14 September 2020: I love Eberron. D&D's fantasy world of high magic, noir intrigue, and swashbuckling adventure manages to be fresh and new and still hold true to the core of D&D. Everything in D&D is in Eberron but no ...

6 September 2020: Playing D&D with one player and one DM is a wonderful way to play the game. With one player and one dungeon master, we can truely focus our stories on the character. Playing D&D one-on-one is not a le ...

31 August 2020: For a video on this topic, take a look at the Most Important Lazy D&D DM Tool: A Good List of Names on Youtube. Names are hard. It's hard to come up with them. It's hard to remember them. Throughout o ...

24 August 2020: "The key to becoming a great GM, more than anything else, is an understanding of pacing." - Monte Cook and Shanna Germain, Your Best Game Ever As dungeon masters who take their craft seriously, we c ...

17 August 2020: Note: This article contains spoilers for the adventure Descent into Avernus. This article is one of a series that covers tips and tricks for running the hardback D&D adventure Descent into Avernus. Th ...

10 August 2020: Note, this article has been updated from the original posted in February 2016. When improvising an NPC or custom monster during the game, you can often start with a base DC between 10 (easy) and 20 (h ...

3 August 2020: D&D is a game of action and high adventure yet sometimes we lose the sense of wonder and excitement when we fall into the minutia of the mechanics. We also may want a combat system that doesn't requir ...

27 July 2020: In previous articles on Sly Flourish I wrote about the value of randomness in our D&D games and offered random tables to help inspire your own adventures such as those in the Lazy DM's Workbook, Rando ...

20 July 2020: Since all of my in-person games have moved online in 2020 I've become fascinated with the best practices for playing D&D online. While there are many solutions out there, I've found that playing D&D o ...

13 July 2020: Few movie plots work well for our D&D games, often for one big reason: the movie's story depends on how the characters act and we can't count on that in D&D. Instead, the movie plots that work well in ...

6 July 2020: For the last few years, while using the steps from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master to prepare for my game, I'd write my prep notes in a text file using markdown and saved my files to a campaign dire ...

29 June 2020: Our D&D games can become more fluid, flexible, and easier to improvise when we DMs focus on larger situations and less on specific scenes and encounters. At it's core, D&D can be broken down into the ...

22 June 2020: Note: this article contains spoilers for the hardback campaign adventure Descent into Avernus. If you take nothing else from this article, heed these words: the biggest improvement you can make to you ...

15 June 2020: A west marches campaign is a particular style of RPG campaign, easily transported to D&D, that has some of the following criteria: There's no regular scheduled time. There's no fixed group of players ...

8 June 2020: Boss battles are hard. That's the first four words in Fantastic Lairs: Boss battles and Villainous Encounters for 5e. While we can build solid tools to improvise a lot of our D&D games as the stories ...

1 June 2020: Below is a list of 1d100 Eberron factions. Use these factions in combination with other random lists from the Dungeon Master's Guide or these generators for monuments, relics, items, locations, or any ...

26 May 2020: The heroes stand atop a mountain of bones with one hundred skeletons swarming in. The cleric holds her holy symbol aloft and waves of radiant energy tear through the skeletons, shattering dozens of th ...

18 May 2020: In a previous article, we looked at how to place Blackclaw Mountain, the primary location in Fantastic Adventures, Ruins of the Grendleroot, into Avernus, to expand the hardback adventure Descent into ...

11 May 2020: Note, this article contains spoilers for Descent into Avernus. In the popular D&D hardcover adventure Descent into Avernus the characters travel into the first layer of hell to save the city of Elture ...

4 May 2020: Back in the third edition of D&D, monsters could be augmented with monster templates to give them a new feel. The fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons, for the most part, lacks these monster templates. ...

27 April 2020: The characters' levels in D&D mean something within the fiction of the game. Chapter 1 of the Dungeon Master's Guide describes the four tiers of play and the impact the characters have in the world as ...

20 April 2020: Dyson of Dyson Logos, the best site for D&D cartography on the internet, posted about how D&D BECMI creator Frank Mentzer used a single map over 30 times when running D&D in public. Dyson [recreated t ...

13 April 2020: There are fewer movies more influential than Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and this movie's story makes for a nearly perfect D&D adventure. The theme of Seven Samurai may be a perfect D&D situation t ...

6 April 2020: This article is one of a series of articles covering the hardback D&D adventure book, Ghosts of Saltmarsh. You can read all of these articles here: Ghosts of Saltmarsh Session Zero Running Ghosts of ...

30 March 2020: In these times of social distancing, it becomes even more important for us to connect and spend time with family and friends. There is no better way to do that than playing D&D. D&D gives us the excus ...

23 March 2020: Many of us currently find ourselves stuck at home and unable to play our in-person D&D games. If we want to keep playing D&D, we have to move our games online. While it may be harder for us to get our ...

16 March 2020: What to use to represent characters and monsters when running combat in D&D is a constant and continual conversation among D&D enthusiasts. Some swear by the need for a large collection of pre-painted ...

9 March 2020: Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes includes a wonderful and deep section on the githyanki, the strange conquerers of the astral plane. Volo's Guide to Monsters includes a similar chapter for mind flayers. Th ...

2 March 2020: Simplifying the process of building combat encounters has been a focus of Sly Flourish since the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons has come out. Along with running combat in the theater of the mind ...

24 February 2020: Note, this article contains spoilers for Descent into Avernus. Fantastic Adventures, Ruins of the Grendleroot, my book of ten 5th edition underground adventures, is designed to fit into any fantasy RP ...