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Lazy Map Annotation

by Mike on 8 September 2025

Instead of annotating every room on a dungeon map, write a list of possible chambers you can reference during play.

I'm a big fan of dungeon crawls – whether for infiltrating an inhabited location or exploring an old tomb. Exploring locations is just a fun activity for me as a GM and for my players. It also mostly fits my lazy style of prep – I have no idea where the characters are going to go but I know it's somewhere in this location.

Dyson of Dyson Logos gave us 1,300 maps including 600 commercially licensed maps we can sift through to find great dungeon maps for our games.

But then we need to annotate them. What are each of those rooms?

Step 5 of the eight steps of game prep from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master has us building fantastic locations. Each room on one of these maps might be a fantastic location but defining each room with three features that make rooms familiar, functional, and fantastic (using Rodney Thompson's great model for building fantastic locations) is a lot of work – too much work for a lazy GM like me.

In the optimistically titled Simplest Way to Annotate a Map, I talk about writing short room descriptions directly on a printed map.

But maybe' there's a simpler way!

List Chambers In Your Notes

Instead of putting down a detailed description of every room in a dungeon, write a list of locations abstract from the map. For example, we might have a map like this:

and instead of filling out every room on the map, we can list ten rooms like this:

Marrow Vaults. River styx, archway to Savandra's office, vault of forbidden tomes, underworld ziggurat, cracked obsidian sarcophagus, necrotic laboratory, squirming refuse pit, sacrilegious treasure vault, shrine to the Pale Lord, pain amplifier.

This loose list of room descriptions fits nicely into our "Fantastic Locations" section of our eight-step prep notes and doesn't require us to manually annotate the map.

If you're having trouble coming up with ideas for room descriptions like the Marrow Vaults, I have a list of twenty chamber descriptions for fifteen different types of dungeons in the Lazy GM's Resource Document released under a CC BY license.

Some descriptions clearly match specific rooms on the map but other ones do not. We can improvise these rooms as we need them from our list. Maybe a smaller chamber is a forbidden library. Maybe it's a sacrilegious treasure vault. Maybe it's a room with a pain amplifier or a cracked obsidian sarcophagus. You decide how tightly your room descriptions connect to the rooms on the map itself.

What you don't have to do is make a pretty annotated map.

This abstract annotation style fits a larger lazy GM principle: your notes serve only you. You aren't preparing a map for an adventure you're going to publish and sell. You're prepping these notes to help you run your game. No one else may ever see them. They don't have to be pretty. They don't have to be complete. They only have to help you run your game.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video.

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers.

Talk Show Links

Here are links to the sites I referenced during the talk show.

Last week I also posted a couple of YouTube videos on Adjudicating Stealth and Hiding in D&D 2024 and 5e and Sunspear – Dragon Empire Prep Session 37.

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

Reiterate quest goals often.
Throw the kitchen sink at high level characters.
Nothing increases the threat in combat like more damage.
Shrink dungeons to fit the time you have.
Mix roleplay and exploration challenges in dungeon crawls.
Use rank choice voting to determine the next quest of three.
Choose monster targets randomly.

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