Third-Party Book Club: Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master

0:20 Hello Adventures, the podcast for role players and game masters to help level up your game. We are your dungeon masters. Jason Portiso, I'm Joe McCall and Jim Cracker. So today's episode it's a it's a nice relaxing Friday. So I wanted to like kick back and read a book with you guys. This is something that we tried that we did literally once on the Curmudgeons Show, and that's something I really wanted to come back and revisit and and said we just didn't do anything anymore. But this is the we're calling this the third Party Book Club. They're so so just there's just so many books. There's just so many, and I'm just talking about the ones I own. There's still just so many more I don't own. And this I find at least three three new ones to that I that I put on my list.

1:07 I think I'm a thick starting for right now. It gets a bit ridict. I love Kickstarter books. I love third party content creators. Oh yeah, I actually just bought one yesterday. I completely forgott I don't remember. I think it was something it was something about mysteries. It had something to do with mysteries. It was from a blog and it was free, so I did the suggested donation through drive through RPG. Oh yeah, yeah, like three dollars and fifty cents I think is what I ended up haanging on it. Some really great some really quickness that like don't make it too like full on distribution, end up on drive through for pretty cheap and it's still there's still great books. Yeah, what was it about? It's a mystery. Yeah, it is both. It is about mysteries, but more than that is a mystery. Yeah, I don't remember. Can we saw what Joe's book was about? Today? We were going to be talking about one that was like the first third party book that was suggested to me. I think, Joe, I think you actually suggested this to me. This is slide Flourish is Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master and basically his entire Lazy Dungeon Masters series. I am a believer. I am a I belong to the Church of the Lazy Dungeon Mass. I'm fully fully Lazy Dungeon Master. So, just for context for anybody that's not familiar with Slide Furish, when you say his what are you talking about there? Jason, So Slide Flourish is actually Mike Shay. Mike Shay is a game writer and game designer who's worked with everyone from Wizardy, the Cost Colbal Press, mc DM. Before influencer was a thing, he was an influencer for Dungeon and Dragons tabletop art.

2:39 Yeah. To my knowledge, well, note I'm gonna call him game designer. To my knowledge, he's not designed a full on game, but has influenced the design in a lot of other games. Yeah, yeah, you can. You can be a you can be a game designer for You've done is written a bunch of dventures. Absolutely yeah. And he's definitely written like the hearts of other books. And he's worked for Watts the Yeah, in front of you kids out there. An influencer before there were influencers, we would have called that a blogger blogger back in the day, and then a vlogger, yes, yeah, video. But Mike has credits in in the Cobol Pressed Home of Beast books. Actually a lot of that's a good pedigree.

3:20 That's that's a really great one. That's that at some point we're going to go on about how great those books are too. So you must have but the series that they put out, and slide Flourish is kind of the name of Mike's team. I guess, like his his I'm not sure exactly how you feel. Like it was like his handle. Yeah, like it's so it's his handle, but then he almost into a brand and what I mean. So I'll be using the terms of Mike Shay and Slide Flourish interchangeably, and I may refer to slide Flourish as they as a collective. So so just kind of, you know, follow along. Yeah, no context is good. So, the the original book was The The Lazy Dungeon Master, and this was designed to get your games prepped faster and easier, with less actual time being put into the prep of it. And the book that we are reviewing today is called Return the Lazy Dungeon Master, and it sounds like it should be a sequel, but it is actually a it's basically like like a version two. It's a revision. Yeah. So he says in the Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master that it's been five years since the original publication and that he learned a lot, right, Yeah, it's five years of running games, thinking about games, you know, iterating on other people's ideas more experience. I hope you got new ideas. Yeah, and I know one of the revisions because I think like originally it was like you can you can prep you know, between fifteen minutes and thirty minutes or something.

4:47 He's like, well, maybe it's a little bit longer. Maybe, I know. Yeah, yeah, and I know that, like he said that on his podcast which I listen to. Sure that. Yeah, you know, I've kind of walked that back even it went from thirty to forty and now it's probably more like an hour. But I guess the take home here is that this is a standalone volume. You pick it up, you read it start to finish, and you won't miss anything because you don't have that first volumeeeah. Yeah. This is not this is not a second in a series. This is a replacement of the main book. So like it's it's hard to even find the original the Younge Master Book because it's out of print, you know, because why would you print an old version of your own book. Sure, so if you're looking for least you Knowuge Master, and all you find is return and it sounds like, you know, it sounds like you know we're returning the Mummy, or it's a it's a great sequel title, which is almost like which is almost a shame that he wasted a great title on on something that's not a sequel. That's my only read ride with this book is that the title in return doesn't make sense. So this is going to be the first in a series of what we're going to call third Party book Club. We are going to judge these books in kind of five different category not really judge, We're gonna just go over these books in five different categories. Evaluate, yeah, evaluate, and discuss yeah. Sure.

