Preparation

28 hours to game time. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't the least bit nervous - you know, having not run a game in years, and having a bunch of players demanding to be entertained at the table tomorrow - in a public forum too.

As a result, I'm trying to cover all my bases. I have a plan, a story arc, and an idea of where I want the players to go, but just like how no plan survives contact with the enemy, no plot survives contact with the players. At least not entirely. For players aren't computers - they're unpredictable creatures that will resist being hemmed in. They will come up with their own ideas and motivations that may not entirely be in line with what your plot demands, and in most cases, fighting against this tendency is a bad idea. Players resent being told what to do - and in my limited experience the ideal is to provide the illusion of freedom while slowly and carefully nudging them in the direction you want them to go, without them realizing they're being so nudged.

Of course, it doesn't always go that smoothly. Sometimes things just go, to borrow a phrase, tits-up, and in that case it's best to have a contingency plan. Enter Grozzy's Random Dungeon Creator. This fantastic web-based applet allows you to produce a sound, well-laid out random dungeon in seconds, with a lot of tweakable options from aesthetics (color/black and white) to maximum room sizes, etc. This program generates dungeon maps of "small," "medium," "large," and "immense" sizes, and though sometimes it'll generate a map I'm not completely pleased with, all I have to do is click the "generate" button again, and most of the time the next one it cranks out suits me just fine.

Now all you have to do is have some encounters prepared for the appropriate level of your PCs (assuming you don't want to randomly generate encounters on the fly). One of the best tools for this is WotC's own encounter generator (the only downside is it requires a D&D Insider subscription). A more budget-friendly tool is Asmor's Encounter Generator which may not have all the bells and whistles of WotC's, but it gets the job done.

So now I have several random dungeon maps of various sizes, and some generic encounters planned out. This took very little time to put together and stick in my campaign binder, and it's a fantastic safeguard if my players want to wander off the beaten path for some reason. Hopefully, I won't need it, but better safe than sorry!