Prepping and Running Lazy Campaigns

by Mike on 13 July 2026

The Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster Kickstarter campaign is going strong! We had the strongest first days of any campaign we've ever run and we can't wait to get this book into your hands.

Please check out the campaign, support our work, and share it with your friends!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/slyflourish/rise-of-the-lazy-game-master?ref=dvqil8

Last week we talked about Expanding Each of the Eight Steps in Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster. Today we're going to talk about what the book has to offer for prepping and running lazy campaigns. In the next two weeks I’ll talk about adventure types and the lazy GM toolbox.

Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster offers a process for preparing and running your campaigns spanning several chapters. Here's a list of those chapters and what you can find within them:

Find and Maintain a Great Group. Advice for the hardest part of running RPGs — getting your friends together regularly to enjoy your game sessions. The chapter includes advice for finding new players, ensuring those players are right for your group, maintaining a consistent schedule, and keeping games running even when players move on. It includes a list of questions to help ensure the players you bring to your table for your style of GMing, suitable for in-person and online games.

Run Single-Session Games. Though not strictly about running longer campaigns, this chapter covers how to prep and run "one-shot" games. It talks about running a mini-session zero, ensuring you keep track of time, running timed adventures, and expanding single-session games into short-run multi-session games.

Build and Run a Lazy Campaign. This main chapter, available in the preview PDF on the Kickstarter page, describes the high level process for preparing and running a lazy campaign. It discusses choosing what world to set your games in, defining your campaign's hook, detailing the campaign's "truths", developing patrons or factions, considering questions for player-focused world-building, and preparing a starting adventure.

Write a Short Campaign Guide covers your creation of a guide you can give to your players before your session zero. It outlines the campaign’s hook, the truths, the characters' role and a group bond for the campaign, potential connections to patrons or factions, a description of house rules, and describes your chosen safety tools. The chapter also includes an example campaign guide for the City of Arches setting.

Run a Session Zero discusses how to get your campaign off on the right foot by going over the campaign guide with your players, discussing your safety tools, building characters together and connecting them to one another, choosing a patron or faction, asking world-building questions, and finally running a short adventure to get campaign started.

Fill Out Your Lazy Campaign talks about how to build out your campaign from the results of your first session with "spiral campaign development" — building from the characters outward. It offers guidance for building a starting location based on common places characters want to visit, adding adventure locations and quests, outlining three potential villains, and further developing factions.

Run Lazy Campaign Adventures takes you beyond your first session and on to the next . It discusses quests and hooks, the value of offering quests at the end of a session, thinking two horizons out, having a world that reacts to the characters actions, thinking through the eyes of your villain, keeping your hands on the pacing of the game, and focusing on your next session.

Lazy World Building steps back from your individual sessions to help you build a useful and practical world for your campaign. It discusses the creation of a practical history, pantheon, geography, magic system, and economy. This chapter mostly focuses on building what you need to run your sessions, quests, and adventures.

Running Games Online talks about how to run games with online tools by building your own online toolbox, using a resilient software stack, using and allowing for physical dice and books even when playing online, how to find players online, and tricks to manage player turns when running online.

Ending Campaigns discusses how to build a final boss battle for your game, the importance of giving players what they want instead of attempting a rug-pull final plot shift (I'm looking at you, Game of Thrones), and using "one year later" montages to let the players define the final outcome of their characters.

You can see from the above that we're taking a big comprehensive look at the full scope of campaign prep and play in Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster. This comprehensive focus is the sort of detailed approach you'll find throughout the whole book.

If you haven't yet checked it out, please support the Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster Kickstarter and if you already have, please share it with your friends!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/slyflourish/rise-of-the-lazy-game-master?ref=dvqil8

More Sly Flourish Stuff

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.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video.

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers.

Talk Show Links

Here are links to the sites I referenced during the talk show.

Last week I also posted a YouTube video on Two Million Gold – Dragon Empire Prep Session 71.

RPG Tips

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:

Write a short rollable list of potential encounters for your dungeon delving game.
Include non-combat encounters in your dungeon encounter list.
Let the characters face, maybe even fight, the aspects of major villains early.
Wrap the physical objects of your world in the markings of your worlds gods, factions, and historical figures.
Review your notes and materials an hour or two before your game.
Print notes and maps for easy reference during your game.
Aim for one page of notes per session.

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This work includes material taken from SlyFlourish.com by Michael E. Shea available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license.

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