Sly Flourish's Fantastic Locations

Twenty Fantastic Locations for Your Fantasy Roleplaying Games

By: Michael E Shea

Narrated by: Rudy Basso

Length: 5 hrs and 53 mins

Publisher's summary

We RPG game masters have a lot of tools to help us run our role-playing 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 an audiobook of 20 system-agnostic locations you can drop into your favorite fantasy role-playing 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, or a dwarven mine that cracked into the tomb of a dead god.

Thanks to the support of 779 backers on Kickstarter, this audiobook was expanded to include a total of 20 locations each with full-color artwork included as a PDF along with this audiobook. This audiobook helps you fill your mind with the lore of these fantastic locations so you can build fantastic worlds for your players.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2016 Michael Erik Shea (P)2018 Michael Erik Shea

Surprisingly Digestable

I was definitely pretty dubious about listening to a gaming book, I am much more used to reading them (usually with pencil in hand, copying down notes and new ideas) and saving my audiobook credits for history books and the occasional novel. But this was actually a great way to absorb Shea's ideas. There were definitely a few locations that I would have skimmed through if I were reading (do I need one more Lich Sanctuary in my life?) but ended up listening to and enjoying.

Awesome, Entertaining Resource

I have the softcover of this book, which I love, and the audio version is just as awesome. I can listen to the book while I type and make notes for my game about the creatures, traps, NPCs, and more I want to put into the locations. I love the different voices Rudy puts into each location to give them a different feel, which helps envision the author's intent. I just used the audio book on a plane to prepare for a three-day, nonstop campaign at a convention. You can listen to the book on your way to a game, while working out, doing dishes, folding laundry, etc. and get that prep time in. Thank you so much for this!

Not as good as I hoped not as bad as I feared.

Overall the ideas at play here are interesting frame works with a history for the frame work you can build a campaign location around. Think of a brochure for a destination vacation.

There are no maps. Which is a real shame as making them is time consuming and confusing if you’re not used to it. There is also no suggestion of trap placement, challenge settings or any concrete plot hooks.

A book can explore themes and concepts with tips on how to present ideas to a group of players or it can be technical and lay out the guts of a setting for meticulous setup. This sits right in the middle and presents largely the launching point and gives the reader all the actual heavy lifting.

The narrator isn’t terrible. It is a bit over the top at points but I can forgive for basically reading a tour guide blurb a few hours long. I’ve heard better and worse. What can’t be forgiven are mispronunciations and sentence long retakes that were left into the book. That was sloppy and unprofessional. It happened often enough that it felt like padding, but I can’t think of any real reason for that.

Campaign Locations Make Your Story

The Fantastic locations you build into your campaign will make the story your players and you are creating. if you are either a Green or Veteran Dungeon Master this book is for you.

Great Stuff

A great pseudo source book for veteran and aspiring DMs to use either as inspiration or directly lifted. Narration is clear and delivered without issue or annyoance which is just what I wanted for this sort of book. Great book and audio supplement that I will enjoy stealing from in future campaigns.

Always Enjoyable Inspiration

Sly Flourish consistently brings me something to inspire my game. Never an uninspired moment. I have always enjoyed his blog, podcasts, and books. If it’s from Mike Shea, I’m on board.

Imaginative, but poorly edited.

This book is full of neat ideas, but the narrator is not quite as good as Colby Elliott, who read the other Sly Flourish books. No great crime, of course (except for his inability to pronounce “Scintillating”). But there are numerous spots where phrases are quickly and redundantly repeated, as if there were a second take that wasn’t edited for.

A Great Idea!

I wasn't sure how an RPG book would translate to audio format, but this book really works overall. While obviously you can't use an audiobook for reference at the table, it's great for listening on lonely car drives to get your DM brain spinning with ideas, and Sly Flourish's stuff is perfect for that. Recommend!

bland content presented by an exhausting narrator

Couldn't make it past the first location. Lacking in useful specific details. Annoying exaggerated narration.

What were they thinking!

Great material in the work itself; utterly ruined by the grating and horribly amateur voice reading.

I’m assuming they saved the cash from the KickStarter and did the stretch-goal-audiobook on the cheap (real cheap). It is literally unlistenable.

Just terrible. Returning the audiobook until they re-record it with at least a semi-professional.