So you want to be a Game Master by Justin Alexander is a 544 page behemoth aimed at new game masters but also contains many tips and tricks that experienced game masters will find invaluable.
Printed in a larger novel size in black and white with simple grey scale images and drawings this is a book definitely and deliberately designed to teach you how to play and how to design and play different adventure structure types. The book is concise in its writing style and despite it’s large page count it is well written and designed.
For those interested in learning more about the author you can get an ample taste of the authors thoughts and words by visiting The Alexandrian which is a contains a plethora of topics in which you can dig and learn (completing the book).
But what of the book? The broad themes are:
- Part 1 Dungeons – This is the primer teacher section of the book and well placed at the front. It provide a great start for a person to understand game play structure and their role as the game master. It provides you the tools needed to design a basic adventure flow / structure, concrete dungeon design and faction design tips. This chapter condenses about 50 years of role play gaming knowledge in a compact easy read format.
- Part 2 Mysteries – This section is focused on how to design an adventure for your players that contains structure with a focus on providing players the opportunity to make a decisions and meaningful choices but within a Gamemaster can plan and respond too. The nice thing about the approach presented is that applied correctly the Gamemaster will be surprised along the way also becoming a player as the table as well as rules adjudicator and facilitator.
- Part 3 Raid and Heists – This chapter provides a good structure on how to and not run a heist. These are popular in practice but hard to execute – a great aide.
- Part 4 Urban Adventures – A focused view on how to do an urban campaign. The tools help you focus on what is important and what is not. This is important as the perception is that you need to build a campaign guide for a city when really you do not.
- Part 5 – Into the Wild – How to run adventures in the wilderness, encounters and environment as well as how to design a point-crawl-campaign.
- Extra Credits – The largest not labelled part – a 100-page section bringing all you have learnt to create a campaign adventure along with additional tips and tricks to help you to become successful.
The book is very good. You don’t have to read from one end to the other and its certainly able to be used as a reference. In many ways the book brings together 50 years of RPG magazine, podcasts, and game manual advice into one location.
If you are looking for a book that provides detailed structure its a good buy. If you are a more graphical and simpler adventure focus book then Sly Flourish Lazy Return of the Dungeon Master might be for you but with less technical details.
But honestly buy both!
