April – June 2025 Patreon Q&A

It can be tough! My best advice is to try to solidify the options the characters came up with and get them to make a choice about one of them. Designating a "caller" who speaks for the group can help. You can also tell them directly that you plan to jump forward but they won't be screwed if they wanted to do something beforehand. Let's say a shopping episode is getting too long – you can say "we're going to jump ahead but if you want to montage back to having picked something up you forgot, we can totally do that."

Yeah! Absolutely. I think that's a great idea. I'd be a little worried that the characters my turn into those murder hobos if pushed too far but that might be covered in a session zero. Having communities turned against the characters sound like a pretty cool situation.

yes, definitely. The 3-2-1 quest system fits well with a job board style quest but almost any campaign of note is going to go beyond finding two or three jobs on a bulletin board. In our campaigns, these quests can come from anywhere: - NPCs the characters know might give them out. - The characters themselves might build their own quests. - The situations they get involved with spawn new quests. - New NPCs show up with new quests. The two or three quests of a 3-2-1 quest style system don't have to each come from the same place. One might be a new NPC they met. One might be a sort of self-guided quest. One might be a quest from an old ally. I think the key is to try to have two or three quests in front of the characters that still drive towards that north star. In a "stop the return of Orcus" style quest, the characters might go after three parts of the wand they know exist while their researcher NPCs seek the others. Of course, be wary of the all-or-nothing collection quest model that can end up being brittle. What happens if half of the pieces are collected by the cult of Orcus and the other half are in the possession of the characters? Does the whole quest fall apart if either side happens to have just one piece? Here are a couple of articles that talk about this potential problem: https://slyflourish.com/all_or_nothing_quests.html https://slyflourish.com/three_of_five_keys.html https://slyflourish.com/vecna_tears_of_unmaking.html So yeah, the short answer is that you can still do the 3-2-1 quest system with more story-focused campaigns. It's all about ensuring those options are in front of the characters and clarified. The quests themselves can come from anywhere.

To me, it's more important that I'm able to share things that help people connect with their friends and create awesome stories. I'm less concerned with how to make money from it and more recently I'm trying to even be less concerned when I see ideas of mine being used in the wild and people don't even realize it came from me. That's more of my own attempt to check my ego. I'm a fan of the Walt Disney quote that goes something like "we don't make movies to make money, we make money to make movies". I'm lucky to be in a position where our business is doing fine and our own personal expenses are low so trying to monetize every single aspect of what we do isn't critical. I also have a bit of a desire for a legacy and I don't want that legacy to get caught up in copyright issues after I'm gone. I want this stuff to be out there, freely available and freely usable, after I've disappeared. So yeah, I plan to keep giving things away and giving more away year after year. I don't know how all of that will manifest. Mostly I want to give away the big crunchy stuff – all the stuff you can find in the Lazy GM's Resource Document (which I continue to expand every few months): https://slyflourish.com/lazy_gm_resource_document.html So yeah, the short is that I want my stuff to eclipse me and benefit the whole hobby and the money is less of a concern for me than that.

I really don't know. It's hard to say what any given new GM already brings to the table from fiction. Maybe it's from anime or manga instead of tolkein. I will say that it seems we have much more access to lore about monsters than we did back in the 80s and 90s. Then it was all basically Tolkein or bust. Now we're one search away from finding out more about trolls than we could ever absorb. So I don't think its much of a problem. I also don't expect a lot of new GMs are grabbing Shadowdark without any context with the larger sphere of D&D. I do think it helps a system to say "this is what a troll is like in our world" – particularly if the world and the system are joined together. Shadow of the Weird Wizard has specific lore surrounding orcs and trolls and other monsters that don't necessarily fit with what D&D 5e says about them. So in that case I think its worth a publisher explaining explicitly what a troll is in their world.

I don't think campaign worlds like this need much when it comes to converting from one system to another. I would look at the monsters and see if you can find replacable monsters from Daggerheart to replace those that show up in Grendleroot. City of Arches shouldn't need any conversion at all. It's very system agnostic. My best advice for converting from one system to another is to hang on with a loose grip. Grab the main story arcs and then use the mechanics of your chosen system, Daggerheart in this case, to resolve the game itself. Rarely does an adventure or campaign have such a close connection to the mechanics that you can't rip it out and replace it with another. Only when the theme of an RPG doesn't match the theme of the world do things become difficult – say Shadowdark in the world of Eberron. But all the ones you mention feel like they'd work well with the high fantasy nature of Daggerheart.

Oh there are a lot of ways! Just reading the books and enjoying what you read is one way. Watching liveplay videos is another – I imagine lots of people enjoy the hobby by watching others play. Doing your own world building can be fun as long as you recognize that it won't necessarily come to anything when you do get your group together. Journaling games like Thousand Year Old Vampire is a great way to let your creative brain go wild with some fun prompts. More crunchy games like Ironsworn can stretch your GMing muscles in ways that even typical games cannot. Shadowdark has a solo mode now called Solodark that you might want to try out. If you can find one other person to play with, one-on-one games can fit much better into peoples schedules than full big-group games. Those would be my thoughts!

