Dungeon World: Book review and play test

I first came across Dungeon World about six months ago while going through a bit of a GM burnout phase. Pathfinder was feeling a bit complex and I was looking for a less crunchy game that might lend itself more easily to the more narrative type of game that I prefer.

I have a paperback copy of the book purchased from drivethrurpg, it also came with an ebook version and a selection of PDFs that meant I could start reading while the book itself was in the post. The book is well made with a colour cover and black and white interior. The format is roughly A5 (perhaps the same as a trade paperback) and super easy to fit into my bag so I can read it on the go. 

This book is a combined core rule book, game master guide and monster manual spread over 400ish pages in that order. There is also an advanced game mastery section and a number of appendices at the back of the book.

Core rule book section

The authors state that fiction comes first and the streamlined rule set encourages both players and game master to get creative with the use of the basic and class moves.

All the classes one would expect of a typical fantasy game are here and third party publishers such as awful good games have created a whole bunch more.

The 'powered by the apocalypse' rule set is a radical departure from the D20 system that I'm used to but easy to understand and the move system allows characters of the same class to differentiate themselves as they advance towards level ten. Character advancement looks pretty quick with only current level+7 experience points required to level up. The main source of experience appears to be from failed move attempts which is a nice touch.

Game master guide section

This section describes how to run a session as well as advocating a game mastery style that emphasises emergent story lines. Those new to game mastering will likely find this very helpful and would hopefully give them the confidence to kick off their first campaign. The lightweight and easy to remember ruleset lowers the barrier to entry in terms of system mastery for new game masters.

Those of us who are more experienced will still find useful ideas and methods for generating and organising material even if you prefer your adventures to be more tightly scripted.

There is plenty of advice regarding the consequences for player characters when their moves fail. This system allows the game master a lot of flexibility when it comes to arbitrating the results of success and failure than other systems I've used.

Monster manual section

This section is split into nine themed sections (such as cavern dwellers, twisted experiments, folk of the realm) that make finding an appropriate creature for a given encounter easier. The minimalist stat blocks (each creature only has three proper stats plus a few descriptive tags and a paragraph of text to inform motivations) allows two creatures to be presented per page so I'd guess there are about two hundred creatures in the section.

There are also guidelines for creating you own creatures so if what you need isn't here, you be able to cook it up yourself in a flash.

Overall I think that this book is a worthwhile addition to my bookshelf, and a nice change from the rule heavy world of pathfinder.

The slave pit of Drazhu

Having just wound up my pathfinder campaign I took the opportunity of a free slot in our role playing calendar to run a two hour module called 'The slave pit of Drazhu' by Jason Morningstar. This adventure seems to be intended as an introduction to Dungeon World and has plenty of helpful tips for GMs especially when it comes to keeping to time.

The module begins with a character generation section with a number of questions and bonds to ask and offer the players respectively. These really helped to set the tone of the adventure and to ease the players into the play style that dungeon world encourages.

I ran this adventure with five players and overall it went really well and we enjoyed ourselves, but here are some things I noticed.

It is really easy to overlook quieter players during combat. I think this is mainly due to a combination of my inexperience with combat systems that don't use initiative and maybe having too many players for a first run with the system. I was initially planning to run with four players and I think that might have been the better move for me.

The combat can get really fun. The wizard of the group began play without his spell book and thus no spells to cast, but after an initially disastrous attempt at hack and slash versus an orc while using a drag bucket as a weapon, he decided that trying to distract the orc by swinging the bucket around wildly would be more effective. I suspect that combats very rarely drag out into three hour slugfests in dungeon world.

The fact that my orcs didn't need to roll to hit the player characters during combat was a breath of fresh air. I got through the session without rolling a single die, and my players were happy to accept my adjudication of their failed move attempts. I get the feeling that a band of goblins could still present a threat to a high level party and a dragon isn't necessarily a guarantee of a low level TPK.

Dungeon world may not be for everyone. Before play commenced I asked the cleric of the group 'What terrible crime did Drazhu commit that made you swear to destroy him?' The player then started looking for the answer on his character sheet, the same player later complained that he didn't know what he could do as there were no skills listed on his character sheet. I've noted in the past that this particular player seems to get more enjoyment from fiddling with game mechanics than he does from role playing and as such I think he's not part of the target market for Dungeon World.

I've got another one shot adventure to run, but it's looking likely that my next fantasy campaign will be run with Dungeon World. 

