Sly Flourish

Finding and maintaining a great RPG group remains the biggest hurdle for the RPG hobby. It's the topic of memes all over the internet. With all of our technology and interconnectedness, it hasn't...

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Like the best lazy GM tricks, monuments serve multiple purposes in our fantasy RPGs. A monument is a physical object sitting in the middle of a room, location, or scene. They draw our players' at...

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The eight steps for game prep from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master include: Review the characters Create a strong start Outline potential scenes Define secrets and clues Develop fantastic locat...

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13th Age is an awesome fantasy roleplaying game built by Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet as their love letter to D&D. There's much to love in this book but today we're going to focus on one featur...

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"How close are the gnolls?" "25 feet." Understanding distance when running combat in the theater of the mind can be tricky if players have their heads still wired around 5-foot-per-square distanc...

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On a previous episode of Mastering Dungeons, Teos Abadia and Graham Ward answered an excellent question about whether Hasbro / Wizards of the Coast was being a good steward of D&D. Graham turned ...

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Hasbro may be hurling D&D towards a digital future but we already have everything we need to enjoy this game for the rest of our lives. Hasbro is super-excited for a digital D&D future. They're t...

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For the past few months, I've been running and enjoying the Shadowdark RPG by Kelsey Dionne of the Arcane Library. After a very successful Kickstarter, Kelsey delivered the book both digitally an...

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The DM describes the environment. The players describe what they want to do. The DM narrates the results of the adventurers’ actions. The above list is taken from page 6 of the 2014 D&D Player'...

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Over at the Sly Flourish Patreon I get asked where ideas for our games come from. For me, great ideas come from great fiction. Chapter 25 of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master offers a list of fic...

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I'm not going to spend a lot of time on details but I wasn't a fan of the plot of WOTC's Vecna – Eve of Ruin adventure. Without spoiling, I'll say that the adventure hinges on one bit of decept...

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Though the technology is 5,000 years old, there are new tricks we can learn to more effectively use paper character sheets in our TTRPGs. Using paper character sheets gives us a degree of flexibi...

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Having your players build out parts of the world in which you play can seem daunting. The world's a big place! What if they take off in six different directions? You now have to tie these scatter...

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I've been enjoying running a lot of Shadowdark RPG games recently, the prep of which you can watch on my Shadowdark Prep YouTube Videos channel. During this campaign we began the process of crawl...

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Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master offers eight steps for game preparation to help GMs focus on the most valuable material one can prepare to help them improvise during their game. These steps inc...

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"Get more out of your RPGs by preparing less." This is the core motto of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master which follows with eight steps designed to help you get the most value out of your prep....

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Tying characters to factions is a great way to connect characters to a central hub in your campaign. Building and using these realtionships in game give players a choice in how they want to appro...

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Looking for a good system for managing treasure in your fantasy RPGs? Use a mixture of random treasure and hand-selected magic items that fit the characters and their players' desires based on wi...

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The term 5e defines compatibility between the products of hundreds of publishers and the 2014 version of the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop roleplaying game – known as 5th edition D&D. In early 2...

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Here are two free resources to help you run your games online. Owlbear Rodeo Level Up A5e's Monster Tokens Owlbear Rodeo Owlbear Rodeo is my favorite virtual tabletop. It's lightweight, fast, eas...

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Here's an easy house rule to streamline the integration of a new character into an existing group. When the new character shows up, state: "Looking into their eyes, you see their heroic spark –...

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Over the past couple of months I've written articles defining adventure types – how we prep them, how we run them, what pitfalls we might run into, and how to mitigate those pitfalls. These art...

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This article is one in a series where we look at types of adventures and examine how we prepare them. how we run them. what pitfalls we might run into. how we avoid these pitfalls. These articles...

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This article is one in a series where we look at types of adventures and examine how we prepare them. how we run them. what pitfalls we might run into. how we avoid these pitfalls. These articles...

https://slyflourish.com/running_intrigue_adventures.html?rss=1

This article is one in a series where we look at types of adventures and examine how we prepare them. how we run them. what pitfalls we might run into. how we avoid these pitfalls. These articles...

https://slyflourish.com/running_defense_adventures.html?rss=1