Players need to know what's going on in the campaign. They can't build characters focused on the world and the story if they don't know anything *about* the world and the story. Players are really great at building characters and, without knowing what direction they're headed or what the world is about, they'll build characters that may be unsuitable for the world you're planning to run. Of course, you can keep back information you want the characters to learn but having some good understanding of the world, the current situiation, and their place in it helps players build focused characters built to follow and have fun with the campaign you're planning. Does that make sense?

I wouldn't say I've "fired" a player but I've had discussions with players where we recognized that the game wasn't a good fit for them and it was time to move on. Really only once and it ended badly and I'm still sad about it. I lost a friend over it, someone I still greatly respect but who clearly is very angry about the situation and doesn't want to talk to me anymore. This sort of thing gets beyond just managing a game and gets into human nature. As pack animals, being rejected from the pack is one of the most tramatic things we can face. I remember not being invited to a party all my friends put together. It hurt. Bad. And it can hurt in our D&D games. One of the reasons I push so heavily on finding ways to vet your players before they join a regular campaign is because you really want to set up situations where you can feel out a player for your group without yet committing. It lets you learn about things in a way where you don't have to fire them if it doesn't work out. In the specific circumstance I brought up before, I didn't vet them because I knew them and knew what they had done before and thought they'd be perfect. But it didn't work out and it caused a lot of pain for both of us, clearly. Here's more on vetting players: https://slyflourish.com/finding_players.html https://slyflourish.com/interviewing_new_players.html So I think we have to be careful about this. We're all playing games with dragons and swords and spells but we have real human beings around the table who can be hurt by how we handle things like this.

The answer is "sure"! I have a one word cure-all to D&D 2014 to D&D 2024 conversion woes: "relax". Don't worry too much about it. Work with your player, tune the effects. Come up with something that makes sense for both the player and for you running the game and you're fine. Give yourself license to change things if they're either too overpowered or underpowered and ensure you have that agreement with the player. Be on the same team as they are when it comes to figuring out what works best but generally we don't have to worry about it. There isn't a perfect system for converting 5e material from one flavor of 5e to another but that's ok. It's a beautiful mess and we get to forge our own games out of it.

Thank you, Pepples! Every week on Thursdays, after my Wednesday game, I write seven tips I learned from the game I just ran the night before. I add these seven tips to a text file on my webserver which now has (looks it up) forty such tips in a queue. Every day I have a Python script which reads the tip at the top of that file, posts it to Mastodon and Bluesky, and then removes it from the list. It then *adds* it to a dnd_tips_archive.txt file which has all the tips I've posted in the past ten years or so. That file has 4,202 tips in it =) The same script that posts a new RPG tip posts a "tip from the archive" daily, pulling a tip at random from that list and posting it. So every tip posted to Bluesky and Mastodon is a tip I wrote. Some of them are probably a month or so old based on the game I ran the night before I wrote the tip. The others are tips I've written over the past ten years or so pulled randomly. So yeah, they're all hand-written but at different times in my life.

I've started either keeping those location descriptions in my session notes or I print the map and handwrite the annotations on the map itself. I also wrote a new map annotator tool in the 5e ADB so I can quickly annotate a map but I haven't actually used it yet.

Hi John! All my best advice on this topic I wrote here: https://mikeshea.net/how_to_make_it_in_the_rpg_industry.html I even got some other major prominant RPG creators and influencers to have a look who agreed with a lot of my sentiments.

Hi Andreas! I've done a ton of updates to the 5eADB including a lot of the things you mentioned! Monsters, Items, and Spells now have dedicated filters. You can type in +24 or -24 in the combat tracker text box for damage and it will subtract or add that to the monster's current HP. You can now edit AC in the combat tracker. There's not a great way to link to a monster because its a text field you can edit. I'll have to think about how to do this more. There's also a lot of other changes across the ADB including a whole new app-wide search with filtering by source and type that includes an "I Feel Lucky" button that jumps to the first selection. This also lets you add the &lucky=1 URL parameter to jump straight to the first hit, great for a Kagi-like "bang". Lots of stuff got changed over the past couple of weeks! I hope you dig it!

We don't have any particular rules for snacks at our tables. We put out some snacks that we buy when we're hosting people. Some of our players add to it with their own snacks. There's usually a food order that goes in but Michelle and I eat ahead of time so I don't have to be eating while trying to run the game (which doesn't work well for me). On Sundays, my friend cooks awesome lunch meals for us most of the time and others bring snacks. But we don't have any hard rules for it. Sorry to disappoint!

I don't know of a lot of products like this. I know Life Well Lived by Cubicle 7 was similar to that but more of a series of rolls instead of a card game. I think there's a lot of room for ideas like this but sometimes players just want to whip up a character the "normal" way. I think it's cool to experiment though!

The monster stat blocks in the 5e Artisanal Database (see your Patreon rewards in the pinned post) can be copied and pasted into Notion. It passes along both HTML and markdown. As far as custom monsters, I don't really have a template for that but you could use one of the monsters in the ADB as a template for future ones.

Like the rest of secrets and clues, I use these as improv prompts. Maybe I just tell them. Maybe its an ability check. Maybe it never comes up at all or morphs into some other part of the information they received. I don't really have much of a plan on how they'll discover these tidbits of info – or whether they'll discover them at all. The only difference between character-focused secrets and normal secrets is that they're tied to the character. That's really it.

Ha! She likes to drop in early in the show to say hello to people.

