Sly Flourish
Helping game masters run great roleplaying games.
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Favorite Articles
- Playing RPGs can Save Your Life
- How to Play D&D
- Top Tips for Game Masters
- The Eight Steps for Lazy Dungeon Masters
- How to be a Great Player
- The Lazy Encounter Benchmark
- Running Theater of the Mind Combat
Latest Articles
- Build Characters Quickly in D&D 2024 - 14 Apr 2025
- Gems of A5E's Trials and Treasures - 7 Apr 2025
- Shadowdark House Rules - 31 Mar 2025
- The 3-2-1 Quest Model - 24 Mar 2025
- Assign Player Roles - 17 Mar 2025
- Build a Campaign-Unique Faction List - 10 Mar 2025
- Write One Page of Prep Notes - 3 Mar 2025
- Offer Choices in Every Scene - 24 Feb 2025
- Don't Get Lost in the Zeitgeist - 17 Feb 2025
- Are Actual Play Games Hurting Home-Game GMs? - 10 Feb 2025
- View All Articles
Sly Flourish's Books
- City of Arches
- Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
- Lazy DM's Companion
- Lazy DM's Workbook
- The Lazy DM's Forge of Foes
- Fantastic Lairs
- Fantastic Adventures: Ruins of the Grendleroot
- Fantastic Adventures
- Fantastic Locations
Subscribe to the weekly Sly Flourish newsletter and receive a free adventure generator PDF!
Lazy GM's Resource Documents and Tools
The following material from the Lazy DM series has been released under a Creative Commons Attribution license:
- Lazy GM's Resource Document
- Lazy GM's 5e Monster Builder Resource Document
- Lazy GM Reference Docs Multi-Format Package. Markdown, EPUB, HTML, JSON, etc.
- Lazy GM Tools on Github
Older Books
The following older books are available here for free under a Creative Commons license.
RPG Community Links
These sites and services help connect the larger TTRPG community.
- TTRPG Blogroll
- Daily RPG Blog Posts
- Sly Flourish's Follow List on Mastodon
- EN World and its communities
- ttrpg.network on Lemmy
Lazy Dungeon Mastering
- Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
- The Eight Steps for Lazy Dungeon Masters
- Running Session Zeros
- Review the Characters
- Start Strong
- Scenes – The Catch-all Step
- Secrets and Clues
- Choose the Right Steps
- Using The Eight Steps At the Table
DM Tools
- Tools of the Lazy Dungeon Master
- Safety Tools and Pause for a Minute
- The Lazy 5e Cheat Sheet
- The Pathfinder Basic Flip Mat
- Dysonlogo Maps
- Lazy Monster Tokens
- Using Notion.so for Lazy RPG Prep
- Using Obsidian for Lazy RPG Prep
- Writing a One-Page Campaign Guide
- Pointcrawls for Overland Travel
- Replace Flanking with Cinematic Advantage
- Campfire Story Prompts During Rests
- Easy Initiative Cards
- Advanced Random Encounter Tricks
DM Advice
- Find Local Players for Tabletop RPGs
- It's Five Minutes to Game Time
- Improve Pacing
- Upward and Downward Beats
- Spiral Campaign Building
- The Ability Check — The Only 5e Subsystem You Need
- Creating Villains
- Recovering from a Bad Game
- Getting Ideas for your RPGs
- A GM's Reading List
Running Adventure Types
- Dungeon Crawls
- Infiltrations and Heists
- Investigations and Mysteries
- Overland Exploration and Travel
- Missions and Quest Chains
- Defense
- Roleplay and Intrigue
- Combat
- Mashups and the Undefined
Combat Encounter Building
- The Lazy Encounter Benchmark
- Running "Theater of the Mind" Combat
- Abstract Battlemaps
- Tracking Combat in 5e
- Choose Monsters Based on the Story
- Dials of Monster Difficulty
- Lightning Rods — Showcase Powerful Character Abilities
- Reskinning Monsters
- Running Hordes
- Let Go of Defined Encounters
- Run Easy Battles
- Running Wars
- Set Piece Battles
- Improving Boss Fights
Running RPGs Online
- Experiences Running RPGs Online
- Two Years Playing RPGs Online
- Awesome Tools for Online Play
- Playing RPGs over Discord
- Organizing Digital RPG Materials
- Interviewing New Players for Online Games
- Share PDFs with your Players
One-on-One D&D
Rules Discussion
- Choosing DCs
- Our Ability Check Toolbox
- Darkvision Isn't as Good As You Think
- What Does Passive Perception Show You?
- Handling Surprise
- The Flow of Trap Detection
Have a question or want to contact me? Check out Sly Flourish's Frequently Asked Questions.
