SLY FLOURISH’S RETURN OF THE LAZY DUNGEON MASTER
BY MICHAEL E. SHEA
CREDITS
- Editing by Scott Fitzgerald Gray
- Cover Art by Jack Kaiser
- Interior Art by Pedro Potier
- Art Direction, Cover Design, Page Design, and Layout by Marc Radle
- Special thanks to David Hartlage, Grant Ellis, and Jennifer Gagne for their invaluable input and to our 6,694 backers on Kickstarter.
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“Prep as little as you can.” — Jeremy Crawford, lead rules designer for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master is a book designed to help Gamemasters of any type of tabletop roleplaying game—both veterans and newcomers alike—get the most value out of the time we spend preparing for our games. The ideas in this book are based on reviews of hundreds of videos, articles, books, and interviews, as well as the shared experiences of thousands of DMs and GMs.
Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master begins with an eight-step process for game preparation, then builds on those steps to expand into a full discussion of how we prepare our games, how we run our games, and how we think about our games.
WHO IS THIS BOOK FOR?
Gamemasters with some experience running roleplaying games will get the most value out of this book. Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master isn’t designed to teach beginners how to run roleplaying games. (Thankfully, many RPG sourcebooks and Gamemaster guides can help shepherd new players through the steps of running games for the first time.) But you don’t need to be a hardened veteran to make use of this book. If you have any amount of experience running RPGs, Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master can help you learn how to get more out of your RPGs by preparing less.
WHAT GAME SYSTEM IS THIS BOOK FOR?
This book can work with just about any RPG—particularly d20-based fantasy RPGs. Still, while writing the book, I had fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons clearly in mind. Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master contains no game-specific mechanics, however. The concepts discussed in these chapters can work with just about any fantasy RPG, and will work particularly well with Dungeons & Dragons.
WHY WRITE A NEW BOOK?
It’s been five years since the first appearance of Sly Flourish’s The Lazy Dungeon Master, and much has changed in those five years. Wizards of the Coast published the fifth edition of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game in 2014. The streaming of tabletop RPGs online has exploded into a new form of daily entertainment. By any measure, the popularity of Dungeons & Dragons continues to rise.
Even with all this change, though, the ideas in the original Lazy Dungeon Master hold up. People still talk about how that book remains a valuable resource for learning how to prepare less—and to run better roleplaying games at the same time.
So why write this new book? Because we’ve all learned a lot since then. Though The Lazy Dungeon Master holds up, there are always new ideas to add. We can polish and refine the original concepts with the experience of tens of thousands of Gamemasters to make them even more useful.
Though this book builds off the concepts of the original book, Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master is fully self-contained. You don’t need to have read The Lazy Dungeon Master before reading this book. Every idea has been reexamined and rewritten in the context of what we know today. This book is a complete encapsulation of the way of the Lazy Dungeon Master.
HOW TO READ THIS BOOK
Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master is designed to maximize the value of the time you spend reading it. Each chapter is deliberately brief, to get you to the meat of the book’s topics as fast as possible.
- Checklist Approach: The chapter headings in the table of contents can act as a checklist of the tools, techniques, and principles of the Lazy Dungeon Master.
- Chapter 2: Chapter 2 explores the Lazy Dungeon Master’s checklist that walks you through the main steps of preparation. If you read nothing else, read chapter 2.
- Summaries: The end of each chapter includes a checklist covering the main points. Skim these to review the chapter without having to read the whole thing again.
- References: The end of the book contains a list of references and further reading for further research into running great games.
OUR JOURNEY TOGETHER
The way of the Lazy Dungeon Master isn’t doctrine. It’s not a set of hard and inflexible rules. This style of running games isn’t intended to be the only way to prepare and run our games.
Becoming a better Gamemaster doesn’t result from blindly following rules in a book. It comes from constant and continual improvement of our personal craft. Take the parts of this book that work well for you and omit those that do not.
Let’s begin our journey together.