5:57 So the first section of this we're gonna call subject matter and author credibility. And I would love to just give these just nicer names. This is too academic for my taste. But the subject matter and the author credibility. So author credibility, we just talked about Mike having credits in Cold World Press books and was of the Coast books. I think those two resume bullet points alone are enough too hired to be like, Okay, cool, I'll listen to you. He's also got the Lazy RPG podcasts, so even which a much more like up to date way of keeping up with his opinions on that. You said it was five years between books and he already had some. And he's great on current events just within the TTRPG Yeah, excuse me, a TTRPG space yep, and just what's going on any watsy news. And he also does like a third party book shout out or third party. He talked about some third party stuff there too. Yeah, so shout out to a lazy RPG podcast as well. So knowing that he knows what he's talking about. So what does the book actually get into? So, like we said, this is designed to help you prepare carry your games faster as a dungeon mass as. Yeah, well players aren't preparing their games too, aren't too much? I guess they could? Could we could have that discussion on in another episode. Yeah sure. But so the book is divided into and I love that there's even like a section on how to read this book, because this isn't like a page turner, and it's not quite like this isn't quite really a textbook either. It's kind of it's essentially a collection of essay.

7:27 It's sort of Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say. Like it to me feels like several articles, each one being very helpful. So the whole section is on like how to prepare for the game, section of how to how to run your game thinking about your game, which is a section that I think it gets undervalued. I think, yeah, definitely overlooked a little bit. Yeah, and the meat of the book is in the is in the preparation, and like what what's cool about this and the reason to buy it is that this is something that could have been a blog post, were you just list the seventeen things that would make your prep faster and say, Okay, we'll go forth and have fun. But it's, you know, and it's not terribly a big book. It's it seems out one hundred pages. If you if you look at the face of it and you look at how many chapters it is, it seems like it should be a lot longer than it is. But he says in what is essentially the prologue, right like how to read this book or how to use this book?

8:24 Each chapter is deliberately brief, so you can kind of skip around and you see what's most useful to you. Yeah, you usually that phrase verbatim. Yeah, Each chapter is deliberately brief the judge quote quote unquote, so each chapter deliberately so you can use it. You can kind of skip around, use what you want. You know, you don't have to grab what you need. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can be lazy and you're reading of it. This is This is also definitely one of those books that you can kind of tuck in the basket, like next to the toilet along with your New Yorkers and you know, like issues of whatever it did, whatever else it is that you're you're reading in the book, Joe, what are you having in your bathroom? Uncle John's was the uncle Uncle John's bathroom?

9:09 Diges, your Calvin and Hobbs collection, whatever it is. We're all dating ourselves on this right now, far far side the fire side book readers digest. Yeah, but the dad's out there. Yeah, this this is great, just like you know, anytime you just want to just brush up on something and learn something. The chapter's only a couple of pages. On the whole thing is only one hundred pages. And I guess the other thing we should mention for anybody that hasn't seen these books is just listening to this that the the form factor of the book itself is it's got that large size, like the like the same footprint as like a player's handbook or something like that, like a large RPG book as opposed to being something that's normal like trade you know, non fiction book sized like the way those monsters know what they're doing. Books are. Yeah, this is the same size. It's like an RPG rule book, Yeah the monsters. Don't you doing? Books feel more like like a novel, like like form factor wise, yeah, nonfiction do so. As far as like what kind of subject matter is in the book. I'm just gonna just read off the names of the chapters and like, yes, this could have just been the whole episode. It's like if we if we if we did seventeen ways to speed up your prep and I just wrapped off these seventeen things, it would have been totally fine.

