D&D Session Prep Checklist: 7-Steps, Free Template, and What to Skip

A lot of D&D and TTRPG session prep articles tell you what you should prepare. This one gives you a 7-step checklist, the 3 things you should focus on, and the order in which to skip them if you don’t have time to finish.

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When preparing for an upcoming game, it’s hard to find good advice that lays out the different things that can be prepared for a game in an easily referenced, prioritized manner. This article will cover preparation systems for a character-focused, ongoing campaigns. If you’re still choosing a system, compare DnD alternatives before building your prep routine. Good prep makes the session easier to run, not longer to write. Everything covered here is built to be used at the table, not admired before it.

Choose your route:

• Running an ongoing homebrew campaign? Use the seven steps or the 20-minute routine.
• Running your first game? Start with the first-session checklist. You will need to prepare more because you are still building the skill that makes short prep work.
• Running a published adventure? Use the module version. Half the checklist is already done for you, and the other half matters more.

The D&D session prep template and checklist

Seven steps, in order. Steps 1 through 6 are for tonight’s game. Step 7 is for the next one.

• 1. Review what happened, 3 minutes. Reread your notes from the last session. Write a one-sentence summary to read aloud.
• 2. Review the characters, 3 minutes. Confirm who’s playing. Review the party’s goals and background hooks, then select one to reference in this session.
• 3. Write a strong opening, 5 minutes. Summarize the first scene in two sentences. Include something from the opening scene.
• 4. Write three situations, 5 minutes. List three possible challenges the party faces. These are just possibilities, not a predetermined list.
• 5. Write secrets and clues, 5 minutes. Draft six to ten interesting facts that players can uncover in multiple ways.
• 6. Prepare only the NPCs and encounters you might need, 6 minutes. Write down the motivations and limits of each NPC and the actions of each monster. Look up rules or stat blocks you are unfamiliar with.
• 7. Add to your notes after play, 3 minutes. Write down what has changed, what is left unsolved, and what the party intends to do next.

Steps 1 through 6 take approximately 27 minutes. You will benefit from more prep time when the game requires tactical maps, unusual monsters, custom encounters, riddles, handouts, a plot-dependent mystery, or rules you are unfamiliar with.

Steps 2 through 6 are adapted from Michael E. Shea’s influential eight steps in The Lazy Dungeon Master. Shea describes his steps as interchangeable instead of sequential. In this version, we close the before-and-after continuity loop, prioritize the tasks based on what can be omitted, and treat locations, loot, maps, and rulebook references as secondary tasks you fill in during the night when you need them.

A character hook is a goal, relationship, fear, promise, or piece of backstory a player wants to see matter. A strong start is an opening scene with something already in motion. It saves you from spending ten minutes going around the table asking “What do you do?”. A situation occurs when there is someone who wants something but something standing in their way, and then a consequence if nobody steps in. You’re setting up the pressure, not writing the outcome. A secret or clue is just one fact the players might use. Write it down without specifying how or where they’ll learn it.

For your first game, this checklist assumes that you can figure out what to do when you don’t have all the details. That’s a learned skill, not a prerequisite. After a few games, trim down your prep until it takes you less time.

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Get the D&D session prep template

Apply the seven-part checklist to your own game. Open the printable session prep sheet, then save a copy or print it before you start:

• Last time: One sentence to read aloud to your players
• Character focus: One hook you might use
• Strong start: Two lines of action to kick off the session
• Situations: Three lines, plus two bonus lines
• Secrets and clues: Six lines of information, plus four bonus lines
• NPCs, encounters, and rewards: What you need for this session only
• Loose threads: Things to decide, follow up on, and determine later

Open the free D&D session prep sheet

Fill it out on screen or print it and write by hand. If you don’t need a section, leave it empty. The sheet is meant to help you run your game, not add more to your workload.

What to cut when you’re running short on time

These are the cuts to make by default for a flexible, ongoing campaign. Don’t skip anything that will be the main source of play in the session. Anything you leave out of your prep has to come from improvisation, so new GMs should cut sparingly.

