Mike Shea, better known as Sly Flourish, has spent over a decade building a toolkit for game masters who want great sessions without exhausting prep. I’ve pulled his core tools together in one place here: the Eight Steps of Lazy RPG Prep, the Lazy Campaign Building Checklist, the Simplest Quest Model, situation-based encounter design, his session timing techniques, and the Slashes and Xs damage tracker. For each one you get what it does, when to reach for it, and how it has held up at my table.
Everything here is Shea’s work, and his books and posts go far deeper than a single article can. Treat this as a field guide, and buy Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master if any of it clicks for you.
What is the Lazy DM method?
The Lazy DM method is a prep philosophy built on one claim: prepare only what helps you improvise at the table, and skip everything else. Instead of scripting plots, you prepare flexible pieces of the fictional world, things like a strong opening, secrets, locations, and NPCs, and let play assemble them. You prep less, and the sessions get better, because nothing you build goes to waste when players head somewhere unexpected.
Which Lazy DM tool do you need?
| Tool | What it solves | Prep cost | Reach for it when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eight Steps of Lazy RPG Prep | Session prep that survives player chaos | 15–30 min per session | Every session, any GM-led system |
| Lazy Campaign Building Checklist | Starting a campaign without months of worldbuilding | A few hours before session zero | New campaign kickoff |
| Simplest Quest Model | Adventure hooks that take one sentence | Minutes | One-shots, side quests, sandbox filler |
| Situations, not plots | Encounters that respond to choices instead of railroading | Replaces scene-scripting time | Any encounter you’d otherwise script |
| Timing tools (45-minute scenes, movable MacGuffins) | Fitting the climax into real-world hours | None at the table; small habits in prep | Convention slots, weeknight sessions, one-shots |
| Slashes and Xs | Monster HP math slowing down combat | None | High-HP monsters, crowded battlefields |
The Eight Steps of Lazy RPG Prep
The Eight Steps are Shea’s session prep checklist: review the characters, create a strong start, outline potential scenes, define secrets and clues, develop fantastic locations, outline important NPCs, choose relevant monsters, and select magic item rewards. You can run all eight in under half an hour. Shea is also explicit that most sessions only need a few of them, and in practice the strong start and the secrets carry most of the weight.
The framework is deliberately system-agnostic. Shea has used it for D&D 2014 and 2024, Numenera, Shadowdark, and Shadow of the Demon Lord, and it travels well because every step prepares the fictional world rather than the mechanics. A secret, an NPC motivation, or a strong opening works the same whether your table resolves actions with a d20 or a dice pool. It fits any game where one GM prepares a world for a group of players to explore. It was not built for GM-less or shared-narrative games, and Shea says as much.
How the Eight Steps work at my table
At my table, I don’t use all eight steps every single time like I’m checking boxes. The strong start and secrets are the ones I lean on the most, because those two things give me enough momentum to get the session moving and enough hidden truth to improvise when the players start poking around. If I know how the session opens and I have a handful of clues or reveals ready, I can usually handle the rest as it comes up. The best use of this for me is when a simple opening scene turns out to have more underneath it than the players expected, because then they feel like they discovered the adventure instead of being pushed into it.
The Lazy Campaign Building Checklist
Where the Eight Steps prep a session, the checklist preps a campaign, and it does the job in hours instead of weeks. You define a one-line campaign theme (“Reclaim the Lost City,” “Heists”), establish a handful of campaign truths that make your world distinct, sketch only the starting region, and run a session zero that ties the characters to the premise. From there the world grows in a spiral, meaning you detail places and factions only when play gets close to them.
The theme becomes a filter for every prep decision afterward. If a faction, NPC, or dungeon doesn’t serve it, it can wait. That one discipline kills the scope creep that buries most homebrew campaigns before session three.
Background events pair well with the checklist. Keep a short list of things happening in the world that don’t involve the party, like a faction war advancing, a plague spreading, or a rival adventuring company pulling off the job your players turned down. Advance one or two between sessions and let players hear about them through rumors and NPC chatter. The world feels alive precisely because it visibly doesn’t wait for the party, and the spiral approach means you only flesh out a background event if the players decide to chase it.