Encounter Building: Part 2

In my previous post I examined encounters in order to understand a little more about them. My objective was to answer these two questions:

1. How should I run a fast paced and engaging combat with at least twelve entities in the initiative order.
2. How should I go about balancing combat encounters so they contain an element of risk that I can easily calibrate.

I gained a pretty good qualitative understanding of encounter design last week and thank you to those who contributed your own ideas, they were really helpful when it came time to crystallise my thoughts for this post.

So if we assume as a starting point that we've chosen a collection of story and setting appropriate antagonists for a given combat encounter and devised an evocative description of the encounter to draw the players in; what should be done to ensure that the combat runs smoothly and that the level of risk is appropriate?

During the most recent session of my Pathfinder campaign I looked at the behaviour of my players to try and identify sources of pacing issues. In doing so I realized that combat always seems fast paced to me as I'm involved in everyone's turn while the players each get to engage in short bursts of activity followed by a period of waiting for their turn. During this period of waiting some players lose focus on the game as their attention - and sometimes their whole body - wanders to other things. The game then has to pause as they catch up to what has happened while they were away.

Another significant source of delay is players not being being able to read their character sheets, either because they used computer aided character creation (discussed here) design and can't find what they're looking for or they lack some understanding of the rules of the game and don't know what they should be trying to find. This is sometimes worsened as the magic users roll out a variety of buffs that apply different bonuses to the player characters.

In short, some of my players are becoming disengaged while they await the next action of their character and this leads to some of the pacing issues that I encounter. If, as a group, we work towards more descriptive actions I think that engagement will increase and pacing will become less of an issue. Also, as the Game Master I should be doing more to ensure that the players grasp the overall story of the campaign and the place of this encounter within it. If they're engaged they'll be ready for their turn, hopefully they'll take the time to collate their buffs into one modifier and things will move along more quickly.

When it comes to the issue of balancing the mechanics behind the encounter my starting point is the advice found in the Pathfinder Core Rulebook. The book recommends using the average party level (APL) as a starting point for establishing the challenge rating (CR) of the encounter, this can then be modified from -1 to +3 depending upon how difficult the encounter should be, because I have a large group I should also add one to the CR to reflect this. Once the CR has been determined I can refer to a table to see how many experience points I have to spend on creatures.

In my experience this advice seems to break down with a party size greater than six as if I follow these directions I end up with encounters that I perceive as being consistently too easy.

I've tried a few different approaches to constructing encounters this way:

• Concentrating all the XP in a single powerful creature. If this results in an encounter with a creature with an individual CR more than about APL+1 there is the downside that player characters can be slain with very little warning and the creature, while powerful, often doesn't have enough hit points to survive longer than two or three rounds.
• Large numbers of weak opponents. This results in slightly longer but quite dull combats as the creatures are largely unable to successfully attack the player characters and the CR of the encounter in no way reflects the ease with which the party are able to overcome the encounter.
• Opponents with special abilities. This is probably the most successful approach as it forces the player characters to alter their tactics to cope with the unexpected, but it is difficult to find a range of appropriate antagonists with special abilities to keep this approach functional.

In general I've been operating on the premise that the party can handle encounters of up to APL+4 without too much trouble and for more challenging encounters I start pushing the CR of the most powerful creature to average party level +2 or +3. I do have to be careful with this approach that I spread damage around to avoid frequent player character death.

Perry S. sent me a link to a post he has made discussing different ways to approach encounter creation which I have found to be very helpful. In the future I'm going to try using different tactics against the players such as screening my big hitters with minions to give them a few more rounds of use and forcing ranged encounter possibly with terrain or  multiple ranks of opponents.

Hopefully this kind of approach will allow me to get a bit more mileage out of my XP budget.

The final components of encounter design are experience and treasure. Recently I've been scaling experience rewards based on the perceived difficulty of the encounter as it seems that most of my encounters are on the easy side and I don't want to speed up the levelling process as this will progressively increase the difficulty of balancing encounters.

As for treasure, I try to make the treasure appropriate to the opponent but this tends to mean that the treasure reward of a given encounter will be lower than it should be. In order to counteract this tendency and avoid consistently short changing the party, I keep track of how much treasure I should be awarding and top it up with quest rewards so that on average the amount of treasure being given out is correct.

