Heck folks have been doing this hashtag stuff for nearly a week now.

Here we go again with today’s theme…

I’m going to interpret today’s theme (over looking that it’s spelt wrong) as text that provides a mood or gives background information.

So in D&D terms we are talking about the boxed text in the published adventures.

For me a follower of the way of the lazy DM, less is more. I’m running what many would consider a homebrew campaign. So when I come to preparing the next session I don’t want to be spending hours writing text that may not even be needed. Let alone making sure it will hopefully keep the attention of the players when it is finally read out allowed.

By following Chapter 7: Develop Fantastic Locations of The Return of the Lazy DM, all I need to come up with during my prep for each potential location the players might visit is “an evocative name and the location’s aspects.”

The advice given is that the “name of the location should fire up
the imaginations of you and the players alike.” Whilst the location’s aspects “describe important, notable, or useful features of the location.”

An example from the Return of the Lazy DM for a fantastic location is the following: “The Bridge of Teeth: Narrow bridge of bone spanning a gorge; bones tied together with cracked and splitting leather and sinew; howling wind sounds like moaning”.

All we are aiming for is “having just need enough of a reminder to help you describe it to the players during the game.” I don’t know about you but the example fantastic location gives a lot of flavour and creates a vivid image of the location. Does the location description need to be any longer? Not in my opinion. I think it ticks all the boxes of the definition at the start of this post.

When our group finally returns to our campaign sometime in September (world events allowing) I’ll be following the steps Sly Flourish outlines in a post about applying the above to an existing dungeon map that I plan to use.

So there we have it flavour in an RPG doesn’t have to be paragraphs and paragraphs of text, it can be a sentence or two of text instead.