Hi Rob! It's easy to feel like we left good ideas a the table but I think we just have to push past that. I joke that I've never effectively ran a lich in the past ten years of 5e but really, people had fun so it doesn't matter. As the guy who wrote Red Headsman (I'm so glad you liked it!) I see nothing wrong with reskinning the dragon as a green and it doesn't matter that he didn't use his breath weapon as long as you and your players enjoyed it. Worry less about leaving things at the table if you can. If something comes up think about how you can use the lesson to make future games better. What can you learn from this that can help in the future? Otherwise, worrying about stuff that happened in the past doesn't really help us.

Take a look at Deep Magic by Kobold Press. It has a ton of wild spells in it. It's in the 5e Artisanal Monster Database so you can have a look there but if you like it, I suggest picking up the PDF or physical book.

Great question! I'd suggest a few possible things you can try: - Try describing the circumstances before you put down any sort of map or before see the map of the next room. This way they have to imagine it before they see it. - Use abstract map distances so they don't get caught up in minutia. If you're running on a VTT, use gridless maps without putting down grid-lines. - Use maps with less detail. Dyson maps are great for this. - If you're in person, draw small maps of the layout as they explore with few details just to give them an idea how things are positioned. You can even use a line and block chart just to show how things are arranged. - Use big tactical maps for big battles so players can enjoy the cruncy part of the game when it really matters.

I think I'd take a look at the Deadlands RPG. They have a Humble Bundle going on right now: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/deadlands-reloaded-megabundle-books There's also a Cthulhu old-west game: https://www.chaosium.com/down-darker-trails-pdf/ And Haunted West by Darker Hue Studios: http://www.darkerhuestudios.com/shop/5jzf1ll837tdgeyhcb1csp03d6qpsu Hope those help!

Hi there! Yeah, I think you hit on a lot of the things I'd do: - Run solo games like Ironsworn and Ironsworn Delve, Thousand-Year-Old-Vampire, Solodark, and other solo RPGs. - Read RPG campaign books and sourcebooks for inspiration, write down my ideas that I could use in future campaigns or just stash cool ideas in a notebook (virtual or physical). - Watch liveplay shows to enjoy the flow of RPGs even if I'm not in them. - Play RPG video games. I'm really into Solasta at the moment. It's a fantastic 5e video game. Baldur's Gate 3 of course, but also maybe Baldur's Gate 1, 2, and Planescape Torment. - Read and listen to fantasy novels. Think about how the narrator switches characters in audiobooks. - Run duet games with a partner. Use the Sherlock Holmes model to fit sessions into small amounts of space: https://slyflourish.com/framework_for_one_on_one_dnd.html I hope those ideas help!

Hi there! I did a deep dive into our experiences with Cypher and Numenera here: https://youtu.be/TUCxPJhlVAU Players generally felt like the whole process of burning lots of their resources to lower rolls falls apart at higher levels, which I think was true. Making the sacrifice of hit points to lower a roll is a tough one to swallow because you're sort of damned if you do and damned if you don't. I sort of wish they were separate pools. That's the big takeaway I remember. I still love the simplicity of the system and how, on the GM side, everything is just a level between 1 and 10 whether it's a tiny rock the characters have to leap over or a world-ending cybernetic planet eater.

Instead of skill challenges I like to set up the situation in the world and let the players navigate it. If they have to convince several groups before the witch herself will be convinced, that makes sense. Instead of setting up some formal subsystem to handle it, though, go with the flow of it. Maybe they do a good job convincing some but not others. Maybe they have to go on quests to convince them if their initial negotiations fall short. Maybe they have to rough up some bullies before the bullies actually listen to them. I'm a fan of a mix of combat and negotiation. They don't have to kill the witch but they do have to break her down before she'll listen to reason. Or the witch has some guardians they have to defeat before the witch feels vulnerable enough to negotiate. My main lesson is to set up the general ideas without putting hard rules on them and always have some flexibility so the whole thing doesn't hinge on a single roll or not.

I don't know that I have all of them in my head but a few come to mind: - Hypnotic pattern can incapacitate a ton of monsters all at once. - Create Food and Water can remove any real issues of resources while traveling. - Fly can often let characters circumvent any open dungeon or castle environment. - Invisible (which they can technically get at 3rd level) can make recon much easier. - Fireball can take out a ton of smaller enemies or do a bunch of damage to bigger enemies. - At 7th level, banishment can take pretty much any monster out of the battle that doesn't have legendary resistance. There are ways to handle a lot of these things but it does require thinking differently about how we run the game. The key isn't to fight these new capabilities but to recognize how our story changes as the characters become superheroic. The truth is that Zone of Truth exists in the world so mysteries operate differently. It means we have to rethink how our games run and how the stories play out. Expect the characters to use these abilities and let the situation dictate what happens.

I think its a powerful trick to find a way to run lots of monsters without becoming too much of a burden. One way to do it is to group a monster's multi-attack into a single attack. If a veteran normally has two attacks that do 8 damage each, you change it into one attack that does 16 damage. That way you only roll once for the veteran. You can go further by combining multiple attacks into a single roll. Say you have six skeletons attacking one character, you can split it into two groups of three, roll twice, and triple the damage on a hit. A faster way is the "one quarter succeed" idea which says that in any group of attacks or saving throws, one quarter of them succeed. This is great when you have a *lot* of minions, like 30 or more. You don't really need to do this with eight. In Forge of Foes we offer several solutions and those are really the best advice we have for it. You mentioned you read it but just to be sure, the "Running Minions and Hordes" on page 54 is the main advice. Hope that helps!