Encounter building: Part 1

Recently I've been thinking a lot about some of the challenges I face when creating encounters, especially combat encounters, for my pathfinder campaign, my party is reasonably powerful with nine players running level eight characters (plus one animal companion and an eidolon), and consequently they can easily deal with challenge rating 12 encounters as long as no individual opponent is more powerful than challenge rating 9 or so.  If individual opponents get too powerful player characters can start dying with very little warning.

My main issues are:

1. Running a fast paced and engaging combat with at least twelve entities in the initiative order.
2. Balancing the combats so they contain an element of risk that I can easily calibrate.

As I began to engage with the process of seriously thinking about these challenges I found myself deconstructing the notion of encounters to see if the root of my issues perhaps lies with some misunderstanding on my part of what an encounter should be. This led me to realise that game masters have quite a bit to think about before we start adding mechanics to encounters. Thus I suspect that there might be a lot of thinking to do before I can start getting close to grappling with my two key questions.

So what is an encounter?

In meta game terms it seems to be some instance, I'm going to call it a scene, that prompts a dialogue between the game master and the players as opposed to game master exposition. In less meta terms, an encounter occurs when the player characters interact with the game world and the outcome is uncertain. An encounter will not necessarily invoke the mechanics of the game although many times it will.

To illustrate, imagine a situation where the game master describes a marketplace including some history about the site and activities that routinely occur there - this is game master exposition. In addition if one or more party members were to visit a weapon smith in the marketplace and purchase some goods - this isn't an encounter as there is no uncertainty as to the outcome.

In contrast, if the players characters spoke to Stanislaw the Baker, a stall holder in the marketplace, who told them about how Sozakc the Bugbear was finally captured and executed right over there, 'you can still see the blood stains on the cobbles' and the cleric of the party then asked what happened to Sozakc's axe (the demon possessed one) - the players have engaged with the scene and learnt something about the game world that has furthered their quest, this is an encounter.

Note that no game mechanics were invoked in this example but they could have been if a player wanted to make a sense motive on Stanilaw's statement for instance.

Why then do we break up the narrative structure of role playing games into encounters?

If we think about other storytelling media we find that they also consist of a series of scenes following encounters between the story's protagonists and their environment. The main reason would seem to be that there are lots of things that happen between encounters that aren't necessarily very interesting or that contribute much to the story at hand. While it might be interesting to role play walking from the marketplace to the keep from time to time, but if nothing is going to happen that would distinguish this from any other walk between arbitrary locations there is not a lot of point to doing it every time.

Adopting a 'role play everything that happens' approach would also generate a ton of work for the game master, and without discrete scenes to work on where would you start?

What role do encounters serve?

Encounters are important elements for driving the story forward, and without the story there isn't much to motivate role play. A well thought out encounter creates conflict between the player characters and the world around them as well as potentially between player characters (maybe even between a player and their character?).

Encounters can also serve an important role in world building, the little details that go into encounters can create the illusion that the world the player characters inhabit is alive, and help to make the story meaningful to both the players and their characters.

When encounters engage the mechanics of the game system they create opportunities to roll dice and exploit the abilities of the player characters and even when they don't, they provide role playing opportunities.

Another aspect of encounters bringing game mechanics into play is reward.  Without encounters there is no treasure and no experience points, and these are what empower the characters to face more dangerous foes in the future.

This week I unpacked encounters to try and understand them better and help to answer the two questions if began the post with

1. How to run a fast paced and engaging combat with at least twelve entities in the initiative order.
2. How to balance the combats so they contain an element of risk that I can easily calibrate.

While I think I've gained some insight into encounters I don't have any answers to my questions but over the coming days I will continue to work towards them and hopefully by next post I will have a some satisfactory solutions. If you have any insights of your own feel free to leave them in the comments.

Implementing the Draconic Method: Part 2

Last week I discussed some aspects of the Draconic Method that I was planning to incorporate into my game.  This week I’m going to discuss how I think that went.

Overall Friday’s session went really well, everyone had fun and some good progress was made.  We did decide to cut the session short though. The party was about to enter a mausoleum, they knew there was a trap on the door and the player who runs the rogue of the party was away sick.  Should he be away again next time they’ll have to bite the bullet and take a risk with the trap.

Who cares about Atlantean glyphs – The weird limbo stone, coupled with an encounter with a pair of reasonably powerful demons has galvanised the party into finding the Axiom. My challenge for the future is to be a bit more subtle about inserting these important story elements into the game while still making sure that they have an effect on the PCs that is great enough to ensure that they pay attention to them.

