July 2023 Sly Flourish Patreon Q&A

Hi James! I don't think I'd run Scarlet Citadel with Shadowdark (or any RPG). It's problem isn't the system but the pure piles of text it throws at the GM without easy ways to reference it during the game. Kelsey's style of writing for Shadowdark is much preferred. I haven't yet decided what campaign or series of adventures I want to run for Shadowdark but I wouldn't use Scarlet Citadel I don't think.

Secrets and clues serve you! If they're working well for you, they're working. https://slyflourish.com/secrets_serve_you.html Certainly there are times where a secret best comes from a particular NPC or location or whatever, and that's totally fine. We typically don't want to lock an important secret behind just one point of discovery but as long as we're willing to move things around, there's no problem assuming a particular secret comes from a particular source.

I think an easy way to do this would be to take the baseline stats from forge of Foes and use those instead of the baseline stats for Von Glaur in Flee Mortals but use all the rest of his abilities. This is a good way to respec any given monster to any given CR. Alternatively you can use the baseline vampire in Flee Mortals and give him some legendary actions and resistances.

Hey there! I just answered this question on the August thread. Thanks for moving it over!

Hm. I'm not sure I get the idea behind faction rosters. Your group may just be saying to you "sometimes it's fun to just fight a giant spider". Remember you can always reflavor a monster with interesting characteristics and yet the monster is still clearly the monster. A skeleton is a skeleton. A wight is a wight. A bugbear is a bugbear. You just make each of them unique in appearance or weapon type or mannerisms or things like that. I don't think I'd go through the trouble of trying to recategorize monsters. Instead, during your session prep, think about what monsters make sense for the given situation. List a few out and bookmark them in your book when you're getting ready to play. Hope that helps!

The idea of nullifying a monster with an improvised action isn't part of 5e. There are other spells and abilities that pull off that sort of thing. When it comes to improvised actions, I almost always lean towards it offering advantage on the next attack. If that feels like a nerf to players who are used to hacking off the arms of giants, it may be worth an out-of-character conversation to say "look, we love it when we see cool improvised abilities but here's how they're generally going to work. You describe your improvised action, I'll set a DC and applicable ability and skill, you make the roll. If you succeed, you get advantage on your next attack. If you fail, the situation is likely to give the monster advantage on it's next attack against you." More on this idea here: https://slyflourish.com/cinematic_advantage.html This can still be flavored with things like trying to blind the monster or wounding their arm. You just don't get to nullify a monster completely with a single successful DC check. Hope that helps!

Hi Pipe. As a small business with just myself and my lovely spouse managing things, we just don't have the time to really dig into translations. It's a very complicated process even when someone else is doing the translation. It's very hard to conduct quality control. The contract negotiations are difficulty to manage. And all of that takes away from working on new things. One of the reasons I put a lot of Lazy DM material into a Creative Commons is to help out those who want to translate it into other languages. They no longer need my permission to translate anything in the Lazy GM's Resource Document: https://slyflourish.com/lazy_gm_resource_document.html But right now I really can't offer more than that. Sorry!

This is a good situation where it's worth starting with what makes sense in the world and then modify it in a way that makes it fun for the group and for the game. As you say, it may not be fun if its just another series of battles. Instead, you might think of the whole thing as a situation in which the characters *see* ahead of time that the cultists have restocked and repopulated and the characters have to find a different way to the boss without just murdering them all. It's also possible the leader only used low-level cultists to restock so they're really easy to cut down (depending on the level of the characters). Since the characters know the layout of the location, they might find another way to get back in that doesn't involve fighting a million cultists. Maybe there's old sewers below or a haunted catacomb they can navigate. In Scarlet Citadel, it's fun to see how each level repopulates after the characters have gone through it. In my own campaign, the ooze queen has completely taken over level 2 and is starting to take over level 3 while the characters are dealing with levels 5 and 6. But they have vertical shortcuts to take them right from level 0 to level 5 so they're all set. In short, I'd try to think of the whole thing as a big situation or heist. Let the characters learn about the repopulation. Give them a goal. Give them some alternate paths. Let them navigate it as they choose. Hope that helps!

In my own group, we play in Discord so we have a channel called "Maps and Handouts" where I can paste screenshots of images, maps, and other visuals so the players can see them and archive them. I use it regularly for overland maps, location images, and images of NPCs or monsters. It works really well. A couple of features I'd recommend getting used to: learn how to do a lasso-style screenshot in whatever operating system you use so you can grab a piece of an image you have on your screen and share that. Also, on a Mac, the Preview app now has a "remove background" feature that gives you a cool transparent PNG of a monster image snatched out of a monster book. It's a great way to share full images of a monster instead of just relying on tokens. I don't use Owlbear Rodeo for anything other than managing a map with tokens on it. One of the reasons I like it is that it solves one particular part of the equation without trying to do everything.

