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THE AMA IS NOW LIVE

We at /r/DnD are excited to host Mike Shea of SlyFlourish.com! He'll be discussing his upcoming Kickstarter, his vast history as a freelancer in the TTRPG space, and anything else! Save all your questions and join us on Tuesday, July 7!

From Mike:

Hello!

I'm Mike Shea, writer for SlyFlourish.com and author of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master and other books. A few years back I also released the Lazy GM's Resource Document into the Creative Commons to share what I've learned and gathered from other GMs into the world.

I've been playing RPGs since the mid-80s and writing about RPGs since 2008. I've been freelancing for various RPG companies for the past 15 years or so including Wizards of the Coast, Kobold Press, MCDM, Arcane Library, Pelgrane Press, and many others.

The Kickstarter for my latest book, Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster, is going on now! This is the latest of the Lazy GM books, expanding each of the eight steps of Lazy GM prep and taking a new focus on campaign planning, adventure types, and an expansive lazy GM toolkit. I hope you'll check it out.

I'm excited to be here to talk to you all about RPGs!

So I've been playing DnD for around 15 years, and I've had this same issue once before and it didn't end well.

I've recently joined a new group, all level 1 characters, homebrew campaign. The DM and all the players are great and the characters are really cool... Well except for 1. Our DMs one and only ground rule for creating a character was to not make a character who's the suspicious loner type who doesn't work well with the other characters. Seems one of the players decided he didn't want to listen to that and made a heavily suspicious loner character who refuses to help or be helped. Last game he basically stole 200 gold that was meant to be shared between the party. He rolled high on his deception and the DM had no choice but to let him keep it all. My character is the only one who rolled a high enough insight to know he was lying.

Here's my issue. I've played with someone like this before (well, a few times, but only once was I sort of forced into doing something about it), and ended up in the same situation. The guy stole gold from the party and I was the only one who knew. When I confronted him in-game, he attacked and killed my character (I was a squishy lvl 2 warlocks and he was a barb, it wasn't even a fight, it was a slaughter). The DM told me I could make a new character, but I said no, gathered my things and left.

I like this group I'm playing with, but I don't want to deal with another character like this again. I just wanted to play with cool people and have fun, not have internal in-game conflicts with the shady loner pc. We've had 3 games already and are just starting to get into the story, but now I'm finding myself not wanting to play, because I know the next game I'm going to have to confront the PC about the stolen gold. So now I'm really considering explaining my thoughts to the DM and then leaving. I can't be bothered dealing with this type of player anymore.

So my fellow Redditors, would I be in the wrong if I left the table? I feel bad but I'm not even excited to play anymore.

She is called Iyara of the Fractures, though few know her true name. Among merchants, she is simply “the Lady of Quiet Blades.” Among arcanists, she is an uneasy whisper, the Collector of Fragments.

Iyara was not born with rabbit ears. They manifested on the night she stepped through the Rift of Mirrath, a tear in reality that opened beneath her during a forbidden ritual. She had been an apprentice in a conclave devoted to studying dimensional echoes, fascinated by how memories leave residue in the ether. When the seal failed, everyone fled. Iyara did not. She heard something calling her name from the other side.

What returned was not entirely human.

Since that night, she has carried two curved daggers forged from lunar steel, each set with a green crystal taken from the Rift itself. These crystals are not mere decoration. They are anchors. Every time Iyara strikes, she does not only cut flesh. She divides probabilities. A single slash can split an enemy's fate into two possible paths, and she alone decides which one becomes reality. A fatal fall may become a stumble, while a certain victory may dissolve into failure.

But there is a cost.

With each altered destiny, the world compensates. Small things vanish. The name of a street, the face of an old acquaintance, the taste of a fruit from childhood. Iyara no longer remembers the sound of her own voice before the Rift. Her half-lidded gaze is not one of coldness but of constant calculation. She is always measuring how much of reality she can still afford to lose.

Now she moves through the shadows of rival city-states where mages barter for impossible relics. She does not accept gold. She asks only for secrets. Secrets have weight, and that weight helps stabilize the fragile fabric of the world around her. The more she knows, the more firmly she remains anchored to reality.

They say that when Iyara gathers enough fragments, she will reopen Mirrath. Not to escape, but to return something that was left behind. Something that whispers to her every night, promising that the rabbit ears, the blades, and the crystals were only the beginning.

The next change will be the last.

I had so much fun working on this commission, hope you all enjoy it!

If you liked it, here are my social media profiles, feel free to check out more of my work here 🤝

Feel free to join this giveaway and celebrate the closing days of our Outer Gods Dice Pt.2 campaign on Kickstarter! The rules are simple:

1. Leave a comment under this post to participate
2. There will be three winners, the first place gets 3 dice sets, the second place gets 2 sets and the third place gets one set. You can choose from any three sets we've already made (Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth and King in Yellow), even duplicates. Each set comes with a matching bag!
3. Winners will be determined via Reddit Raffler at 15 July 16:00 CEST (UTC+2). We will edit our first comment to mention the winners and message them about delivery info.

If you want to participate in the current campaign and help us reach a streatch goal, feel free to check the link below: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/yanshulman/outer-gods-dice-collection-part-two/rewards

Pact of the Blade + Thirsting Blade + Devouring Blade + Lifedrinker + Eldritch Smite can achieve damage a ranger can never hope to achieve. Although the ranger through fighting styles can be more accurate.

Even after factoring in ranger subclasses the weapon damage just doesn't catch up. The Gloomstalker comes close but unlike Eldritch Smite, Dreadful Strikes are a Long Rest resource and stalkers flurry targets a different enemy.

Give the Warlock the right background then it now also has Survival and Stealth proficiency, not too bad compared to the ranger's expertise.

PS: I play rangers more than I play warlocks

Hi friends!

I'm Mike Shea, the author of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master and several other D&D and RPG books. Over the years I've freelanced with Wizards of the Coast, MCDM, Arcane Library, Pelgrane Press, Kobold Press, and several other publishers. I've also written GM-focused advice on https://slyflourish.com for 18 years and released the Lazy GM's Resouce Document — a big document of useful GM aids and tips released under a Creative Commons license.

I just launched the Kickstarter for Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster – a book expanding on each of the eight steps described in Return based on eight years of experience. *Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster* also offers a new focus on campaign planning, prepping and running common adventure types, a huge lazy GM's toolbox, and more.

A little bit of trivia — I wrote a bunch of material on Everquest back in the early 2000s and my father wrote the cult classic novels Illuminatus! with his co-author Robert Anton Wilson.

Here's some verification.

The kind moderators of r/DnD agreed to host me for an "Ask Me Anything" today! I'll be answering all day today so please — Ask Me Anything!!

Heyo! ^^

We just tried posting this and got the message that we needed a bigger bodytext, so we might aswell introduce ourself: we're the Lambda System, we're an artist and also play a lot of DnD! This is a character for a campaign that hasn't started yet and we really wanted to illustrate her. As I said in the title, she doesn't have a name yet so suggestions are welcome ^^

She's a Monk combining martial arts with ballet, and her backstory is mostly something we hope to discover over the course of the campaign. What we know is that she was most likely designed to be a full time security companion, probably for some noble. Somehow she was lost, and ended up broken in a cave for a long time before one of the others PCs found her and woke her back up.

-Alyx