Michael Shea

Sly Flourish October Newsletter

Added 2019-10-04 14:06:34 +0000 UTC

Welcome to the October newsletter for Sly Flourish! Thank you all again for your outstanding support to help keep Sly Flourish going.

This month we moved Sly Flourish from its old host to a brand shiny new one. This was a longtime coming. Now I can attach an SSL certificate to the site, to help its Google rankings and help ensure the site you're seeing is the actual site you want. Bandwidth costs mean I'l have to pay about 3x more than I was paying before but thanks to you, that's all covered. The site is now up and running on the new server and it's even faster than before. Sly Flourish will never win awards for snazzy design (it did win a silver Ennie last year though!) but I pride it on being super fast and easy to read on just about any device you can use.

Moving servers meant updating a bunch of code I have running as well, including the code to run D&D Blogs, D&D Tweets, and the @dndtweets Twitter bot. That's all squared away too.

This move also meant I could use some space-age machine learning to add new features to Sly Flourish. The bottom of every article now includes a "related articles" section with the ten articles closest in subject matter to the article you're reading. A "article keywords" displays terms that showed up more often in this article than the typical. Click one of them and it runs a Google search of the site for that term. I also added a new site-wide search bar, powered by Google, at the top of the right-hand sidebar. These were all features that came up when I asked folks on Twitter how Sly Flourish might improve. And no, I'm not adding comments. How come? You can read more here but in short:

They're too easy to hack.
Moderation takes too much time.
Not every comment deserves equal attention to the article.
Communities are better cultivated on social media and here on Patreon!

I have my email address (mike@mikeshea.net) on the site and I'm always happy to talk to folks who send in an email. Many times these emails result in new articles for the site.

New Sly Flourish Articles

Thanks to your support we have the following new articles on Sly Flourish:

New Lazy DM Prep Videos

Top Tweets from September

#dnd tip: Clarify when the characters have exhausted all the information they're going to get in a scene. "You're pretty sure you've learned everything you can here."

Thinking about “It” has me thinking about group backgrounds that help tie characters together. “You all banished a hag as children 27 years ago”. That sort of thing. I bet we can come up with twenty of those. #dnd

#dnd tip: Drop hints of interesting things the characters might otherwise miss. Strange thudding noises in the attic, strange glowing shining reflections in the mud at the bottom of the well.

#dnd tip: Are the players smiling? You're doing it right.

#dnd tip: Change out boss monsters based on the backgrounds of the characters. Is a character hunting a black ship-eating whale that ate her parents? Get that sucker into the adventure!

Things that Caught my Attention

I've started running a monthly Margreve game. Tales of the Old Margreve by Kobold Press includes both a setting in an ancient forest and a set of adventures you can run in said forest. It's a cool setting with a lot of flavor and a great "environment as a character" approach. I recommend it.

I still obviously love Ghosts of Saltmarsh. Everyone else has their attention on Descent into Avernus but I'll put more time into that once I get ready to run it. I'm really looking forward to the new Eberron book!

D&D is in a really interesting time. I posted a question to Twitter to crowdsource the answer to whether we're in a D&D bubble or not and how likely that bubble is to burst. Here were the results:

That's a good prediction for the hobby!

Yesterday Wendy's released a full tabletop RPG clearly built off of D&D. That's hitting this hobby from a whole new angle. More and more I am surprised to see attention applied to this hobby from sources I never would have expected. Billboards in LA for Critical Role; movie stars releasing their own D&D clothing lines; multi-million dollar Kickstarters based on a Youtube series. It's amazing to see and it's hard not to be intimidated by it as well. Sometimes I feel like I'm standing on a train platform and a bullet train just roared past me.

I have no idea where this hobby is going to go but I'm hoping to grab on for the ride!