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Unframed: The Art of Improvisation for Game Masters
by Ranjith E. M. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 08/07/2014 11:13:00

Please note that this review is sorted from bad to good, with a problematic caveat at the end, though.

The biggest problem I see in the document is the repetition, though. I got the distinct impression that about half the essays suggest using a seemingly standard approach from improvised acting (as in theatre acting). Sure, each contributor takes a slightly different approach to it, and some are easier to understand than others, thus making the variants interesting, but in the end, it is basically the same advice clothed in slightly different apparel.

If you take this into account, the 105 pages of text become maybe some 50 to 60 pages of effective text. Still quite nice, but it may appear a bit pricey.

In addition, each individual essay is rather short. At times, you get the feeling you would want to read a bit more on the suggested approach or get more details. Mind you, the essays get the message across, but I personally would have liked to have some of them longer (maybe double their current size).

There is indeed some very solid advice there and a few approaches (despite the repetition) to try out for GMs. As such, I think the book can deliver for GMs who want to switch from rail-roaded role-playing to more improvised approaches or those who feel overwhelmed by the surprises that come up during play. While there are essays dealing with the planning of the session, the majority focuses on actually handling the situation (and even those dealing with the planning turn towards the actual play, of course).

As a bonus, the essays in this text are all really well-written and an entertaining read. Anecdotes and examples are often amusing and drive the points described home.

I also want to mention that I didn't notice any typos or grammar mistakes (save maybe a single time where an unmodified "weird" is seemingly used as a comparative, albeit that may very well be a deliberate decision of the author rather than a mistake). While this may seem a minor point, I personally find it rather distracting if an item is full of typos or mistakes (like using "dice" for the singular of our favorite randomizer!). I really want to send some praise to the authors and the proof readers and everyone else who helped keep the quality that high. It is really appreciated.

Now, for the special caveat, I need to point out and explain an easily over-looked aspect. Besides your standard, multiplayer RPGs, there are also solo or solitaire RPGs, probably the most successful engine being Mythic's Game Master Emulator. Those RPGs allow gamers to enjoy RPGs all by themselves without the need for other players. This becomes possible, at least with Mythic's engine, by keeping the answers of the GM Emulator very vague and requiring the player to interpret the controlled randomly generated and abstract results. As a consequence, solitaire RPGs played using this or a similar engine is highly improvised gaming where the player is partly GM (providing details) but mainly player. Therefore, a game about improvisation for GMs sounds like a good tool for anyone wishing to play solitaire RPGs. Unfortunately, only very few of the essays center on the GM by themselves. Instead, improvisation is mostly defined by a style of interaction between GM and players. Therefore, while there is some good advice even for solitaire gamers, it is rather little, so I am not sure whether it is worth it for exclusively solitaire players.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
Unframed: The Art of Improvisation for Game Masters
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Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Session Prep
by Guntis V. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 07/10/2014 15:22:29

So many good - and true - praises! Really, this book turns the GM's prep work almost into exact science. It really puts things in a good perspective! The author even analyzes possible 'short-of-time' scenarios and suggests how to cope with them. Love it!

I'm not a very experienced GM (just a dozen sessions), and this book showed me many things puzzling me before.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Session Prep
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Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game
by David R. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 03/19/2014 10:33:51

I found some samples of Eureka and Masks on Engine's website and was very impressed with the information, samples, and ideas provided, so I decided to buy the full ebook for both.

This book is very well written and provides lots of easily NPCs with great physical descriptions, backgrounds, motivations and some sample storylines to go with them that work with any system.

I've already used a couple of the NPCs with little or no adjustment and the players in my game absolutely loved the detail and interaction these new NPCs provided.

I also love the name generator banner that is on each page. By flipping to any page and picking a first name from one page and a last name from the other, you can come up with 100s of new character names. It would be nice to have an index of first/last names in a table or something that would allow for quicker lookup or even a roll chart.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game
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Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters
by David R. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 03/19/2014 10:28:48

I found some samples of Eureka and Masks on Engine's website and was very impressed with the information, samples, and ideas provided, so I decided to buy the full ebook for both.

This book is very well written and provides lots of easily expandable/tweakable plots that work with any system.

I've already used a couple of the plot ideas in my game night and even with only a couple days prep time, the players the original storylines and twists that they dealt with.