The mechanical parts of Forge of Foes won't work with non 5e games but most of the chapters in the book are system agnostic. Even a lot of the mechanics of monster powers can be refactored into a different RPG with just a little work. I think its worth understanding how monster mechanics work in any game so we know what happens when we reskin or if we want to tweak the stats. So yeah, Forge of Foes can help a lot regardless of the system you're using. Many of its concepts have come from experiences running dozens of different RPGs including just about every previous version of D&D – thus, many of those ideas work with other systems as well. Hope that helps!

I like to think that the rules have springs attached to them. The springs want to pull us towards using those rules as they are whenever we can but we can pull on those rules and stretch those springs, when we think it leads to a more fun game and a better story. Maybe a Ring of Mind Shielding doesn't exactly work the way we run it in our story but it makes the story work a lot better when it does. The further we stretch away from the rules, the more tension we feel in those springs. So I think it helps us to know those rules and it probably helps to pull away from them only when it really makes the whole time at the table better. We don't just throw them all away and do whatever we want – we start by knowing what the rules do and why and then we can pull away from them, increasing that tension in our rules-springs, when we think it makes the game better.

This next update is a big one and is going through an editing pass so it may be a couple weeks into August.

I honestly have no real opinion on it. I've used psionics on the DM side of things by just reskinning spells. I think it'd be cool if psionics had its own system but I don't hang onto that desire too strongly. I think a lot of people care more about psionics than I do.

Don't worry about it. If you see a chance to drop in some foreshadowing, that's great but you don't need to go out of your way for it. Introduce villains, maybe. Heralds can be cool too. But you don't need to foreshadow events because you really don't know what they may be. I tend to not worry about foreshadowing too much except for villains and their current actions. The characters may see what villains are up to which feels like foreshadowing but really isn't. Above all, give yourself a break. You're doing great =)

Hi Gabriel! See my answer to Jason Kemp just a few posts above you. Pacing can be hard and sometimes we just have to shield-push players forward, helping to narrow down their choices, maybe set some sort of external timer like "in 20 minutes the portal is going to close – better make a choice!" Shadowdark RPG uses torchlight as a way to move things forward. That doesn't work perfectly for D&D but it gives you an idea. One of our roles is to arbitrate group decisions. Run the tally, reinforce the options, show which ones they choose, and move things forward. Hope that helps!

I think its really up to the taste of the GM and the players when it comes to the amount of crunch one wants. I know groups that *love* their super-crunchy systems and deep characters. They love big thick tactical combat with lots of odds and ends. They like breaking down actions into three smaller actions. Other groups want fast and furious without worrying about pesky squares and with randomly generated and randomly growing characters like those in Shadowdark. I think deciding which style of combat and the level of details a group wants in a game is an important thing for that group to figure out. I know, and have heard from, many Pathfinder 2 groups that love the system. I knock it as a gag sometimes but I recognize that it's well loved by many.

Maybe, but I tell you, the style of adventures are very different. There are many great Shadowdark adventures you might consider before jumping into Scarlet Citadel. The theme fits well enough and it's not hard to reskin creatures in Scarlet Citadel into Shadowdark monsters but I probably wouldn't bother. Run some fun Shadowdark adventures instead.

Hi Jason! Keeping pacing moving is a really hard and really useful for keeping a whole RPG moving forward. Sometimes, if our group doesn't grab onto actions as much as we hope, we have to move things forward ourselves. If it's a problem we're having trouble with in-game, we might need to have a conversation out of game about it. Something along the lines of "I notice sometimes it feels like things bog down and go slow. When this happens, I'll make this gesture to help get thing moving forward again". Help the players navigate choices in front of them. Tell them things they might otherwise spend a lot of time figuring out. Tell them when they've exhausted all of their options or fully searched rooms. Combat is a whole other issue. Higher damage lower hit point monsters can work. Running theater of the mind helps for smaller battles. A big one is running with fewer players. Three or four can be a great game and runs much faster than six. Heavens help you if you have more than six players. Hope this gives you some ideas!

If you use Discord, you can run some off-line asynchronous scenes using a Discord channel. I also find emailing microfiction can be good fun. If the in-world timing is right, you can do some individual roleplaying with one or more of the players out of the game – just in pure conversations. You can even do this as flashbacks – roleplaying scenes with the characters that had occurred in the past. Offer some prompts in email or some form of chat and see if the players bite on it.