Hi Blake! Most VTT-compatible maps have a buffer zone between the secret room and the entrance to it so you can use a fog of war to hide the room and it isn't clear that there's a hallway. Not every map does it this way. I've used a draw-able fog of war to cover a tiny spot of the wall so it looks like I messed up the fog but really I've just covered up the marker that shows it as a secret room. It really depends on the map and how it's laid out but a carefully drawn fog of war can usually hide a secret room without giving it away to players. Hope that helps!

I don't have any other changes to the lazy generator planned at the moment. What parts would you want to see updated with the 5.2 SRD? I do have a new D&D 2024 treasure generator: https://slyflourish.com/random_generators/dnd-2024-treasure-generator.html As well as a Tales of the Valiant treasure generator: https://slyflourish.com/random_generators/tov-treasure.html But I don't plan on changing the treasure generator in the lazy random generator right now because I like mine better. What changes would you like to see?

So glad you're digging the City of Arches! You might work with the other GMs to decide when you can hand over one of the story parts of the campaign for them to run in a dungeon or portal world so that it still ties to the story. That can be a little harder to run. I think an "adventure of the week" can still work in City of Arches – it's built for that kind of thing – but the group has to behind that style of play. If they're just not that interested in the more ala-carte adventures and instead want to focus on the story, maybe focus on that now and switch later? I'm not sure that's a fantastic answer.

If you're assuming one would already have the D&D 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide (which is a fine book on its own) and I'm not allowed to offer my own book "Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master" (which would be my next choice). Maybe Dungeon World? It had a lot of great advice for GMs outside of what we normally hear about in most gamemaster guides and it changed my perspective a lot on GMing. I'll go with that – Dungeon World. It was very influential to me.

I'm not much of a fan of a planned death. I would probably leave it up to the player to describe what happens – maybe giving them a "one year later" montage to decide what befalls them. I'd be wary that they'd actually feel bad later for killing off their character and there's no reason they have to die – they could just go somewhere else. Anyway, I'd probably leave it mostly in the hands of the player so they get what they want. You can tie it together to some in-game benefit once it's actually happened. A daily use of the "bless" spell or "aid" spell or something like that.

The fact that they're magnetic isn't really the important part. It's their weight and feel on a battle map or table that makes adhesive magnets work well. Any base heavy enough to give the token some heft would work fine. Some have said they use little felt adhesive disks you put on the bottom of furnature but those sound like they'd be too lightweight.

Hi Justin! I'm not really sure how a mega-dungeon-crawl works with West Marches but my understanding of West Marches is that the players select where they're going to go and let the GM know so they can prepare that area. I think the same can work for a dungeon crawl. If they say they're going to the kruthik ruins, you can focus on just preparing the kruthik ruins. Some elements, like the Strong Start, may not come into play depending on how you run your West Marches style game but that's true for the 8 steps in general – choose the steps that make sense for the game you're going to run. So, in short, I'd break up your megadungeon into regions and then offer the regions to the players. When they select a region they're going to explore for your next game – focus on that region.

Hi Michael! I think we can hang on to a possible conclusion with a loose grip, thinking of it like a guiding star instead of a clear definitive plan for the ending. I sometimes have players ask me "when do you think this campaign is going to end?" and often I have no idea. For my Dragon Empire campaign, I know I have three antagonist dragons – Parsis, Ibbalan, and Atashah – but I don't know exactly what becomes of them. Do we get to the point where the characters fight and kill them? Maybe! Does something else happen? Maybe! I figure a conclusion will come to me when I get closer to it but, for me and for my players right now, I think just riding the plot to "disrupt the tyranny of the Dragon Empire" is enough to move forward. I know we want to have firm conclusions in mind to feel comfortable but it's that discomfort of the unknown future that propels our creativity and the whole game in areas we never expected.

That sounds awesome! All of my best one-on-one advice is here: https://slyflourish.com/running_one-on-one_dnd_games.html https://slyflourish.com/balancing_combat_for_one_on_one.html https://slyflourish.com/framework_for_one_on_one_dnd.html I think one-on-one adventures can work really well for Grendleroot. Good luck!

Honestly, I don't worry too much about the tone of a campaign. It goes where it goes and that tone comes from the players as much as me. If I want to steer things towards a particular style of feeling, I'll focus on that tone for the session I'm going to run and the worlds I use to describe it. Games do end up silly a lot of the time, which is fine for me, but I can still steer it back to some serious themes. I think bringing in ideas from our favorite fiction is a great way to add that theme in. If you're thinking about Nosferatu or Guardians of the Galaxy, you're going to have different feelings when you manifest some of the feeling of those movies into your game.

I haven't paid much attention to either very much. I'm excited to see what Draw Steel does because the lead designer is my good friend James Introcaso and I love all the work he does but I've been avoiding it because I want to experience it when it's finished. I figure I'll hear all about Daggerheart when it comes out and see what I think. I wouldn't be surprised if I picked up both but I don't know if I'll do a deep dive or not.