Building encounters – Last week I broadly described an upcoming encounter with a pair of demons that that had the twin goals of encouraging the party to search for the Axiom and also to set up a meeting with a new player character.  The extra work I put into describing the setting and what the demons were up to really helped the players understand what was going on.  We use dungeon tiles and miniatures for combat and my description allowed the players to set the tiles up with practically no supervision from me.  I'm definitely going to continue using the rule of three for future encounters.

The illusion of a lot going on – I think my description of the wooded lake shore has given the players an idea of how desolate the area is.  I also threw in an encounter with a pair of wardens (who are the law enforcement agents of the kingdom they are currently in) who were fleeing a large group of bandits. The players seemed to be quite interested in this little nugget of extraneous detail and went on to wipe out the bandits just to help the wardens out. With a little more effort I can apply this technique more widely within my game and enhance my players sense of immersion within the game world.

The saving grace of 33% – The party had to cross several miles of lake to get to the mausoleum I mentioned earlier. It was clearly too great a distance to countenance swimming and I had been expecting that they would find a boat to use (they had hired a fisherman previously who was waiting about one days walk south of their present position, so they could have gone back to him or borrowed a boat from a lakeside croft). The cleric suggested that he could cast water walking on everyone. I didn't make a roll to see if this could walk, instead I simply decided to fudge the distance to the island so that the spell would give the party just enough time to get there. In the past I have occasionally shot down ideas like this but forcing the party to spend time locating a boat wouldn't have added anything to the story and getting the party quickly across the lake has advanced things to a nice point. I'm sure that there will be times in the future where things aren't so cut and dried so I’ll keep the saving grace of 33% in mind.

Attack descriptions – At the beginning of the session I asked the players to try to make at least three attack descriptions during the session. This drew a mixed reaction with one player in particular scoffing at the idea.  However a couple of players really took to the idea and provided fantastic descriptions of what their characters were doing. One, the cleric, described the physical manifestation of his spells as he was casting them and the other, a ranger, rolled her attacks and then provided colour commentary of her character's actions once she knew the results. This encouraged the others to also describe the actions of their characters, and by the end of the session even that one guy had started to join in. I'm going to remind the players about this at the beginning of the next few sessions and hopefully it will become a habit for everyone.

I think that so far my implementation of the Draconic Method has been a success. I was especially impressed with how asking my players to provide attack descriptions has gotten my players to do more during combat than roll dice and ask ‘Is it dead yet?’.

Moving forward I will continue to do what I’ve started doing and will use How to Game Master like a Fucking Boss as a reference to keep improving my game. Thank you Mr. Satanis.

Implementing the Draconic Method: Part 1

Recently I read and reviewed ‘How to Game Master like a Fucking Boss’ by Venger Satanis. I enjoyed reading the book and decided that I’d try to make a deliberate effort to implement at least some of the Draconic Method and possibly get a little bit closer to game mastering like a fucking boss. This is the record of my efforts.

The Draconic Method consists of a lot of moving parts so to start with I've picked five tips that I think will go a long way towards improving my game.  I'm not going to stop with this five though, adapting and improving my game mastery style will be an ongoing, and probably lifelong, process.

Who cares about Atlantean glyphs (p.14) – This piece of advice is all about getting the players to pay attention to exposition that doesn't necessarily have an immediate bearing on their characters but that will be important in the future by having it directly affect their characters now.  If you want to incorporate foreshadowing into your game you need your players to pay attention to this stuff.

I had an issue where I wanted the party to realise that they needed an item called the Axiom, which had been created in times long past by a guy named Euz, in order to successfully deal with a demon invasion. I started dropping Euz’s name into the game long before they needed to find the Axiom in an attempt to establish him as an important historical figure, and someone whom researching might lead to solutions to their problems. Unfortunately, the one player whom I could depend upon to pick up on and remember this stuff kept missing the sessions where I was doing most of this history building. 

In order to solve this issue I've given one of the characters a weird stone from Limbo that acts as a power source for the Axiom along with a persistent urge that is pulling them towards an encounter that will hopefully nudge the party in the right direction.

Building encounters (p.15) – When creating an encounter I think it is quite common for a game master to have a strong mental image of the situation but then fail to adequately convey it to the players. The Draconic method recommends breaking the encounter down into at least three elements and giving each element three descriptive aspects. If a given aspect is important it can be given three further characteristics.