• Detailed treasure. Use a simple reward, or decide what it is after the session. Leave it in if the reward determines an important decision.
• Decorative location detail. One sense detail is often enough. Save clues, hazards, exits, and interactive features.
• Extra NPC characterization. Wants and limits are more important than a full history and voice. Keep NPCs whose relationships influence player decisions.
• The fourth and fifth situation. Three flexible situations should be plenty for most sessions. You can add more if you’re running a sandbox with many open options.
• Optional monster variety. Use monsters you know instead of learning multiple new stat blocks. But don’t skip an encounter’s objective or unknown unique abilities.
• Maps. A theater-of-the-mind scene may only require a rough sketch. Don’t skip a map when positioning, terrain, exploration, or a virtual tabletop is critical to the session. When learning how to play dnd online especially, don’t skip a map when positioning, terrain, or exploration matters

Don’t cut the pieces that make tonight’s specific game work. A mystery game needs redundant clues. A heist needs a target, obstacles, security, and chances to get info. A dungeon crawl needs a legible map, room connections, inhabitants, and procedures. A tactical scene needs terrain, objectives, and encounter checks.

What D&D session prep looks like in practice

Now that you’ve seen each step in the checklist, here’s an example of the whole process. This example is for an ongoing campaign. At the end of their last session, the party was outside a warehouse near a harbor, searching for missing medicine.

Last time: “You found out the clinic’s medicine came from Warehouse Nine. An unmarked cart rolled in shortly before midnight.”

Character focus: Mara the rogue does not trust the city’s officials because she watched her brother thrown in prison over fabricated evidence. Put the city inspector in a position where helping him would benefit them, but make them uneasy.

Strong start: “Halen the dockmaster moves a crate through the warehouse’s backdoor. He spots you, stops, and tells you, ‘You weren’t supposed to be here yet.'”

Three situations:

• The shipment: The dockmaster needs to move medicine to an illegal clinic before the inspector searches the warehouse.
• The inspection: The inspector wants evidence of smuggling, but his superior has ordered him to leave this warehouse alone.
• The clinic: A courier must collect the medicine before dawn; if it does not arrive, three patients will die.

These aren’t three scenes that need to happen in sequence. The players can help, expose, rob, shadow, talk to, or ignore any of the people involved.

Secrets and clues:

• The medicine was not stolen, someone altered the shipment records.
• The dockmaster’s sister works at the illegal clinic.
• The inspector has searched this warehouse twice before.
• Both earlier searches were quietly cancelled by his superior.
• The crates carry a legitimate merchant’s seal over an older burned mark.
• A clinic courier uses the phrase “the tide turns at dawn.”
• The merchant was paid from a city relief fund.
• One crate contains blankets hiding the medicine.

Any of these facts could come from a book, an NPC, eavesdropping, a labeled box, or a successful check. Don’t force the players to find one specific clue in one exact spot.

NPCs & Encounters:

• Dockmaster Halen: Wants the medicine delivered. Will lie and bribe, but will not hurt anyone. Avoids eye contact.
• Inspector Vale: Wants proof of corruption. Will threaten arrests, but will not plant evidence.
• Courier Tessa: Wants to protect the clinic. Will run or bargain, but will not reveal its location to strangers.
• Possible fight: Four guards try to contain witnesses rather than kill them. They block exits, grapple, and call for reinforcements.
• Rules to have open: Hiding, grappling, and the guards’ stat block.

Session end notes:

“The party allowed Tessa to get away with half of the medicine, handed Vale the ledger, and kept the burnt shipping seal. Halen is now in their debt. Vale plans to take his findings to his boss. Next week, the party plans to follow the merchant listed in the ledger.” That’s plenty for multiple iterations of the same night without having to write out any of them.

Your first D&D session

Your first session needs a different list. Writing additional notes and materials will allow you to figure out how to run the game at the table; it doesn’t require you to write a 10,000-word document about your world.