That's a tough question! Maybe bring it to the group and ask them how they want to handle it? I think a mixture of in-character and out-of-character discussions can probably navigate the situation. Some of the suspicion about what a character knows or not can be interesting in the story of the game – what dark secret does she hold back? But it can't be done at the expense of real-world trust between the players and yourself. I'd say have an open conversation about it and see what people think.

There are a few things we can do when reviewing the characters that work for published adventures or our own homebrew adventures. - What magic items does the character have? Are they due for a new one? - What cool stuff does this character (and player) like to do? How can we reinforce that? - What does the character think about what's going on in the game? Where does their mind go in the past and what are they thinking about in their future? (campfire tales) - What secrets in the next session might connect to one of the characters? What secrets might they know or discover? That's not all-inclusive but it's a good list to consider when looking at the characters regardless of the type of adventure you're running.

The only other big full 5e compatible system I know if is Fateforge which is very cool. I haven't dug into it to a big degree but I like a lot of what they've done with it. I'm always looking at supplemental books and some, like Cubicle 7's books, are almost complete wrappers of 5e. Same with Grimhollow and others. So yeah, I'm always keeping my eye on these books and getting ideas from them. At some point, though, we just have to sit down and play our games. We need to figure out which books we want to use for that and sometimes its just easier to use the core books and go.

Probably both. I'll let the quests come out organically but at some point I'll break character and clarify to the players what they have in front of them and what it means if they select one over another. I don't want stuff to get mixed up because I held my cards too close.

Outside of Icespire Peak, I don't have one adventure in particular that I think is great for one-on-one play. I think just about any adventure can be modified to support such a game with some tweaks – mostly to the number of monsters in any given situation. Check out the work of https://dndduet.com and see if their stuff resonates with you. They've done a lot of work on one-on-one games.

There isn't a great way because notion started to choke when I put in so many monsters. Instead, I'd recommend keeping the artisanal database handy and pasting in the markdown for a monster into your notion database when you need it. There are programmatic ways to import data into Notion but it was pretty extensive and again, the performance of the whole notebook started to go down. Sorry!

My approach to stocking a dungeon is having a list of the types of monsters that make sense for that dungeon, or that section of a dungeon if it's split up. I'll then improvise encounters from that list based on what makes sense for the story and what fits the beats and pacing of the session at the table. The Lazy Encounter Benchmark is only there to tell us if a single encounter may be inadvertently deadly. There's no Lazy Benchmark for stocking a whole dungeon. There are too many variables to consider and it would make the whole thing too predictable and gamey if there was. So the lazy approach is to list monsters that make sense and choose the number and mix that fit the situation and the fun of the game. Hope that helps!

This is where you really need to do your own homework and, if you're really worried about it, talk to a lawyer. I am not a lawyer and I am not your lawyer. But... If the name of a monster is not trademarked and not clearly the intellectual property of a particular company, you should be fine. Mentioning *shadow demon* is almost certainly fine. So is death knight. Dracolich? That's tougher. Maybe switch to Dragon Lich (which is what Kobold Press did I think). You can see how we threaded the needle in City of Arches to see what we thought about it. I think the real question is "are we taking away a publisher's ability to make money with this thing? Are we hurting their brand or their own products or their ability to license things to others?" Also, keep in mind that the 5.2 SRD isn't in the public domain. It's still a license even though it's a very permissible license. It's worth doing some research on that too. Where I would draw the line is "am I using a specific term that very clearly belongs to WOTC?" and "am I copying significant text from their book outside of what's available in the 5.2 SRD. I would avoid both of those things. Hope that helps!

I've got the product for you! https://nightnoongames.itch.io/shadowdark-monsters This is made by Michael Putlack, a fellow SF patreon and who works over at Arcane Libary helping Kelsey deliver Shadowdark. It's a fantastic book that covers how to build monsters for the game. As far as a lazy benchmark, the Shadowdark book itself has reasonable guidelines for encounters on page 193. I find that thinking of a monster as 1:1 works well enough. A monster is a hard challenge for a character if its level is equal to a character's level. You can also add up all the levels of monsters in a shadowdark encounter and compare it to the total levels of the characters and its a good gauge for a potentially deadly encounter. The level:level comparison is useful. One thing to keep in mind is that Shadowdark isn't built around the idea of "balanced" encounters. Instead you roll randomly, determine what monsters make sense, roll for reactions, roll for distance, and potentially other factors to determine what happens. This is a big depature from 5e. In games like Shadowdark, combat is sometimes considered a failure-state. The players should have options and be considering how to avoid the danger of monsters instead of running into battle the whole time.

I try to keep a general idea on which characters have which magic items but I mostly keep track to ensure players are getting good and interesting toys. There are some magic items that can have a big effect on the game but a lot of magic items don't change things so much that I have to worry about it from a balance standpoint. In 5e, anyway, characters have so many character-based abilities that magic items don't always have as big an effect. There are some magic items, however, that have a *big* effect – instruments of the bards, particular staves, the new enspelled weapons, armor, and staves, things like that. Some items its really worth asking what sort of effect it'll have on the game. I thin the D&D 2024 DMG has a lot of "landmine" magic items that can make games much harder to run.

It's really player dependent but yeah, I think I find GMs as players to be pretty engaged with the game and have an understanding of both sides of the screen. They're more conscious of things like spotlight time and inter-party connectiveness but players who don't GM pick this stuff up too after enough time. It's really dependent on each player what they bring to the table regarding their GM experience or lack thereof.

