% with properly lowered expectations.

Keeping Myself Honest

So, the goal of the dungeon-making process I’m sharing is to create a perfectly fun dungeon using just the right amount of brain. But this article’s goal is to demonstrate that process as authentically as possible. To that end, I’m sitting down with nothing. I’ve got no ideas. No notes. As I type these words right f$&%ing now, I have no idea what I’m going to make.

Okay, that’s not precisely true. Because I’ve got this drafting and rewriting and revising process that makes sure my articles aren’t garbage. So, technically, these specific words are rewritten and revised versions of the words I typed without knowing what I was going to make. But I’m not making any major changes. Just cleaning up the words.

Anyway…

I’ve got nothing. No notes. No ideas. All I’ve got sitting next to me are my Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual. Apart from that, I’ve got some blank paper for notes, a set of dice, and a few sheets of graph paper. Okay, that’s not true either. I’m going to use Profantasy’s Campaign Cartogapher 3+ mapping software with the Dungeon Designer add-on. But I won’t make anything pretty with it. I promise. Just the same crappy dungeon maps I’d draw on graph paper. It’s just easier for article-writing and graphical-exporting purposes.

Beyond that? I’m going to burn through each step of this process as I write about it. Basically, I’ll describe the step, then I’ll do it, and then I’ll show you my results. And I promise you I’m not showing you my best ideas. I’m not vetting things. Whatever comes out of my head, that’s what you’ll see. They’re going to be good enough. And they’ll get polished up at the end.

Since I’m basically showing you how to make Baby’s First Dungeon — except I’m not; the secret is you can make really amazing dungeons the same way you can make quick-and-dirty crap dungeons — since I’m basically making Baby’s First Dungeon here, I’m going to make Baby’s First Dungeon. That is, I’m going to make a dungeon that a bunch of 1st-level characters can delve into for their first game ever.

Clear on the ground rules? Good. Let’s get started.

Step 1: List the S$&% You Already Know

When I’m making a quick-and-dirty, perfectly fun, good-enough dungeon — let’s call it a QDD so I don’t have to keep typing all that s$&% — when I’m making a QDD, I start with a list of the s$&% I already know about the dungeon.

I usually know, for instance, what experience level the party’s at when they start delving the thing. But I might know other stuff too. Like, during play, I might have already told the players some s$&% about the dungeon they’re going to delve. Like the setting or the goal or the big bad that lives there. If there’s s$&% that’s already true about the dungeon because of what happened at the game table, I write that down.

For example, let’s say that the players learned two weeks ago that there’s an abandoned elven treehouse in the heart of Fayfay Forest. And therein lies the Mystical Harp of Bewitchitude. The players decided they wanted to retrieve the harp and that’s why I’m stuck making the dungeon I’m making. So, I note that the setting is an elven treehouse and that elves don’t live there anymore and that hidden somewhere therein is a harp of bewitchitude.

But that’s not the dungeon I’m building. I know nothing about the dungeon I’m building. Except that it’s Baby’s First Dungeon. So, it represents a good challenge for low-level PCs and it’s located within convenient walking distance of civilization.

Notice I said, “low-level PCs” and not “1st level PCs.” Game balance is just one of the many ways GMs overthink this dungeon s$&%. It’s a good thing to keep an eyeball on, but you don’t need laser-level precision. And you shouldn’t try for it.

Notice also I’m not using that elven tree house idea. Why not? Well, even though I agree it’s cool and I totally could use it, I want to go into the next step without any ideas at all. Because I want to show you how to build a perfectly fun QDD without any ideas at all. See, the DMG — like many gaming resources and even like a certain brilliant but very angry master of games — suggests that you start this whole adventure-writing process with story s$&%. Figure out the goal and the setting and villain and the villain’s motivations. Blah blah blahdy f$&%ing blah. It’s not bad advice. In general, that’s a good way to build an adventure. But QDDs don’t need that s$&%. And frankly, that s$&% makes it harder — not easier — to build a fun, good-enough dungeon.

