It's 6 o'clock on a Wednesday night. Your week has been hellish. Between work, running errands, and other commitments you've had zero time to prepare for your weekly Dungeons and Dragons game. The players arrive in one hour, but you haven't even begun to think up tonight's adventure, let alone the NPCs, monsters, treasure, and fantastic locations within.

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Nonetheless, you want to provide a memorable and enjoyable night for your players. There are a handful of ways to save time when preparing for your next game. When used together, an hour can be more than enough prep time for creating an awesome evening.

10 Reskin your Favorite Characters as NPCs

Coming up with affable NPCs is time-consuming. Thankfully, there are millions of great characters waiting to be plucked from other stories. No one's going to notice that you've just introduced them to Han Solo when he's been turned into a woman with an Irish accent.

Furthermore, that one name provides a vivid personality to work with when roleplaying your NPC. Best of all, you can always add more details to your NPC later on to personalize his or her character.

9 Theater of the Mind Combat

Players love minis and they especially love battle maps. But, to be frank, minis are expensive and creating battle maps doesn't often encourage players to interact creatively with their surroundings. In fact, it can be inhibiting. Theater of the mind combat is battle without minis or a map.

While there are some battlefields that demand a fully drawn out map, such as an encounter with the kingpin of a local gang, most skirmishes don't require one. You'll be amazed at how much faster combat moves when players aren't concerned with terrain and minis.

8 Roll up Random Encounters

Custom tailoring monster encounters is highly recommended, but using the random encounter tables in the Dungeon Master's Guide and some modules can provide the same results. It also introduces an element of the unknown into your game, which can lead to all kinds of shenanigans as the players search for an explanation to what was admittedly the result of a dice roll.

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Random encounters provide inspiration for future adventures and further world-building. For example, why is there a band of sahuagin roaming the desert sands? If the players are interested in finding out, you can come up with an explanation later and it will appear as if you had everything planned all along.

7 Use a Prebuilt Dungeon

As a dungeon master, there really aren't many exercises more tedious than building a dungeon from top to bottom. There are thousands upon thousands of dungeons you can use that have already been made though. You don't have to steal a dungeon whole cloth.

There's also the option to mix and match rooms from a variety of sources, creating your own custom dungeon using the pieces of other ones. Besides saving you time, looking at dungeon creations from other players provides a healthy amount of inspiration. You can find prebuilt dungeons in modules and most D&D related websites.

6 Have the Players Recap Last Session

Writing up a recap of the previous game is a great way to get your players back into the game time mentality. It also takes a lot of effort and time. Instead, you can have your players write their own recap by asking them to recount the events of your previous game at the beginning of the session.

More than saving time, this exercise can be eye-opening. Your players may recount details that seemed minor to you at the time, in turn revealing the activities most important to them. You can then use this information to inform your future games, providing scenarios and encounters that lend themselves to your player's interests.

5 Roll up Random Rewards

Beggars can't be choosers. The loot tables in the back of the Dungeon Master's Guide allow a dm to quickly create the treasure for your next session. As with random encounters, randomly rolled treasure can also add to your game in exciting and unforeseeable ways.

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When an iron flask containing a genie willing to grant one wish under the conditions the wisher first makes a wish of the genie's own desires, your players will jump at the prospect of this campaign derailing action. A good Dungeons and Dragons game mirrors many intricacies of the real world. One of them being randomness.

4 Work on Improv Skills

As dungeon masters, we each have wardrobes chock full of many different hats. But no matter what hat we might be wearing, improvisation is a contributing factor to our performance.

You don't have to take up an improv class at the local community college to work on your improv skills though. You can find practice in more leisurely ways such as board games, conversations with friends, and online research.

3 Steal Story Beats from your Favorites

Weaving the narrative of your game's plot can be a daunting task. You have to walk the line between creating an entertaining story that has value to your players and keeping things simple enough that the chain of events doesn't get convoluted.

One surefire way to keep your feet firmly on the tight rope is by using the story arcs from your favorite movies, books, and other tales. We may know that Darth Vader betrays Palpatine at the end of the Star Wars saga, but that doesn't make the same action between your game's BBEG and his most prized underling any less dramatic.

2 Use a Module

To date, there are 14 officially published 5th edition modules. Each of them provides a plethora of encounters tied together into a single overarching story. However, it is very easy to take singular encounters out of these modules and put them into your very own game world. Modules like Tomb of Annihilation as well as Tales of the Yawning Portal are especially well adapted for this purpose, as they contain areas and characters that stand on their own without any editing required on your part.

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It may take a little more work, but modules from previous editions of Dungeons and Dragons can also be converted for your 5th edition game. In short, there is a gold mine of fully written material available at your fingertips.

1 Read and Reread the Dungeon Master's Guide

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When you first became a dungeon master, it's likely you sat down with the dungeon master's guide for a considerable amount of time. Pouring over its instructional pages while a cup of hot joe steamed on your coffee table. But how much time have you spent with it since?

The dungeon master's guide is no different than any other book. Successive readings will reveal details and ideas you may have not noticed before. Committing as much of the DMG to memory as is possible will provide you with a bottomless font of inspiration, improvisation, and preparation for your next game and the games beyond. Powerful though they might be, no wizard is so grand when separated from his spellbook. The same goes for a dungeon master and his guide.

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