Thank you so much for watching! How do you create your locations? Support the show and get over 175 exclusive Web DM Podcasts, Q&As, Discord, Discounts, Supplements, and more! www.patreon.com/webdm
Historical maps like the John Speed City maps and floor plans of famous palaces like Blenheim or Versailles make great maps for D&D and are widely available online. They have the added bonus that you can view photos of the real places and use them to help you visualize the fanatasy equivalents. The DK guidebook series is also great for this.
Kinda not out of the box, but WOW also has usable maps. A lot of games do really, depending on how much your players know the maps/games or how much they care or if you don't show your players the maps and have them draw them themselves.
"Same with a Dragon Slayer. You know, a Dragon Slayer is really an extension of that dragon." Wow. That's deep, ma - Oh! _Lair!_ Dragon's Lair! Yeah, that makes sense.
Here is a trick, when someone points to something and you don't know what it is, tell your players, "You don't know what that is," or, "Your character doesn't know what that is." Because if they're curious enough to go find out what it is, you can send them on a little fact finding mission figure it out and use the time that the activity takes you think up whats going to be over there.
Created a neat tavern / hotel called "The Last Resort" with the gimmick that its the place villain's plane shift too when on 2 HP trying to flee an adventuring party.
There's always a river that starts between two mountains, it always branches in three places, and at the mouth of that river you can always find a tavern. From that tavern there's always a door that leads where you want to go, you just need to know how to find it. A little thing I add to all my settings so that planar adventures are always an option.
Skyrim has like the exact problem Jim is describing. A lack of empty space makes the whole map implausible to the point where you feel like you are in an amusement park built just for you instead of a living world.
I appreciate the wonderful advice. I find that I can't even *begin* until I understand the purpose of a dungeon. Spot on! Adding framework (outlining, basically) helps me work a lot faster to achieve a good dungeon.
One word of advice is to not over populate the map and leave room for things that you might not have though of at the time . That way if the players do something like get an npc mage angry with them for what ever reason you can always place the mages tower or whatever someplace the characters don't know about but find clues to its location for example . When I create a world setting I map the entire world out but only the geographical locations and leave towns , villages and cities out . I map out a 100 mile radius area around the campaign starting area leaving enough room to add things at a later point but with just enough things like aincent ruins , keeps , monster lairs and things like that . Most parties don't travel more then 100 miles from where they start but you can guide them to unknown areas with things you come up with at a later point . Another thing to do is make up a few dungeon maps some large , some medium and some small but leave them empty and fill them in when needed or you can even fill them out ahead of time and drop them in what ever location you choose . Hexcrawling is something not many Dm's do but can be fun for both DM and players alike especially when you have a good set of random wilderness tables filled with things such as rivers that the players have to cross to ruins of aincent temples , villages or cities and even to random weather such as tornados , brush fires and other non combat encounters . Not all encounters have to be with enemies some can be weather related , some could become potential allies or employers . One last word if advice is find out what style of play your players like and expect and go with that it helps to know what they like and don't like so your game doesn't become boring to them
Oh yeah, my dose of Web DM. I swear, Jim is so evocative he indirectly stimulates my own creativity... Like dnd brain pron... Edit: pron for "sanctity of the family show"
Empty rooms are especially important. Many home-game dungeons seem too dense, and it's something that WotC usually gets right; a moment to fight, and a moment to breathe and explore.
My friend is a mega-nerd so this might not be universally applicable, but my current DM’s world has a few different city states. One’s style is modernized baroque/art deco, one is victorian, an elizabethan, and the rest all have very distinct architecture and fashion styles
Your Intros really ARE gold. And not just your Intros. [13:37] The Villain Hans Grub'Thulu holding workers hostage in an office building and trying to get into that vault to steal the necronomicon. - WoW! Such a gold nugget.
I love the word Abattoir. It is a word we use in English, of French Origin... but it is rarely used. It is synonymous with a Slaughterhouse. So I use it in my worlds as a Slayer's Guild called 'The Abattoir.' Feel it sounds fancy and like something a successful slayer's guild would be named. I Think it would also make for a good name for a gladiatorial arena. :)
Great episode!! This was amazing advice; word list, using mall layouts, your descriptions should match how you expect the PCs to interact with the environment. Honestly, it has been a few videos since I have gotten this caliber of information. This was a good one!! Thank you!
In a pinch just pull an image or map offline and give it your own descriptive flare. I have had entire sessions happen just from a player wanting to investigate some random thing in a corner I hadn't even noticed yet. Improve an interesting description of it and see what they do with that random well, end table with a curious trinket, or NPC you have no name or background for yet. They don't know you're pulling it from your A.
Is it an infiltration mission, frontal assault, social encounter? It's funny that you think I'd know that ahead of time. No DM plan survives first contact with the players... especially mine. Lol.
Mansion on the hill and return to Mansion is great because the players remember how they damaged stuff the first time through. As players add in stuff I forget as they revisit it. I decided that the hill holds more than what they found first time.