I haven't and Von Glaur is a little high CR to be a true drop-in replacement for Strahd. He'd be great for a high level vampire but that CR 12ish Strahd might require something a little less lethal. Apparently Von Glaur destroyed many groups in playtesting.

Hi Ben! I actually rarely use in-game puzzles in my games. Instead, I focus on the situations in the world and let the players figure out where to go and what they want. I use non-combat encounters all the time but this is usually exploration and roleplaying in which the characters navigate locations, learn secrets and clues, and talk to NPCs. This gets done with ability checks for the most part. I used to use more advanced puzzles but they usually didn't make much sense in the context of the story, took time to prep, and didn't really resonate with my players so I tend to skip them now. Thank you and welcome to the patreon!

I think being able to go back and see what I prepped in the previous session helps me remember what happened. Reading through old scenes, old secrets, old locations and old monsters helps me remember what happened. It isn't always easy. I do like prepping as close to the session I can and still give myself some room if the prep goes long. I prep my Saturday game on Saturday, my Sunday game on Sunday. My Wednesday game usually on Tuesday and a little on Wednesday. I don't really do any prep for my Scarlet Citadel game outside of the show. I might read more of the book to get myself familiar with whats there but I don't write anything down.

One bite at a time! It's worth digging into things like a little bit of the history and intro to the regions and the gods. At that point, pick one particular location for your adventures and focus on that location, its history, its gods, and its lore. You don't need to know the whole world. Just a region, even just a town or city, can be enough to build out your next couple of adventures. Even when running a big scope adventure like Empire of the Ghouls, they still hit each region one at a time. One chapter might be in Zobeck, one in the Cantons, one in the Northlands, one in the Southlands, and two in the undercities but you still need only focus on one such region at a time when running your games. So yeah, take it in small steps focusing on just the region you intend to run.

Hi Jason! I'm not really the expert on 5 room dungeons so I can't dig into it too much Johnn Four is the real expert and has wonderful examples on his website and in the booklet you can get for signing up for his news letter. https://www.roleplayingtips.com/5-room-dungeons/

I hear you. It's up to you if you want to pull your punches for the drama of the game. We start with what makes sense given the world but also what would be fun for the situation. If you really think the drama of a character death would be an interesting turn in the story, you can *make* yourself do it by rolling in the open and explaining what's going on to the players as enemies make their choices. I try to telegraph potential death early. Monsters rear up to make their fatal moves with more character turns ahead before such a blow falls. That way the players *know* its coming. They steel themselves for it or they do something to avoid it. But yeah, it can be a hard situation in which to follow through. Knocking a character to zero, though, I do that all the time.

Hi Jonathan! At this point, I highly recommend Shadowed Keep on the Borderlands and can't recommend Scarlet Citadel. There are probably parts of it worth stripping. The maps are fantastic. But the text is so verbose that you have to do a ton of work to draw out what's happening. I would just run Shadowed Keep and build your own adventures off of it.

Hi BB! That's a great question! I think there are a few places I'd spend my time. Even if you don't know who the characters are, the other seven of the eight steps from Return are still useful for whatever adventure you're building next: The strong start, scenes, secrets and clues, monsters, npcs, treasure, locations – all of those are still worth spending time filling out. Beyond your next adventure there are some fun and useful areas: - Really understand the region in which the characters adventure. If this is a town or city, really know that town or city. The more you fill your mind with the details, the easier it is to improvise during the game. - Understand the most relevant gods and pantheons. Again, whether published or your own, knowing the gods and how they relate to the world around the characters can be useful. - Same thing for factions. Who are the notable factions? What do they want? How do they clash? Who are the notable NPCs for those factions? - HIstory. World history isn't terribly important but regional history is. History, factions, and gods are fantastic layers to overlap with your notable locations for any adventure. They make mundane locations unique. - Situations. Think about interesting adventure situations the characters might get involved with. Don't determine *how* they'll deal with them but setting up situations is fun. The three-hex-out method is a good time, what are three notable adventure locations within a day's journey of your starting location and what is the situation at them? That sort of exercise can be useful. Hope this helps!

