Blogs I Love: Sly Flourish

Just by itself, the Sly Flourish blog would be considered a great resource for those 4e DMs out there. Written by Mike Shea, the posts are concise, well-written and accompanied by excellent pictures. The monster optimization series alone is a great resource. Not only does it give DMs monster combos to place into their own campaigns where appropriate, but he explains what it is about the combo that makes it awesome, effectively providing a learn-by-example tutorial on encounter design. It definitely makes you look forward to Mondays.

Recent Posts

• Three D&D Tips I Learned From Dragon Age
• Monster Optimization: Foulspawn Mangler + Foulspawn Seer
• Powerhouse Dragons
• James Bond Encounter Design
• Monster Optimization: Ghouls and Deathlock Wights
• Evernote for Dungeon Masters
• Giving 4e an Old School Feel
• Monster Optimization: Shadow Dragons
• Ten Ways to Challenge Powerful Parties
• Scaling 4th Edition for Six Players
• Magic Gems for Item Reward Flexability

If you need your fix more than once a week, fear not, Mike gives out great ideas throughout the week through Twitter. Followers of the @SlyFlourish twitter account are treated to small nuggets of DMing and story telling wisdom.

Recent Twitter D&D Tips

• Cross-train your RPG reading with King's "On Writing", Tharps "Creative Habit", and Edwards' "Drawing on the Right Side o/t Brain"
• Try out a Stephen King style and foretell coming events: "That was the last time you saw your home town before it burned."
• When using published adventures, don't be afraid to replace NPCs with those already known and loved (or hated) by your PCs.
• Give your players a lot of different quests, each with a well-designed quest card so they can keep track of them.
• Does a PC have a big moment coming? Try using a music playlist based on that PC selected by that player.

In addition to the blog and twitter account, Mike created a really nice 4e blog aggregation site, 4eBlogs.com.