You have played a game or two of D&D using the free resources and decided you like the game and want to get deeper into the WotC 5th Edition rabbit hole.

The obvious place to go next is to get one of the two starter sets or the essentials kit. But which?

You have to decide you want to create my own characters or not? If the answer is yes then the you go for the essentials kit. Otherwise you need to decide which starter set to choose.

Both of the Starter sets are good. Both have similar contents (basic rules, set of dice, pregen characters, adventure book). So it’s down to the adventure and availability.

Obviously the older of the two sets will be (eventually) the harder to get. However the included adventure Lost Mines of Phandelver is pretty good, and later this year WotC are publishing an adventure book that follows on from it.

The new starter set also has a pretty good adventure called Dragons of Stormwreck Isle. The advantage of this set is it’s a bit more DM friendly.

If you went with the essentials kit you get basic rules that cover creating rules, set of dice, DM screen, blank character sheets, condition cards, map, sidekick cards, item cards, combat reference cards, and the adventure Dragon of icespire peak.

After you have finished whichever of the kits you chose you will need the D&D 5e holy trinity of the Players Handbook (PHB), Dungeon Masters Guide (DMG), and Monster Manual (MM).

After the holy trinity your options are unlimited. You can run published adventures official or third party. Or create your own.

However I would recommend the Lazy DM series as a supplement to the DMG. I look on these books as the stuff the DMG forgot to tell you.

I’d start with the Return of the Lazy DM. This introduces you to a way of prepping your session that I really like. It does cut down on the amount of time required to prep. You can read about the steps in the Lazy GM’s Resource Document (which is a great resource).

The Lazy DM Workbook is a great book to have to hand whilst running a session. It’s full of useful tables, and ten generic maps.

The Lazy DM Companion has great advice in it for running D&D, plus pages of adventure generators, and maps. This is an amazing resource for planning your session.

Finally Forge of Foes is all about monsters. It’s only pre-order at the mo, with physical and pdf available later this year. Kickstarter backers have early access to the pdf. Not sure if a pre-order also gets it. But this allows you to create your own monsters, improvise monsters at the table, has advice about running monsters. It’s the missing sections from the MM.

All four have sample pdfs available that are useful without needing the rest of the book. Mike Shae has demonstrated this on his YouTube channel.

Also the resource document I linked to above has some of the content from the books too.

I thought it was about time to update the links etc for how to play D&D 5e for free.

The only outlay you need to make is for some dice, pen/pencil and paper. Oh and for printing out some character sheets. Otherwise using an electronic device of some kind you can use everything else digitally.

First up you need the rules. Luckily WotC released the core rules to Creative Commons earlier in the year. Sadly it’s not all the classes, spells and monsters. But it’s a good chunk. So you need to get the D&D 5e SRD .

In a couple of weeks time Mike Shea aka Sly Flourish will be putting some of his Lazy DM stuff out under a Creative Commons license. And as Mike said on his live steam/podcast this week once out this could almost be considered the DM Guide for with the SRD.

However while you wait you can get the samples from one or two of the full products for free (which may have some over lap with the stuff that gets released under the Creative Commons).

So you can get a really useful sample of the Lazy DM companion, and Forge of Foes for free.

Using bits of these you can create your own adventures and monsters and never need to buy a thing. Yes really! Mike has videos on his YouTube channel where he shows these two documents in use. Well worth watching.

But if you are creating your own adventures you might need a map. Dyson Logos is the only place you need to go. He has hundreds of maps you can use in your own games for free. Plus if you watched one of those Mike Shea ol’ YouTube videos I mentioned earlier he uses a Dyson Logos map for the adventure he created using the extracts, and you get to see how to populate the dungeon.

But maybe you want some free monsters, etc to drop in your adventures made by a publisher. You know cut down on the work you have to do. Well Kobold Press have your back.

Kobold Press have a lot of their stuff under the OGL, which you can get here. I personally prefer the Kobold Press monsters to the WotC stuff.

A great free first adventure to try is the The Delian Tomb by Matt Colville.

You can get free blank character sheets here. The link also has some pregenerated characters to.

Now Mr Shea also has some free adventures and pregenerated character sheets that are samples of his various books, Fantastic Locations, Fantastic Adventures, Fantastic Adventures: Ruins of the Grendleroot, and Fantastic Lairs. You’ll find the download links on pages I link to.

I hope folks find this useful, and get to try D&D 5e for free (if they have the dice already).

