July – September 2025 Patreon Q&A

I would do it at level 1 and keep things simple. Also, be careful because 1st level characters are really delicate. You might have a patron cast "aid" on them so they each have an extra 5 hit points. That'd help a lot.

I have an upcoming Sly Flourish article on this very topic. Here are some quick ones: - A5e: supply and safe havens. - D&D 2024: better exhaustion. - D&D 2014: More free-flowing ability checks and action types for skills. - TOV: Luck and Doom.

Hi there! I don't think I'd use them for Shadowdark but I've never really tried it. Shadowdark isn't really a system intending for you to have your hands on the dials too much. I mean, we can always use whatever tools we want if they make the game more fun but dreadful blessings in shadowdark might be going too far. You can always see if you need them and talk to your players about the idea and see!

I think the Stranger Things boxed set is a great idea! I don't have a copy yet so I don't know what it's exactly like but it looks really good. I did a show segment about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb2T0jhLqYA&feature=youtu.be I'll probably have more when I get my hands on it but I think its a great idea to bring new people into the hobby. Next to Critical Role, I think Stranger Things brought more people to RPGs than anything else. I hope they have some sort of focus on it in the show!

I don't typically add side quests but I've certainly done so from time to time. I think it's fine to have quests and adventures that aren't lock-step in line with any sort of main quest. I think we also have the freedom to offer multiple paths of main quests depending on the situation going on. This gives our quests some freedom outside of what you'd find in a video game. Imagine if all the quests and adventures in a video game changed depending on what you had done previously. That's the freedom we have in our tabletop games and its one of the reasons I suggest not planning out whole campaigns and instead focusing on the next one you're going to run. Let the quests and adventures flow from what happened in previous ones instead of planning them all out. This means there are no real side quests and main quests – everything flows from the decisions and actions of the characters.

I have a few rules of thumb for fireball placement (or things like that). First, if they want to hit one target and no one else, they almost always can. Because they can position a fireball in a 3d space, they can form it to just hit one person somehow. Otherwise, I try to keep in mind roughly how many creatures should typically get hit by a fireball (about four or so) and then move it up or down based on the circumstances. If you're trying to fireball a handful of guys who are already fully engaged with the characters, it might be harder. If there's a horde of orcs running in a 20 foot radius circle, you can hit them all. I have no problem with precise positioning to hit the maximum number of bad guys. I always have more bad guys.

I wouldn't say any of my local game shops are anything special but in DC there's Labyrinth. I haven't been there in a long time – only once – because its on the other side of DC for me but it's well respected by a lot of folks.

I think we can centralize a campaign around a main theme, one to three villains, the quests they're going on, and the adventures in front of the characters that focus on that theme. See chapter 16 of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master and check out the campaign frameworks in Ruins of the Grendleroot or City of Arches for examples of building around a particular theme. It's a careful balance of having a clear direction in a campaign but also giving everyone the freedom to make choices about the types of adventures they go on.

The order is actually there for a reason but yeah, I tend to jump around as ideas come to me and I think that's fine. The first step – review the characters – is first to help you get your head around the characters first and to help the rest of the prep of your game. Strong start makes sense being next, then scenes, secrets, and so on. The order isn't critical but they're in that order for a reason. But yeah, if you watch me go through my prep, you'll see I jump around a lot.

I love to flavor them in the world and not worry about the stat block so much. Different weapons, appearances, distinctions in their armor, species, and so on. There's a lot we can do with just how we describe things to make them different. I really don't think players care that much about the mechanical differences of monsters.

I don't have any special way to handle factions. I think thinking of them along the alignment graph isn't a bad way to go and then flavoring them for the setting you have. I think three good-guy factions and three bad-guy factions is a start and you can add more as you go or as desired. Building factions around the deities of a setting can work too. I've been working on a list of domains that can help fire up ideas for factions too I think: ## Major Domains 1. Light 2. Dark 3. Life 4. Death 5. Nature 6. War 7. Trickery 8. Knowledge 9. Tempest 10. Harvest 11. The Hells 12. The Abyss 13. Fire 14. Water 15. Earth 16. Air 17. The Sea 18. Undeath 19. Magic 20. Creation ## Minor Domains 1. Murder 2. Love 3. Serpents 4. Insects 5. The Void 6. Blood 7. The Hearth 8. Stars 9. The Hunt 10. Beauty 11. Music 12. Prophecy 13. The Wilds 14. Seelie Fey 15. Unseelie Fey 16. Shadow 17. Wine 18. Metalwork 19. Revelry 20. Beasts

I've actually never made a hex map. I almost always have some sort of map for the games I'm running published by someone else. Even if I'm homebrewing adventures, I'm usually running them in a published campaign setting (even my own – City of Arches) so I just use those maps. I haven't used any hex mapping tools enough to recommend them but my friend Joe at Inkwell Ideas makes Hexographer which many people really like. When I ran my Shadowdark campaign, I ran it using Kelsey's settings and they had hex maps already.

Shadowdark and 5e are really very different systems so transitioning from one to the other might be a bit jarring. It's a fun idea and maybe it works fine, but for me, I'd probably just start with 5e. You can go with much simplified 5e characters to begin with. There are several supplements for 0 level characters you might look at and treat that as a sort of funnel. Again, it might work fine to do shadowdark characters as sort of zero level 5e characters and then grow from there but I'd probably just stick to 5e.

I do improvise them. One important thing about examples like the "pain amplifier" is that it's a note for me, not for any other DM. So *I* have an idea what a pain amplifier is even if anyone else reading the example does not. This is something I think we miss when we're looking at notes like the adventure examples in the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide. Our notes can be very brief for us because we might already have an idea what that is. For me, I did have *some* idea what a pain amplifier is but not much. Turns out, the characters never went there so I'm glad I didn't work up some huge set of mechanics and backstory for it. So yes, when they get into a room with a brief description like that, I improvise the other features of what that thing might be like. I know that there are necromancers who ran that place so I have some ideas kicking around in my head for what that whole thing might be like (probably some sort of electrical / necrotic iron maiden). I think practicing getting good at improvising off of just a couple of words can help us go far with prepping less and improvising more in our games.

I think that sounds cool and I don't think it violates the NPC betrayal, particularly if the characters are able to figure out early that these things they're seeing aren't really their friends. A lot of it depends on how you introduce those NPCs but I think, as long as you're good with them figuring out that these slime things aren't really their friends and they're still willing to go through with the exploration, that can work. It sounds like a fun False Hydra sort of creature. https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2014/09/false-hydra.html

Hi Midas! I don't really use puzzles and I wrote more about it in a couple of other Q&A posts over the years. Here's a summary with some links to other things I've written or discussed about puzzles: https://slyflourish.com/sf_patreon_files_898123050001223/qa/?query=puzzle I know Tasha's Guide to Everything includes a bunch of puzzles you can drop into a game but I haven't used them. As you say, the toughest part is wondering why there would be a puzzle in the middle of a dungeon anyway. Who is it for? Why would you protect your most valuable protections with a Sudoku puzzle? Exploration, for me, is a different sort of thing – it's about discovery and that's often tied to secrets and clues. I'm fond of my recent article on types of decorations in old places: https://slyflourish.com/ten_stonework_decorations.html

There are really two ways to handle it. First, you can roll back. Tell them that there's new info you forgot to tell them. This can be jarring though. Second, you change the reality of the future. They can learn that the big bad is there but the big bad doesn't know that *they* are there. Give them chances to stay out of sight or recognize that they may be recognized *before* they're recognized. Villains aren't always masterminds. They make mistake and have bad luck themselves. I'd try to find a way for the characters to realize that the cult they've infiltrated is being run by the big boss but give them chances to stay out of sight. Maybe the big boss has to go on a retreat and won't be around for a while. Good luck!