You can build a dungeon the same way you build a world. Or play a character. Just start doing s$&% and fit the pieces together while you build. So, starting with an idea that didn’t grow organically from the process — like Search for the Lost Harp of Bewitchitude — would ruin the magic trick I’m trying to pull. Sorry.

Long story short? I’m building a low-level dungeon for a new group of players. That’s all I know right now.

Step 2: List Some Cool-A$& S$&% to Fill Your Dungeon With

As I suggested, dungeon adventures aren’t about plots and backstories and villains and s$&%. That’s actually part of what makes dungeons fun. They’re just holes in the ground filled with monsters and treasure. The backstory and the goal and the villainous motives? They’re there. For context. They make the dungeon feel like it belongs in the wider world. And they provide emotional engagement. But they’re still just excuses to explore a constrained environment and kill some monsters and overcome some obstacles and collect some treasure.

Thus, a dungeon crawl is about the stuff that gets killed, the obstacles that get overcome, and the treasure that gets collected. This is why, when you’re making a dungeon, you start with that s$&%.

To put it another way, if you have thousands and thousands of Lego pieces in a big-a$& box and you can build whatever you want, you’ll spend a lot of time staring at the box trying to figure out just what the f$&% to build. If you’ve got a few dozen pieces in a small box and they’re all gray and white and transparent cockpit pieces and cones and nozzles and wings, you’re building a spaceship and you can just start building.

So, you start by gathering up your pieces. You need some monsters — dungeons are big ole dens of combat, after all — and you need some hazards and traps and obstacles. You need some interesting terrain features to spice s$&% up. And you need some treasure to hide behind the traps and monsters like a psychopathic Easter bunny who’s finally done with the kids and all their s$&%.

You can gather your pieces however you want. I start with monsters. And since I know my monster rosters, I just pop open the DMG to the Monster by CR index and browse for s$&% that looks fun. And while I don’t sweat the game balance at this stage, I do limit my browsing to s$&% that’s just slightly above the party’s level and no more than four levels below it. I also read down the list from the biggest threats to the smallest. If something catches my eye, I jot it down on my scratch paper.

But that’s me. You can do whatever you want as long as you end up with a list of monsters that you’ll have fun stocking a dungeon with. How many? As many as you find. Doesn’t matter. You probably won’t use them all anyway. And if you’re not like me and you don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of all the monsters in every edition of D&D ever, you can browse the pages of the Monster Manual instead.

Now, what usually happens is I get stuck on a theme pretty early. Which is why I start high up on the list. I usually end up with a good creature for a climax and then look for other monsters that might be friends with it. But I also don’t stop myself from adding s$&% that just seems cool. Which is what happened when I did my list. Which looks like this:

• Spined Devil (CR 2)
• Imp (CR 1)
• Animated Armor (CR 1)
• Thug (CR 1/2)
• Flying Sword (CR 1/4)
• Blood Hawk (CR 1/8)
• Cultist (CR 1/8)
• Noble (CR 1/8)

The spined devil happens to be a favorite low-level devil of mine. I overbought spined devil minis years ago. So, I couldn’t resist. And the spined devil immediately suggested a theme. Devils. But there’s not a lot of other devils filling out the shallow end of the monster pool. I added the obligatory imp and then figured that, when a devil can’t find other devils to hang out with, he’ll probably bum around with cultists. So, now I’ve got a Satanic Cult thing going.

But I also saw the animated armor. And I love animated s$&%. It’s just fun. So, I added the animated armor. And to balance out that passive-aggressive animate, I added the actually aggressive flying sword.

The noble and blood hawk came together. I’ve never used blood hawks. Forgot they existed even. And I wasn’t really sure what they are. But I spotted the hawk and then spotted the noble and I thought, “you what would be f$&%ing cool? A noble falconer and his evil falcon!” Right?

