New to Sly Flourish? Start Here or subscribe to the newsletter. Listen to articles on Readings and Reflections.

Location Moves

by Mike on 12 January 2026

When we're prepping and running locations and monuments, think about what features those locations or monuments have that can act for or against the characters. Imagine the locations themselves are characters – what do these locations do?

I just started playing Daggerheart and really dug Daggerheart's "environments". Environments are like stat blocks for locations, with a lot of stuff packed into a short space. Environments include a flat overall difficulty, a list of potential inhabitants, some "impulses", and features.

Each environment almost feels like it could contain a whole session of play in a half-page of material.

Today I want to focus on two components of environments: impulses and features.

The "Cult Ritual" environment in the Daggerheart core book, for example, has the following impulse:

Profane the land, unite the Mortal Realm with the Circles Below.

This impulse is what this environment does.

It also has four features:

Desecrated Ground
Blasphemous Might
The Summoning
Complete the Ritual

Each feature has mechanics tied to it like making the whole environment nasty for characters, beefing up the main bad guy, pushing minions into attacks meant for said bad guy, and summoning demons.

The idea that a location has actions is pretty cool and something we can transfer over to other RPGs.

We don't have to write down the impulses of an environment like Daggerheart environments have, but it's an interesting thing to keep in mind – what is this location's goal? That can seem like a weird question but an interesting one – what purpose does this location serve in the world? What is it doing?

The Moves of Fantastic Locations

In step 5 of the eight steps of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, we outline fantastic locations for our game. Sometimes these fantastic locations are larger areas with an evocative name and three aspects:

Defiled Catacomb. Oozing sarcophagus, wailing skulls, unholy circle.

Other times we jot down short descriptions of several rooms in a large dungeon. Here's an example list of rooms in one of the dungeons I ran in my Dragon Empire game:

Trapped stairwell, guardian chamber, blood mage dormitories, upper cells, lower cells, blasphemous library, infernal machine (hell rift, torture blades, runic etching machine), treasure vault, archmage quarters, summoning chamber, desecrated decorations of Aten, secret shrine of Heretical Aten.

Some of the rooms have adjectives you can think of as moves such as trapped stairwell, torture blades, blasphemous library, and summoning chamber. These locations can do things. These locations have "moves".

Here's a list of effects from the Lazy GM's Resource Document that can serve as these location moves:

Smoky
Acidic
Bloodied
Burning
Frozen
Poisonous
Necrotic
Thunderous
Ringing
Lightning
Radiant
Shadowed
Oozing
Ethereal
Whispering
Windswept
Drenched
Diseased
Crystalline
Silvered

Many of these effects can serve as "moves" for a location.

The Mechanics of Location Moves

During prep we don't want to have to outline the mechanics of every single room in a large dungeon. Instead, we want enough of a flavorful descriptor to help us improvise what they do and have some general-use mechanics from our system of choice to apply mechanics to the location's move.

Daggerheart has the "Environment Statistics by Tier" table on page 242 of the Daggerheart core rulebook which serves this purpose well. Daggerheart also has two standard conditions, vulnerable and restrained, which we can apply to improvised location moves.

D&D 2024 has the Improvising Damage and Damage Severity and Level tables on page 30 and 31 of the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide. Those, along with the standard DCs of 10, 15, or 20 help us improvise mechanics for locations. We can also include status effects from the standard list of conditions on page 29 and described in the rules glossary of the 2024 Player's Handbook. If you want some conditions that don't have quite the same large effect as the standard 5e conditions, take a look at the weapon mastery effects on page 214 of the Player's Handbook. And, of course, you can apply spell effects from your favorite spells as well.

Other systems often have other improvisational mechanics you can apply to locations. Having a toolbox of damage values and conditions lets you improvise the moves a location might inflict when the characters get involved even if you're just starting with a single adjective like "radiant" or "bloody".

You'll also have to improvise how these moves manifest. Do they have their own turn? Do the characters or NPCs trigger them by doing something or moving somewhere? Are they just always going on? Ensure you don't trap characters or NPCs by having the effects act too often while also debilitating character movement or actions. You don't want to have an environment that activates at the beginning of a character's turn and stuns that character until the end of their next turn – they'll never escape!

Here's a list of common triggers for location moves:

At a set initiative, perhaps at the top of the round or bottom of the round.
Triggerable by a character or NPC, perhaps as a free or bonus action on their turn.
When a character enters an area for the first time or ends its turn there.
One time, triggered by some larger event.
Always on. The effect is continual.

You can end effects a few ways as well. The characters might use an action, bonus action, or a free action on their turn to attempt to turn on or off an effect with a suitable ability or skill check. The effect might have a clock – getting more or less powerful as the clock goes up or down. Some other event might either turn on, turn off, scale up, or scale down the effect.

Example Effects

Here are a handful of improvised mechanical effects based on the rooms I described earlier:

Blasphemous Library. Cursed books, if read, inflict 3d6 psychic damage on those who fail a DC 15 Intelligence saving throw. On a success, a character can inflict an extra 1d6 psychic damage on any damage roll for one hour.
Torture blades. Bladed pillars whirl with spinning metal. A creature who moves within 10 feet of a bladed pillar or starts its turn there takes 1d6+14 slashing damage.
Summoning Chamber. While the cultists in this chamber live, their summoning ritual continues. At the end of four rounds a vrock is summoned from the lower depths, smashes through the ceiling above, and into the city beyond. If all the cultists are slain, the summoning ritual fails.

Locations as Actors

The concept of locations as living breathing things is an interesting way to add more dynamic environments to your game. Give it a try!

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 Five Scenes and Saving Winter's Love – Dragon Empire Prep Session 51.

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:

Offer multiple viable choices.
Have players describe their characters at the beginning of a few early sessions in a campaign. Remind everyone who everyone is.
Include multiple paths, secret paths, hidden chambers, and loop backs in dungeons.
Draw small line and box charts to represent the layout of a dungeon – it doesn't need to be fancy.
Build a local library of your favorite maps. Don't worry about reusing maps you've used before.
Keep an eye on the time. Adjust your adventure early to fit the time you have.
Adjust published adventures to fit your style, desires, and the desires of your players.

Share this article using this link: https://slyflourish.com/location_moves.html

Subscribe to Sly Flourish

Subscribe to the weekly Sly Flourish newsletter and receive a free adventure generator PDF!

Get More from Sly Flourish

Sly Flourish's Books

Have a question or want to contact me? Check out Sly Flourish's Frequently Asked Questions.

This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. It allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, for noncommercial purposes only by including the following statement in the new work:

This work includes material taken from SlyFlourish.com by Michael E. Shea available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license.

This site may use affiliate links to Amazon and DriveThruRPG. Thanks for your support!