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by Mike on 2 February 2026
Recently I had the unique experience of running two session zeros in the same week. Preparing, running, and building campaigns off of these two session zeros helped me refine my own checklist for lazy campaign building which I offer to you today. The checklist below includes links to longer articles on related topics.
Before you begin in earnest, consider your system, world, and theme and get your players on board.
Prepare for your session zero.
Spend a session talking to your players about the campaign you're all going to enjoy.
Your session zero is complete, now it's time to build off of it and get to the next adventure you're going to run.
At this point you hopefully have enough to start putting adventures in front of the characters and running games. Now you can step back and flesh out the larger world around the characters, continuing to focus on the characters and spiraling outwards.
Prep and run your next game!
Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs.
Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video.
Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers.
Here are links to the sites I referenced during the talk show.
Last week I also posted a YouTube video on The Twin Dragons – Dragon Empire Prep Session 52.
Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:
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