Michael E. Shea, the tabletop role-playing game writer behind the Sly Flourish website and the "Lazy Dungeon Master" series, has launched a Kickstarter campaign for his new book, Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster. The book expands the low-prep game-mastering philosophy he has developed over more than a decade, and matters because it distils a widely influential, time-saving approach to running Dungeons & Dragons and other TTRPGs for busy Game Masters.

Shea's method rejects the traditional image of the GM who prepares exhaustively, arguing instead that "the only game that matters is the next game you play" and that efficient preparation can take as little as 15–30 minutes for a four-hour session. The new book reaffirms his "eight steps" of preparation — from reviewing characters to selecting rewards — while expanding each with different approaches, tailoring them to adventure types such as dungeon crawls and mysteries, and broadening the GM toolkit with ideas borrowed from other systems like Powered by the Apocalypse and Thirteenth Age. Shea, who joined Wizards of the Coast's D&D Community Advisory Group in June, frames the approach as accessible improvisation focused on letting stories flow and relinquishing control, echoing figures such as Chris Perkins, Matt Colville and Mike Mearls.