Hi Te-a-go! (I think I have it right!) You're right, I tend not to worry about the timeline of a campaign too much. I know Gary Gygax famously said something like "if you don't have a calendar, you're not playing D&D!" or something similar. I've never bothered and it's never really come up in my games. I do try to drop in points of downtime. I'll mention that they had a week or so in town to recouperate after a particuarly monumental event or adventure but we don't have to spell out every day. Instead, the characters can talk about things they want to do during that time and I'll narrate it. I even let them retroactively fill up that downtime later. If, later on when we're in the throws of a big adventure, they say "oh, back when we were taking it easy, I would have asked about X and Y" I think that works fine as long as its not too obviously tied to the very thing we're doing now. But yeah, I play fast and loose with downtime. I still haven't really dug into Bastions in D&D 2024. They're not well loved from what I've heard but there might be some interesting things to drop in. But in general I tend not to worry about the length of time going on in the adventure. I get that it can be weird if you add it all together and characters went from 1st to 12th level in like six weeks but that's ok if you ask me.

I don't know that the eight steps directly map over to the player side of things. I think just taking notes at all puts you above the median of players and it's a great way to stay engaged in the game. I like to just jot down bullets but each of us have our preferred style I think. You can focus your notes around the characters and things you notice about them and notable NPCs you encounter. I know names for me are always important to write down (as a GM or a player). Otherwise, I imagine good practices for note-taking in general work well for note-taking during games.

I think there are some things their characters can discern pretty easily like fire mephits and fire elementals being immune to fire. Other stuff they might have to find out. You can always ask them to roll intelligence (arcana or religion) or wisdom (nature) checks to learn more stuff at your leisure. I don't think you're typically forced to tell them everything unless a spell or ability does so. I think the way you're doing it is fine. Think about what the characters would know or can figure out by looking at it.

The premise of the keep is that a being is trapped in some sort of vault and citadel and you have groups either trying to kill it, free it, or just happen to be around. You can read the plot of the Keep here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keep_(film) To make the most of it, don't build around an expectation of what the characters will do and focus on the factions surrounding it. You probably want a group of minions trying to free the creature so the characters have some direct friction. Other than that, I'd say roll on the tables in the Companion and see what you get!

Sure! It sounds like a great idea. I do this sometimes with flash fiction (little 100 word in-world stories sent in email) and sometimes I'll have conversations with players about things their characters know. I think it's a great way to enrich the game without plotting it out. Great idea!

Hi George! It would help, I think, but the overall assessment from myself and my group is that a lot of the extra complications in skill mastery and other stuff wasn't worth the effort. Having an online tool helps but we didn't find the extra stuff worth it. A lot of it is really cool, though, and transportable to other games like Supply.

A black dragon on its own is already a big memorable encounter. I really don't think you need to do much else environment-wise to make it more so. Use of the dragon's ability to swim and hide are probably the biggest things to focus on. Even when they're just conversing, having it move from one part of the lake to the other, using stealth to hide sounds really fun and scary. You might give it the ability to cast darkness, replacing one of its attacks, to make things more interesting. Good luck!

I think it's a good idea to do a full character reset unless you plan to expand the campaign with their current characters completely. Alternatively, you can ask them to switch from D&D 2014 to D&D 2024 rules, converting their current characters from one to the other. I don't think I'd do a mix of the two. Either do a hard reset or let them continue on with their current characters. If you're running another published adventure, like Tyranny of Dragons or Storm King's Thunder, you can slow down level progression until they catch up to the appropriate level in the game. Whatever you choose, have an out-of-game conversation with them about it and take their feelings into account but also make it clear what you need to run a fun game. Good luck!

Ability score generation like this makes a lot more sense for games like Shadowdark and, I assume, Dolmenwood, because the rest of the math of the game accounts for the fact that you have lower averages on ability scores. I'd start by explaining that if they complain. Also, characters aren't expected to be staying around for entire campaigns (again, I haven't yet played Dolmenwood but knowing its OSR roots, I'm making this assumption). My group just accepted that the 3d6 down the line was the way to go and we all sort of understood that the rest of the math followed this idea. Monster AC isn't as high. Monster attacks aren't as high. The DC ladder isn't as steep and a lot of things you do in the game don't require a check at all. You can have a charisma of 6 and still negotiate with the king's viceroy if you, as a player, take the right approach. There's overall less reliance on ability scores in the OSR gaves I've read and played and that means a 3d6 down-the-line approach works fine for them.

In 5e, magic items aren't required to keep up with the rest of the math of the game and any other reward you're likely to offer in a similar vein might likewise further complicate things. You can stick to rewarding flat-bonus magic items for her that she can calculate once and then forget about. You can ask her what other sorts of rewards she might be interested in. You can also just slow down the number of magic items she receives so its a little more managealbe. You can also throw in more utilitarian magic items that the whole group can benefit from and let her decide which ones she wants to take. I'd keep the lines of communication open and continue to give magic item rewards for the rest of the group.