I think you might just have to tell them that for your own peace of mind you'd like to try breaking things up into separate groups. Ask them to try it out and see how it goes. Or ask them for other ideas you might not have thought of. How often is everyone there? If you run games even if a handful are missing, than many times you might have fewer players and a more manageable game. It's though though, but your vote matters. So I'd say have a conversation with them again, explaining how hard it is on you to manage and ask if you can try it out for a short bit and see how it feels.

Hi Ben! It sounds like you've already seen this but just in case, here are some one-on-one articles: 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 you can do a session zero like normal, getting the baseline for the game and the character. I would work with the player to generate a second character but let them build out the mechanics and explain that you'll be roleplaying them. In a recent Daggerheart one-on-one game I ran with Michelle, I ran both the mechanics and roleplay of the secondary character since Michelle had her hands full running her own character and that worked fine too. You can run the support character on your own but make it clear that your wife's character is in charge and has the spotlight. Your character is there to support her.

Hi Laura! These days when I sit down to do my prep, I think about what secret might tie the character into the current situation in the game. This looks a lot like a secret and clue but one tailored for the character. During the game it helps me tie lore of the game to specific characters. Here are some examples from my Wednesday game: - Andrew Armageddon – The magic of the primordials is ancient and powerful. - Kendal Olamaer KO – Old warriors worshipped Lord Halax, known to some as the Bloodspear. - Lana – The poison of the worms of the deep desert is said to be some of the worst in the world. - Ozara – While most members of the Golden Knights followed Agon the Protector, some used to ward off a god or demigod known as the Black Gauntlet. - Zillian – Lord Halax the Bloodspear is a favored god of berserkers. - Lloris – The primordial Voor is said to be the anthesis of the goddess Elvenia of the stars. Sometimes they come up and sometimes not. About half of these did. I don't really think of it as an evolution of the eight steps. It's just one of the many things we can do when reviewing the characters and there are other things we can do as well: - Review a character's current magic items. - Review their stars and wishes or campfire tales. - Think about what character abilities they might want to show off. Great question!

A few things are coming into play. This is specific to the Metallurgist subclass. First, the fist attacks of the Metallurgist count as light weapons which means they can dip into fighter and get the quick strike talent that lets them hit with four attacks a turn. At 7th level, the Metallurgist gets an extra d6 damage which means they can now get four attacks at 2d6 base damage (the equivalant of a greatsword). And they get to crit on 19 and 20 which means they have four chance to crit per turn. Limiting multi-classing would have helped a lot for me, I think. But I don't know what else I could do that isn't a direct nerf.

My two biggest tips to help the pacing of games with time constraints are: 1. Run with fewer people. 2. Run lower level games. That's not always possible but those two things have the biggest effect on the timing and pacing of your game. Otherwise, I'd say always run a shorter adventure than you think you'll need. Cut down the number of scenes, making some of the scenes cuttable during the game for timing. Don't cut out the conclusion – make sure to give yourself enough time to run a good conclusion. I think its ok to rush players a little bit. You might even tell them at the beginning of the game that time is tight so you might be moving things forward faster than they're used to. Time waits for no one as they say. Also, use a timer to keep yourself on track. It's easy for us to get into the flow of the game and lose track of time so use a device to help you mark each hour so you know where things stand next to your outline of what's to come.

Hi John! I answered a similar question about a month ago in this same thread, which I'll include below so you don't have to dig for it. I have three new takes on LLMs: 1. LLMs are a twenty billion dollar industry in a trillion-dollar suit. The whole tech industry is in a huge LLM bubble that's very likely to burst. If I knew when, I'd be rich, but there's just no way these things are making the money back for their cost to operate. 2. LLMs generate custom average answers with a 20% error rate. That's what they do. Their results are average by design and they're wrong about one in five times. There are times where that's ok – where figuring out what's wrong doesn't take longer than doing the real work. 3. Show me what people generate with LLMs and I'll show you something they don't care about. We use LLMs to generate average stuff we don't really want to do ourselves. There's definitely valuable applications for this. I don't care about writing perfect super-clean javascript for the 5eADB. I want the tool to work and average code can do so (more on this below). None of its applications aleviates the main problems with generative AI: - It uses a ton of power and resources. - It's built on the intellectual property of people without their consent. - It's super-inflating the tech industry which will likely crash down. - It's flooding the internet with generated crap. - It's being used by corporations as an excuse to fire people or take money away from already hurting contract work. Here's more from my previous post: >>> The 5e ADB is made from a bunch of stuff. It's almost all HTML and javascript with a few libraries for things like datatables and the search index called lunr.js. The data mostly comes from Open5e's API and Github repo. I used Claude Code for almost all of the javascript creation. I'm not a javascript coder but I am a software engineer and python programmer. I don't feel great about using LLMs for code like this but boy howdy, it made it much easier to build these small downloadable tools and keep the various Javascript libraries working. Frankly, these tools wouldn't exist if I didn't have a lever like Claude Code. Updates take minutes instead of hours. I don't know how well Claude Code would have worked on more complicated projects but since the 5eADB is mostly small independent locally-executible tools, it worked very well. Because the code was generated by an LLM, I released all the code under a CC0 license – I essentially take no ownership of the code itself. This is sort of my way of addressing the issue of LLMs being trained on a bunch of people's own material without their permission. And all the data – the actual creative material hosted by the 5eADB – is all human generated and rendered with traditional procedural scripts – not LLMs. The tools themselves don't use any LLMs either. This is sort of my way of addressing the massive power consumption of LLMs. Yes, LLMs generated the code but once generated, the code can execute extremely efficiently in the user's browser. These sort of small coding projects are the only real value I've personally gotten from LLMs (and the command-line-based LLMs really are impressive at this sort of thing). My personal stance is that I never want an LLM doing actual "Creative" work for me. That's for me and other humans to do. Of course, others have their own opinions and a lot of what I just said could be taken as hypocritical justification so I'm reallly not here to judge others on the topic of LLMs. I have lots of opinions about LLMs and we discuss it often in the AI channel on the Discord server. Anyway, so that's my long answer to your short question =)

Yeah, the ending of campaigns can feel like this, where there really isn't a lot of choices. Big campaigns funnel down to the final confrontation (something my wife and I refer to as yam-shaped adventures). I think that's ok but by the time it gets to this stage, it's probably best to focus on the big important stuff and get it done quickly so you aren't railroading them for very long. As far as prep goes, try to find the things that really excite you about what remains. It's ok to bring some new stuff in, new bits of history, new NPCs, and stuff like that but don't pull any big switcharoos at this point. Try to focus on the big stuff that you and your players enjoy and cut the cruft you might feel obligated to run just to fill in the blanks. Jump to the good stuff both in your prep and play.

