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 renowned hero, or the current possessor of the Golden MacGuffin, someone’s going to come at you. Probably more than one someone. 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: drawing the maps. Say goodbye to encounters between PCs and baddies in randomly generated dungeons and hello to a game in which where the fight takes place is just as important as the fight itself.

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 both the strengths and weaknesses of all the characters involved, creating spaces that are strong enough to keep out ordinary intruders…and to provide a thrilling challenge to extraordinary ones.

Including more than a dozen scenarios that will push your players to think about how to solve problems before running at them head-on, How to Defend Your Lair is a must-read for any RPG gamemaster.

Keith Ammann has been a Dungeons & Dragons player and DM for more than thirty years. He has been writing his fifth edition D&D–focused blog The Monsters Know What They’re Doing since 2016. He lives in Chicago.