I'm looking forward to delving deeper and finding more that I can use to add to my game.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters
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Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters
by Brian F. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 01/04/2014 16:07:50

Have you ever found a sandwich that’s so big, juicy, messy, and full of sandwichy goodness that you can’t figure out where to start eating it? That’s kind of what happened when I grabbed a copy of Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots To Inspire Game Masters by the authors of GnomeStew.com. This book should be like crack to not only roleplayers in general and gamemasters (GMs) in specific, but should also provide infinite ideas for novelists and short story writers seeking inspiration for their own works.

For those of you who aren’t gamers or roleplayers, there’s a huge and growing population of people who play tabletop roleplaying games (RPGs) who also write articles throughout the blogosphere. Gnome Stew (GnomeStew.com) is one of the more focused, schizophrenic (i.e. multiple-writer), and excellent gaming resources on the web today. I typically peruse the Gnome Stew RSS feed at least once a week to get an idea for what’s going on in gaming and stealget ideas for my own gaming blog (the Moebius Adventures blog).

The amazing folks at Gnome Stew evidently had their “eureka” moment in June 2009 and it took twelve months from that point to create this huge storehouse of ideas and inspiration for the community. As Martin Ralya, the owner of Gnome Stew, points out in his introduction – “To call Eureka a labor of love would be an understatement.” And the love shows.

Before launching into the plot descriptions themselves, the authors chose to provide a chapter about how to use the book. That takes up less than 20 pages of the 300+ the book fills. But without that information, it would be much more difficult to hunt for ideas on a particular topic. They have provided four different ways to find the perfect plot – by theme, primary genre, sub-genres, and tags.

The themes they use are the 36 Dramatic Situations written by Georges Polti in 1917. The book poses that there are only 36 basic plots used in all the dramatic works ever created or that ever will be created. It’s quite an idea and it’s still in use today by drama students, authors, playwrights, and many more. You can read the book in the public domain here. In terms of RPG plots, this helps by boiling down the initial idea succinctly and then building on it in the text of the plot description.

Genres are broken into four general categories. In this case, a genre is just a set of criteria for a setting that also lends itself to describing the overall tone or assumptions for stories fitting those criteria. In this case, they use three main categories – Fantasy, Sci-fi, and Horror – and add a catch-all “Other” category for any plots that don’t fit in the first three.

And when you get to tags, that’s where the real fun comes in. It’s obvious the editors and authors thought long and hard about how to make this book useful for readers. Like genres, tags in this case are just additional descriptive words to categorize a particular plot. These tags describe things like the type of Challenge involved in the plot, what Creatures and Enemies will be encountered, what kinds of Non-player Characters (NPCs) and Relationships are central to the plot, the Play Style, and the Setting. Beyond that, there’s also a broader “Features” general category for elements that don’t fit anywhere else.

Each of these descriptive methods is used to create a detailed index (four indexes are included – by theme, primary genre, sub-genres, and tag) so that you can simply peruse any of the indices for a particular idea or term. That certainly helps when you’re faced with the sheer volume of work presented in this book. Your other approach is simply to start at the beginning and read until inspiration strikes or you find what you are looking for. My problem with that is that I have hardly dented the Fantasy plots, which come first, so who knows if I’ll ever make it all the way to the Horror section!

There’s no way to do justice to the myriad plots described in the book, so I’ll just talk about one to provide an example of what you can look forward to.

“Vengeance Taken for Kindred upon Kindred” has a long title, but immediately I knew it was describing what I call the “Hatfields vs. the McCoys” problem. It’s a family feud at its heart. And in the fantasy version described in Eureka, it’s a tribe of orcs that’s split down the middle after a chieftan dies and his twin sons want to take the tribe in different directions. Stuck in the middle is a local town. With a war coming between these two factions, the player characters (PCs) must figure out how to save the town.

The plot goes on to describe the problems at hand, including the fact that they can’t face down all the orcs by themselves and what happens when the town mayor tries to make a pact with one camp for protection from the other… There’s just enough information to provide a framework for an enterprising GM to roll an adventure around it.