I’m serious by the way. This is actually my thought process for making dungeons. “I love spined devils! Animated armor is so cool! Evil falconer!” It’s that fun thing I mentioned earlier.

And who’s better to lead a Satanic Cult but a noble falconer and his evil falcon? See what I mean about themes emerging?

Of course, the animated armor and the flying sword don’t really fit the theme yet. But that’s okay. S$&% on the list doesn’t have to make sense. Either it’ll eventually make sense or it won’t get used or it’ll get used with a shrug and a “who cares, it’s fun!”

After monsters, I do treasure. Because a dungeon’s got to have treasure in it. And, by the way, the reason I start with monsters and treasure is that those two things usually end up defining the dungeon’s goal. Most dungeon adventure goals come down to “kill the thing” or “recover the thing.” So it’s a good idea to see what s$&% there is to kill and what s$&% there is to loot and see if any of it would make a good goal. Like, say, a magical harp of badassitude.

Treasure’s easy. I just assume every dungeon’s got a single hoard. Which, to be fair, is what the DMG bounces around sorta but not quite saying. Every adventure’s got one hoard worth of treasure. Either it belongs to the villain or to the enemy faction or to the dungeon or some patron hands it over by way of reward. Doesn’t matter. Strip away all the other wishy-washy bulls$&% in the DMG and you end up with a simple law of adventuring nature: do an adventure, get a treasure hoard.

For dungeons, I figure out the treasure hoard in advance and then break it up and scatter it around. If a patron is paying the PCs, I hold something back as payment. If there’s a villain, I give him a big portion of the hoard to sleep on. And if there’s a cool magical item, sometimes I’ll hand it to a monster to use. I generate the hoard randomly. Because rolling for random treasure’s fun as hell. But I’m also happy to edit s$%& I don’t like. Here’s what I rolled up for this dungeon:

• 1,300 cp
• 1,300 sp
• 80 gp
• 4 25 gp art objects
• 3 Table F magical items
  • brooch of shielding
  • +1 weapon
  • boots of the winterlands

The moment I rolled an 87 for Art, Gems, and Magical Items and then determined there’s 3 Table F magical items in the adventure, the adventure’s themes totally solidified. That’s a lot of magic items for a low-level dungeon and Table F isn’t just consumables and uncommon junk items. It’s the good stuff. It’s a nice haul for Baby’s First Dungeon. Between the magical items and the animated armor and the flying swords, I’m thinking the setting’s an abandoned wizard’s lair. Since it’s got to be close to civilization, maybe a wizard’s estate. The wizard’s long gone and the cult showed up because the wizard had a pet devil. They want to free it. Or bind it. Or worship it. Whatever. So Noble McBloodhawk gets his Thugee buddies together and plunders the place. And the party’s warned that Noble McBloodhawk is down at the Old Spellcasterson Place and up to no good.

Right? That s$&% works!

Except…

The boots of the winterlands don’t really fit the theme. You’ve got a wizard into magical arms and armor and devil-summoning and s$&%. And he’s got a pair of magic snowboots? I don’t think so. So, I drop the boots and replace them with an arcane spell scroll instead. That’s a good, obvious prize for looting the Spellcasterson Mansion.

Next, I like to come up with a couple of non-combat obstacles, hazards, or traps I can add some variety with. Obviously, animated armor and flying swords are basically traps. Inanimate objects that come to life and f$&% up anyone who touches the wizard’s stuff. But it’s also fun to have a few trap-traps. Real traps.

The DMG doesn’t have too many traps in it. But it does make it easy to invent your own. So, if, say you want to have spell turrets that shoot fire and lightning and magic missiles, you just need a trigger, an effect, and a damage rating. So, spell turrets.

Finally, I like to have a couple of terrain elements I can use to liven up encounters or build puzzles around. The DMG has a few ideas buried in some random example tables, but not a whole lot. Fortunately, this s$&%’s also easy to just invent. So come up with a fun idea or two and assume you’ll be able to adjudicate it easily enough. Because you will.