I love doom points / dreadful blessings instead of legendary resistances. I typically don't worry about adding legendary actions to creatures unless its really needed. If they're more apt to die before their turn, legendary actions are a good way to spread their threat out across a round. As far as making spellcasters feel special, I wouldn't worry about spell slots. Instead, pick out some specific spells you think fit their style and theme, maybe customizing them further for the specific monster. Spellcaster monsters aren't going to survive more than three or four rounds so you don't need a lot of spells. Pick some interesting ones that fit the level of the boss. Use the damage per round value as a guage of how powerful a spell it should be. And don't worry about customizing the spell to make it something unique and fun. Avoid fun-suckers like charm and banish. Reskin them into more interesting spells like a one-turn banish that inflicts some damage or a charm that forces a character to use its reaction to attack an ally and is then done.

I think its fine to help kids along and ideal if you know of some form of fantasy fiction they've enjoyed that they can fall back on. Of course, that means *you* need to know that fiction too so that might be some homework for you. Offering reasonable options their characters would know isn't removing agency, especially if you include any ideas they come up with based on what you describe. Players only grab about half of what you're throwing out there and I bet that's even rougher when players don't have the same baseline of fiction that you do. Offering options is fine, I think.

I think we're all different in how we react to running games like this. For me, I definitely expend a lot of energy running a game for people I don't know at a convention. I limit myself to no more than one game a day and I prefer a day break betwen them so one game every other day is even better. Recently I did find that my voice gave out more than anything else. I've talked to GMs who *gain* energy for every game they run, which is pretty awesome. I don't know what's more common though. But yeah, I'd say knowing your own limit and limiting your sign-ups to the amount of games you're comfortable with is the best advice. Other than that, when you're in the moment. Take breaks. Conventions sometimes have quiet areas where you can just go and chill out. They're quiet and dimly lit usually. See if your convention has a space like that when you first get there and see how it goes.

Hi Adam! I don't have any new advice for downtime beyond what I've talked about before (in the links further in this reply). I think the big thing is customizing downtime options for the characters and their goals and warning the players that they'll have the opportunity for downtime and might want to come up with some ideas. Here are some links on this that might help! https://youtu.be/i4YZArzluk0?t=2028s https://youtube.com/watch?v=b-uk2LB5zCo&t=3380s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooJQ8SmxYXc&list=PLb39x-29puaoZke5BVk7fjyyyjWXcxCu1&index=36&t=2206s https://slyflourish.com/sf_patreon_files_898123050001223/qa/?id=363 https://slyflourish.com/running_downtime_sessions.html https://slyflourish.com/sf_patreon_files_898123050001223/qa/?id=2253

Yeah! I think this is a great idea and something to bring up explicitly with your GM and your group. If you, as a player, keep track of the backgrounds, themes, motivations, and drives of the other characters you can tie into those hooks to bring them in. One thing you likely want to do is warn the player that you're going to do this or ask them if they're interested. I've seen it where a player just isn't interested in the connection to another character. They just want to play without a lot of deep interconnected stuff going on. So it's definitely worth having the out-of-game conversation before trying it in-game.

Hi Ethan! I answered a similar question below (Manma's question). In short, for larger dungeons, you don't have to use the three aspects on every room because that can take a lot of time. Instead, a single evocative name might work better (see my article on lazy map annotation https://slyflourish.com/lazy_map_annotation.html ) I wouldn't bother with aspects of the whole dungeon unless it helps you get your hands around the them of the dungeon (oozy, hellish, ancient). That's not a bad idea, actually. You can use those themes to help you fill in details of rooms as you run them. If you have certain larger chambers you know the characters are likely to see, you can add the three aspects to them to help you out during play.

Hi Andy! I have a couple of answers to this question in the Q&A database: https://slyflourish.com/sf_patreon_files_898123050001223/qa/?id=558 https://slyflourish.com/sf_patreon_files_898123050001223/qa/?id=2443 and some Sly Flourish articles! https://slyflourish.com/build_cities_around_the_characters.html https://slyflourish.com/pointcrawls.html And some youtube video segments! https://youtu.be/NLj-svT7bmQ?t=1430s https://youtube.com/watch?v=b_KTdoDX08c&t=2473s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3VHlc65c1s&list=PLb39x-29puaoZke5BVk7fjyyyjWXcxCu1&index=23&t=3289s

Yeah, I've turned to improvising notable features when it comes time to run the room. If the theme of the room is evocative enough, the details spring forth from me at the moment the same way they would if I was doing my prep. Here's a trick that's coming together in my mind. The faster you are at prepping something, the easier it may be to improvise it at the game itself. If you can come up with things quickly *before* a game, it seems logical that you could come up with those things quickly *during* a game. But back to location descriptions – when I have a better idea where the characters are going, I'll add some resolution to the locations they're going to visit because I know that time won't be wasted. I think its a waste to come up with a location description and three aspects for every room of a 20 room dungeon when the characters only see six of them. But returning to your question, prep what you need! If you think you need a couple of bullets for a location, add the bullets. You can change your apprach per room if you want.

Honestly, I don't run duels. If you have to, the idea of first to bloodied can work but the main thing is not spending too much time on a battle that only affects a single character instead of the group. Maybe it's a group duel where the whole party is involved against the duelist and their friends. Other than that, I don't have any real advice. Terrain effects they can use during the duel could be fun. I like the idea of rerolling initiative each round. That adds a fun variable. Good luck!

Imagine if Ethan Hunt didn't get "this mission, if you choose to accept it" but "one of these three missions, if you choose to accept it". I think the 3-2-1 model can work well. It's possible there are other teams working on missions too and its possible the characters are in the best position to determine which of two or three missions has the biggest impact on their other goal. A mission computer that says "these are the three current hot spots" and then "these are the two remaining hot spots" and then "that third got taken care of, now there are three more" works just fine I think!

Glad to do it! I'll still be talking about individual systems – including 5e (lots of people play 5e in addition to other RPGs) but I'm going to try to keep the advice more system agnostic. We'll see how it goes!

Homebrew adventures have a lot of advantages over pre-published adventures but you can actually use ideas, maps, locations, and the like and pick out the parts you want to use in your own adventures. There are tons of great Eberron adventures available to pilfer from and the setting lends itself to some truely fantastic adventures. I'd suggest going through your lazy campaign prep: what's the main theme of the campaign, who are the main villains, where will the characters start (Sharn is a great place!), and what local adventure can they get caught up in – that's a good place to start. Focus on the next adventure you're going to run and then see where it takes you. If you find yourself having trouble coming up with good ideas for adventures, take a look at the published Eberron adventures and see what ideas grab you. Then take the parts that work but make them your own. Hope that helps!

