How to Defend Your Lair
Defend yourself and protect your assets in a lair that feels as real and alive as your monsters with advice from Keith Ammann, author of The Monsters Know What They’re Doing: Combat Tactics for Dungeon Masters.
The world is a dangerous place—especially when you’re up to no good. Whether you’re a rampaging monster, a calculating mastermind, or the current possessor of the Golden MacGuffin, someone’s going to come at you. Probably more than one someone. You can’t know when, but you can choose where. You need to be ready.
You need a lair.
In How to Defend Your Lair, gamemaster Keith Ammann pulls back the curtain on an underrated but crucial part of any tabletop roleplaying game: the theater of battle. Say goodbye to encounters in randomly generated dungeons and hello to a game in which where the fight takes place is just as important as who is doing the fighting.
This book teaches you how to use real-world principles of building security and area defense to create strongholds infused with flavor, informed by narrative, and complex enough to force your players to think strategically. You’ll look at the strengths and weaknesses of both defenders and potential attackers, creating spaces that are strong enough to keep out ordinary intruders…and to provide thrilling challenges to extraordinary ones.
Including more than a dozen fleshed-out sample strongholds, How to Defend Your Lair is a crucial resource for any RPG gamemaster who wants to push players to think about how to solve problems before running at them head-on.
Reviews
“How to Defend Your Lair … takes the guesswork out of building the best lair for your game. … Every possible question I could have about how to build a lair has already been thought of and answered in this book. Not only are they answered, but they’re presented in a way that is easy to understand without making the reader feel stupid. … I felt like I was talking to a very enthusiastic friend who is helping me learn how to improve my own gaming experience.”The Cosmic Circus
“How would a big bad evil wizard actually protect his spellbooks, or his treasury, or his life? How would the ruthless assassin's guild head protect her assassins, her big book of client names, and her escape route? GM long enough and you can come up with some ideas. With this book you can organize the approach based on real world principles and a sensible and logical approach. It's very good stuff.”Dungeon Fantastic
“Part fantasy thought piece, part nonfiction about the practicalities of lairs, and part dungeon master’s guide to crafting great lairs for TTRPG campaigns. All of it comes together to form a very serious book about a somewhat silly subject that I enjoyed quite a lot.”Andrew Mather, The Quill to Live
“Ammann's literal decades of expertise, combined with his witty and approachable voice, makes this book a must for your gaming bookshelf.”Kara Dennison, Ko-fi.com