Playing Dun🐼geon Master for a campaign takes work. For every moment of adventure that players get to experience, a DM has to put work into planning it. But what if there was a simpler way?
There is plenty of advice out there about how to reduce prep time for a session. Tips like using shorthand to write down dungeon descriptions or honing your improvisational🌄 conversation skills are good, but there is one tip that can shave hours off your prep time: go𝓰od DMs borrow, great DMs steal. The trick is just knowing what to steal from.
Published Adventures
There are plenty of already published adventures out there that DMs can shamelessly steal from. If you ran Waterdeep Dragon Heist in the past, you still have an ad♋venture full of already-written encounters and puzzles you can take. Just rework some elements to make it fit into your campaign, and you have some good last-minute, low prep elements for your campaign.
The Adventurers League is an especially good resource for this. As the official weekly session endorsed by Wizards of the Coast, AL has numerous published adventures for play𝔍ers and DMs of all levels and experiences. They can be found on , and run the gamut from combat-heavy meat grinders ꦯto role play-focused odysseys.
Take care that you don’t use any puzzle elements from adventures that your players are familiar with, and be careful using puzzles or traps from very well-known adventures like Tomb of Horrors. You🐎r players may not mind, and may even appreciate the reference, but it can be awkward when a party solves a puzzle because the players played through the adventure last year.
Puzzle Books
If you’re looking for interesting puzzles, lift them wholesale from puzzle books or equivalent internet resources. Lateral thinking puzzles can be an especially good re𒀰source for this.
You will have to adapt puzzles somewhat. Putting a fantasy skin over them can help. Buttons in a puzzle can become magic pillars, lightbulbs can become torches.🅰 You also have to adapt any puzzles so that they make sense to characters within the setting in which the puzzle takes place, not just to an outside observer. Still, having the solid base of an already existing puzzle can drastically cut down on prep time over building your challenges from scratch.
Also, these resources are some of the e🌸asiest to𓂃 acquire. You can get books full of puzzles for cheap at most major bookstores. You can also get find many similar resources online for free.
Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition
D&D 4E was widely known for being a very bad version of Dungeons & Dragons. However, it did do one thing right and that thing was monsters. Every entry in the 4th Edition𓄧 Monster Manual has descriptions of the tactics and strategies that mo🧸nster uses, as well as lists of other monsters they might band together with in combat.
This makes building combat encounters easy. If you have only a vague idea that you want your party to fight, say, drow, you can look up the drow page in theꦯ 4E monster manual and have all the information on what a squad of drow might look like, the different roles that they might have, even the ꦑtypes and numbers of steeds or pets that might be with them. Just look up the corresponding stat blocks for the current edition and you have a ready-made combat encounter that even includes enemy behaviors and tactics. It’s such a good resource that it’s worth holding onto an outdated Monster Manual.
These are only a few resources that you can draw inspiration – or outright steal – from. There are also plenty of random encounter tables, other online resources, or actual play podcasts like Critical Role or The Adventure Zoneꦬ. Remember, you may not be Matt Mercer, but you can definitely steal from him.