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Adventure Hooks
In an interview on D&D Beyond, legendary adventure writer Chris Perkins describes the requirements for a solid adventure: Good villains and monsters. A location for the adventure to take place. A...
View ArticlePlaying Dungeons & Dragons On A Budget
One of the interesting things about Dungeons & Dragons is the incredibly wide range for its potential costs. The cost to play D&D can go anywhere from free to potentially thousands of dollars...
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Storytelling with Spells: Fireball
This is the first in a new series of articles that focuses on how particular spells in D&D can tell stories all by themselves. The core D&D books are full of fantastic ideas for stories but...
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Facing Insurmountable Foes
In the beginning of Hoard of the Dragon Queen the characters face off against Lennithon, an adult blue dragon, when the characters are likely level 1. It doesn't take any powerful encounter building to...
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The Deadly Shift of Tomb of Annihilation
Warning, this article contains spoilers for Tomb of Annihilation. Tomb of Annihilation is a fantastic D&D adventure. It's an adventure of high fantasy in an interesting environment (the jungles of...
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Converting Vault of the Dracolich to Fifth Edition D&D
This article has been updated since the original published in April 2014. Back in 2013, Teos Abadia, Scott Fitzgerald Gray, and I all worked on the adventure Vault of the Dracolich. This adventure was...
View ArticleThrowing Away Secrets
I often receive questions both from readers of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master and those watching my Lazy DM Prep videos regarding throwing away secrets from session to session. For many people, this...
View ArticleAlways Be Learning
Great DMs are always refining their craft. We are not static beings. We learn. We adapt. We don't throw away our decades of past experiences when a new idea comes along. We use those experiences as our...
View ArticleSession Zero of Waterdeep Dragon Heist
Note, this article contains spoilers for Waterdeep Dragon Heist. Running a session zero for any new campaign offers many benefits. Session zeros help us and our players all get on the same page about...
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Revised 5e D&D Cheat Sheet
Back when Fantastic Locations came out we released a one-page campaign worksheet intended to help DMs focus on the characters and have a bit of a cheat sheet at the same time. It's served well but it...
View ArticleRevealing Secrets
Chapter 6 of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master focuses on defining secrets and clues in our D&D games. In many ways secrets and clues are the anchor of the 8-step game preparation process in Return...
View ArticleDM Deep Dive with Adam Koebel on Dungeon World
Back in November 2018 I had the great pleasure to talk with Adam Koebel, a co-creator of the mind-blowing RPG Dungeon World, to talk about his game and what it meant for D&D. You can watch the...
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Running Waterdeep Dragon Heist Chapter 1, A Friend In Need
Waterdeep Dragon Heist is a different kind of adventure than other hardback adventures. This is a more focused adventure in two ways: it only takes characters up to level five and it takes place almost...
View ArticleGaining Confidence to Run D&D Games
A while back I asked newer DMs on Twitter to describe the hard parts they encountered when running running D&D games. I got back a lot of interesting responses many of which focused on learning the...
View ArticleBuilding for the Three Pillars
If you read deeply into Tomb of Annihilation and Dungeon of the Mad Mage, you'll notice that Wizards of the Coast has avoided a common problem in older adventures. Older adventures often focused on...
View ArticleReturn of the Lazy Dungeon Master Video Series
Over the past year I've been recording my own game preparation using the eight steps from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. I broadcast these these shows live on Twitch Sundays at 10am EST and then...
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How to Read Your D&D Books
"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." - Tyrion Lannister, Game of Thrones Over the past year, this topic has shown up in lots of other articles here at Sly Flourish and many of my DM...
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Thoughts on the Finale of Tomb of Annihilation
Warning, this article contains spoilers for Tomb of Annihilation. This is the final article of a number of articles discussing the Dungeons & Dragons hardback campaign adventure Tomb of...
View ArticleWolfgang Baur on Worldbuilding
In the March 2019 episode of the DM's Deep Dive I had the wonderful opportunity to talk to Dungeons & Dragons and RPG luminary Wolfgang Baur who is currently the Kobold-in-Chief at Kobold Press the...
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Handling Missing Players
Of all of the things required to run a great Dungeons & Dragons game none is harder than getting a group together regularly to play. Finding and maintaining a group is the biggest hurtle for...
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