How I used the checklist
The checklist helps me keep campaign prep from getting out of control. I like starting with a few big truths about the world, the kind of problems the campaign is about, and the area the players are actually going to touch first. I do not need the entire setting written before session one; I just need enough for the world to feel like it already existed before the party showed up. One thing I like doing is keeping background events moving between sessions, because sometimes a rumor I thought was just flavor becomes the thing the players suddenly decide to chase.
The Simplest Quest Model
Shea’s Simplest Quest Model compresses adventure design into one sentence: an NPC wants you to do something at a location. The widow Marsk wants you to recover her husband’s body from the flooded mine. That’s a complete quest seed. You know who’s asking, what they want, and where it happens, and every interesting complication can be discovered in play instead of written ahead of time.
Stack three or four of these seeds and you have a session’s worth of player-driven options for the cost of four sentences. The model pairs naturally with our one-shot design guide, where it generates the central hook. It also pairs with the tools section of this site. Roll an NPC from our generators and you have the “who” in seconds.
Build situations, not plots
A plot is a sequence you expect to happen. A situation is a set of forces that reacts to whatever the players do. Shea’s encounter advice is to prep the second one: give NPCs goals, give the location features, set events in motion, and let player choices determine the sequence. You stop writing “if they talk to the guard, he says X” contingency trees. Instead you know what the guard wants, what he knows, and how he reacts under pressure, and your improvisation covers the rest.
Of everything in the toolkit, this saves the most prep time, because contingency-scripting is where plotted prep burns its hours, and it’s work the players never even see.
A situation from my table
One thing I’ve learned is that my players almost never handle a situation the way I pictured it in my head. If I prep a scene as a plot, that becomes a problem fast, because now I’m trying to steer them back to what I wrote. But if I prep the people, the pressure, and what everyone wants, the scene can bend without breaking. They can talk, sneak, accuse someone, make a deal, or completely derail the obvious path, and I still know how the situation should react.
Timing tools: ending on the climax, on time
Shea draws a line between timing, which is how much material fits into real hours, and pacing, which is how the session feels. His timing toolkit is a handful of small habits that punch above their weight:
- The 45-minute scene heuristic. Most scenes, whether a fight, an investigation, or a tense negotiation, run about 45 minutes. A four-hour session holds roughly four to five scenes. Prep with that number in mind and you stop bringing seven scenes to a four-scene night.
- Movable MacGuffins. Don’t lock the objective to room 14. If time runs short, the thing the party needs can be two rooms closer. If they’re flying through content, it sits deeper in. Players never see the difference.
- Flexible climaxes. Hold the boss until the time is right rather than where the map says. A final fight that starts at the 3-hour mark of a 4-hour slot is worth more than geographic fidelity.
Slashes and Xs: monster damage without subtraction
Instead of subtracting damage from a monster’s HP total, you mark it: a vertical bar per point of damage, five bars convert into a slash, and two slashes cross into an X worth ten. A monster that has taken 47 damage reads as four Xs, a slash, and two bars. No arithmetic in the middle of combat, and one glance tells you how hurt everything on the battlefield is. It scales nicely to high-HP solo monsters and to fights with eight goblins, where per-monster subtraction is the thing actually slowing your combat down.
If you track monster damage digitally, this one may not earn its keep. Its value is specifically for pen-and-paper GMs. For the same math-reduction philosophy applied to encounter difficulty itself, see our companion analysis of where 5e’s encounter math breaks down.
My tracking setup
For tracking damage, I like whatever I can read fast and keep moving. If I’m running on paper, slashes and Xs make sense because I do not want to stop combat just to do monster HP subtraction over and over. If I’m running digitally, I’ll let the tool handle the math. Either way, the goal is the same: less time staring at numbers and more time keeping the fight moving.
How the tools fit together
In practice the toolkit layers cleanly. The checklist starts the campaign, the Eight Steps prep each session, the Simplest Quest Model fills the session with player-facing options, situations replace scripted scenes, the timing tools land the ending, and Slashes and Xs keeps combat moving. None of it requires the others, so steal whichever piece fixes your current prep problem first.