I know first hand that WOTC likes to experiment with formats and designs for their products. I actually had a conversation with Chris Perkins about how the focus of various adventures changed. From more narrow-path adventures like Tyranny of Dragons and Out of the Abyss to huge widespread adventures like Storm King's Thunder. He said yeah, that experimentation was definitely how they looked at things (this was about six years ago at Origins I think). I think they're experimenting with campaign book design as well. Do they do big widespread campaign books like Eberron and Ravnica or focused adventure books like Dragonlance, Strixhaven, and Spelljammer? I have a clear preference. I want big campaign books like Eberron. I'm happy with a starter adventure and some campaign outlines or hooks (like I'm doing with City of Arches) but I don't think Dragonlance, for example, scratches my itch for an actual modern Dragonlance sourcebook. Worse, this is the *only chance* we're going to have for books like these. No one else can write them and WOTC doesn't tend to go back to a world and write it again. Even Van Richten's Guide is far enough away from Curse of Strahd as to be a totally different book (I love Van Richten's Guide for example). But that spelljammer boxed set we got is the only one we're going to get for maybe a decade and it doesn't have a sourcebook. There's almost no material to build your own campaigns in Spelljammer. To me, it failed at its duty. Light of Xaryxis is a fine adventure but now it's done and I doubt I'll ever open those books again. Eberron, however, I use all the time. Same with Van Richten's Guide. I'm really hoping Planescape offers more sourcebook-style material so I can build my own adventures in that domain. It's 64 pages longer than Spelljammer, so that's nice, but where they put their attention matters a lot. I'm hopeful but also wary.

I've run consecutive campaigns in the same setting but the campaigns themselves are different enough with a different enough theme, drive, location, and character options that the players are excited to try something new. Here's what I'd recommend: - Offer different character options (this is one big reason why we shouldn't let players choose anything for any campaign). - Ensure it's in a different region of the campaign setting. - Ensure the overall theme is different (low / high magic, etc). - Make sure your central drive for the campaign is clearly different (Dragon Queen vs Storm King's Thunder vs Waterdeep Dragon Heist vs Tomb of Annihilation). Change enough of the variables and the whole thing feels fresh.

Ah, hard problem! Is there a way someone, maybe a god or powerful villain, rolls the time forward? Is there a way they might get stuck somewhere and time rolls on faster than they realize? Traveling to another plane, for example, can dork with time quite a bit and bring them out with only a couple of days left. I often leave myself wiggle room for events like this so I don't get too locked into them needing to do something at a specific time and either missing it because of one extra long rest or being there three weeks early. Even if you come up with a bullshit reason to move time forward, your players will scoff but they'll understand why. If they're headed to the Underworld, making the underworld time move faster or slower than main-world time is a good way to get out of those extra weeks. A nice shadowy surprise when they return home!

Hi Thiago! I actually talked about this a little bit here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3MABNQT5Og&list=PLb39x-29puaoZke5BVk7fjyyyjWXcxCu1&index=18&t=3620s I would definitely have in mind an idea what you want to do if it *does* TPK. Do they get resurrected a century later after the big bad has ruled the world? Do they come back as a new group of characters? Are they actually captured and turned into wights but they suddenly have memories of who they were and now need to figure out how to thwart their new master? Think about how your campaign might pivot on a TPK. I think that's a lot more fun than just having them all die. What happens to the world when they die and how do they come back into it?

Hi Baptiste! I don't know of anyone currently converting it into French. Part of the selfish reason I released it was so that I didn't have to keep track when teams decided they wanted to translate it. I'm no longer the one holding people back! As I hear about new translations, I'll be sure to mention them and add them to the reference document page.

I actually have Halls of the Blood King in a physical book right here! I pulled it off the shelf when you mentioned it. I haven't given it a super deep dive but I remember very much liking the abbreviated style. It's a style Kelsey over at Arcane Library also uses for her 5e and Shadowdark adventures. I think, in the case of Scarlet Citadel, their intention was to offer a more opinionated old-school style adventure that included design notes right in the text. There's a lot of *how* you should run a location instead of just what's in the location and what's going on. There's a lot on monster behavior, attitudes, feeling, theme, and other sorts of writing that, I think, the intended to use to help teach GMs how to run it but I think all of that gets in the way when you're actually trying to run it. On the flip side you have more abbreviated OSR-style adventures. Many of these authors embraced the idea that these need to be easy to run right at the table. Use as few words as possible. I expect adventure writers lean away from this because there *are* matters of feeling and theme they think would be lost if you abbreviate it too much. I think that's a real risk too. I think a lot can be done with the design of an adventure to separate out designer notes from the details you actually need to run it at the table. I also think there isn't a perfect answer and different GMs have different preferences. It's a real hard problem.