For some reason, my brain yelled “invisible walls!” Don’t know why. It did. So, fine, walls of force. The PCs can’t see them. They have to discover them by breaking their nose on them. That s$&% will really f$&% up a combat. But that’s not enough for me. Because I’m a sinister a$&hole. Once the players figure something out, I like to mess with them. So, apart from the invisible walls of force that you bounce off of if you bonk into them, there’s also invisible walls of teleport that send you somewhere else if you bonk into them. Pac-Man tunnels.

And isn’t this a fun little dungeon now? A wizard’s funhouse with animatronic killer armor, invisible mirror mazes, invisible teleporters, and spell turrets that shoot lightning at your face. And there’s a cult that’s taken up residence. And there’s a devil.

Now, themes and ideas don’t always emerge so easily. You might just have a list of fun-seeming crap with no idea how and why it all fits together. In the end, you might end up just cramming a bunch of crap into a cave or sewer somewhere and calling it a day. And that’s fine too. That’ll be perfectly fun. And the more you do this s$&%, the better you’ll get at spotting themes and capitalizing on them.

Anyway, here’s my complete list of game elements:

Monsters

• Spined Devil (CR 2)
• Imp (CR 1)
• Animated Armor (CR 1)
• Thug (CR 1/2)
• Flying Sword (CR 1/4)
• Blood Hawk (CR 1/8)
• Cultist (CR 1/8)
• Noble (CR 1/8)

Treasure

• 1,300 cp
• 1,300 sp
• 80 gp
• 4 25 gp art objects
• brooch of shielding
• +1 weapon
• arcane spell scroll

Traps and Hazards

• Animating Armor and Swords
• Spell Turrets that Shoot Lightning and Fire and Stuff

Terrain

• Invisible Force Walls
• Invisible Teleporting Walls

Step 3: Smash Your Game Elements into Encounters

A dungeon’s all about encounters. Combat encounters, obstacles, hazards, interactions, whatever. S$&% the players have to deal with. Now that you’ve got a pile of fun game elements, you’ve got to make some encounters out of them.

Understand you’re not designing encounters yet. You’re still just scribbling furious notes. If I didn’t have to write a 5,000-word article about it, I’d only have invested about ten or fifteen minutes into this process so far. Longer if I skimmed the Monster Manual instead of just browsing lists. Point is, this ain’t the time to do math or balance encounters. I mean, frankly, even when it’s time to do that s$&%, you shouldn’t overdo it. But that’s another story.

That said, it’s a good idea to keep at least one eyeball on the game balance so you don’t plan anything too crazy-deadly. Unless you meant to. Which is fine.

What you’re really doing right now is planning the plot points. A narrative has a plot, right? A sequence of major events around which the story turns. Well, the encounters in a dungeon are that dungeon’s plot. It’d be silly to map out all the twists and turns of the dungeon without knowing about the big turning-point events, right?

Let me show you what I mean.

Ideally, my adventure would end with the party fighting the spined devil, Noble McBloodhawk, and Noble McBloodhawk’s blood hawk. But combining a CR 2 devil with anything — even a really weak pair of CR 1/8 allies — is probably a bit much for a low-level party in Baby’s First Dungeon. The devil alone’s going to put up a hell of a fight. I’ll probably want to even the odds in the final cut somehow. Or find a way to let the PCs lose without dying.

Either way, the devil’s on his own. A boss fight. That’s an encounter.

Meanwhile, Noble McBloodhawk and his blood hawk need a couple of friends to make a good fight. What they need are some cultist buddies. Maybe the noble’s up on a balcony or at the top of the stairs sending his bird down to harass the party while they fight his mooks. If the fight goes bad, the noble flees and cowers behind the devil in the next room. And maybe we’ll give the noble a silver weapon. He brought it specifically to bully the devil with. And if the PCs kill the noble before he flees, they’ve got one-up on the devil.

