Laird Barron

Michael Shea

This is a landmark book, wonderfully illustrated, and destined to be a classic in the field.

The Autopsy and Other Tales

You love Dungeons and Dragons. As an experienced dungeon master you've run dozens, if not hundreds of games. You put a lot of work into making your games great. What if there's another way to look at how you prepare your game? What if it turned out you could spend less time, less energy, and have a better game as a result?It's time to unleash the Lazy Dungeon Master.Written in the style of Sly Flourish's Dungeon Master Tips and Running Epic Tier D&D Games, The Lazy Dungeon Master shows a new approach to game preparation, one that takes less time and gives your game the freedom to grow at the table. This book will help dungeon master prepare awesome games for any version of D&D.Based on the real-world experiences of hundreds of dungeon masters and dozens of professional game designers, the Lazy Dungeon Master includes interviews with veteran D&D DMs and a complete toolkit to help you improvise an entire game.Whether you play 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, Pathfinder, or the D&D Next playtest; The Lazy Dungeon Master has tips, techniques, and advice to make preparation easier and help you run a flexible and entertaining game.

The Lazy Dungeon Master

In Yana

Nifft, a master thief, journeys to the Place of the Raging Dead, a virtual hell, in search of the Wizard's Key

Nifft the Lean

This Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition compatible book was written to give you solid usable tips to help you build your story, design exciting encounters, and run a great game when youâ€™re at the table. Itâ€™s a short book, designed to be read quickly and referenced often. Oh yeah, and itâ€™s got some awesome original artwork by Jared Von Hindman of Head Injury Theater.

Sly Flourish's Dungeon Master Tips (ePub)

Master thief Nifft joins the barbarian Barnar HammerHand, the lady Lagademe, a courageous sea captain, and others on what seems at first like a simple act of robbery. Original.

The Incompleat Nifft

The prosperous kingdom of Hagia had ransomed the souls of its inhabitants to the Spider God A'Rak in exchange for wealth, but now their bargain must be fulfilled with the deaths of thousands, until two unlikely allies--Lagademe, who specializes in delivering anything to anywhere, and Nifft the Lean, a legendary thief--join forces to stop A'Rak. Original.

The A'Rak

Polyphemus

We RPG game masters have a lot of tools to help us run our roleplaying games. Our monster books and bestiaries give us piles of foes to throw at our adventurers. The various guides for game masters often give us non-player characters, treasures, and story-building tips. One of the hardest parts of game mastering, however, is coming up with interesting adventure locations for our characters to explore. These locations need to be fantastic, detailed places that capture the minds of our players every session we run. Good locations are hard to improvise and often hard to strip out of a fully-fleshed-out adventure. Sly Flourish's Fantastic Locations is a book, available in PDF and print-on-demand, that gives you twenty system-agnostic locations to drop into your favorite fantasy roleplaying game. Each location builds on a fantastic theme, such as a mysterious ancient structure under the ice, a cursed castle of a mad king, a fallen celestial fortress, and a dwarven mine that cracked into the tomb of a dead god. Each location includes artwork by Brian Patterson of D20Monkey. Sometimes this artwork takes the form of maps. Sometimes it's an overlook of a specific location. These sites and structures aren't full adventures. Instead, you and your players build your own stories in these fantastic locations, then you populate them with the monsters that fit your story. Thanks to the support of 779 backers on Kickstarter this book was expanded to include a total of twenty locations each with full color artwork. This book is system agnostic. You can use it in just about any fantasy roleplaying game.

Twenty Fantastic Locations for Your Fantasy Roleplaying Games.

Sly Flourish's Fantastic Locations

Sly Flourish's Fantastic Adventures is a book of ten short adventures for the fifth edition of the world's most popular roleplaying game. Each adventure is written for 2nd to 5th level and is designed so GMs can drop them into any fantasy campaign world. Whether you run a homebrew setting or a published game world, these adventures will fit in as either main adventure hooks or side quests to be undertaken by the characters in your game. The adventures include: The Night Blade: Ralavaz the Night Blade, a notorious bandit chieftain, has been released from prison. The local sheriff believes that Ralavaz's return means the Night Blades are back-and that the bandit chieftain must be stopped for good. The Dwarven Vault: Miners digging on Goldpeak Mountain recently broke into an ancient dwarven vault lost for centuries, and from which treasure and madness now flow. The Well of the Black Sun: The mine known as Deepfathom Well is the only source of the lucrative alchemical substance voidwater. However, a number of recent murders-including the immolation of a head miner-have closed the operation, and the mine's owner hires the characters to investigate. Rosethorn: A particularly intelligent goblin named Rosethorn has brought the local goblin tribes under his control, and is leading them in devastating raids against trade wagons and farm folk. The Gleam in the King's Eye: Lord Marlin Whitesparrow hires the characters to join him as he explores the lost chambers beneath his ancient keep. The Crashed Palace: When a celestial palace falls to earth, its destruction unleashes corrupting magic and a bearded devil intent on summoning its master-a powerful pit fiend from the hellish plane of Dyn. The Flesh Eaters: Lizardfolk tribes living near settled lands traditionally keep to themselves. So when a lizardfolk attack leaves local settlers dead, the characters are asked to investigate. The Queen of Red Water: At an old dwarven dam, a bugbear matriarch has found the key to holding an entire valley hostage by stopping the flow of the local river. The Cult of Dusk: A deadly attack in the local village leads to the revelation that a dark cult is seeking forbidden magic in the nearby ruins known as the forgotten library. Gloom: Lord Whitesparrow's spoiled nephew and heir, Pennin, is marked for death, and the characters are tasked with discovering who is behind the threat. Each adventure includes a map of the adventure location and a special presentation format designed to make it as easy as possible for game masters to pick up this book, choose an adventure, and get started playing. Whether you're running a single-session adventure for a few friends or want to drop a short adventure into the middle of your longer campaign, Fantastic Adventures has you covered.