And at the end of the plot description, there’s a section describing what other genres it can easily be adapted to, including Action Horror, Cyberpunk, Grim and Gritty Fantasy, Post-Apocalyptic, Sci-fi, Traditional Fantasy, and Western. The section also describes all the various tags associated with the plot idea – alliance, deadline, innocent, isolated area, mass combat, sandbox, tactical planning, and villain.

As a GM, I think I could take this idea and spin it at least three ways right off the bat, which is awesome. It’s this kind of inspiration with crunchy details that really sets my brain on fire.

So if you’re a GM, a player, a writer of any sort, or just like noodling about story ideas, Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots To Inspire Game Masters by the authors of GnomeStew.com should provide you literally hours and hours of gaming fun. One review I saw mentioned that with 501 plots at your disposal, that’s more than a year’s worth of adventuring time for even the most aggressive gaming group!

(This review first appeared here: http://blogcritics.org/rpg-book-review-eureka-501-adventure/)



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Odyssey: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Campaign Management
by Nearly e. D. P. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 10/26/2013 13:45:23

After spotting that Odyssey: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Campaign Management had been released for pre-order, I decided now was a good time to have a nosy through this book, and see everything that I do wrong when managing my campaigns.

I won't lie, my initial thoughts of this book forced me to have flashbacks of management lectures at university. Well, at least the ones I remember considering I slept through most of them. I was worried this was going to be a dry tome that would not educate me because obviously I knew EVERYTHING about being a GM. Most GMs have a flavour and style of GMing, and the idea of reading a book to improve on that seems like an alien concept. We all learned through the hundreds of failed campaigns we tried to run, the dozens that fell at the first hurdle, and then finally reaching the few that are still talked about as the "Best campaign EVER!". Then there are the GMs who prefer to improvise a lot more than spend hours pouring over his notes and preparing for sessions.

Allow me to dismiss all of these fears and questions. This book isn't boring or dry, but lays out the facts that everybody has to usually learn the hard way. There are plenty of stories and examples for each stage, that helps break up the information dump that comes from such a book. The writing styles are clean and easy to read, without huge piles of abbreviations or in-jokes, which means even the newest of aspiring GMs can dig into this book and understand what it is trying to tell you.

The information in the book may feel like "well, isn't this obvious?" if you have been GMing for a while, but there certainly are plenty of light bulb moments where I have gone "Why did I not think of that?!". The book is also clear about what it is, and what it is not. This book is about the bigger picture than just session by session preparation. It is about getting that initial campaign off the ground, and how to absolutely nail the first session to keep your players coming back for more. I can see a more experienced GM might view this more as a reference material rather than a hefty document (although there is less than 200 pages of actual information) as there is an absolutely superb index. This sort of book needs an excellent index to allow those who just want to find the advice they want without pouring through all the sections. The book is also bookmarked and hyperlinked throughout to help you find what you are looking for easily.

There are three main sections of the book. There is a bit of a blurb at the beginning from each of the writers, as well as their thoughts on why managing a campaign is kinda a big deal. After that we move onto starting a campaign, managing the campaign, and finally ending a campaign. In each of these sections is step-by-step advice on how they think each section could be managed, and what the best case scenario is and the worst case scenario is for the outcome of each section. This is combined with stories from the author's past describing similar issues they discuss in the sections.

I have only had the chance to read through this book once, but already I feel like I have picked up some valuable information for when I run my next game. Some GMs might find the approach a bit formal but it is correct that sometimes, especially when emotions can be on the line, that is the best way to treat this. I am also thrilled to see the book emphasise that GMs need to be enjoying the game as well, not just the players. After all, everybody is meant to be having fun!

I would heartily recommend grabbing yourself a copy of this book and gets a full thumbs up from me. The advice available is useful and well thought out, and will improve your GM skills.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Odyssey: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Campaign Management
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Odyssey: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Campaign Management
by Jay S. A. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 09/12/2013 20:43:40

If there ever was a university course for Game Mastering, I would probably find Engine Publishing’s Odyssey in the list of textbooks.

The fourth of their series of books to help GMs run better games, Odyssey joins Never Unprepared in taking a look at a facet of the hobby that is often unaddressed in the industry: that of game (and people) management.

