Michael Shea

The Lazy GM's Reference Document

Added 2023-04-20 22:19:26 +0000 UTC

One of the wonderful things you fine patrons of Sly Flourish facilitate is for me to spend time and energy on projects that help the whole RPG community without worrying about whether it's going to pull in money or not.

This past week I've been working on the Lazy GM's Resource Document. This single HTML page includes material from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, the Lazy DM's Workbook, and the Lazy DM's Companion. Once ready, I intend to release it under a Creative Commons Attribution license so anyone can use the material in this document for any purpose, even commercially, only requiring that they attribute the work to me and SlyFlourish.com.

Download the Lazy GM's Resource Document here.

I want to release this document because I feel like it can help the entire 5e and fantasy RPG hobby. I want publishers to benefit from the ideas in this document – ideas used by thousands of GMs to improve their own games over the years. I want to give these ideas and tools to GMs, designers, developers, producers, and publishers in the RPG community to use as they wish. I want these ideas to live beyond me.

This document only includes about 30% of the three Lazy DM books. The rest I feel is unique to the Lazy DM ethos and doesn't benefit publishers to have in the open. Most of the text of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master isn't released in this document, for example. Instead, I'm focusing on ideas, tools, and resources shoring up what isn't yet released for 5th edition.

I hope you'll look at the document and give me your feedback. Do you like what's in here? Does anything surprise you? Does it make you mad to see so much material released for free? Is there any material you think is missing given my goal for the document?

I'm really excited to release this material and I hope you're as excited as I am.