First-session prep checklist

• Play through a starter adventure, or some other short published scenario. Let someone else provide the locales, encounters, and overall pacing.
• Read only what you think you’ll encounter during the first session. Read it twice, note down page numbers, and condense everything to one page.
• Read the opening aloud. Assemble the party and give them a concrete problem to react to.
• Assign each player a connection. A character, piece of gossip, mystery, or personal objective is sufficient; no need to make it a major plot point during the first session.
• Outline two or three possible scenarios. Your first session will take longer, so you may need fewer scenarios than anticipated.
• Get your gaming table ready. Verify all character sheets, dice, maps, miniatures, URLs, audio clips, and permissions before the group arrives.
• Memorize the rules of play. You don’t need to know everything. Understand when to ask for an ability check and how to determine its DC. Know how to adjudicate attack rolls, saving throws, advantage, and disadvantage. Be able to track rounds and initiative in combat, deal with characters who reach 0 hit points, and run short and long rests. It’s fine to keep a one-pager next to you with the most important information.
• Highlight every monster stat block and rule you plan to use. Jot down a brief description of what each creature intends to do during combat.
• Have backup clues and names ready. This is to mitigate two of the biggest sources of writer’s block.
• Establish how you will make interim decisions. Should a rule lookup begin to hinder the pacing, make a reasonable call, record the issue, and check it later.

Have more materials prepared for your first three to four games, and then observe which portions were utilized. This data can help you determine what you can eliminate for your specific group. Be prepared for the party to disregard certain elements. This is simply a reaction to their choices, not necessarily an indication of poor planning.

Before your first game: run a session zero

Contrary to popular belief, a session zero has nothing to do with creating any sort of narrative or story. Its main focus should be creating standards of play between players and DMs alike, ensuring everyone is comfortable with themes to be presented and creating a collective understanding of what type of game everyone’s signing up for. These standards of play should include:

• Agreement upon premise, tone, and character suitability
• Agreement upon availability, absences, and expectations
• Safety tools for players to call-out problematic elements of play without needing to explain themselves

If you would rather learn from an experienced game runner, you can also find professional DMs through Nerd Culture.

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How to prepare a D&D homebrew session in 20 minutes

This framework assumes the following: the game has already started, you are familiar with the rules and lore, and you know your characters.

• 0 to 3 minutes: Look over your notes from the previous session and summarize it in one sentence.
• 3 to 8 minutes: Review the player characters, pick one plot hook, and write the beginning of the encounter.
• 8 to 13 minutes: Write six to ten clues and secrets.
• 13 to 16 minutes: Write down three scenarios that may occur during the session.
• 16 to 19 minutes: Come up with three NPC names and jot down their motivations and limitations.
• 19 to 20 minutes: Select a monster that you’re well acquainted with, open up its stat block, and ensure you understand the point of the battle.

This last step is only practical if you know the creature and the rules involved. Should the battle involve new creatures, unknown locations, multiple goals, or intricate balance considerations, allocate more time for that part.

What if you only have 15 minutes? Select one character hook, write the opening scene, write as many helpful clues and secrets as possible, and decide where the first major conflict will come from. This is sufficient for running a D&D game in a well-established world, but it isn’t advised as your go-to process for your initial games.

How to prep a 20-minute published module

• 0 to 5 minutes: Look over the area you expect the party to visit and pinpoint its core objective, key locations, and escape routes.
• 5 to 9 minutes: Jot down names, NPC motives, and page numbers.
• Minutes 9–12: Mark the necessary clues and how you’ll reveal them, including alternate ways to reveal them.
• Minutes 12–15: Go over the characters and pair up a single hook with something.
• Minutes 15–18: Write out a good opening or transition to that scene.
• Minutes 18–20: Open maps, stat blocks, handouts, and unfamiliar rules.

If there’s a tricky fight or a puzzle where the clues are vital, give yourself more than twenty minutes.

These are four questions to ask myself when running published material. It makes the process much less daunting:

• What does each important NPC want right now?
• What does the party need to know, and how else might they find out?
• What happens if they decline or skip the anticipated hook?
• What is the opposition doing while the party is away?

Reviewing the characters and writing a solid opening are especially crucial when running a module because these are the areas where it’s easiest to tie a published narrative into your specific table.