It’s not surprising that our hobby is a social one, and it is inevitable that the GM, often the de facto head of the group has to exercise a form of leadership and management to keep the group running. It’s not enough that the game itself is good, but there are steps taken outside of session prep and running the game that makes up for a large part of the enjoyment and experience as well.

This is where Odyssey steps in.

Odyssey is an honestly written book that looks at the real-life issues of managing a group of people to show up and commit to a game. It looks at campaigns from the very start, from concepts and frameworks, and into the management of players, story, people, risk and change. Finally it wraps up with a discussion of ending Campaigns, with a refreshingly frank take on how to end Campaigns in a manner to avoid a “bad” campaign end where players feel unsatisfied and upset.

The book is very well illustrated and laid out, with interesting art pieces that break up the discussion and augment the text. Short fiction pieces help illustrate how games go well (and badly.)

I loathe to pull specific quotes from the book because it’s very, very good. It’s clear that the authors are veterans who have given more than a fair share amount of thought and work into the book. The advice they share is meant to help people, and it shows. There’s a solid sense of “I’ve done screwed up this way before, and here’s what I think can help you avoid making the same mistake.” going on in the book, and it’s a kind of sincerity that I certainly appreciate.

Odyssey: The Complete Game Master’s Guide to Campaign Management lives up to its name. There’s a lot to learn, and the book makes it easy. I would certainly recommend this book to any GM, and if you’re a player, do your GM a favor and buy this for him. It’ll do him (and your games) a world of good.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Session Prep
by francesco b. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 08/16/2013 15:02:06

Very useful, it helped me flesh out techniques I had already been using and organize processes I already was employing. Recommended.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Session Prep
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Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Session Prep
by Paul E. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 08/16/2013 12:29:59

I wish I would have known about this earlier. It was reviewed on a podcast a very long-time friend of mine has been involved in for some time, and I only recently heard about this, purchased it and have been making my way, VERY slowly -I read slowly- through it. I agree with many of the other reviewers of this fine work... it's really about time we had something like this, essential and inexpensive.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Session Prep
by Emily B. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 08/05/2013 17:21:05

This is some of the best Gamemaster advice I've ever read, and I've been GMing for almost twenty years, on a daily basis in some cases. The book is very well-organized, enough that I was able to implement its suggestions in real time as I was reading through it. While most of these concepts are things I've subconsciously discovered throughout my time as a GM, they're also concepts I've never properly mentally organized. This book makes the process faster, helps me remember every step, and brings up some ideas I never consciously considered.

Overall, one of the best RPG supplements I've ever read.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Odyssey: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Campaign Management
by VP401533 K. H. L. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 07/11/2013 11:54:38

As what the author said at the beginning, it's more like how to manage a campaign than how to design a campaign. Guess I didn't read the title carefully. Nevertheless, I read as much of it as I simply can (since I am a PM by profession too) and I can say it is really a management guide. It's good for a one time read through but if you intend to use it as a reference guide, then you'll be disappointed.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
Odyssey: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Campaign Management
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Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Session Prep
by Viktor V. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 07/05/2013 12:16:37

This was a really good book. It has some great insights and methods into how and why to prep for sessions. It's easy to read and understand. One caveat might be that it is somewhat loose, it doesn't tell you PRECISELY what to do but it does the next closest thing.

This book is solely about prep, and how to make prep more enjoyable. It's not about running a session or anything like that. If you're looking for tips about prep, and want to find a good mentality and methodology around it, then buy this book.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Session Prep
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Masks and Eureka: 1,000 NPCs and 501 Plots [BUNDLE]
by George T. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 03/15/2013 19:06:17

Picked up the bundle a week ago. Flipped through the "501 Plots" book and copied a half dozen into my random encounter lists for my Aftermath! RPG. I did the same for my random NPC lists for the same game, from the "1.000 NPC;s" book. During the game, a random roll opened one of the plots and a pair of the NPC's. (Evil villains) Easiest random encounter set up I've ever done. The plot and one of the NPC;s have been integrated into the game as part of the long term story arc and the gamers have discovered a truly psychopathic villain who wants their heads on a spike in revenge! Totally delightful! Highly recommend it. Great value, if only to read and 'cherry pick' ideas.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Masks and Eureka: 1,000 NPCs and 501 Plots [BUNDLE]
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Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Session Prep
by Alex N. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 03/06/2013 06:34:25

One of the reasons this is so successful as a MUST HAVE is the price point. There are a lot of "must have" books or collections that aren't really must-have because of their cost and sadly a lot of people don't purchase them. Never Unprepared is the perfect read for the perfect price.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Session Prep
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Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Session Prep
by Benjamin B. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 10/24/2012 19:15:30

[Originally posted at http://secondleft.blogspot.ca/2012/10/review-never-unprepared-complete-game.html]

I've recently finished reading through Phil Vecchione's, Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Session Prep, and now that I'm finished, it's review time.

