Systems composed of large numbers of interacting agents often admit an effective coarsegrained description in terms of a multidimensional stochastic dynamical system, driven by small-amplitude intrinsic noise. In applications to biological, ecological, chemical and social dynamics it is common for these models to posses quantities that are approximately conserved on short timescales, in which case system trajectories are observed to remain close to some lower-dimensional subspace. Here, we derive explicit and general formulae for a reduced-dimension description of such processes that is exact in the limit of small noise and well-separated slow and fast dynamics. The Michaelis-Menten law of enzymecatalyzed reactions, and the link between the Lotka-Voltera and Wright-Fisher processes are explored as a simple worked examples. Extensions of the method are presented for infinite dimensional systems and processes coupled to non-Gaussian noise sources.1 A complementary branch of theory exists dealing with the relaxation of this assumption, see (Arnold and Imkeller, 1998;Roberts, 2008) for starting points in the literature.