D&D session preparation tips

These techniques help me adjust the checklist and use it even when the players take the game somewhere I didn’t expect.

Save your best energy for the three most important steps

When running in the style of this checklist, the three most important steps are usually reviewing the characters, writing a strong opening, and creating adaptable clues. Going through the characters makes the session feel unique to that specific table. Don’t bother writing four new subplots. Just put one thing that someone already cares about within reach. If the rogue doesn’t trust city officials, the inspector entering the warehouse brings their history into play without costing anything extra.

A solid opening keeps the beginning from dissolving into ambiguity. Bad opening: “You’ve arrived in the port district. What do you want to do?” Good opening: “As you approach the warehouse, the port authority official pushes a sealed package out a side door. He notices you and stops dead.”

Secrets and clues are an improvisational backstop. Prioritize six useful facts, and then add more if they come to you easily. Shea says this is the core of his eight-step process, but he has other abbreviated methods that prioritize differently depending on the type of game he wants to run. The checklist should be a guide, not a mandate.

Step 7 is different because it takes place after play. Protecting those last few minutes makes all of your future prep easier.

Prepare scenarios, not predetermined outcomes

There is no way you can guess what your table is going to do. Preparation that relies on the party taking a specific course of action is likely to fail if they choose to talk with the bad guys, bypass the plot hook entirely, or become obsessed with some inconsequential element. That doesn’t mean you should show up empty-handed. A world you’re not prepping can feel fragile, and constantly searching for names and rules can eat into the time you have set aside for actual prep. Brennan Lee Mulligan calls it “making toys” for the players. It’s a great question to ask yourself: will this be something they can probe, exploit, modify, resist, or simply care about?

Frame each scene as someone who wants something, something that gets in their way, and a result if it fails: The dockmaster has to get the medicine to the underground clinic before the city health inspector arrives. If no one steps up, the clinic goes without meds until the morning. No inevitable showdown, revelation, or brawl. Helping him, betraying him, stealing from him, tailing him, or letting him walk free all change the world.

There are more rigid requirements for a mystery, heist, dungeon crawl, or combat-focused scenario, but they still improve with loose endpoints. Preparing the clues, location, opposition, deadline, and aftermath, not the outcome.

Keep random tables on hand for surprises.

Clues describe what the party uncovers. Random tables describe what’s there when the party investigates something you didn’t know they would. Because they will. You’ll have spent half an hour building the haunted warehouse and they’ll spend 40 minutes questioning the pie-seller you created about the alley behind it. And someone will also ask what’s in the desk. Someone always asks what’s in the desk.

Four lists can cover a lot of improvised ground:

• Twenty character names broken down by locale or culture
• A list of mundane and exotic items to find in a desk, chest, pocket, or room
• The unexpected twist that stops a scene from wrapping too easily
• A reason an NPC won’t or can’t help right now

Create your own, pull from published materials, or generate them online. Most adventures include several tables you can reuse, and donjon will generate names, loot, encounters, dungeons, and much more, for free.

Keep whatever works and supplement with repeated answers from your own table. The point isn’t just to roll random dice; it’s to be able to say, “Sure, here’s what they find,” rather than staring at an empty piece of paper while five players wait to see if the mayor keeps his good underwear in the desk.

When AI can help, and when it shouldn’t

The least invasive ways to use AI are for organizing material that you and your players have already made. You can ask AI to help you work through what your group has come up with, such as:

• Clean up your rough notes and turn them into a brief player-facing recap
• Pull out characters, commitments, unfinished quests, and unanswered questions from your session
• Turn an NPC’s description into a goal, a weakness, and a defining characteristic
• Make an encounter into a single-page rundown: the enemy’s goals, its tactics, any rules you need to refresh your memory on

It also makes a good brainstorming partner: “Give me twenty tavern names,” “ten complications for a warehouse job,” “six ways a sentry will take a bribe,” or “give me a few twists on this obvious scenario.” When using the AI for ideas like these, don’t assume you’re getting usable content, use the output as fodder for your own ideas: revise it, combine it with other sources, throw out anything that doesn’t fit. It’s meant to be an input, not a finished product.