13th Age is where I came to love abstract distances in combat and the system itself hangs on tight to it. Lots of other RPGs other than the two big ones – D&D and Pathfinder – have moved to abstract combat. Numenera, Blades / Forged in the Dark, any of the Powered by the Apocalypse games, any Fate-based game, Shadowdark, Knave, EZd6, Index Card RPG. The upcoming Shadow of the Weird Wizard will use zones.

Hi Peter. This definitely sounds like a case where it's worth having a mid-campaign discussion about it. You can just tell the players, outside of the game, that you really don't like running a game where the "heroes" are torturing prisoners. Tell them that, when there's information to be gotten, they can get it other ways. You don't need an in-game explanation for this. You don't need to come up with ways in world for them to miss the opportunity to torture prisoners. You just really don't dig it and torture won't be a gate to any information they'd receive. Instead they can get it with compassion or deception or whatever, but not torture. The same might be asked about executing prisoners. That might not be cool either depending on your view and that of your group. Redemption is always an option.

Definitely Esper Genesys. It's a pure 5e Mass-Effect-style game written by my friend Rich Lescuflair. You can also get a lot of great material for generating adventures from Ironsworn Starforged. I think mixing up games is fine but you probably want a core set of rules for your players.

I don't think you have to hang on too tight to match leveling with specific adventures but I think knowing how to move adventures forward into new challenges as the characters get more capable with spells like speak with dead, zone of truth, fly, and other spells that change how their entire interaction with the world works. Thinking about how the game shifts as the characters get new capabilities, I think, is an important part of how our adventures and campaigns grow. You can find some ideas about how that scope changes here: https://slyflourish.com/tier_appropriate_adventure_locations.html I wouldn't restrict access to spells. I'd change the types of adventures they have as they level. Hope that helps!

We may not care about magic items but players definitely do. I do indeed tailor magic items around characters along with dropping in random magic items to shake things up. There's a reason it's one of the eight steps for lazy GM prep. It's worth focusing on. Check out the relevant chapters in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master for more info.

I haven't but I've come close. I was convinced in my big 4e campaign against Orcus that Orcus would win in their final fight. I had this whole plan for how they'd come back 10 years later when Orcus is running the show and have to find a way to deal with him again. It was going to be awesome. Thinking about how the world might change if the villains won and then dropping the characters back in like the resistance against a big empire could be a lot of fun. What would the world be like if Tiamat won? Write that situation and then bring the characters back resurrected after 10 years by a secret cult looking to thwart the queen of dragons!

Feedback is definitely one way – both direct and non-verbal. Talking to players as a group. Using your "Stars and Wishes". Using campfire tales. https://slyflourish.com/campfire_talk.html This can hopefully give you an idea what the players are enjoying. You can also look internally and look at other GMs to see what you notice about other styles. Liveplay shows and podcasts are good for that. Here are a couple of articles that may help: https://slyflourish.com/path_for_dm_expertise.html https://slyflourish.com/dms_reading_list.html

Cities are definitely hard. I recommend sitting down and thinking of the few fantastic places in the city that the characters themselves want to go to. Where would your barbarian like to go? Your rogue? Your wizard? What places can you focus on that you think the characters and the players would really dig? You can read more about it here: https://slyflourish.com/build_cities_around_the_characters.html

I'm sorry you got the impression that I thought having licensable mechanics was a bad thing. I don't think that at all. I think ORC is probably right that a lot of pure mechanics can't be (or shouldn't be) copyrightable. My main issue with ORC is that it forces all downstream products to use ORC instead of being able to choose other licenses – including no license at all. I think it's too heavy-handed in this approach. Instead, I think taking the material you want to release and putting it out under a CC BY license is better. That licenses the whole thing and only requires one or two sentences to reference the original work. That would be my recommendation. You can see how I did that with the Lazy GM's Reference Document: https://slyflourish.com/lazy_gm_resource_document.html

Check out Ghosts of Saltmarsh which has fantastic material for running adventures on the high seas. A lot of people pointed at it as an example of what WOTC should have done with Spelljammer. I'm also just a fan of focusing on flavor. Use your words! Describe what it's like out there. Give them lots of islands of adventure to explore. Let them build their crew and build their own little cabins the way they want them. Let their ship become their mobile home base. An adventure like this is a fantastic model. Enjoy!

If you have the time, going through and creating index cards for each of the locations and maybe for the rooms would be great. A few bullets is all one really needs. Check out the Arcane Library which has fantastic adventures written in this very short and abbreviated way that may help a lot. She can also run her own adventures and then doesn't need to read anything at all! Half of DMs run their whole lives this way. Good luck and I'm glad to see her coming into the hobby!