10:20 I wish we would have thought of that before we decided to do this this episode that we're good, I'm just kidding. But then knowing that there's a whole chapter on going in depth, and not only the chapter to read along, but there's so there's a do a long book as well. We'll get to that in a second. Uh, just the titles of the chapters alone. So let's just I'm just gonna blaster these the way the Lazy Dungeon Master Lazy Dungeon Master's checklist, which is you know, very feels like an introduction. Then the actual like the real meat here, review the characters, create a strong start, outline potential scenes, define secrets and clues, develop fantastic locations. Outline important and PCs. Choose relevant monsters, select magic, itember where it's preparation notes. So far reduce the checklist, offer high value preparation activities. Then stuff like the tool kit reskinning, building a dungeon and running a session zero. So like that alone in what took me what ten seconds to rattle off is already valuable. Yeah, and then having not only the pages to back up what to do, but then run step of channels.

11:28 I could get that, but not only having the chapters on backing up the information, but then the work along kind of like challenges and like you know, it's amost like it's almost like going to school. It's like here's your skill and now we're gonna we're gonna work on a little bit. I'll just mention too, just in what you're saying there with the work along. There is a version of this that comes I think with like a work book yep, that allows you to do exactly that. I bought mine digitally, so I okay, I don't have that, but there is one that comes with like a separate buh that you have worksheets in and you can do. It's what I have. It's on my shelf still, but yeah, that's the elasiannge Master Workbook, and there's also the Elazian un Master Companion. I'm really a fan of the way that he breaks down those different parts of prep because it can get easy to kind of sort of mash those all together, when in fact some people are good at some parts of that and maybe not as good as others. You know, like I don't need help coming up with evocative MPCs maybe, but like you know, creating interesting maps is a thing that I'm always going to need help with. Yeah, And so you know, being able to pull that stuff out to look at that and go okay, that I think I got to handle on, I'll skim it. But this other thing, yeah, I'll actually do the workbook exercise along with it, because that's a thing that I actually have trouble with every time. The way he's got it broken down like that, I really really like that.

12:58 I think that's super super helpful, even for an experienced DM, because you can look at it and go, I only need three of these ten things, but boy do I need help with those three things? Still makes it worth getting into Yeah, Heven just reading it now, like the chapter on defining secretcy and clues, it's like, oh, that's where that's where I can use a lot of help. Yeah. It's just good as a as a brush up too, though, because I think sometimes you almost forget something or not forget, but you don't think about it as clearly as maybe you once did. Shortly when something becomes doing it a certain way right right, so and you know, maybe a little nudge to say, hey, try this other technique. Maybe it adds a little to the way you're doing it, even if it's a thing you think you've got down cold. Hello Adventurers, thank you so much for listening. If you enjoy the show, the absolute best thing you can do to support us is to subscribe so you'll be notified when new episodes are release. You can also leave us a review five stars. Of course, that will help us get seen by more D and D players, and more than anything else, just tell your friends about us.

14:09 If you like what we're doing here, then there's a good chance that your DM or your players will enjoy it too. And you don't need to loop goal to do any of that. We appreciate your listening. Now back to the show. So next section, we're going to talk about the complexity level and the depth of analysis. So as far as depth of analysis goes, like this whole thing is about one topic, and as the preparation and as far as complexity level goes, we're taking like a just our one bullet point of preparation, dividing it into so many subsections twenty chapters. Yeah, yeah, seventeen alone just on the prep. Yeah. I think the other thing that can come into play with complexity level with some of these Dungeon Master prep books is making assumptions about how familiar you are with maybe some of the more obscure rules or the way certain monsters work and all this kind of stuff.

15:03 You know, how much explaining are they going to do about things like like game terms and stuff like that, or are they just going to dive into that assuming that you know all of that already. This seems to kind of dive in exactly assuming that you already are prepping games. This isn't how to prep games. This is how to do it in the leasiest way of possible. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is this is essentially an understanding or what's the word assuming? This is essentially assuming that you have a solid grasp on the rules and act as a dudgeonmaster to some degree, right at least, like you understand what a dungeon master does and how to prep and stuff. And I will say I can sing sly flourishes and Mike Chase praises all day. I'm a big, big fan. Really, There's one thing that like irks me. Maybe it's a hot take, is he just almost makes the assumption that everybody is as smart as he is, and like he has a really solid grasp on monsters and like challenge rating, like not challenge rating, but like like a balance like a balanced encounter, and so he'll just like roll through that stuff like in its podcast, on his videos and stuff. And I'm like, wait, what, like because that's one thing that I really struggle with, Like I don't know if there's a group of five level five players, like, what is a good amount of whatever kind