So, Noble McBloodhawk, his blood hawk, and a bunch of cultist mooks. That’s an encounter.

Those two encounters are actually a great one-two punch of a climax.

Meanwhile, you can’t have an invisible mirror maze without a fight in it. That’d just be a wasted opportunity.

So, cultists in the mirror maze. That’s an encounter.

Now…

I think I mentioned that I’m kind of a dick. I’ve got these animated flying swords, right? Basically traps. When the players touch stuff, the swords come to life and go Inigo Montoya on their thieving a$&es. I’ve also got a magical +1 weapon to hide somewhere in Old Spellcasterson’s House of Tricks, right? Wouldn’t it be funny if the players were so afraid of swords that they didn’t want to touch the magical sword for fear it’d try to kill them? Wouldn’t it be even funnier if they destroyed it?

I’m serious by the way. This is actually my thought process for making dungeons. “Wouldn’t it be funny if the panicky, paranoid players smashed the best treasure in the dungeon!” It’s more of that fun thing I mentioned.

Pulling that s$&% off requires two encounters. At least two encounters. First, an encounter in which a displayed sword comes to life and goes into a stabbing frenzy. Second, a non-encounter in which a displayed sword looks like it’s going to come to life but doesn’t. I’ve got four art objects to hide and flying swords are CR 1/4. That means, they can safely come in pairs and they still present an easy challenge for a party of four. So, over each of several art objects, there’s a pair of crossed swords hung. Displayed. Standard decoration. Except animated and guarding the treasure. But over one art object, there’s just one sword hanging. And it doesn’t come to life because it’s just a +1 sword. The fact that it’s not paired suggests something’s different about it. And, in all likelihood, the PCs won’t destroy it and they’ll eventually figure it out. But it’ll be a fun little paranoid moment.

And here’s where the magic of this process shows itself. When you look at the encounters like plot points and try to outline them before you start mapping the dungeon and putting s$&% around, you naturally look at ways to connect the encounters. It’s an important part of adventure design. Not just QDD adventure design. Every f$&%ing adventure design. Progression. Setups and payoffs. Introductions and twists. Tutorials. All that crap. A sense that the later s$&% builds on the earlier s$&%.

Let’s look at the cultists for instance. The party’s fighting cultists twice. First in the mirror maze and second in the encounter with Noble McBloodhawk. The cultists are just filler in those encounters. They’re not the focus. Those encounters are about the mirror maze and the evil duo of falconer and falconee. The cultists really need an encounter of their own. Just so the party can fight some cultists.

So, that’s an encounter. The party has a fight with some cultists on their own.

That mirror maze encounter? Well, if you throw the PCs into a mirror maze — with or without extra teleporter fun — and you make them fight against foes who presumably have learned where the walls are, you’re blindsiding the players. So the party’s got to run into invisible walls and teleporter walls before the mirror maze throwdown. Fortunately, mirror mazes and teleporters can’t really hurt the party. On their own, they just block the party, confound navigation, or comprise puzzles. So I can make sure the party has some chances to play with invisible walls and teleporters without endangering them.

As they explore Old Spellcasterson’s House of Tricks, the PCs will need to deal with a few invisible walls and teleporter walls and figure out how to get into blocked-off rooms or some s$%& like that. Just so the invisible walls and teleporters don’t throw them for a loop. And maybe I can even find a way to telegraph their presence if not their exact position. Like, maybe they’re always anchored between certain kinds of pillars or in archways. And the mirror maze is filled with pillars and archways. Some have invisible walls and teleporters. Some don’t.

Telegraphing also makes the flying swords less dangerous after the first encounter. First time the players get shanghaied by swooping swords, it’ll be a surprise. After that, they’ll know exactly what to expect when they see a sparkly bauble on a podium with a pair of swords hung over it. And they’ll hopefully plan accordingly.

