Showing results by author "Michael Shea"

Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master builds off of the concepts of the well-received GM's guidebook Lazy Dungeon Master, updating that book with five years of new experiences, new approaches, and new observations of the way people prepare and run RPGs. This new book is a completely self-contained work, which does not require anyone to have previously heard the Lazy Dungeon Master. Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master offers a new focused approach for preparing and running our roleplaying games.

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 and less energy and have a better game as a result? It's time to unleash the Lazy Dungeon Master.

Follow the adventures of Nifft the Lean, the master thief whose felonious appropriations and larcenous skills will lead you through Stygian realms to challenge your most lurid fantasies and errant imaginings.

One of the hardest parts of game mastering 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. 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, or a fallen celestial fortress.

Prosperous Hagia's vaults brimmed with gold. Her warehouses bulged with the goods of the southern seas. She had the spider-god to thank for her prosperity. But beneath Hagia's ancient bargain with the A'Rak lay the direst danger. That mercenary kingdom had mortgaged its soul in its pact with the giant arachnoid. When the note fell due, death of the most hideous kind awaited the multitudes of that affluent and bustling nation.

Nifft the Lean and his companion-in-arms, Barnar Hammer-Hand, were often lucky. En route to working Costard's sap mine - very dangerous and sometimes nauseating work far below ground - they were shipwrecked. But this proved fortuitous when they met Bunt, who had been seeking just such as they. If they would work the sap mine, but also bring back 20 gills of fluid, he would make them exceedingly wealthy. So it was settled. Of course, the best laid plans sometimes do go a little astray.

High school senior Aiden O'Connor's life is in turmoil. He's bored with school, his growing skill at boxing won't pay the rent when his drunken father leaves, and someone is keeping his mom from finding work in any pub in South Boston. Lured by childhood friend Tommy's promise of easy money, Aiden reluctantly gets mixed up with the Irish mob. Aiden's strong sense of honor makes him a bit too good at his job with the King of the Street, who wants to keep Aiden involved for reasons of his own. Conflicted about nearly everything, Aiden has to decode where his loyalties lie - and when he has had enough.

The Extra is set in a future California where members of a desperate populace sign contracts to participate in reality death films, knowing that less than 20% of them will survive. It’s a view of the future—and Hollywood—as delightfully cynical as Kurt Vonnegut with sympathetic characters, Hollywood executive sleazeballs and much more.

Less than a hundred years in the future, pollution, economic disaster, and the rapacious greed of the corporate oligarchy have brought America to its knees and created dystopian urban nightmares, of which Los Angeles may be the worst. Curtis, Japh, and Jool are film extras, who - with the help of a couple of very gutsy women - survived being anonymous players in a "live-action" film in which death on-screen meant death in real life. Surviving the shoot made them rich enough to escape the post-apocalyptic hell that LA has become.

As an over-60 today you are likely to be very much healthier than previous generations of retirees and you're close to outnumbering the younger age group. So why should they have all the fun? The grey dollar is particularly strong, and the so-called Third Age holds the largest proportion of the country's disposable income.

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books began in 1996 with a simple goal: to bring together the people who create books with the people who love to read them. The festival was an immediate success and has become the largest and most prestigious book festival in the country, attracting more than 130,000 book lovers each year.