Hi Thomas! I think the best thing an AL DM can do is ensure you're prepared to pull out of the middle to make sure to get to the end. I can't count the number of times I've played an AL game where we had to skip the conclusion because we stomped through every step of the "boring middle". That's not really an eight-step thing, though. I think an AL GM can look at the adventure and probably outline things into an 8-step process (probably skipping the first step unless you know who the characters are going to be). How do you get the game started quickly? What scenes are likely to occur? What are the secrets and clues in the module? NPCs? Monsters? Treasure? You don't need to write them out if the module itself has them but you might make a reference sheet if some of these items are harder to find. That's what I'd do anyway!

I honestly just fumble through it. 5e variants are pretty easy because we understand the core fundamentals but yeah, it's easy to forget or miss new rules. A5e has a *lot* of new rules that are easy to miss – weapon breakage rules, masterwork weapons, skill masteries, safe havens, supply, and the like. My players and I just sort of figure it out. I think its ok to fumble with the rules when you and your group are learning a new system. Ask your players to help you out looking up the rules instead of building an expectation that you are the only one who knows the rules. Count on them to help you out and that way you're all playing one big collaborative game instead of being a judge and arbiter for them. It helps that a lot of game systems these days build off of previous ones so when I look at Daggerheart, I can sort of get what they're doing and where it comes from. That helps me piece things together in my head.

Hi Pivo! This comes up pretty often! Here's an answer: https://slyflourish.com/sf_patreon_files_898123050001223/qa/?id=2562 and a discussion on the Talk Show https://youtu.be/ro9wvd3xLf0?t=1053s https://youtu.be/4raqtTNvQBY?t=260s

I don't know how I feel about it. We try to wrap metaphors around things to better understand them and maybe this one works. I don't think it matters too much and we have to remember that 5e has only existed for 10 years out of the 50 year hobby so there was stuff before that. I think its generally a safe assumption that people understand the basics of 5e – if they understand RPGs at all – and work from there. I guess it really matters what the intention is. Is it teaching new players? Having informative conversations with people? Where does the metaphor help us?

I haven't really done so. I like to think about these complex traps by how they operate in the world itself instead of the out-of-world mechanics. How does this massive vault work? Does it have a whole series of complex interwoven traps? Think first from the fiction and then figure out the mechanics from there. For me, when running 5e games, I apply DCs to the specific elements of the trap and let them work on each DC which might disable one part of the trap. So yeah, my recommendation is to think about how it works in the world first and then apply more complex mechanics to deal with it.

Hi Sam! I usually drop the HP of remaining opponents to 1 and let the next hit or damage done kill them. Players almost always want to stop fleeing enemies. Surrendering enemies or enemies that drop on the next hit help with this. Otherwise, yeah, you're going to get into a chase.

It really depends on the specific situation. Having lightweight prep means having a lot of freedom to run with the story as things unfold. Sometimes its coming up with an NPC on the fly, or filing out a location, or changing the behaviors of the inhabitants of a location. The players and their characters bring a lot to the table in this regard. I think this sort of improv comes from practice and we also have to put ourselves in the position to almost force ourselves to do it. I can't get away with no prep and feel comfortable about a game, but following the eight steps helps me get my head around what's going on and the freedom to fill it out as it goes. For me, it helps a lot to just put myself there in my imagination – the locations and the NPCs – and think about what they might do given what's going on.

Hi Andreas! I'll look into it but I'm wary about adding any more fields to the combat tracker. The encounter calculator includes CR benchmarking but adding that to the combat tracker would require adding the CR field just for this calculation even if you wanted it or not. The same is true with the custom damage value – it would require a whole field for each monster and that takes up too much space for a mobile view. I'm trying to keep the combat tracker usable on mobile devices which limits how much I can add. Sorry!

Hi Joel! If I have NPCs in combat, I'll have them maybe aid one of the characters to give them advantage on their next attack. It's not game-breaking, doesn't take any extra time, and makes players feel good about having the NPC around. I also tend to keep NPCs out of harms way.

I was just writing about this today! One advantage of Secrets and Clues being abstract from the method of their discovery is that we can move them and change them based on the direction the characters take. For the most part, that works but if you need something stronger, you can simply tell the players that their characters are aware they're probably chasing the wrong direction. You can also try to "reset" the situation by having an event bring in new information that might get the characters on track. They get jumped by hired toughs who have a note from a villain on them!

Hi Alex! That's two questions but you're forgiven since I missed answering this last week! Most of the time the items the characters loot no longer have the power of the NPC. In the same way characters have spell foci that don't contain any direct magic, the same is true for the weapons monsters carry. The extra lightning damage is a creation of the archpriest, not the scepter. But you can always turn it into a magic item like a staff of lightning or even a staff with a single charge of lightning bolt or chain lightning that doesn't recharge. That can make looting such things a bit more fun.

I think you're going to have to decide what to do. I know a lot of GMs use LLMs these days to help them brainstorm and I'm certainly not one to tell them they're wrong. You could, instead, switch to using random tables and material direct from sourcebooks instead of having the LLM piece it all together for you. I find random tables to be really useful for shaking up ideas in my brain and they won't melt a glacier in the process. I wrote more about this here: https://slyflourish.com/best_llm.html Some people have very firm stances on AI use – wanting nothing at all to do with it – but its up to each of us to decide where that line is and I think you're in a spot to decide whether it's worth losing a player to use an LLM to aid you in your game.

With experienced groups you don't have to worry about the pregen characters as much but the adventures are still fun. Starter adventures can be just as entertaining as advanced adventures – it's all about what the players bring to the table. I think either of your approaches can work. You can slide one of the starter adventures into your campaign, use them to start off a new campaign, or just enjoy a few sessions of a mini-campaign. Like other adventures, you can use ideas and seeds and maps fro them in your own homebrew world as well.

I suggest asking to run two to four sessions of one of the games you like just to see how it goes. Many of those systems, Draw Steel and the One Ring, are pretty D&D-ish and your players might dig trying them out. I think sliding them in between your larger 5e campaigns can be one way to go. I asked my players if we could try out Cairn when we're done with our mega-5e game. They're all on board. So we'll try two to four sessions of that and then probably jump to Shadow of the Weird Wizard which looks like a lot of fun and also isn't a huge campaign. Shorter campaigns in general is a good idea. I'm bad at that. All of my current campaigns are multi-year and I'm ready to try some other stuff.

The human actually gets *two* starter feats which is sort of bonkers. When replacing Inspiration with Luck, you can have the human start with three luck points (or max out their current luck if they already have more) to make up for the inspiration part of it. The other big reason to play a human is because you want to be a human. Not everything needs to be about the mechanics =)

I don't know if you've hit irreconcilable differences but maybe. It might be worth discussing it directly with the other DM one on one. Sometimes things just aren't a great fit for everyone at the table. Maybe suggesting that you run the grimdark style games occasionally but focus more on the heroic and tactical games for the most part since that's what people prefer. Like a lot of things, I'd think a conversation is the best place to start and see where that goes. Eventually saying "would you be ok if we stuck to the heroic / tactical games? The rest of us seem to prefer that." might be the approach to take. Tough problem!