Now, you don’t have to telegraph everything. It’s okay if a few encounters or game elements come right the f$&% out of nowhere and then vanish, never to be seen again. So, animated armor. Somewhere in the dungeon’s a treasure room guarded by a suit of armor that comes to life and kills would-be thieves. At this point, I’ve got so many other encounters planned that I don’t have room for more than one encounter with animated armor. That’s fine though. The party will have to think on their feet and deal with the armor. And, at least, the armor fits the theme.

I can also get away with a spell turret trap somewhere. Yeah, it’ll catch the PCs by surprise and it’ll probably hurt. But they know they’re in a crazy wizard’s funhouse and they know he uses magic to protect his s$&%. Honestly, they should have seen a lightning bolt to the face coming at some point. Shame on them for not searching for traps. Especially if there’s a copper scepter or a stone dragon head hanging over a treasure instead of a pair of crossed swords. And if I want to drive the point home, I can put the scorched corpse of a dead cultist nearby. Which explains why the cultists have taken over only one wing of the house so far or whatever.

Technically, the spined devil comes right the f$&% out of nowhere too. It’s not set up. The party’s going to have to improvise their way to a win. Unless…

I still have that imp, right? If the wizard can summon a spined devil, it can have an imp familiar. And I do love the imp-in-a-cage encounter. There’s an imp in a silver cage, maybe disguised as a rat or something. It tries to make an innocent-sounding deal with the party. Trade them information for freedom. Whatever. If the party deals with the imp, they can learn about the spined devil. And later in the campaign, I can f$&% them over with the hidden consequences of dealing with even itty bitty devils.

Anyway, in the end, I’ve got a good scratch list of encounters to include in the dungeon. Organized by progression, they’re as follows:

Satan’s Little Helpers

• Cult guards
• Invisible wall and teleporter wall challenge(s)
• Cultists in the mirror maze
• Cultists with birdman
• Spined devil

Magical Defenses

• Flying swords guarding treasure
• A non-flying sword not guarding treasure
• Spell turret traps guarding treasure
• Animated armor guarding treasure

Other

• Imp in a cage

Step Next Time: Make the Dungeon

Now you know what’s in your dungeon. You’ve got a bunch of game elements to work with and you’ve got a list of encounters to include. Maybe it’s just the set-piece encounters. The big ones. Maybe you’ve only got a two-part set-up and pay-off pairing of encounters. That’s fine. Once you actually map the dungeon and place the encounters, you’ll fill in the empty space with one-off encounters and throwaways. Some of the empty space, anyway. Not all of it. Whatever you’ve got now is fine. But having at least one encounter progression, however small, turns a kitchen sink hodgepodge of crap into a real adventure.

At this point, you’ve probably only been at this for a half-hour. If even that. You’ve just made a couple of lists and giggled to yourself and rolled on some random tables and then mixed and matched some stuff into big, standout encounters and tried to interconnect them into progressions somehow.

A dungeons’ not just a list of s$&% that happens though. I mean, it totally could be. A dungeon could be nothing more than a gauntlet of encounters or a formulaic five-node flowchart. But you’re supposed to explore a dungeon. Pick directions and make discoveries. There’s got to be some dead ends and empty rooms. And there’s got to be some flavorful, fluffy filler.

The arrangement of the rooms and the flavorful, fluffy filler are important. That’s the s$&% that turns a gauntlet of encounters into a Mad Old Wizard’s Funhouse. And there’s more to building an encounter than a good pitch. You still need interesting battlefields and actual mechanical statistics. And you’ve got to decide where all the treasure goes.

That’s what we’ll be doing next time. I’ll walk you through fitting the encounters together into a map. And then polishing the adventure.

Meanwhile, why don’t you take the next week to come up with your own list of fun game elements and encounters and progressions? Call that homework. Start designing your own QDD so you have something to map and polish next time.

And for f$&%’s sake, have some actual fun with it!