Great thoughts, and I agree! There should be player screens too (or reference sheets). I use a big acrylic sheet on my table and under the sheet I have quick reference materials I use all the time. I've had a dream for a while of making a Paizo-style flip mat that has reference materials for players and GMs around the outer edge of the mat. One day I'll have time to do something like that.

I definitely use these ideas but I don't really think of them as a dial. Choosing tactically unsound ideas is a fine way to go but its very situational so I think of it more as a general good idea instead of something fixed like a monster dial. Great techniques though and I love the name!

There are a couple of things you can do. Instead of paralyzing or incapacitating characters, you can remove their movement, bonus actions, or reactions like a slow spell. You can also give them the opportunity to break out of a stun-like effect by taking 1d8 psychic damage per every even level or per CR (or half CR) of the monster inflicting the effect. I use that a lot. For a charm-like effect, I like to take over the characters reaction by making them immediately move and make an attack against an ally but then they have their full turn next round. Those are some of my ideas. We talk about this in both Forge of Foes and the Lazy DM's Companion under the "stress effects" chapter.

Hm, I don't know a great single source of tactical combat advice directly but everyone loves the Monsters Know what they're Doing by Keith Amman. You might start there!

I'll have to check that out! The example of good clean succinct writing I use nowadays is Light of Xaryxix which packs a lot of fantasy into not a lot of words.

I lean towards less mechanic-focused solutions and let the players know directly "you have an opportunity to escape if you want it" and let them know they won't get stuck. Sort of holding both shoulder-buttons in Final Fantasy to run away.

It may be worth having a conversation out of game explaining how it interrupts the flow of the game and also that the world you're running isn't exactly the same as the one they might have in their head. You might also take the opportunity to switch worlds when the time is right. But really, such disruptive behavior is probably worth a one-on-one conversation.

I think its handy to prep as close to a session as I can. It keeps it fresh in my mind and I'm ready to go. If I find myself prepping early for a session, I try to do a quick review of all my notes before I run the game itself also to push it into short-term memory.

I always love those sort of creative interactions so I just go with them. It is part of your job to make sure such actions don't eat up too much time and give those same options to other players who might be more character-sheet focused. Let them know such options exist for their character in various circumstances. Offer deals to quiet players. I throw this all under the category of "cinematic advantage": https://slyflourish.com/cinematic_advantage.html

It's hard for me to offer concrete advice without knowing more about the campaign (and I'm really too busy right now to dig in much further – sorry!) I think it can work out fine as a side quest and side story. I think it can be fun for the characters to learn themselves how to banish the grannie hag by shattering the mirror (which sounds like it deals with other problems of theirs). As long as its the players who discover this fact, I think they'll still dig it even if it seems sudden. Hope that helps!

Agree that Kelsey's stuff is great! Mike did a segment on Arcane Library here: https://youtu.be/scdG4YXGKss?t=1033s

I think you have to be firm both in and out of game that the NPCs won't join their group most of the time. You can set up situations where the NPCs go on away missions outside of what the main characters are doing. But you want to clarify to the characters AND the players "these guys aren't going to go on jobs with you. That's your job". It's always fun when Blastimoff says "I'd love to go with you but, you know, my back".

I don't know if I can pick one specific thing but I really love what Brennan Lee Mulligan does in his games. Fantasy High was awesome and Escape from the Blood Keep is just fantastic. It's always eye-opening to see how he builds off of what the players bring to the table.

There are so many good one-shots out there already, why burden yourself with creating a new one? You could take and existing adventure and mod it or mash it up with other elements to your heart's content.

I'm hoping to run at least a short shadowdark campaign when we're done with Scarlet Citadel.

I have a key phrase I use at the end like that "And that's where we'll end today's adventure". I use it in all of my games and its a good way to close the book on the session even if it's in a cliffhanger. If a player tries to jump in, I'll say "we'll see how that works out next week" or something like that. It can also be a good time for a "pause for a minute" and say "game's over. We'll get back into it next week!".

I was definitely focused on building particular scenes for particular approaches – mostly developing combat encounter scenes in 4e like battle arenas in Gears of War. I outlined my scenes ahead of time, built these big set pieces a lot of the time, and had a lot of expectations about how they'd go. Moving to 5e and its more old-school approach showed me the value in letting go of defined scenes and focusing on situations. I'm a lot happier with my games now but I definitely do have players who miss the tactical battles I used to run.