I use the 1st edition Dm's guide on dungeon dressing to fill out rooms in my dungeons in appendix I . I also try to follow how ad&d modules used to describe rooms in a dungeon so it's not just an empty room with nothing in it but a room that seems to be in use but no one is in it at that moment in time . It was one of the best features of the dmg along side the random dungeon generation tables
Feel free to take this: for my thieves’ guild they operate out of a phony art dealership / museum (as a front for legitimacy.) They keep their treasure golem in the open as part of the exhibit. In combat the treasure golem steals the players weapons, and only takes full damage from Thieve’s Tools / Lockpicking.
I'm working on a fairly short 3rd level murder mystery/conspiracy plot idea. My thought was that it's set in a mansion where the owner, a very wealthy man who was once an adventurer himself, has invited the most renowned local adventurers for a banquet. Just as the festivities are starting, the host is found murdered and the mansion grounds become cut off from the outside world by a shell of dark magic. Honestly, the first setting that came to mind was the Spencer Mansion from Resident Evil.
When constructing a location sometimes, it feels as if the process starts up somewhat strange, then I embrace the strange and flow with it... ... I'll conjure up a sort of an almost tunnel-vision railroaded concept, then I purposefully derail it myself by adding details. If not railroaded, I come up with a confined, but open-ended area, like a walled-off city, and I start focusing on the interconnectedness of the city's different parts. One of my setting's cities is somewhat similar to Planescape's Sigil, if it resembled and somewhat operated like Batman's Gotham City, and there's portals to other dimensions in my homebrewed cosmology which offer shortcuts to other parts of the city... ... If I have to get inspiration in some cases, a few videogames come to mind... ... Gauntlet: Dark Legacy, Silent Hill 0rigins, Silent Hill Downpour, and Secret of Evermore (...which is a DM's goldmine, I might add... but even if it feels empty and railroaded sometimes, it'll persuade the DM to branch off and add more content to fit the themes and environments provided...). This even includes games which have qualities I don't like, such as Grandia 2 and Secret of Mana. I'll be like.""Oh, I want to avoid running an encounter or dumb NPC like this" or "This was just the kind of glue and duct tape I needed to tie up some pesky loose ends." ... The branching path idea feels like the roots of a big ol' tree... ... ...which can enrich the existing qualities. A city of crime? Every crime syndicate and gang you create, pick some core goals, common daily objectives, long game conspiracies, a base of operations, their 'turf,' and common defining characteristics of the shady group's typical members. With this, you can start with the NPC's first, then start constructing where they live and operate, where the bullied and oppressed citizens live in relation to the group in question, and guard houses for law enforcement. If you build a place, start asking yourself questions about how the area operates, and who most often uses it. ... Maybe you want to reverse engineer some kind of Phandelver-esque adventure... ... ...and just having only goblins isn't going to do. Maybe you want a more deeply rooted area, and you want to build into an Avernus or Barovia style adventure, so you can build up a series of legends and weird-but-relevant stuff which opens up to those terrifying places of adventure. Perhaps a shady wizard ordered someone to give some weird potions to a nearby clan of ogres, in an effort to loosen up the leylines keeping portals to Avernus or the Shadowfell popping up unexpectedly. Where does the wizard live? Who's going to be affected by the chaos created by the ogre clan's shenanigans? ... All in all, I like to build scenarios, locations, and NPC's... ... ...almost simultaneously, with the intent of answering the questions a circumstance, place, and individual would beckon me to ask. I want to thrive on the audacity of it all, and let the crazy flow like Dionysius intended. A cartoon called 'Adventure Time' was written with the help of Dungeons & Dragons style creative pathways, likely including the game itself to serve as inspiration. I don't mind being wild and free, because the players can help rein things back in with their interactions in the world as the game is played. This can even lead into the players uncovering the obscure bits for me, as if to be quickly enabled to think "Oh, yeah! That's what I wanted to do!" I can go in without the full picture, and the players unwittingly help my mental palace's toolbox appear right where it needs to be. I can embrace the fact a certain dungeon is 'under construction' as far as the game's concerned, because inspirational bits can come along and help fill in the blanks.
OmG. Finally clicked. The 'interview' technique has less going on than the "DM / (senior) Player" interaction. Sure they're both simply a pair of personas. But one of them shows a warmth viewers can invest in... just a thought. 🤓
Look up “incredible locations” or “fantasy landscape” and use those images or get inspiration from them. Or look up “greatest buildings”. If your world doesn’t have a lighthouse in the form of a statue as big as the Statue of Liberty, why not? Taj Mahal? Sultan's palace. Neuschwanstein? King's castle. Niagara Falls, Angel Falls, the leaning tower of Pisa, the pyramids of Giza, canals of Venice, the Roman Colosseum, the Paris Catacombs… your budget is infinite.
I'm running an adventure with my daughter and twin granddaughters, all first timers. I genuinely stress that they will die and be shattered. I need help lol
