Struggling to fit in preparation time for your next Dungeon & Dragons adventure? The Lazy Dungeon Master is THE go-to resource for whittling down those long hours. It genuinely saved my gaming group and allowed us to regularly play, in spite of growing families and diminishing free time.
Then, in 2018, came the Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, an updated and revised resource reborn for Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition. Again, this was a game-changer, one I have recommended to any and all prospective Dungeon Masters I have subsequently met.
And now comes the Kickstarter for The Lazy DM’s Companion, the perfect accompaniment to the Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, and it’s stacked-full of more Lazy DMing tips, tools, and tables.
Following the Laziest path
When I first started DMing D&D games for my friends, I was daunted by the seeming enormity of the task. How do I create a world that feels real and exciting when I don’t even know where to start? One of the first websites I found most useful in solving this riddle was slyflourish.com. The hints, tips, and guides I found there made running a successful game so much easier. Fast forward eight years and I still religiously return to Sly Flourish for campaign strategy guides, DM hints, and everything else in between. I even included Sly Flourish’s Fantastic Adventures in a recent round-up of one-shot D&D stories.
Some years ago Mike Shea, creator of Sly Flourish, compiled the Lazy Dungeon Master. This offered a simplified approach for preparing fantasy RPGs with one clear directive: prepare only what most benefits your game. And, oh, boy, did it help me out. Because the truth of the matter is:
I Am a Lazy Dungeon Master
And I just don’t have the time in my life to plan my sessions. Now, this is the path I follow. I am a Lazy Dungeon Master, and you could be too.
The Lazy DM’s Companion
This Kickstarter launches the third book in the series and includes guidelines to help streamline your 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons games. It features inspirational generators to help you build your own campaigns and adventures, guidelines that make it easier to focus your game on the fantastic stories, and tools to help you break out of creative ruts.
Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master offers advice for preparing, running, and thinking about your game, and the Lazy DM’s Companion is meant to sit beside you as you run your game, giving you charts and tables to help you quickly improvise elements of your game when you need them. As well as this, the Lazy DM’s Companion helps you prepare your game, offering suggestions to make various types of scenarios easier to run and generators to inspire unique adventures you can put together quickly and easily.
Each page of this 64-page book offers useful guidelines, an adventure or campaign generator, or a versatile map within which to build your own adventures.
What’s Included?
- Tools for improvisation
- Quick tricks for Lazy DMs
- Session Zero checklist
- Creating secrets and clues and building situations
- Revised guidelines for Theater of the Mind
- NPC and villain generators
- Random environmental locations
- Quest templates
- Multiple adventure generators
- Lazy combat encounters
- Stress effects
- Monster difficulty dials
- Elemental monster templates
- Undead templates
- Improvised legendary monsters
- Running hordes
- Lazy treasure generator
- And much, much more!
There’s so much included in this project that this list simply doesn’t do it justice, but the key highlights for me are things like the session zero checklists, on-game generators for almost every eventuality imaginable, and the adventure generators that help you create and develop your own meaningful campaigns.
The Kickstarter campaign for The Lazy DM’s Companion runs until the 28th of October and has already reached its main funding goals, but it’s not too late to jump on the bandwagon and declare: “I am a Lazy Dungeon Master, and that’s OK!”
