Shea - Sly Flourishs Return of the lazy dungeon master

by Michael E. Shea

Editing by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

Cover art by Jack Kaiser

Art direction, cover design, page design, and layout by Marc Radle

Special thanks to David Hartlage, Grant Ellis, and Jennifer Gagne for their invaluable input and to our 6,694 backers on Kickstarter

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Dungeons & Dragons and Dungeon Master are registered trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC

Copyright 2018 by Michael E. Shea

Prep as little as you can.

Jeremy Crawford, lead designer for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons

Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master is a book designed to help Gamemasters of any type of tabletop roleplaying gameboth veterans and newcomers alikeget the most value out of the time we spend preparing for our games. The ideas in this book are based on reviews of hundreds of videos, articles, books, and interviews, as well as the shared experiences of thousands of DMs and GMs. Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master begins with an eight-step process for game preparation, then builds on those steps to expand into a full discussion of how we prepare our games, how we run our games, and how we think about our games.

Gamemasters with some experience running roleplaying games will get the most value out of this book. Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master isnt designed to teach beginners how to run roleplaying games. (Thankfully, many RPG sourcebooks and Gamemaster guides can help shepherd new players through the steps of running games for the first time.) But you dont need to be a hardened veteran to make use of this book. If you have any amount of experience running RPGs, Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master can help you learn how to get more out of your RPGs by preparing less.

This book can work with just about any RPGparticularly d20-based fantasy RPGs. Still, while writing the book, I had fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons clearly in mind. Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master contains no game-specific mechanics, however. The concepts discussed in these chapters can work with just about any fantasy RPG, and will work particularly well with Dungeons & Dragons.

Its been five years since the first appearance of Sly Flourishs The Lazy Dungeon Master, and much has changed in those five years. Wizards of the Coast published the fifth edition of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game in 2014. The streaming of tabletop RPGs online has exploded into a new form of daily entertainment. By any measure, the popularity of Dungeons & Dragons continues to rise.

Lots of new people are coming into this amazing hobby. Lots of people who left the hobby are coming back again. The game has changed. We have changed.

Even with all this change, though, the ideas in the original Lazy Dungeon Master hold up. People still talk about how that book remains a valuable resource for learning how to prepare lessand to run better roleplaying games at the same time. For Dungeon Masters and other Gamemasters reading the original book today, the ideas found within it work just as well in our current games as they did in our games five years ago.

So why write this new book?

Because weve all learned a lot since then.

Though The Lazy Dungeon Master holds up, there are always new ideas to add. We can polish and refine the original concepts with the experience of tens of thousands of Gamemasters to make them even more useful.

Though this book builds off the concepts of the original book, Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master is fully self-contained. You dont need to have read The Lazy Dungeon Master before reading this book. If you have previously read the original Lazy Dungeon Master, youll find familiar ideas here, but this books way of the Lazy Dungeon Master is a complete revision of the way of the Lazy Dungeon Master presented in that book. Nothing has been copied over directly. Every idea has been reexamined and rewritten in the context of what we know today.

This book is a complete encapsulation of the way of the Lazy Dungeon Master. If you want to follow this path, this is the only book you need.

Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master is designed to maximize the value of the time you spend reading it. Each chapter is deliberately brief, to get you to the meat of the books topics as fast as possible. Though reading this book from cover to cover offers great benefit, thats not the only way to make use of it.

The chapter headings in the table of contents can act as a checklist of the tools, techniques, and principles of the Lazy Dungeon Master. You can skim the table of contents to get an idea of what you already know and what you might want to reexamine. Rereading the table of contents every few months can then help cement the core ideas of the Lazy Dungeon Master in your mind.

Chapter 2 explores the Lazy Dungeon Masters checklist that walks you through the main steps of Lazy Dungeon Master preparation. If you read nothing else, read chapter 2 to gain an understanding of these main steps.

The end of each chapter includes a checklist covering the main points of the chapter. Skim these individual chapter checklists to understand what each chapter contains, and whenever you want to review the chapter without having to read the whole thing again. If any of those topics arent clear, you can dig deeper into the chapter to see what its talking about.

The end of the book contains a list of references and further reading, including books, RPG sourcebooks, articles, and videos for further research into running great games. If you want to dive deeper into becoming a great Gamemaster, these references are the best place to start.

Read this book in whatever way best suits your needs. If you prefer reading it cover to cover, thats great. If you prefer to skim the contents and pick out the topics that interest you, youll likewise learn from it. If you find that these ideas resonate with you, you can reread or skim the book regularly to wire its concepts into your own mental GMs toolkit. Like all the ideas in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, the book itself is meant to be used in whatever way gives you the greatest benefit.

The way of the Lazy Dungeon Master isnt doctrine. Its not a set of hard and inflexible rules. This style of running games isnt intended to be the only way to prepare and run our games.

Rather, all of us are on a journey together, following the paths of thousands of GMs who have walked before us for more than forty years. We all seek to find ways to make our roleplaying games better. This isnt about anyone grabbing you by the ear and dragging you down a single acceptable path. Instead, each of us has the opportunity to study what we see, discuss it, and determine individually whether a path is the right one or the wrong one for us and our games.

Becoming a better Gamemaster doesnt result from blindly following rules in a book. It comes from constant and continual improvement of our personal craft. It comes from our continual exploration of this limitless hobby, from finding out what works well for each of us, and from determining what we should discard.

Although this book presents a complete checklist for lightweight game preparation with a focus on improvisation at the table,