Focus on flavor! You can do a whole lot with just descriptions doing the heavy lifting. You can use five CR 4 monsters using the base stats and then just flavor how they're different. An archer or a mage or a rogue or a paladin can all feel different even if their core stats are the same. If you want, give each one a unique ability that exemplifies their class. Rogues with backstab, mages with some sort of crowd control or area bursts. Fighters with higher C. Stuff like that. Good luck and thanks for supporting Forge of Foes!

Forge of Foes is now out in PDF! You can preorder it if you haven't backed it and next time we lock orders, you'll have your copy. When I know I'm going to run a downtime scene, I try to focus the options around things I know the characters would want to do. Here's an article on the topic: https://slyflourish.com/running_downtime_sessions.html

I do! I wrote about it 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 The immersion breaking of a fewer number of enemies isn't any more immersion breaking when you have four to eight bad guys versus your party of five. Minions and hordes are a good way to throw a lot of monsters at even a couple of characters but you'll still want to wait until they have an ability to handle them. See the horde rules in Forge of Foes or the Lazy DM's Companion. The Companion also has a section on running games for one-on-one play.

I really haven't looked into it. I just haven't had the time.

It's a bit of work but I'm enjoying Empire of the Ghouls. I also loved running Wild Beyond the Witchlight and Light of Xaryxis. There's also no reason you can't run your own more linear adventure in a campaign setting of your choice. I think you can still offer choices to characters even in a linear adventure. It's more like a series of situations and goals the characters have to navigate but the path is still clear. Whether they take a shadow road, a red portal, a walk along the trail, or a sand barge – they're still going to the city of Siwel to find the key they need.

Honestly, not so much. I still think about what villains are up to such as how Daneska Maskelov has become a giant sentient slime creature and is busy taking over the upper reaches of the citadel. I don't always label it as checking fronts but I still think about what the villains are up to. Where is Gellart the Gruesome going? And so on.

Even for published locations, we can do a bit more service by talking about the one thing that makes the town interesting. It doesn't always have to be a giant stone hand reaching out of the ground but old monuments are a good one. The black obelisks that WOTC has stuck in most of their adventures are good ones. Old statues to old heroes can help. Monuments in general are a good option to make even a mundane town feel special. You can generate some for ideas using the Lazy GM's Random Generator: https://slyflourish.com/random_generators/sf-random-generator.html Sit back and think about your favorite fantasy series or setting and ask what sorts of things might make the location fantastic. Write ten down and pick the one that works for you.

It's definitely a different style of game and if someone's looking at it from the perspective of D&D 3rd edition or above, those 2e characters are going to look pretty weak. The sleep spell is crazy powerful though, if I recall. Recommend that to them. You can also have them read Dragons of Autumn Twilight where Raistlin Majere was 1st level forever and went bananas when he found Magic Missile in a spell scroll. But yeah, I think it needs to be reinforced how a 2e game plays out compared to a 5e game. Maybe a run through the Old School Gaming manifesto to understand the different approach. https://lithyscaphe.blogspot.com/p/principia-apocrypha.html

It's hard to say what is going wrong. You are in control of the pace, however. What if you made a mandatory "level every other session" or even "level every session"? I know it sounds extreme but that's surely one way to do it. The game Shadow of the Demon Lord expects to be played like this - one session for each level of the game. Write short episodic adventure sessions with some downtime in between each one and hammer then up the levels!

Hi Chris! That's a big question. Shawn Merwin and Teos Abadia probably have better answers than I do. I'll offer up some material though: https://slyflourish.com/deep_dive_with_david_christ.html https://slyflourish.com/dm_deep_dive_organized_play.html https://slyflourish.com/running_games_for_the_adventurers_league.html https://slyflourish.com/ten_tips_from_gencon_2015.html https://slyflourish.com/pacing.html Hope that helps!

Hi David! So I'm probably 30% robot – and I'm only slightly kidding. I do have a pile of Python scripts and various processes and procedures to let me get a lot of stuff done easily. I have scripts to manage my Mastodon account, scripts to manage my blog and newsletter and YouTube channel. All the content is mine, of course, I'm not Chat-GPTing articles or anything, but the actual behind-the-scenes plumbing is a lot of Python. I'm also a longtime user of David Allen's "Getting Things Done" system, although certain steps I've been skipping a long time. Along with a to-do app that lets me schedule regular events (like doing the Patreon Q&A on Friday mornings!) and lets me bump tasks until the day I know I'm free to do it. I wrote more about this whole thing on this Notion page at the bottom: https://slyflourish.notion.site/How-to-Make-It-in-the-RPG-Industry-3b2b2fd121204578b57bf1dd3deafeb5?pvs=4