I think their past knowledge might give them new insights into the world they're in now. I think its possible element of the world they've left behind bleed over into this world. Their skills, classes, and species might give them ways to look at things in their current world that others might not see and *those* can become the secrets they would recognize even if they don't *know* them.

I think the ideas that the lands are dangerous places outside of the local communities work well enough. It doesn't have to be too realistic for me. I do think it can make sense that small bands of monsters in the deeper woods fear the people of the village as much as the villagers fear the monsters in the woods. The monsters aren't organized. They're not really interested in destroying the whole town. Same with the skeletons in the ruins beneath the old watchtower. It's also possible that now is the time when villagers really have to worry about being invaded and that's why the campaign starts here and now. That can become the catylist. That's my thought anyways.

Absolutely. I really want to play Daggerheart. I haven't had a chance yet but so far I've really liked what I've seen. I think it's very exciting.

You can definitely run a campaign from the Book of Ebon Tides. I think it serves well as inspiration and ideas moreso than directly applicable material. There's an adventure by Kobold Press called Court of the Shadow Fey that you might enjoy if you want an adventure based on court politics. For me, my campaigns took place in midgard but dove over to the shadow roads a couple of times and I used the book to fill in those details. That was fun. Book of Ebon Tides is a harder book to figure out but I've found myself going back to it several times.

I don't use D&D Beyond but I'm pretty sure the three players playing D&D 2024 characters are using D&D Beyond. But Beyond really doesn't do anything to speed up weapon masteries that I've seen – other than remind you that they're there. We have a big mix of paper-based characters and digital tools like Excel or Beyond at my Wednesday 3x5e game and I can't tell a difference in player speed between them even at 16th level.

I think if you take a look at some of the adventures I've written here on the Patreon, the Ruins of the Grendleroot adventures, and the adventures and adventure locations in City of Arches – that gives you a good idea what I think needs to be in an adventure. Published adventures are hard. I don't think there's one ideal style. Even WOTC has changed their format often over the past 50 years and they should, theoretically, have the best data to tell them what works and what doesn't. But people want different things. Some want all the mechanics spelled out everywhere. Others want a brief description they can run with on their own. I lean towards leaner adventure styles myself but I'm always experimenting. I think some of the better OSR adventures are good to examine moreso than the heavier 5e adventures I see these days. I tend to get more out of less as a GM myself. It's why Shadowed Keep on the Borderlands is one of my favorite adventures. It has enough material to help me build the kind of adventure I want to run with my friends. So yeah, take a look at some of the adventures and adventure scenarios here on the Patreon to see what format I dig.

Not very many right now. I don't have any house rules for my TOV game. My 3x5e game is a huge messy mix of 5e rulesets so I don't have any hardened rules for it – even at 16th level. My other D&D 2014 game is pretty straight forward as well. I don't think I have any real house rules for that either. I do have one – Luck. I use the TOV luck system and the TOV Doom Points (which I call Dreadful Blessings) and I use both of those in all of my 5e games. They're so much better than inspiration and give me a way to keep the story going when the mechanics fight against it. But that's really it!

I'm still generally happy with D&D products being published by WOTC. I'd say about half the books they put out are books I like and enjoy. For every Vecna Eve of Ruin there's a Wild Beyond the Withclight. Dragon Delves looks cool from what I've read. I'm actually pretty positive about D&D 2024 – more positive than a lot of other folks I talk to. I think the upcoming D&D Starter Set looks really good. I definitely want to try that out. I'm hoping there's enough in the upcoming Forgotten Realms book to offset my vexation that they're regurgitating two areas out of five we've already had twice in the past ten years – Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale. We'll see. When I say I'll check something out on D&D Beyond, keep in mind that I have a D&D Beyond insider account which means I can check it out without paying. That's a benefit for folks who watch the show because I can hopefully give them an unvarnished view of what this stuff is. I don't know if I'll bother to review the three DDB supplements or not because whether they're good or bad, I don't like them *because* they're online supplements. I don't think I advertise D&D Beyond – no one watching my show and hearing me say "You should buy third party products on their own website instead of D&D Beyond" then says "wow, I should check out this D&D Beyond thing". But a lot of people get into this hobby through D&D. Their products get a lot more general attention. So I still talk about them. I review and spotlight a lot of other games on the show too. I promote the whole hobby, not just D&D. But I'm also good with whatever game people want to play. So, in short, I think you feel stronger about it than I do. I'm very skeptical of D&D Beyond but overall, I think WOTC is doing interesting things with D&D. I think they're worthy of criticism in a way other companies are not – given their relative size. So I don't have any intention of *not* talking about D&D in the future. But good news! All the videos and podcasts have bookmarks so you can skip any part you don't dig!

First, a lot of campaigns end this way and that's ok. Things in the real world change. There's a couple of things you can do. You can skip forward to the end of the campaign or at least the end of the current arc and run it for the two remaining players and then jump to a "one year later" montage so the players can get some closure for their characters. You could run it as sort of a one-shot game. If you get other players, you can bring them in too, explaining that it's the end of a big campaign but they're bringing characters in right at the end and then starting fresh. I wouldn't stay on it too long with new players, though. It sounds like it might work best to start a new campaign with them – ideally a shorter campaign so this doesn't happen again. You can also just move on. Not every campaign needs a perfect ending. I think talking to your existing players to see what they're interested in is a good way to go.

Hi Steve! I wrote an article but haven't published it yet on the value of published adventures even if they're not easier to run. The main thing is production value. Art, design, maps – all of those things can be useful and valuable even if its mostly GM-facing. It also helps to have a framework of a plot or story for the adventure. Sometimes its not as easy for us to come up with those and having some sort of framework gives us great ideas. There's value in a communal experience too. Other GMs run the same adventure we run. We can get advice, share experiences, and enjoy having played through the same material as others. Often these communities share their own resources like art and maps. As far as preparing, when prepping a homebrew adventure, you'll want to spend more time on things the published adventure might already have covered. I talked about that in this article which breaks down the eight steps depending on the situaton you're in: https://slyflourish.com/choosing_the_right_steps.html My personal preference is still using published campaign worlds with homebrew adventures. I find I get the most bang for the buck that way.

Done! https://slyflourish.com/5e_artisanal_database/tools/point_buy_calculator/index.html Great suggestion!

Sure! I don't see any problem with this. I often tell people DCs and often ACs after they've had a few hits. I dont think projecting this is a problem. As you say, other RPGs work this way entirely. Dragonbane is one. Numenera and Cypher is another. I think it's a lot better for GMs to be to open than be too closed. I see few drawbacks and none leap right to mind.

Hi David! This can be tough. Some players love the releaxed "shopping episode" and other planning type sessions. Others are bored to tears. Sometimes it can be useful to have an out-of-game conversation about it to make sure folks are on the same page. Yes, we can have an hour or so of planning but then we need to get into the execution so others aren't bored. There's a concept of "comfort RPG" where players just enjoy being in the world and enjoying nice things but that can be quite different than the going into dungeons and fighting things approach. See Delicious in Dungeon as an example. I don't have a super-easy tip for handling this because the variance in desires and expectations between players can vary so much. I'd say making sure to watch the clock, give those who love to plan some time, but also get on with the adventure is good and having open conversations about it may help. Good luck!

