Plagiarizing Like a Good DM

Who made me the DM I am today, the referee that others all quote?

Who's the professor that made me this way, the greatest that ever got marker on her coat?

One man deserves the credit, one man deserves the blame, and Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name

OY 

Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachev- 

I'll never forget the day I first heard of the great Lobachevsky.

In song form I was told the secret of success as a Dungeonmaster: Plagiarize.

Plagiarize!

Let no one else's work evade your eyes!

Remember why the good lord made your eyes, so don't shade your eyes

Just plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize-

Only remember, of course, to call it "research".

RIP the best to ever do it, Tom Lehrer

Contrary to what my chud of an ex-roommate (fuuuuuuuuuck you, Ben) would say whenever I talked about my method for building dungeons and adventures or expanding on my setting, it is in fact not a sign of a terrible DM to take what work was already done and retool it to fit whatever purpose you need it for. I would say it's the sign of a great, intelligent, and creative DM to be able to look at a megadungeon and go "wait I know exactly what I could do with this."

My primary setting of Solaria started as an adaptation of Mystara, the greatest setting TSR gave us, and after some numbers being filed off was slowly retooled into what it is today. Imagine how much effort and stress would go into coming up with details, ecologies, cultures, etc. completely off the top of my head with nothing to springboard off of. I already developed a smoking addiction in film school, that would have just exacerbated things. 

See This Map? It's Mine Now

Modules and adventure packs can be of varying quality. Maybe the writing is bad, maybe the railroading sucks, maybe the encounters just are too easy or too tough, or maybe it's something that is actually peak but gets overshadowed by being so late into a product line no one gives it the time of day (King's Festival, my beloved). Regardless of how good or bad the 16-40 page book's contents are there is always one major contribution to my tables that even the most low effort can contribute: the maps. Back when I worked at the game store, the joke would always be that I looked at module books as maps that came with optional adventures as a bonus.

From DA2 Temple of the Frog by Dave Arneson
and David Ritchie

Take the map to the right for example: this is from the TSR module Temple of the Frog and is the ground floor's layout of the eponymous location. As written in the adventure, this place has been overrun by thieves, cutthroats, slavers, bandits, and BrOSR members. What I see, however, is a perfect baseline for any temples to the various Immortals or pantheons in Solaria. Instead of broken tables and monster closets, the side rooms can be libraries or places of healing for the sick and poor. A few generic keying here and there and we can make this one of our go-to maps when the players decide they'd like to go to the Silver Cathedral in Arnskirk.

Simple, easy, effective. No needing to study church layouts or worry about making everything perfect and symmetrical, just good ol' fashioned "Mine now" and fitting it into what you want to do with it. The Typical Tavern layouts in the Mystara Gazetteers have all be repurposed when appropriate into a place like the Foamy Spoon or a meeting hall for one of the chapters of the League of Adventurers. City Layouts in supplements or adventures have been turned into whatever town or major capital I need them to be for the moment.

Megadungeon? More like Multidungeon

Megadungeons are incredible. Not because of their scale as I find them to be just too large to do anything meaningful in, not because of their quality because an overwhelming majority of them suck, and not because of their ease to run because seriously have you seen how poorly written most are? Mad Mage makes absolutely no sense and Castle Greyhawk is a bunch of in jokes and pop culture references taking the place of what was supposed to be Gary's magnum opus. To make matters worse, most of the ones like Ruins of Undermountain only have 20% or so of the actual map keyed and stocked. So why do I love them? Because those gigantic layouts are just perfect for turning into several smaller dungeons.

A lot of times if you need a quick dungeon for some eager beavers who decided to run off to a place you weren't expecting or who had the dice determine they would stumble upon a sudden cult hideout or other dungeon to delve, you can look at these titanic maps and zoom in on one specific area that you feel suits the situation. The image to the left is from the 3rd Level of Undermountain, located around the middle left of the map. Now you wouldn't have known that if I had told you (Even the few people I know who actually ran Undermountain have no shot of recognizing a random slice of it), but that's the beauty of it. This excerpt from a titanic map can easily serve as a dungeon for any number of purposes, be they dank caverns or perhaps the hive of a race of hyper-intelligent ant-men. Undermountain is full of areas you can just slice off and repurpose, or even add on to if you feel a bout of inspiration. A bit lower down on the same map are a sudden series of ziggurats that could easily become lizardmen temples or the hosts of portals which send travelers to a far off world of hyper advanced humanoids with an Egyptian aesthetic. Possibilities are literally endless.

Featuring Ludwig von Hendricks as...

Every story needs characters, otherwise the PCs are just talking to cardboard cutouts named Butcher, Baker, and Candlestick Maker before they go fight [Evil] in order to appease [King], get their reward, and possibly get to shag [Princess]. But sometimes it's hard writing interesting characters from scratch, and why should I have to come up with an entire cast of people for my players to interact with? 

Fortunately, most sourcebooks and modules come with a whole range of daring-doers, mundane citizens, and antagonists that you can just pop right in to your game. A name change and possibly a redirection of their goal and now instead of Baron Desmond Kelvin III, the accomplished militarist who wants to impress Archduke Stefan Karameikos and become ducal heir, we have Lord Eram Blackmoor with mostly the same personality traits and upbringing but instead wants to prove himself to the other lords in Galanov and has just enough paranoia that his actions make the PCs unsure they can trust him. You don't even have to adjust stats as they rarely become relevant. Players won't know they're interacting with a new coat of paint over characters as old as their parents, and you saved yourself a weekend generating "ok" canvases on Kassoon and then doing all the work to make them actually usable.

Everything is up for Grabs

And that's the whole point of this article. There's no RPG police that's going to knock down your door and confiscate your books or PDFs because you're "misusing them" by not running them RAW, so grab whatever you can and worry about actually running the game instead of how sensible the small village you built is. So do like great Lobachevsky and plagiarize to your heart's content! Can't do worse than some of the Youtube DMs out there...