16:37 of monsters And he's like, yeah, we'll throw in like three knolls and two of these and ten of those and yeah, but that's a pretty medium encounter. Like wait, why I still use There's several of them online, but I still use the combat uh, the the encounterbalancer, you know, I use the one through D and D beyond and and it's not perfect, but I essentially like take that. Okay, it says it's this much. I really kind of more look at XP than I do, whether its as it's deadly or not. Keep adding I just keep adding in little guys until it just hits dead. Yeah, no challenge ratings survives contact with the dice. That's it, of course, because it's it's variable. But but it's what so like it's I mean, what it sounds like is we're this is kind of we might peg. This is like an intermediate level sort of a thing, right, it's not. If you've never dm'd before you buy the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide. In this book, this is something you pick up after you've done it for a while and you've got some systems in place, and you want to make those systems better, more efficient, and you know, like like kind of it sounds like sort of turbo charge them. I think that if you have a solid understanding of the rules, right, So if you've been a player for a while and you're going to try being a d M and then you look at the all of the things to do with dming, right and you feel a little bit like overwhelmed by that, and maybe you've run a session or two and felt a little overwhelm by that. I think this is perfect. So it's on the beginner side of intermediate, I would say, but definitely you have to have a solid understanding of dragons and the rule. So yeah, you're not buying actually put

18:08 this a little bit further into into intermediate. And I think the people who are going to benefit from this the most are ones who have prepped sessions several sessions, you know, the hard way, the long way, or the or the way it's intended to be. You know, you can see fansbots on a podcast. But I mean, I think it's also worth noting that this is kind of this is very much picking up where the Dungeon Master's Guide as published No kidding leaves off. Yeah, sure, yeah, does not have a lot of the practical advice for how to set these things up. It gives you all the numbers you need and things like that, but is you know, kind of sadly willfully short on exactly step by step how to set things up. And this sounds like the perfect stepping stone up up from that from kind of just that information that the DMG, there's a sense without a lot of practical tips for how to then it all out. And that's essentially how I came to find the book, right, is because I read all this stuff. I think I had done one or two sessions and be like, yeah, like I don't know what I'm doing, and and went searching and found fly Flourish and Mike Hay and I will say like that helped me tremendously, gave me a better understanding, gave me context that I just feel like I had been missing because again I had, you know, it played some, I had dmmed a tiny bit, like really not a lot.

19:30 I never did it in the quote unquote right way before. And I think that was part of what I was missing, was like a structure, right, And so I think that's a really good Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think that's a really good analysis. Tem is like it picks up where the DMG leaves off. It gives you all of the tools that the DMG does not, and then and then gives you a better understanding. I think of some of them as well. Our next bit here is is we're called the innovation. Is this book doing something that other books are not. I think it absolutely is the short chapters and really just taking every little facet of preparation and do with with the angle of shortening the time you're spending on them. Or actually one chapter is about shortening your list, so like, yeah, there's here's a list of seventeen things you can do, you don't need to do all seventeen of them. Do two or three, get your lists short? What do you need to do today?

20:26 And then next week do something else. So I think the innovation, I think this is this is exactly what we're looking for. Yeah, I have one hundred agree. Yeah, pretty straightforward. There's a lot to say about that that we haven't already. So we can kind of roll this into a fourth section, which is relevance, usefulness, and audience and we kind of just got into this when we're talking about the complexity level. So rather than go and circles with that, I'm going to say, the audience for this book, who is this for? And this is when we when we we were going to do these third party book clubs, the number one thing I wanted to get into is that, like you know, when you think, like you know, if you're reviewing something, so it's like, Okay, do you buy it? Do you not buy it? We between the three of us, all the books that we talk about, at least one of us owns, if not all three of us, Right, I'm pretty sure all three of us have a copy of this. So this isn't a buyer and not buy This is a who should buy it? And I'm going to say when should you buy it? At what point in your playing career should you be looking at buying this book? So the audience is of course Dungeon Master is this is not a player's book. And this is to me, this is smack in the middle of intermediate. If you're if the Dunge Master Guide no longer has anything new to offer you, or if you're doing things by the Dunge Master guide, and you've done games, you prepped I'm going to say, like a couple maybe not like tons, but enough so that you are comfortable with the preparation process. This entire book is to science

22:00 to just take that process and cut your time down. Yeah. But I also think that he does a really and I meant to mention this earlier for depth of analysis is I think what one of the really strong points that this book and just the author has in general is taking complex ideas and really kind of dumbing them down in quote unquote Layman's terms, and and helping you understand them pretty well. You know he's not He's very good at that. I think, Yeah, I feel comfortable saying that, and I think we know that I somewhat disagree, but I think I think that we do agree on that. You've done it a couple of times, maybe you've prepped a couple of sessions, and you're like, man, I just I feel like I don't have a solid grasp on this. I think that would be a good time to go and check this book out, yeah, and see if it can help you, because it certainly helped me, helped me better understand like what do I really need to prep a session because it can be a lot.