Yeah! It's interesting to me that a lot of the more simple OSR games also tend to focus on high-risk and quick-death grimdark fantasy. I wonder what a more simple 5e version would look like where characters are still more empowered and heroic instead of always at terrible risk. I haven't seen a variant that focuses on both of these ideas. For more heroic fantasy, I definitely recommend 13th Age which I adore. They have a new version coming out I'm excited to see. It's not what I'd call rules-lite but I think its probably slightly less crunchy than 5e with more of a story focus. 5e itself, I feel, is more of a heroic fantasy RPG. If you're looking for a simpler version, go with the default rules of no feats and no multiclassing. Even further, you can stick to the D&D basic rules and have only the one subclass per class that's really the "default" like champion fighters and life clerics. https://media.wizards.com/2018/dnd/downloads/DnD_BasicRules_2018.pdf You can also keep levels low. Below 7th level.

Hi Jim! I'm doing well! Forge of Foes is out which is fantastic but there's still lots to do. My head is spinning with all the crazy new social media stuff going on. Things are good! How are you?

There's no fantastic way to run with seven characters. It's just a lot of people across which to spread the spotlight. One thing you can do is when someone can't make it, run it anyway with fewer characters. Here are some other things you can do: - Keep the environment simple. - Use only one type of monster. - Run easier battles. - Run some battles in the theater of the mind. - Run hordes of monsters with simplified horde rules (see the Lazy DM's Companion or Forge of Foes for examples). - Keep your monster strategies simple (deal lots of damage). - Use static monster damage. - Always give monsters an initiative of 12.

I have a similar situation in a couple of games. You can threaten those characters with saving throws – often wisdom or charisma saving throws can do a lot. See the stress effects chapter of the Lazy DM's Companion for a general-use supernatural stress effect they might run into anytime they see something weird or otherworldly. Don't overuse it but it can work. Second is to let them be the shield for the party. They went that way because they like it. But yeah, that doesn't mean the whole party isn't threatened. Ranged attackers can shoot overhead. Teleporting enemies can get behind. And so on. I'd mix up situations where that character gets the fun of holding back hordes of melee attackers while the rest get to eat them away and other times where that strategy doesn't work.

Hi Esemwy! I've recently run Blades in the Dark and Numenera for my Sunday group and I'm hoping to run some Shadowdark RPG when we're done with Scarlet Citadel. My other games are all 5e at the moment but heavily invested in Kobold Press material instead of WOTC material.

Hi Nick! You could be right that there's some personal growth in worldbuilding but I don't know that GMs can't get that from absorbing published campaign worlds instead of going through the trouble of building their own. I also think it comes down to the focus that the GM has. Some GMs love worldbuilding so why tell them to stop? Others really focus on the game they have coming up and worldbuilding can be paralyzing – even stopping them from running sessions at all. I'm not going to tell anyone that worldbuilding isn't useful to them if they find it useful. We each get to decide what's good for us. I'm still a subscriber in spiral campaign development, though, and think we can get a lot from published campaign material that would take is far too much time, energy, and money to do ourselves.

I loved the following two Brennan Lee Mulligan series and thought they did a great job with exciting combat: Escape From the Bloodkeep https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiEQO77PV9Q and Fantasy High https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zZxCVBi7-k

The monster powers and monster roles chapters won't be in the CC. The common monster powers are and you can probably come up with your own alternative set of monster powers. We feel there's enough variance and examples in the common powers chapter to give people the inspiration to come up with their own. Monster difficulty dials is already in the CC on the Lazy GM's Reference Document: https://slyflourish.com/lazy_gm_resource_document.html#monsterdifficultydials The rest, I believe, is on our list to put in the CC. I think we're going to start looking into that in August once we've sent the PDF off to print.

Hi James! Great question! With the recent redesigns to monsters, the easiest way is to create new spell-like abilities and use the dials on those abilities. You can use the Forge of Foes monster stats by CR table as a guide: https://slyflourish_content.s3.amazonaws.com/Monster_Statistics_by_Challenge_Rating_Table.pdf Alternatively, you can reskin the spells they have into something relatively unrecognizable and then turn the dials on those spells. Now if it's not damage spells you're talking about, that's a bit harder. The monster's DC is a dial but you don't want to change it once you've used it. You could come up with some sort of improv power where they channel their inner demonic force, trading hit points or armor class for a bump to their DC. You can also use their entire spellcasting trait as a big dial. Give them the spells they'd likely have given the situation. Beef them up if its warranted.