I can’t believe I forgot that I had another way of generating ideas for an adventure using random content from tables using dice rolls.

I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m a fan of Sly Flourish aka Mike Shay and his “Way of the Lazy DM” (that’s my words about it not his).

Each week on YouTube Mike uploads his twitch stream of his prep for his ongoing campaigns. Which are really useful to see the lazy DM principles at work, how another DM preps for a session, and their thoughts on the adventure they are currently running and D&D in general.

Mike has a Patreon (which popular content creator doesn’t?) One of the perks of being a patron (ie giving them money) is access to a regular updated document of Adventure Generators.

“These generators are not complete adventures. They’re intended to inspire you to develop your own adventures based on these themes. They’re intended to help you quickly and easily come up with a scenario that you’d want to run for your group.”

The current themes covered are “Adventurers for Hire”, “Dungeons Deep”, “Seven Samurai”, “Arena of Fate”, “Jaws”, “Apocalypse Now”, and “Dogs of War”. As you can probably guess from the theme names more than one of them has been inspired by a popular movie.

If you can’t decide even on a theme to use, you could always create your own table to roll against to select a theme before moving onto that themes tables.

For this example exercise I’m going to come up with a scenario that could be used in my currently on hiatus D&D campaign.

Although I think any of the themes would work within the campaign. We have already done an arena combat. So I’m ruling that one out for now. I’m feeling pulled towards the “Jaws” theme.

The premise for this obvious movie inspired theme is the following:

“A powerful beast of nightmare holds a settlement in terror. The characters are hired to cut through the threats of the wilds and hunt down the beast before it can kill again.”

There are six tables that I will be rolling a d20 against to create this themed scenario.

The first table is “What is the Beast?” I rolled a 9. Which means my big bad for this scenario is a “Phase Spider“. Not very nautical. But let’s see how this comes out.

The next table and question I am rolling an answer for is “What Makes the Beast Unique?” For this I rolled a 2. So the Phase Spider “Can turn invisible”. This beast is going to be one difficult so and so to get rid of when this combines with it’s ability to “…magically shift from the Material Plane to the Ethereal Plane, or vice versa.”

The Phase Spider needs a liar, and that is the next table “Where does the Beast Reside?” Unlucky for some I rolled a 13. So it looks like my party of adventurers will be venturing into an “Unhallowed temple”.

The next table/question we roll against tells me “Who Protects the Beast?” The d20 said 15. This came out with Devils protecting the Phase Spider. I like this a lot. It fits very very nicely with the previous tables result. Plus this gives an opportunity to make a “deal with a devil”.

Let’s find out what motivates the Phase Spider against the next table “What Drives the Beast?” Double unlucky for my adventurers I rolled 13 again. So the Phase Spider is the “Guardian of a disturbed tomb”. Wow these last two rolls have come up trumps for the liar.

The final table tells us “Who Else Hunts the Beast?” The dice have spoken with a 12. Which means some Trophy hunters are also hunting the Phase Spider.

So here is our adventure idea:

“The adventurers arrive at an island where a Phase Spider has held a settlement in terror ever since clerics disturbed it trying to recover holy relics from a tomb. The adventurers have been hired to hunt down the beast in it’s liar, a nearby unhallowed temple before it can kill again. But the adventurers are not the only ones hunting the Phase Spider, Trophy Hunters have been seen in the area. Rumour has it that the temple is guarded by devils.”

I went to the Dyson Logos blog and searched for temple maps. As you can probably guess there are a few temple maps to choose from.

The secret for me in which to choose is how big a map do I want to use, and does it look right for what I’m using it for.

I decided to go with the “Ye Olde Temple & Crypts” map.

I like that it has crypts. They speak spider lair to me.

The next step with the map is to follow the steps in this Sly Flourish post “Building Lazy Dungeons“. But that’s something for another post on another day.

So there we have it a quick adventure generated for my campaign. A third way of inspiring ideas!