This tip has prompted me to add more description to encounters and to think a bit more about why the encounter is happening and what should be achieved by it.

As an example, I knew that in the upcoming session of my game that the players would almost certainly encounter a pair of demons on the shore of a lake. I also have to introduce a new PC to the party. So for this encounter I have the elements of the demons, a ritual and the lakeside. The demons have a physical description (borrowed from the Bestiary), an activity (crazy dancing around their sacrifice), and a sound (a caterwauling cacophony). The ritual has a purpose (breaking the protective magic of a nearby tomb), a method (sacrifice the new character) and physical manifestation (the sacrifice stretched over a slab of stone surrounded by burning driftwood). The lakeside has the water (freezing cold, lapping gently against the shore, and dark and foreboding), the shore (a stony beach, bordered by light woods and a light mist hampering long distance vision).

Creating an encounter this way takes a little more thought and a little more time, but I think it will pay off in the playing.

The illusion of a lot going on (p.18) – Venger Satanis suggests giving a moderately large number of things a brief mention rather than dwelling in great detail on one or two items. I think this works in a couple of ways.  Firstly, as Venger suggests, it makes the world seem full, secondly, if as the game master you’re mentioning lots of things, the players will have to pay that much more attention if they’re to realise which ones are important.

I've prepared a description of a trek through the woods bordering the previously mentioned that mentions game trails, bird song (or lack thereof), the occasional croft and a remarkable lack of humanoid inhabitants. Hopefully it will give the players a mental image of their environment that is a bit closer to my own.

The saving grace of 33% (p.30) – When situation arises that requires a decision, and where there could be a sensible, logical outcome but where you have an idea for something a bit left field.  Roll a d6 (or percentile) and if the chosen 33% comes up, go with the odd.

I don’t have a particular situation prepared for this one, but I want to keep the concept in mind for when the players have a weird idea. I won't want to run with their idea all the time but I reckon that 33% will help to keep them all entertained and engaged.

Attack descriptions (p.34) – This tip suggests aiming for three attack descriptions per combat; I try to provide attack descriptions during combat, particularly for critical hits and killing blows. However, I do sometimes feel like I'm the only one at the table making any effort at this. It's not unusual for a player to say ‘I attack him’ and I then have to ask what kind of attack they are making just to understand if I need to apply any special rules such as those for cover or concealment.

I'm going to ask my players to try to provide three descriptive attacks per combat and see how it goes.  Hopefully it will add a little spice to a process that can devolve into just taking turns to roll the dice.

If I can get these five pieces of the Draconic Method to stick I think my game will be improved and I can confidently move on to adopting other components of the system. My next game is this coming Friday so I’ll follow up next week with how I think things went.

Computer aided character design

You may have guessed from the title that this post is about computer programs, possibly on the internet, that step a player through the character creation process and that output a character sheet. It’s not really about the programs themselves, but focused more on the effect they have on the game.

I first encountered computer aided character creation when I started playing Dungeons and Dragons 3^rd edition. There was a CD in the back of the player handbook that had a nicely presented program that I played around with but that I didn't make serious use of.  I think at the time, pen and paper was more convenient, I knew the rules inside out, so the program didn't really add anything to my gaming experience.

A number of years later when the D&D 3^rd edition campaign I was playing in switched to 4^th edition I used computer aided character creation as I didn't own the 4^th edition books and had decided that I wasn't going to keep up with each new edition as it was released.

Right now, I'm running one Pathfinder campaign and playing in another, and since I have the books, I'm back to pen and paper, while most, if not all, of the other players are using PCGen to create their characters.

The main benefit that I can see with computer aided character creation is that it allows players who don’t have the relevant books to easily create their characters before the game. It also can produce some very nice, easy to read character sheets. From my limited experience it also greatly expands the amount of material available to draw from when creating a character. This is something of a double edged sword however, as it gives the power gamer more scope to find exploits within the rules and forces the game master to specify which resources can be used if they want to have access to the entire rule set being used in the game.

I am aware in my game of one instance where a character had a feat on their character sheet that was not legal. This was discovered when it became obvious that he had suddenly acquired a huge advantage over the other players, and I had to tell him to rebuild his character without it. Has this occurred with the characters of other players, but with more subtle results? Maybe, I have no way of telling without going through all my players character sheets to check, a task I have little enthusiasm for.

