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Prep Three Quests

by Mike on 21 July 2025

During prep, think about the three next quests that stand in front of the characters when they're done with their current quest. Where will they go next? What options lay ahead of them?

Stick these three potential quests at the end of your "scenes" step from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master.

This idea combines three previous topics:

We want to think about these three future quests early – even if it's just a couple of words. When the characters (and players) start to think about where they're headed next, we can drop them on the table and have them choose one.

Ideally, players choose their next quest somewhere close to the end of a session so you know what to prep next. You can even put these quests out to your players before they're finished with the current one just to get an idea of where they want to go next.

Prepping three quests early helps you avoid the situation where you're in the beginning of a session and your players are only now deciding what they want to do next.

What Is a Quest?

I really like how Robert Schwalb calls adventures "quests" in Shadow of the Weird Wizard. "Quests" focuses adventures down to the actual goal instead of just the situation. What are the characters supposed to accomplish?

Quests can be described in single sentence with a template like this one:

An NPC wants the characters to accomplish something at a particular location.

We can fill this model out by saying "who's asking?", "where does it take place?", and "what are we supposed to do?"

Not every quest focuses on this model but generally you have a motivation, a location, and a goal.

Here are several example quests:

Roselyn Zeshe wants the characters to stop the Children of the Red Rose from assassinating the queen's sister-in-hiding at Heron's Stride.

Queen Karsara wants the characters to infiltrate the Dread Necropolis, face the Dread Knight Karavon, and prevent his war against the City of Arches before it begins.

Garland Willowmane wants the characters to travel into the Vault of the Key of Worlds and recover the artifact before either the marilith Sylisa Sixblade or the erinyes Vether Voidwalker find it first.

You need no more detail than these single sentences when presenting such quests to your players. They choose the one they want to go on and then you fill out the rest of the adventure with NPCs, location details, treasure, secrets, monsters, and the rest of the eight steps for game prep from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master.

Keep Things Simple

Focusing things down to the next three quests helps simplify the whole act of GMing. We GMs have a lot going on. Anything we can do to help build templates and add simple clear steps to our prep makes our lives easier and lets us focus on the high fantasy and adventure stories we build with our players.

Next time you're prepping your game, prepare three quests and present them to your players near the end of your next session.

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 Fast, Medium, and Slow Monster Initiatives and Darkstar – Dragon Empire Prep Session 30.

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:

Replace Legendary Resistance with “Dreadful Blessings” bosses can use for rerolls, auto-saves, attack advantages, extra turns, or minion sacrifices for temp HPs.
Give characters a good reason to attack other monsters than just the boss in a boss fight.
Account for the fact that players love to focus on the boss in a big fight. Bosses need extra protection.
Make the consequences of the characters' choices clear when they make important decisions.
If offering the ability to buy magic items in stores, limit available items to three random choices.
Telegraph bad inevitable news early.
Describe out of character cut scenes as dreams and portents.

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