22:56 It can be really really intimidating to be like, wait a minute, how much time am I giving to this game that I'm gonna play with my friends once a week or once every other week or once a month or whatever it is, And like it's a lot of time. It's a lot of time if you do it quote unquote by the DMG, right, And like you know, some people are like, yeah, for every power of gameplay, you should be spending however long Yeah, no, I don't have. I don't have an extra three four hours a week. I don't well. And also, I mean one of the things that I think is useful that it's actually pretty good at is like beyond giving you ways to make your prep more efficient, there is some advice there on how to make sure that you're you're doing prep that actually gets used. R Yes, you know that you're not doing a whole lot of like I built this whole encounter and then they went that other direction, you know, and I wasted all that time.

23:53 There's there's ways to kind of there's good advice in there and how to make sure not just that your prep is efficient, but that you're you're devoting it to stuff that the players are going to be interested in and that they're going to engage with, because nothing's worse than that than doing prep that never gets Yeah, you know that you never manage to actually use in the game. Sorry, Joe's right, it was still a fun session. Accidentally, well, game stories another time about that one. That was a great story. Yes. My opinion on when to buy this book obviously you start with the core with with the core books I would do as a dungeon master, I would get the supplemental books first, r Xanathar's Yatasha, stuff like that, and then sometime after that this would be like when you're looking into third party stuff. This would be early in the list, and maybe even the first one that is specific to DMS. Yeah. Yeah, this and Keith the Month. Yeah. It's also worth noting with this book in particular, that there's also no point at which it's too late to pick this up. Absolutely greatly. If you've been dming for a number of years, you know all of the advice that he has is as relevant for prep at first level as it is for prep at tenth level. I mean there's a little there's some tweaks that you got to do to things and stuff like that. But you know, the kind of the generalized advice he's giving is going to make your prep more streamlined and more relevant, regardless of where you're at in terms of

25:26 you know, like the levels of the players or how long you've been doing it. You know, if you've been you know, if you if you're a long time DM, it's still worth looking this over, if only to you know, go down the list and go Yep, doing that, Yep, doing that, Yep doing that. Oh, hadn't thought of that because I've been dming for thirty years and there's stuff in here that you know, certainly just because I didn't, I hadn't thought of it or my you know, I typically I've been running in stores, which means my prep works a little differently. There's there's certainly been a few things in there that have been valuable for me, even though I've been doing it for as long as I have. So I think that's going to wrap it up for the first of our third party book clubs. This is Sly Flourishes Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. And if you get the pack with the Lazy dungeon Master's workbook.

26:15 Yeah right, it's called workbook. Yeah, lazy DM's workbook and the Lazy DM's companion. Note that the workbook and the companion say d ms and then the main book says dungeon master. Throwing that out there for any copywriters who want to edit that. But yes, I mean, and like I said, everything we talked about, everything is a buy, Everything is a We recommend everything that we talk about. But this is you know, this is great for dungeon masters who are somewhat experienced up to very experienced. And no it's not. It's never too early to get this book, but like I think you'll get the most of it once you get a little bit of experience under your belt. And then this because this is this is trying to like correct a method and if you you know, if you've never worked them through the supposed correct method, then then there's no new skills to correct, if that makes sense. So but this is a does thanks good good, It makes a great gap. Yeah, So we'll have links to I think we'll have an affiliate link to this in the show notes, so I pick it up through us. We'll be helping out the show We'll leave links to a stock Followish's page and and Mike's bio. Yeah, everybody in the group kicks in five bucks. It's a great gift for your DM. Oh. Yeah, that's an expensive book either, So cool. That's gonna wrap up for today. Thank you so much for listening to Hello Adventures. We are your dungeon masters Jason Portezos, Jim Crocker and Joe McCall. Producer, editor and engineer Jason Portiso, music by Nick Spurrier, artwork Bactors and Broderick. You can reach out to us with any feedback or suggestion by emailing Hello Adventurers Podcast at gmail dot com. Hello Adventures is a JTP audio production Good Adventu