Instead of asking for an entire adventure, ask for options. “Give me ten possible complications for an investigation of the warehouse” gives you a narrow slice and still allows you to exercise your creative choices. “Write tonight’s adventure” is far broader and results in a lot of words you may not be able to read in time to know if a 17 hits.

Obtain consent from the table and maintain privacy

Do not enter audio recordings, direct messages, PC backstories, personal information, or sensitive conversations into AI without permission from the players. Let them know if AI is being used to contribute to the collaborative creation of the campaign, particularly if any member of the table has reservations about AI or its use of intellectual property. If they would prefer AI not be used in the creative process, respect their wishes. Review recaps or campaign summaries against your notes. The AI has no way of knowing whether something was misinterpreted by the party, whether something was mentioned once as a joke and now counts as established lore, or whether Derek’s note about the wizard looking suspicious is talking about an NPC or one of the other PCs.

Lastly, AI should not be treated as the ultimate arbiter of rules. If there is an important decision that could change how the game goes forward, look it up in the rulebook or an official source.

After the DnD session

Start preparing for next week now. Take three minutes to jot down:

• What changed
• The decisions made
• Any names, pledges, and clues
• Unresolved questions
• Anticipated player actions

Four short bullets might be sufficient. A more complex session may require additional points. The point is not to capture every moment, but to ensure a smooth transition to your future self.

If the session is about to end, aim for a decision, revelation, discovery, or milestone that gives your future self a clear direction to pick up on next week. Don’t force a resolution, but don’t end the session on a whim, either, when there’s a more appropriate stopping point. Don’t spend the last twenty minutes doing paperwork if you could wrap things up earlier with a satisfying narrative hook.

Choose, rotate, and archive session notes

Once the game is done, write down the outcomes and changes while they’re still clear in your mind. You’re already the narrator, dungeon master, and creator of every NPC in the tavern. Don’t also take on the role of unpaid scribe for your entire campaign.

Choose a scribe before the game starts

Make the selection known before you start playing. If you wait until everyone is ready to leave, suddenly no one can recall the name of the merchant NPC.

Rotate the role each session. Having the same person do it every session leads to a situation where the scribe is spending more time taking notes than actually playing the game, and the rest of the players begin treating the scribe’s notes as if they’re an official product they’re entitled to access.

Keep the notes brief. Record:

• Proper names: people, places, deities, organizations, and the name of the tavern owner that nobody remembers the spelling of.
• Vows and obligations: particularly those made by the players.
• Major outcomes and revelations: what the party accomplished.
• Unresolved business: things left open, such as closed doors, unanswered questions, lost items, and NPCs who haven’t been met.
• Rewards and opportunities: valuable items, allies, patrons, and pooled money.

Don’t transcribe conversations. Aim for ten to fifteen high-value bullet points rather than three pages of text no one will ever read again.

Store the notes where everyone can see them

Notes kept in a single player’s phone aren’t accessible to the rest of the group. At session eight, four different people will have four different memories of who the duke was, whether he was a vampire in disguise, and why the party owes him a goat. If you don’t have a table yet, use Nerd Culture to find DnD groups by schedule, location, and play style.

Track the progress of the campaign

Step 1 focuses on last session’s notes. In a long-running campaign, periodically expand the summary:

• What has the party pledged to do?
• Which NPCs have they aided, opposed, or ignored?
• Which quests and plotlines remain active?
• Any unutilized items, hints, or names?
• Any decisions made previously whose repercussions haven’t yet manifested?

By taking a broader view, previous decisions remain viable without the need to reintegrate every lingering plot thread into the subsequent session.

Commonly Asked Questions for DnD Session Prep

About the Author

Steven Weingarth, aka ShibaSteve, is the co-founder and CEO of Nerd Culture. He is a player and Dungeon Master of tabletop role-playing games for 15+ years. Steven’s passion for D&D, board games, and sci-fi novels inspired him to start a platform for hobbyists. Nerd Culture helps D&D players and Dungeon Masters create their groups and communicate between sessions. Users can reference conversations and notes from their campaigns for years to come.

Content last updated: September 10, 2026