Hi Justin! The 5e ADB is made from a bunch of stuff. It's almost all HTML and javascript with a few libraries for things like datatables and the search index called lunr.js. The data mostly comes from Open5e's API and Github repo. I used Claude Code for almost all of the javascript creation. I'm not a javascript coder but I am a software engineer and python programmer. I don't feel great about using LLMs for code like this but boy howdy, it made it much easier to build these small downloadable tools and keep the various Javascript libraries working. Frankly, these tools wouldn't exist if I didn't have a lever like Claude Code. Updates take minutes instead of hours. I don't know how well Claude Code would have worked on more complicated projects but since the 5eADB is mostly small independent locally-executible tools, it worked very well. Because the code was generated by an LLM, I released all the code under a CC0 license – I essentially take no ownership of the code itself. This is sort of my way of addressing the issue of LLMs being trained on a bunch of people's own material without their permission. And all the data – the actual creative material hosted by the 5eADB – is all human generated and rendered with traditional procedural scripts – not LLMs. The tools themselves don't use any LLMs either. This is sort of my way of addressing the massive power consumption of LLMs. Yes, LLMs generated the code but once generated, the code can execute extremely efficiently in the user's browser. These sort of small coding projects are the only real value I've personally gotten from LLMs (and the command-line-based LLMs really are impressive at this sort of thing). My personal stance is that I never want an LLM doing actual "Creative" work for me. That's for me and other humans to do. Of course, others have their own opinions and a lot of what I just said could be taken as hypocritical justification so I'm reallly not here to judge others on the topic of LLMs. I have lots of opinions about LLMs and we discuss it often in the AI channel on the Discord server. Anyway, so that's my long answer to your short question =)

I was just thinking about asking this!

Hi Brandon! You've probably heard my best advice but I'll summarize it here: - Write down page numbers everywhere. Every feature you add, put down the page number to make it easy to reference from your book at the table. - Use separate pages for longer reference sheets or for flowcharts. I had a separate sheet that described how my aura and smites worked for my 9th level D&D 2024 paladin and that helped a lot. - Use sheet protectors or pieces of clear tape on your sheet for dry-erase portions you can easily erase and preserve. - Use 3x5 cards for things like hit point tracking, spell slot tracking or other things. - Don't worry too much about having a rough messy character sheet. That's part of the charm. I should dive deeper into this topic but these are the ones that come to mind. You've probably seen this but just in case: https://slyflourish.com/paper_based_character_sheets.html

Hi Thomas! Unfortunately the Obsidian Web Clipper isn't fantastic with all web pages. Sometimes you have to copy and paste the text yourself. It all depends on how the page you're capturing is structured and what the web clipper can figure out. You might ask the other folks in the Sly Flourish Discord server how they manage it. Sorry I can't be more helpful

I'd love it if players described what the thing they do looks like in the world. What does the spell look like? What sort of flourishing attack do they make? Maybe some inter-character roleplaying. On the player side, you could keep an index card in front of you with some prompts to remind you to do so like: - Describe my attack - Describe my spell - Yell to another character in character Something like that. On the GM side, GMs can ask similar questions: "What does that attack look like?" "What does your version of this spell look like?" "Describe your killing blow!"

Mine is really simple. For bigger locations its a name and three features (I've used the term Aspects in the past from FATE). That's usually enough to give me a good idea what's going on and I can improvise the rest. Here are some examples: ***The Burning Monolith***. Pool of molten rock, charred corpse-strewn trees, thick choking smoke. ***The Shattered Tower***. Lighting bolts, floating stones, titan's iron maul. ***The Secluded Pool***. Dancing faeries, giant flowers, strange starscape. ***The Dragon's Claw***. Massive bones, shrine to Mother Avanta, shattered weapons. ***The Burial Barge***. Jotun skeleton on throne, deep saltwater pool, ghost-touched urns of the dead.

Healers, and maybe some sort of up-front fighter type, are really the only roles that I think are highly advantageous but I have played groups that mix it up. On the player side, they can pick subclasses that can help fill in the gaps. On the GM side, you can award them extra healing potions and items that can help heal them. There are a lot of ways to get the characters to fill in the healing role – as you say, potions as bonus actions is a good way to do it. Lots of short rests, of course. I think we always have to balance around the composition and synergy of the characters anyway – this one is just a bit more stark in the lack they have. During your session zero, you might let them know that one of them might want to play one of the healing classes. There are plenty to choose from – cleric, druid, bard, maybe even a paladin. But yeah, there are things they can do on their side to help themselves out and some things you can do on your side without radically changing the underlying system. Magic items on your side, subclasses on their side. Hope that helps!

I think Warhammer and 40k is pretty cool but its just not a home system I play. Too many systems, not enough time!

Hi Richard! You can really only plan for about two to three scenes in 90 minutes. You're doing a lot of stuff right, though – only three or four players and keeping it low level. Dungeons in this format are likely only two or three rooms. I'd probably ensure your strong start isn't a battle unless you're counting it as one of the scenes. I think doing that from time to time can work. For me, I'd aim for one roleplay scene, one exploration scene, and one battle. You might also focus on a single complicated situation the characters can navigate across the whole 90 minutes. Stealing a powerful artifact from a ruined wizards tower – that sort of thing. The compressed time isn't going to give you a lot of wiggle room so I'd make sure whatever your first scene or two are – you can keep them short. If you do have a battle before your final scene, keep it with few monsters and low hit points. But yeah, I'd try to think of it as three scenes, with the first two being somewhat compressed into 15 to 20 minutes and the rest for the final scene. Check out the original adventurers league intro advetures by Shawn Merwin as examples. I also talked to Shawn about this in an episode of the DM's Deep Dive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rWFXTpmZj8 Hope that helps!!

Hi Boštjan! I wrote up all my best advice for "making it in the RPG industry" which includes Kickstarter here: https://mikeshea.net/how_to_make_it_in_the_rpg_industry.html This is a bit dated but has other advice. A lot has changed with Kickstarter since then though: https://mikeshea.net/kickstarter_experiences.html My number one piece of advice is to start a newsletter and work on getting subscribers. Starting with a Kickstarter is going to be hard for all but the smallest projects if you don't already have an audience of some sort.

Please ignore my ignorance, a simple reading of the readme within the Artisanal Database revealed you've already provided instructions how to add custom entries, and how to modify entries too. :)

I dislike absolutes like "paid GMing is a net negative for the hobby". First, its not really a provable hypothesis. Maybe its not for you. Maybe it's not great for one particular group. But I don't think any of us can speak to it overall. It also doesn't matter – it's going to happen anyway. But whether or not another GM offers to run games for pay somewhere else, it doesn't affect your own home game. It can't make the hobby *worse* because the hobby is made up of thousands of independent games with small groups. I'm happy doing what I'm doing (running games for my friends for free). Others are happy GMing for pay on Startplaying.games. There's obviously a drive there for both GMs and players. So yeah, I think its fine and however we each feel about it doesn't matter for our game or their game.