Ten Short Adventures for Your Fifth Edition Fantasy Roleplaying Game

Sly Flourish's Fantastic Adventures For 5e

For more than thirty years, Michael Shea has been making his own distinctive contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos devised by H. P. Lovecraft¿an entire universe of gods and monsters that hundreds of writers have imitated. But Shea has done a lot more than merely mimic Lovecraft¿s prose or add a new god or ¿forbidden book¿ to the Mythos. In his Mythos tales, Shea has infused his own unique vision and perspective.The much-reprinted ¿Fat Face¿ takes us into the seedy underworld of prostitutes and drug dealers in San Francisco, while other tales such as ¿Dagoniad,¿ ¿Copping Squid,¿ and ¿Tsathoggua¿ vividly meld Lovecraftian cosmic horror with the contemporary world of California, with its swimming pools and beachcombers. Shea was also fascinated with Lovecraft¿s novel of Antarctic horror, At the Mountains of Madness, and his stories ¿Under the Shelf¿ and ¿Beneath the Beardmore¿ take us to that frozen land of death and terror.

The Complete Mythos Tales

Demiurge

John Shirley

Darrell Schweitzer

Robert Silverberg

Donald Tyson

Caitlín R. Kiernan

Lois H. Gresh

Arthur C. Clarke

Harry Turtledove

Joseph S. Pulver

William Browning Spencer

Jonathan Thomas

Melanie Tem

J. C. Koch

K. M. Tonso

Lesław Haliński

Maciej Machała

Szaleństwo Cthulhu

A Quest for Simbilis

A gathering evil, as revealed by an indescribable color, haunts a lake in present-day New England

The Color Out of Time

The Lazy DM's Workbook contains a wide range of tools, maps, and reference sheets to help you run your fifth edition fantasy roleplaying game--and is designed to be useful right at the table. This book contains numerous fifth edition rules references, guides, and random generators to help fire up your imagination as you prepare and run your games. The workbook also contains ten lazy lairs: full-color maps and quick descriptions of locations common to most fantasy roleplaying games. When the characters take a game session in a direction you didn't expect, you can use any of these lairs with minimal prep time, running it straight out of the book. The Lazy DM's Workbook is an indispensable reference, designed to be kept at your side as tales of high adventure unfold at your gaming table.

The Lazy DM's Workbook

The Prime Minister is fatally ill with a mysterious disease, but the country can't know about it. In fact, this mysterious illness is affecting a number of famous figures of power. It's too coincidental to be random these men are being targetted. Can the spread of f the disease be stopped?

Spinoff

Spin Doctor

Books and films have skewered Hollywood's excesses, but none has ever portrayed one man's crazy vision of the future of big action/adventure films as Michael Shea's The Extra does. As over-the-top as Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles, as savagely dark as Robert Altman's The Player, and more violent than Rollerball, this is the story of the ultimate, so-insane-it-could-only-happen-in-Hollywood formula for success, a brave new way to bring the ultimate in excitement to the silver screen. Producer Val Margolian has found the motherlode of box-office gold with his new "live-death" films whose villains are extremely sophisticated, electronically controlled mechanical monsters. To give these live-action disaster films greater realism, he employs huge casts of extras, in addition to the stars. The large number of extras is important, because very few of them will survive the shoot. It's all perfectly legal, with training for the extras and long, detailed contracts indemnifying the film company against liability for the extras' injury or death. But why would anyone be crazy enough to risk his or her life to be an extra in such a potentially deadly situation? The extras do it because if they survive they'll be paid handsomely, and they can make even more if they destroy any of the animatronic monsters trying to stomp, chew, fry, or otherwise kill them. If they earn enough, they can move out of the Zoo--the vast slum that most of L.A. has become. They're fighting for a chance at a reasonable life. But first, they have to survive . . .

A novel

The Extra

Best Weird Stories of Michael Shea

The Autopsy

From sea-monsters in outer space ("Polyphemus") to aliens in human bodies ("The Autopsy"), these six stories by the author of In Yana, the Touch of Undying display a distinctive talent for the macabre. Whether based in sf or fantasy, Shea's short fiction is not for the squeamish. Contents: Polyphemus (1981) The Angel of Death (1979) Uncle Tuggs (1986) The Pearls of the Vampire Queen (1982) The Horror on the #33 (1982) The Extra (1987) The Autopsy (1980.).

Michael Shea

About

Books

Join the club