I still feel like good old web searching does a better job than an LLM. I love the Kagi search engine, by the way and highly recommend it) I don't know about language translation so I can't speak to that. Traditional information reesarch on places like ancient egypt by reading books and websites and watching youtube videos from actual people likely offer a more complete picture than an LLM would. It's possible to have an LLM offer suggestions for writing but you can also just ask people to read it and give you suggestions. I have friends who love using LLMs for brainstorming. Again, brainstorming with actual people works well too. There are only two use-cases I've found where LLMs really help me: writing small pieces of code and helping me with small data conversion tasks. More here: https://slyflourish.com/best_llm.html

I'll offer up four I really like that I think bring a ton of value for the patreon dollar: https://www.patreon.com/jpcoovert/ https://www.patreon.com/keithbaker/ https://www.patreon.com/dysonlogos/ https://www.patreon.com/ragingswanpress/

One on one games definitely have a laser focus on the one character and that can really change how the game feels in a great way. It is harder to maintain that focus when you have four to six players all hoping for their own time in that same spotlight. Step 1 of the eight steps is intended to help us build some of that spotlight into our games for the characters but it does mean switching around a lot. I also think there's just a fun synergy between five to seven players around a table (including the GM) that you don't get with just a one-on-one game so I think each has their advantages. But yeah, the focus of character and story in a one-on-one game can be pretty great.

I think its ok to have one player and character who knows the city. They can serve as a vehicle to tell the other characters what's going on in the city. I don't know how much material they read about the *story* but you could change the story up a bit based on your own campaign so they can't guess at what's going to happen. But knowing about the locations, politics, factions, and daily activities probably isn't bad. One character knowing that stuff shouldn't break the rest of the game. You might want to have an out-of-game conversation with them to let them know the story of *this* game is going to be different from anything they've read so they won't know everything going on. Hopefully that helps!

Hi Thomas! I made these up in Pixelmator so it has a .pxm file. Here they are: https://slyflourish_content.s3.amazonaws.com/ff98052f30d610b78a3b_patreon_files/monster_tokens.pxm

Lost Mine of Phandelver can be brutal at lower levels. I like to joke that WOTC wrote Phandelver this way so that not too many people would get into D&D all at once – those who die would move on to other hobbies. 1st level is particularly brutal in 5e, especially given how long it takes to make a character. 2nd level is still rough but not nearly as rough. Once the characters hit 3rd level it should be more straightfoward and once they hit higher levels, the game definitely steers towards the characters in difficulty. The d20 die is a big variable – definitely – and battles can go easy or hard depending on the situation. The lazy encounter benchmark can help you gauge whether an encounter may be deadly or not. You can always halve it for a "normal" battle. https://slyflourish.com/the_lazy_encounter_benchmark.html But yeah, at low levels, its worth knowing how much damage monsters do and comparing that to the average of character hit points (7 x level + 3 is a good equation to keep in mind as the average of character HPs).

I'd say Shadowdark's default is "go into dungeons and get loot". It's the primary play cycle of the game – adventure, get loot, engage in downtime, get experience from treasure, level up. We don't *have* to play it that way. That sort of story doesn't excite me very much. Instead, we can have larger overarching stories going on – or smaller stories going on at specific locations. The one thing I recommend is tying the characters to a faction and having quests and goals come from the faction instead of tying them directly to the backgrounds and stories of each character. Characters can die in Shadowdark pretty frequently but you still want the *player* to be tied to the quest and the way to do that is to ensure each character is tied to the faction and thus has the faction quests built into them. That way you can have big overarching stories that still propel the characters in a way treasure alone does not but not worry about the plot getting lost if a character dies.

I do this for my time-constrained games like convention games and my yearly Ravenloft game. I tell them that at a certain time a certain thing is going to happen. Like the Scarlet Minotaur will know where they are and hunt them down when there's 30 minutes left in my Scarlet Minotaur Shadowdark convention game. I think its important to give players some extra time to finish whatever their goal is when time is tight. Maybe they don't accomplish *everything* they need to do but they know it's time to bug out or they're going to get killed by aliens! Yeah, that can work well.

Hi Sam! I think it can be as easy as using the Monster Statistics by Challenge Rating table to update the villain's stats. Depending on the villain's fiction, you can choose one to three powers to lay on top of them or use the power templates in FOF to design your own. A lot depends on their fiction, of course. I'm a big fan of always-on auras and damage shields to keep the threat of a big powerful monster always active. You can also use Dreadful Blessings to steer the battle in the boss's favor when needed: https://slyflourish.com/dreaded_blessings.html It's really up to you to decide how much you want to change the mechanics of your boss. I lean towards a light hand.

I don't know about "old school" but games that are crunchier than full OSR that have my attention are: - Shadow of the Weird Wizard by Robert Schwalb. It's his love letter to D&D and Greyhawk in particular. - 13th Age by Jonathan Tweet and Rob Heinsoo. It's definitely not old school but its less crunchy than 4e and pretty high power. A true high fantasy RPG. Those are the two I'm most looking forward to running this year or early next year. I don't know of Tales of Argosa. Sorry!

We have a whole section of Forge of Foes that talks about waves and how to balance them. A lot of the question rests on how closely you run the waves together and this becomes another dial in monster difficulty. If you spread your waves apart quite a bit, the overall battle will be easier. If you smush it up together so they're facing the end of one wave while also facing a new wave, that gets harder. There's no perfect math. You have to have a good understanding of the characters and their capabilities and the situations of the battle. So much is circumstantial that you really need to feel it out. You probably don't want the equivalant of three hard battles in a three-wave fight. Maybe total CRs for two hard battles split across three waves as a start? The composition of the waves also matters a lot. I like to do: - One monster per character in wave 1 - Two to four monsters per character in wave 2 - One big boss monster. Sometimes I might throw in some big lightning rods into wave 2. Hope that helps!