It might be worth talking to the other co-GM about what parts of it you share and what parts you keep to yourselves so you're still surprised. You might know larger regional stuff but not the details of what's going on in every dungeon. As far as other tips for lazier GMing, that's what I think about every day and share here, on the newsletter (https://slyflourish.com/subscribe/), and on the podcast (https://slyflourish.podbean.com/)!

I don't know of any others that are in an open license. I don't really have plans to add others unless something significant shows up. I think we have enough to run awesome 5e games forever.

Yeah! This is sort of a new way of thinking about looting dungeons that's come up in the past few years. In City of Arches I put in the Magistrate of Tombs – a group that determines whether it's ok or not to loot locations around the City. The intent was to show that the current government cared about maintaining previous cultures but still give the characters options to delve into dungeons. The Magistrate has the following conditions under which its ok to loot a tomb: Authorization. If you are legally an ancestry of the tomb, that stuff is ok to take as part of the preservation of the original culture (of which you are part). Preservation. Removing material from the tomb preserves it. Otherwise it would be lost or destroyed forever. Direct Threat. Something in the tomb is directly dangerous and needs to be dealt with. Permission. Spirits of the dead give permission to the characters. Of course, they can't just *say* they have permission from a ghost. The ghost must present itself. Interception. Evil-doers are going after the stuff themselves. If we don't take it, someone else will and with less scruples. That's how it works in the City of Arches but you can turn some of these into general concepts for any game. The spirits or gods giving the characters permission is an easy one. A ghost says "hell yes, take my sword. Go fight evil!" Destruction is another "you figure out that if you do not take this, it will be destroyed or looted by others." Permission. It's your ancestral tomb, it's ok. One separation we made in CIty of Arches is that the city and government has laws against the appropriation of loot but individuals are individuals. The characters aren't colonists themselves. They might have a need greater than just profit. Of course, some hate this idea and that's up to them. But it is worth a conversation with your players during a session zero I think.

It's really valuable to ask your players at the end of a session where the might head next so you have some gauge of what to prep. In a dungeon it's a *little* easier because even a large dungeon is somewhat constrained. Trying to define scenes is harder to do when the characters have a lot of agency to explore. In that case, it helps to focus your prep on the components you need to improvise encounters. For a dungeon this includes: - A brief list of the locations in the dungeon. A word or two per room can do it. - A list of potential monsters. You get to decide which ones and how many appear by rolling randomly or choosing them based on the situation and pacing of the game. - Abstract secrets. Secrets and clues can appear almost anywhere so you can drop them in regardless of the direction the characters go. - NPCs. Friendly NPCs are important in a dungeon to break the pace of constant battles and threats. But they can show up in lots of places. - Treasure. Also abstract from where they discover it. You can break it up into several hoards or just one big hoard in a treasure vault. Those are really five of the eight steps built so you can drop them in different places. Hope that helps!

I haven't actually heard of Scarlet Heroes! I'll have to check it out. This sort of damage threshold mechanic is something I'm seeing in more RPGs. I think Cairn has a similar mechanic as does Daggerheart. I don't know about converting it over to 5e. It's probably easy enough to do but I think the system tends to work best as it is, probably. One thing I've done that's similar is tracking damage by using \s and Xs. A \ is 5 damage, an X is 10 damage. Then I can round up or down as needed. Usually this evens out across a battle and it's very fast to implement.

The Daggerheart core book includes ways to improvise monsters and reskinning is always an option. There are a ton of stat blocks in Daggerheart and they're relatively simple in construction so I think there's no reason you can't build just about any monster you need right from the book. I haven't run it or played it yet so I don't have any experiences to share but nothing I'm seeing tells me reskinning and improving monsters can't be done.

Good question! I think our time is best spent thinking about things outside of the story or plot that might surround the characters. Instead we can focus on: - History – what came before? - Political machinations – what's happening in the world now? - Theology and pantheons – who are the gods and who are their followers? - Locations – what cool locations are in the area? - Villains – who are the major antagonists and what are they up to? Try to imagine a living breathing world with history and depth *regardless* of the characters. The richer it is, the more material you have to drive the sessions you're running in the future. Hope that helps!

You can do it as you wish, it's a published setting, but when it arrives at the table it'll be your setting. Your idea of searching an appropiate area is good, replacing some of the established might break something in the setting.

Do a 0.5 shorter version and check what changes with this new characters and if everybody else is happy with these changes. Also let them know the greatest corollary of RPG, players will minmax themselves OUT of the fun if left unchecked. So you can let them play those characters letting them know sometimes you'll be targetting the min part of minmaxing.

I really don't worry about players using the treasure they get. My job is to give it to them. They get to decide what they want to do with it. The only thing i'd recommend to them is having a quartermaster who keeps track of all loot and thus you have some double-entry book keeping. The quartermaster keeps track of all loot coming in and who got what and each character sheet has the loot that character acquired. That way you can validate who got what an when. Other than that, it's up to them. Regarding gold, I like to give the characters a home base and let them upgrade it with gold. There are various systems for this. The Summervine Villa chapter of City of Arches has upgrades for a manor. Another option is offering three pieces of random magic items they can buy: 500 GP for uncommon, 5,000 for rare, 50,000 for very rare, and 500,000 for legendary. Adjust the prices to suit the power of the item.

Offer a single XP if somebody else does it, and offer also an XP if another one helps him a lot in doing it. A single XP ins't much, but it's a free XP for paying attention and helping others remember it all. Sometimes you can offer clariffications through this, offer further information that they seemd to have missed, and do it without taking their spotlight in it. You can even give some information they don't already have but it's in a book they been carrying for ages.

It's a GM decision. I inserted it in Eberron, so after having played several days, they saw a flying ship arriving and docking on a different part of town, and then leaving after 3 hours. This signaled to them a bigger world outside the city that's coherent with Eberron while not forcing them to abandon their quest. But you can use any setting, even hombrewed work for this. After all, the players arrived from other places with no memory, so they don't know in which world they are.

There are ways to handle this. Perhaps in you setting things like a Blacksmith don't have a class, just skill. Same with farmers. So getting a class might require an inciting event that doesn't account for age. Another way of doing this is having had a class but having had some kind of accident that removed it, a curse that ended when his level reached 0 or a mental wipe that doesn't let him use old skills. So, is he now remembering his old class and gaining it back or is he going for another class now? Talki it with your master , give him some ideas and go with something that works for both.

I'm not sure why devils aren't the answer. Is it possible there's an arch devil at work in the background that wants the characters out of the way that might be disconnected from the Cassalanters? They've made a pact with a devil, if I recall. What if that devil is acting independently from them? That might be a fun avenue for the more peaceful resolution.