Never Unprepared is 134 pages long in what appears to be a large digest format (I only have the PDF version, not the print copy.) This short length of the book, plus the easy writing style, make it very accessible and easy for even a busy GM to read and get something out of. Additionally since the pages are in a smaller format, it's easy to read on a smartphone or small screen tablet.

Screenshot taken from DriveThruRPG for illustration purposes First off lets go over what this book is not. This book is not a plan to tell you how to do your session prep. It will not say you should do X and Y before a game, and will not solve all the problems that you have in getting preparation done before your game.

So, what is it? I've never seen one before, no one has, but I'm guessing it's a white hole. Sorry, been watching too much Red Dwarf lately (if you've never seen the series it's a BBC sitcom set on a deep space mining vessel, and the early seasons are really good.)

So, what is it? Well Never Unprepared is a book that takes some project management principles (don't worry, it's not scarey) and attempts to apply them to the art of game mastering. Effectively treating the approach to game prep the same way one would a project plan for a large project. Yes this may sound daunting, but don't worry it's all distilled down in the book. The aim of the book is to provide you with a means of developing your own method of gaming prep that is repeatable and honed to suit your gaming needs and your GMing strengths and weaknesses.So the book doesn't tell you how to prep your games, it tells you how to go about working out how is best for you to prep for your games.

I'm going to borrow from the index now to guide you through the book contents. Foreword Introduction How to Use This Book Understanding Prep Prep is Not a Four Letter Word The Phases of Prep Brainstorming Selection Conceptualization Documentation Review Prep Toolbox Tools for Prep Mastering your Creative Cycle Evolving Your Style Your Personal Prep Templates The Prep-Lite Approach Prep in the Real World Conclusion References and Inspiration Index The core content of the book is explaining the five phases of prep that Phil has identified over his years of GMing. Brainstorming, Selection, Conceptualization, Documentation and Review. Each of the sections on that particular area of prep goes into details on what would be contained in that phase, some common pitfalls to avoid, and a quiz to rate your effectiveness at the particular phase. Additionally there are a load of hints and tips along the way on how you may be able to accomplish this phase without telling you how to do it (in other words it doesn't dictate a methodology.)

For example the section on brainstorming suggests just throwing ideas down on paper that seem vaguely interesting. Don't think about them in great detail, don't analyze whether or not they'd be useful or how you can use them, just basic thoughts. Deciding if they're good comes in the Selection phase, and fleshing them out in Conceptualization. Some hints on capturing your brainstorming, such as always having a note application on your smartphone, or a small notebook tucked in your pocket.

There is advice on how you can improve what you do in each section, and how to spot when you are doing too much. For instance are you really good at coming up with evocative location descriptions on the fly? Then you really shouldn't be wasting your time writing it out in more than a bullet point or two to keep a focus.

Yes some of the advice in the book may see obvious to many, but sometimes you still need someone to point it out to you to make it stick in your mind.

It's hard to pick out specifics that are good, and what is bad, but there is so much useful ideas in the book that I'll end up taking on a lot of them and most won't even be conscious. From that perspective you can get more out of the book that you think. In many ways it's a self help book to give you the push towards thinking in a more efficient way about the approach you take to gaming prep.

Conclusion: Is this a book worth reading for any GM? If you find you're not ready in time for your games, or that the gaming prep is taking too much of your time and you consider it sometimes to be time wasted, then definitely buy this book. In fact I'd recommend buying it anyway as even the most experienced Game Masters will likely find something in there that is useful to them. Myself, I'm taking the templates concepts and applying them into my notes, it's already improved things. And since reading the book, I now use Evernote on my smartphone constantly to enter ideas and carry a small notebook in my jacket pocket.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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