How to Defend Your Lair

By: Keith Ammann

Narrated by: Jonathan Davis

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.

How to setup your D&D Lairs

if you are a D&D 5e DM then this books is for you (players can get something out of it also). I highly recommend the book.

Killing it Keith!!

I have literally waited months for this to come to audiobook, you are a study on D&D, the grandmaster - so well thought out and the reader is perfect from the last book

5 stars all around, but…

Like others said, the audiobook doesn’t come with a pdf version of the many monsters designed for the book.

I have the print version, so I have access to them, but this is a pretty glaring oversight considering that it’s pretty common in other books i have, and they’re normal reading books, not what’s essentially a (really engaging and well written) textbook.

Other than that though, you get not only the actual advice in step by step detail, but then what must be a half dozen or more example lairs, all of them all but ready to be dropped into any world you have. And they’re not just the lairs, but a step by step analysis for why the lairs are designed as is, using the earlier process so you can see how it was used.

no pdf stat blocks

so in a very uncharacteristic fashion there is no included pdf for stat blocks mentioned nor alternatives mentioned for certain creatures. The book is normally great at offering this kind of suggestion but in this one for some reason the only answer is "Screw audio listeners" the man could've posted the stat blocks on his website for crying out loud but apparently no.

would skip for the text version if you want the whole book otherwise try to use a free credit on this one.