I usually don't have much of a plan for how things should go in the future and so I drop in new big things that can feel like entirely new adventures. Sure, you destroyed the Key of Worlds and prevented it from being used against the City of Arches but now there's a grim citadel on the horizon called the Dread Necropolis that's building an army of undead to attack the city! I think having new arcs to a campaign can keep them fresh and leaving these arcs undefined until you're getting close to run them might help keep things fresh. Imagine if you were just starting the campaign now with new characters that happen to be at their current level. What would that *new* campaign look like? I'm so glad you like the show! Thank you!!

I tell them. Secrets can be revealed in lots of ways. Sometimes its a check. Sometimes its something they discover organically by exploring the world *without* a check. Sometimes they just know it. A lot of secrets I reveal to the players through their characters. "You remember back from your latent memories of times past when you battled Karavon the Gray Blade and saw his necrotic blade, Gravestrike, hewing through celestials" Stuff like that.

I think its ok to have one big prep pile that you use for multiple sessions. I still like to have new session notes per session but I'm find copying and pasting over stuff that's still relevant into your new notes is fine. Your notes serve you so you can organize them however best fits your style and the sessions you're running. I'd be wary of having too many sets of notes, though. I think it works best to just have one set of notes – ideally about a page – for the session you're going to run. When I write up my own location adventure writeups and then run them, I'll often skip much of my notes because they're in my writeup. But I still have some notes with things I'm changing around my own group and their situation. Hope that helps!

Are you sort of recreating Eberron? Not as much politics in your campaign, but the magical insustrial revolution is what makes eberron special.

Give bonuses or maluses to the dice throw depending on the described actions. This way you favor both. And if you want to account on a bad dice throw making the content unavailable, don't worry, instead of not finding it think about making him find it at a cost. Most probably time, or he nicks a dagger getting to it, or the little purse gets a gash in that'll start tingling behind him as he looses money.

For me, the answer is just to have better control over the magic items that enter the game. It's fine to have rings of resistance that don't require attunement but *not* good to let players buy *all* of them and buy any amount of them. Having one or two players with a ring of necrotic resistance isn't so bad, but six characters with ten rings of resistance is a lot to manage. I think the answer is in taking control ov what enters the game.

I think the best thing to do is to let a GM select the fonts of truth in his campaign. In other words, what books are allowed (and perhaps what classes or subclasses of those books too) so that players then don't have the whole thing, only the subset selected by the GM.

Hi David! So far I haven't found D&D 2024 rules to slow the game down any moreso than any of the 5es. I'm running a 3x5e game for my Wednesday game where we have characters from D&D 2014, D&D 2024, and Level Up Advanced 5e all at the same table and I wouldn't say the 2024 characters are any slower. I don't think there's any way to add something like weapon mastery and *not* have it slow down a little bit but how players play probably has a bigger effect. So far, I'm happy with D&D 2024. It's been solid at my table and I wouldn't say any other version is better than the others.

I leave it up to them but I make it clear what sources are available for people to use. I think a lot of players like to think about what subclass they'll choose and I don't see a reason to get in the way of that. I worry about the world and the adventures and let them worry about their character. But I do like limiting overall source material to just one or two books just to give the campaign a particular flavor.

It's pretty tricky to time a campaign out to ten sessions. I'd probably have a loose outline of what you hope to get done across the ten and then check it after every session. I've run episodic campaigns using Shadow of the Weird Wizard and that worked pretty well but you have to be rigerous about what you expect to get done in a session. I'd expect whatever your plans are to take twice as long as you think so maybe plan five big arcs that run two sessions each (building them as though they'll only take one session) But be ready to improvise. Be ready to pull stuff out. Re-evaluate between every session to see how things go. Save the final session for the big confrontation. Good luck!

I have a regular game where one player is online and frequently I have one online player in other games I run. Here are a couple of tricks: - Remind the rest of the group to help you include the remote player in the game. Ask them to include that player in their conversations. This can help you all remember they're out there. - Write down the character names in front of you and use that to call on characters throughout the game. This puts the remote player on the same playing field as the other players.

I don't think the 8 steps of the Lazy GM really work well for solo games which are heavily improvised. You don't typically plan out a session for a solo RPG – at least the ones I've played. I think running solo games is a great way to get in some fun RPG play and cross-train our improv brains for games with more players at the table. But yeah, I don't think I'd bother with the eight steps. All of the solo rules I've seen have their own approach that I'd follow for running a solo game.

Personally, I really think Shadowdark is a fantastic introduction to the hobby. I've introduced new players and seen new players introduced with Shadowdark and they really took easily to it. The nice thing is that Shadowdark's mechanics are close enough to 5e that if they end up shifting over to D&D 5e, it will still be familar to them. The same is true the other way – those familiar with 5e will recognize things in Shadowdark. https://youtu.be/wfLiE9XvlqY?t=2141s

First, don't be too hard on yourself. If you can find a way to talk to your group and stomach potential criticism, it might be worth seeing what their perspective is. You can also try different styles for your own homebrew adventures. What is the choice in front of the characters? That's a question I think we can ask ourselves in just about every scene. What options exist? What actions can they take? Sometimes we write adventures that plod along from one scene to the next without any real choices in front of the characters. Mixing multiple random encounters together sometimes creates these choices. Do we stop the mutant bears from clawing down the bandits? Will we miss out on something if we don't? Are we helping the enemy if we do? Thinking of each scene from the perspective of the possible options in front of the characters might help. But I don't know if that really nails the issue in the same way asking players what they've liked from previous adventures and what they want to see more of might.

I would say, if anybody in one of the groups has temporal powers, give them visions. If that is not true, do it the Harry Potter way and have one of the teachers in the Magic Academy be the one to have it. If more than one group has the means, both groups need this. Then you break the story up for each realm, The wild explorers go to a wilder place to do it, the magic academy goes through planar magic, the sailors need to contact somebody in the middle of the see where there's nobody or it's not easy to find, and the faithful defenders need to sprad to defend the whole planet. Of course, you can plan this differently. If you can, I suggest you read Crisis on Infinite Earths, which is a series of comics going through a whole multiverse and collapsing into one universe.

For something so specific you either modify a game risking taking it out of it's comfort zone, find the perfect game (that might be just the Myths of Cthulhu minus the elders, or Young Centurions) or go to a more generic game, like BRP (Basic role playing) which incidentaly is what powers Myths of Cthulhu, or Fate Core which incidentaly powers Young centurions, or GURPS (Generic Universal RolePlaying System). All three of these can run the adventure, but you might want to revise and limit the skill list.

I think the 5e designers assumed that an ongoing effect would last one round. Thus, if you're doing additional ongoing damage, you just subtract it from the total damage. Players are pretty crafty at figuring out ways to avoid the damage. Forge of Foes isn't intended to be an exact science – you're free and encouraged to tweak things based on your own experiences and you can give yourself some wiggle room even when running a monster - removing or reducing the damage of attacks if the ongoing damage appears to be doing a fine job on its own.

Questions to help you rethink the problem. Are all three villains on the same step of execution of their plans? Are they on a similar timeline till the final step or do some of them require years to get there? finally, Is your group the only group of adventurers in the land that is going for one of those three?