I have not. Sorry! I wish I had some tips but I really don't.

Woo. Great question. A big one is a random list of monuments. I think monuments are fantastic improvisational aids for scenes – the physical centerpiece of a location. Many GM books focus either on big things, like whole rooms or whole big multi-room locations – or small things like cups and the decorations on chests or the filgerie on a doorknob. For me, the central monument is super valuable. It can anchor a scene, reveal secrets and clues, be used as a landmark for a point crawl or hex crawl, emit some sort of actual effect in a battle – there are tons of things you can do with a monument and it's often missing from GM books.

While our prep focuses on the next game, we might have ideas in mind for the larger arc going on which we tend to focus on the villains, their goals, and their actions. Those "grim portents" are really the actions the villains are undertaking and how they're exposed to the characters. Often these come up as secrets and clues but they might be a strong start. "the clouds above the sky turn dark and a booming voice echoes in your mind 'I have returned!'" Think about Gandalf and Pippin standing in Minas Tirith and seeing the big green beam cutting into the sky as the Witch King begins sending armies to the ruins on the river. That's a grim portent. So really the fall into either strong starts or secrets and clues but their intent is to show the characters that the villains are up to something.

I think this is why having secrets and clues separate from their point of origin is so useful. Players can learn things from all sorts of people or places including sage-like NPCs. I often have NPC sages give information to players. In our game one of the characters has a sage hireling who is with the group the whole time. He's a non-combatant but sort of always around. As far as letting people know there's a sage, you can just tell them. "You remember that the old priest at the Shrine of the Three sisters is quite learned. You might consult with him to learn more." Be explicit about the options the characters have.

Starting with question 2, I think the eight steps of Return work just fine with Shadowdark and likely with west-marches style games (as I understand them). The key is that the players tell you where they're going before you have to prep the game for them. So once they say they're going to the Twilight Tower, you know to build an adventure around it. You might skip stuff like the Strong Start or you might drop something in just to get people going. Scenes might not be as important because its mostly about exploration. You won't know which characters are there so tying in the characters might not be quite as important. Secrets and clues, NPCs, monsters, locations – all of those are still valuable for the location I think. I think having a mix of experience levels is fine. Shadowdark is great for new players from what I've experienced. Good luck!

I think the first thing I'd do is find the other GMs and talk with them about it. I don't know that you have to build a full living campaign and, instead, let groups dance between GMs and adventures set in the same area. A friend of mine ran the City of Arches as a multi-group location with different adventures they went on and they seemed to have a great time with it. Full epic-style adventures where many groups are doing the same thing are harder to do but you can take a look at the epics on the DM's Guild to get ideas how they work. They can be trickier to run but have some nice features like a stricter timing. Usually such adventures break things into stages – often three stages, with some big thing dancing between tables from time to time. They're fun, but I don't think I'd go overboard. Just having groups playing games is fun enough.

Sounds like your players are either not familiar with this more old-school, dungeon crawling with a 10-foot-pole style of play, or find searching for traps and secrets tedious and just want to skip to the parts they care about. I think this is incredibly normal, and may even be the norm with most tables.

It really depends on what "compatible" means. There are always rough edges depending on the depth of compatibility you want but I'd argue they're "compatible enough". For some, compatibility means being able to run an older adventure without a lot of changes. I think it meets that level of compatibility. Can you use a monster from one in another? That's also pretty straight forward. I'd say all the 5e monster books are compatible enough – at least as compatible as the range of variance within any one system. Magic items and spells are largely compatible. They might not be fully and perfectly balanced but again, that's true even within one system. Backgrounds are compatible with a little bit of conversion work. Subclasses may need some revision to work from one system to another but again, I think we can get there. So it really depends on the level of compatibility you're looking for but my argument is that they're working just fine. If you held a crossbow to my head, I'd say that I'd take the Tales of the Valiant suite of books but I do really like D&D 2024 so it's very close. I might take D&D 2024 just because it has so many subclasses available and TOV lacks that. It's hard. They're all good. I can't give a great answer. D&D 2024 is really good though but it's missing stuff I want from the other books. Gah! I can't choose!

I would probably stick to the Lazy Encounter Benchmark and build encounters like that. The LEB scales well for the number of players, their levels, the number of monsters, and their CRs. It's super flexible that way. As always, be wary of too many monsters versus the characters. Action economy has a big factor. You can probably do some spreadsheet work to build a FOF-style table for boss + underlings but I don't think you need to go through that level of work. The LEB is the easiest way to manage encounters that I've found. It's what I use for all my games.

I think whatever medium works for you is great! Sometimes I use a small Moleskine notebook. Most of the time I use Obsidian. The original Lazy DM book recommended index cards but I think it really had too few steps to be useful. I don't think I'd use a separate index card for every secret or clue or something like that. That's a lot of cards to manage. Don't let the medium get in the way – make sure it serves you and your prep.

Hi there! Unfortunately, I haven't run EZD6. I have it and it looks awesome but I've never had a chance to play it or run it. Sorry!