The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
Blood Magic – Dragon Empire Prep Session 10
Fri, 31 Jan 2025
Mike prepares the next session of his Tales of the Valiant Dragon Empire campaign. Visit the Sly Flourish Blog Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Podcast Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books Midgard Worldbook Tales of the Valiant Obsidian for TTRPGs
Full Episode
Hey friends, it's your pal Mike Shea from Sly Flourish, here with another episode of Sly Flourish's Lazy GM Prep. In this weekly show, I go through steps from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master while preparing for my Sunday roleplaying game.
In this case, I am running a Tales of the Valiant game from Kobold Press set in the world of Midgard, also by Kobold Press, called Scourge of the Dragon Empire, set in the Marathi region of Midgard on the eastern sides. This show, like all of the work of Sly Flourish, is brought to you by the patrons of Sly Flourish.
Patrons get access to all kinds of awesome tips, tricks, tools, adventures, supplements, adds access to our dedicated Discord server. But most of all, they help me put on shows like this. To the patrons of Sly Flourish, thank you so much for your outstanding support. If you get nothing else from today's show, I want to offer up a few tips. These tips actually came from me doing the prep.
I recorded them at the end of the show, but I'm putting them at the beginning of the show so that right up front, you can get some valuable tips to help you run your games. This came from the prep that I just did. One, write down where your game ended. If you're going to take any notes at all, for prepping your game. The notes that you want to write down are where your game ended.
Probably that's that to me, at least for me personally, is the most important note that I can jot down after a game has occurred. Where did it end? There are other little notes that are important like NPC names, but I think number one is where did your game end? And it saved me in this prep. Tip two, your notes are only for you.
You don't have to have clean, super nice notes where everything is spelled out as though you're going to print those in Dragon Magazine or Dungeon Magazine or whatever, or that you're going to hand them to somebody else to run. These notes are for you. You're running your own game. You only need to write down the stuff that helps you. If you already remember it, you don't need to write it down.
If you want an abbreviated sentence, write it down. Abbreviations, write it down. Acronyms, write it down. You don't have to write down anything that isn't useful for you. So don't worry about your notes being pretty. Make them serve you. Write your page numbers down.
If you're using physical books, and I recommend using physical books, I love using physical books, in your notes, write down page numbers of monsters, spells, other sorts of things that you want to look up during the game. Write down the page number, and it makes it far more easy for you to reference that material when you're running your game. Carry along NPCs.
So a lot of times I'll have an NPC that's actually like a spirit inside of an item that is carried by one of the characters. I love doing this because A, that creature doesn't really affect combat. It's not another thing that you have to deal with. It's just a voice in the head of one of the characters, but you get to use it to reveal secrets and clues.
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