Wow I started this post over a year ago and it’s been sitting in the draft folder ever since.

But considering that this post was intended to be all about something I am currently doing for my next D&D session. It seemed about time to dust off the words, finish the post, and share it with the world.

Last week (well it was when I originally wrote this) Mike aka Sly Flourish put up a short video on building lazy magic items (video embedded below).

These are my notes from watching the video below.

In the video Mike uses four “questions” to come up with a new unique magic item for your campaign, adventure, or one shot (I think that covers everything). They are the following:

• What is the condition of the item? – Get a list of conditions from Lazy DM Workbook (LDMWB) page 13.
• What is the origin of the item? – Who made it? Use the list in LDMWB on page 13 or DMG page 142.
• What type of item is it? – There is a list of mundane items in LDMWB on page 14, or the trinkets table 160 of PHB, if you want to make an object special and move away from the usual weapon/armour.
• What special power does the item have? – If it’s a weapon consider giving it a spell effect as well as +1 attack/defence bonus. Daily use power, number of charges, or single use more powerful item. You can also use the tables on page 14 of LDMWB or PHB.

Since then Mike has published the Lazy DM Companion which also allows you to create “… powerful single-use magic items generated with the condition, origin, item, and spell tables from the core adventure generator.”

Even if it’s a weapon like a sword with a +1 to attack rolls that you want to give the players, doing the first two and the last question adds so much extra flavour to the sword, all of a sudden it’s grimy gnomish longsword that twice a day allows the spell bane to be cast, and gives +1 to attack rolls. Wait I’m going to use that this Saturday!

I hope you have found these notes helpful. It’s a great way to create unique magic items for your game that will feel fresh to your players.

I decided to do a short video of me looking through my DM folder for this second campaign. Someone might find it interesting. Maybe, and it’s a long shot, useful.

I have the following on the video, and YouTube page description. It has to be said.

SPOILER ALERT TO MY ADVENTURERS! The following post contains spoilers for the up and coming campaign. You may want to avoid this post and join me in a future one.

Oh and one more thing it’s what’s in the folder at this moment in time. My DM folder is a living thing! It’s contents will change. It will grow with me as the campaign develops.

Not even a couple of days since I posted about Kelsey adding to her series on writing adventures with a video on creating dungeon maps. Then Mike aka Sly Flourish releases another video creating an adventure using random tables.

It’s almost as if they have to respond to each other’s content! A crazy conspiracy based on nothing but coincidence.

In the video I’ve embedded below from Sly Flourish we see Mike create a heist adventure using the tables from his latest Lazy DM book, The Lazy DM’s Companion, and his latest Patreon exclusive content City of Arches.

City of Arches is a city setting that can be dropped into any D&D campaign. It’s currently a 12 page document that includes a city map, one page players handout, and all the information you need to run your adventures there.

It’s videos like these, and the Lazy DM books that give me the confidence to run my own D&D campaign, run the session zero this weekend, and know I have the tools (maybe not the skill) to create something that the players will hopefully enjoy based on our discussions.

Anyway I hope you found the video interesting. I did.

In a previous post “How to random table adventure ideas” I shared some videos by Mike aka Sly Flourish and Kelsey of Arcane Library that show them using tables to create D&D adventures.

Now I could go back and update that post with todays video that I’m sharing. And I have done that in the past when new relevant videos have come available.

But not today.

Today it’s a new post. A new post to share a great video from Kelsey that continues her series on writing a D&D adventure. Plus a great way to remind interested folks that there are other useful videos they can watch (if they click on the link above).

I hope folks find the video interesting. I did. I find it very interesting to see other DM’s thought process. Plus I usually find one or two ideas that I can borrow and add to my creative process. That’s a win for me.

With Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft that came out earlier in the year it’s never been “easier” to create a horror adventure in D&D for this most commercial of occasions.

However you may want some further advice in a more concise format like say talking pictures.

A couple of days ago Kelsey of The Arcane Library posted a new YouTube video on how to write horror for D&D. Not only do we get some great advice but there is also a free adventure The Night Hunter for a party of level 1 adventurers to use this all hallows eve (or any other time) she wrote along with a walk through of running the adventure.

You can download the free adventure mentioned by Kelsey (and also linked on the YouTube video) here.

One year I’ll be organised enough to run a spooktacular scary one shot to participate in this yearly commercialized faux celebration. Until then “need more brains, uuuuurgh!”