I'm also not entirely confident that bonuses to skill checks and such are always correctly applied, especially conditional modifiers; this seems to have arisen in my group on at least one occasion. I think that players should be able to explain the bonuses they have and be able to calculate them themselves. This brings me to an issue that arises most commonly with players who aren't fully conversant with the system they’re using and the one that causes me the most concern. The description on the character sheet of an ability/power/feat/skill may not include a complete description of the rules associated with it, leading to the incorrect use of said ability/power/feat/skill.

If your group creates characters together, having one or more players engrossed in their laptops at the time would of course be detrimental to the experience.

In my experience with creating 4^th edition characters, I found that I would tinker with my character, swapping feats and powers to observe the results and make better choices for my character. This could lead to players indulging any tendency towards min-maxing that they might possess, but it seems unlikely that most normal players will suddenly transform into power gamers as a result.

In conclusion, I think that as long as everyone knows from which sources rules are to be drawn from, and those rules are close at hand should an adjudication be required, computer aided character creation is a positive thing. Especially when it allows players who would otherwise struggle to get a copy of the book to engage in our glorious hobby.

Book review: How to game master like a fucking boss

When I first saw How to Game Master like a Fucking Boss by Venger Satanis I was interested in the book but somewhat put off by the title. What kind of cocky bastard gives a book a name like that? The really enthusiastic kind as it turns out.

The authors enthusiasm for Game Mastery is contagious, I got about ten pages in and decided that I would run my game on a week that I was planning to skip.

The intent of the author with this book is to present the 'Draconic Method', a system agnostic style of game mastering that has been developed over a period of three decades.

This book runs to 122 pages and consists of what I perceive as three main sections, game mastery tips, the checklist and assorted appendices.

Game mastery tips occupy roughly the first fifty pages of the book and are presented as bite sized chunks of advice, most of which are about half a page in length.

The first ten or so tips generally deal with what role playing and game mastering are, why we do them and ways to psyche oneself up to the task of running your game. As I mentioned above these serve to infuse the reader with a portion of Venger's enthusiasm for game mastery and these alone would make the book worth purchasing.

The remainder of the tips are practical in nature and pretty easy to implement in order to incrementally improve your game. Every aspect of role playing seems to receive attention, highlights for me which I'll expand on, included the authors advice on building encounters, positive affirmations and meditation. 

I always go into an encounter with a pretty good mental model of what is going on. Deliberately giving each encounter three elements and each element three aspects plus, optionally, three characteristics to each aspect is an excellent way to bring your mental model of the encounter out into the real world where your players can share it. I'm honestly surprised that I've never come across anything like this before. Revolutionary.

In my work I'm always using positive affirmations to encourage and reassure those I'm working with, and in hindsight it's surprising I never though to bring these to the gaming table.  You're sure to come across a number of tips in this book that are blindingly obvious in hindsight.

Rather than actual meditation, the author recommends spending some quiet time thinking.  This really resonated with me as I'm sure it will with many of you.  I've had insights into lots of things, not just game mastering while gardening or walking to the train station.

I did find some tips to be, perhaps, slightly odd. Despite having a matching dice set myself, I found the  recommendation to have matching dice curiously judgmental. Also, what to do about unwanted flirting seemed a bit irrelevant, but perhaps for those better looking than I it could be useful.

The tips don't seem to be presented in any particular order, for example 'unwanted flirting' is sandwiched between 'focus on one thing at a time' and 'have a backup adventure ready to go'; this has positive and negative aspects but on the whole I liked the approach as there is almost certainly something interesting on any random page even if it does make it slightly difficult to find any particular tip.

The Checklist is a list of ideas for things to include in your campaign.  It occupies roughly twenty pages, and at four or five items per page is a goldmine of game master inspiration. Not everything will be suitable for your game but most of it will be. As I was idly grazing through the checklist I pieced together an approximate solution to a campaign planning problem I've been grappling with for some time.

The appendices as I'm calling them consist of a selection of tables, a glossary for Viridian and some dungeon maps.

The tables could equally serve as inspiration while preparing your game or to fill in a blank that has arisen during play.  Those that stand out the most to me are one hundred questions to ask characters to find out a little more about them, a series of tables for creating a cult and a table of twenty unique NPCs.

The Viridian glossary allows a game master to deliver text or speech in a sinister sounding language the author has devised.  I haven't completely read this section but after a quick skim there appears to be a good selection of words that should allow wide range of phrases to be constructed.

Finally, at the very back of the book are three very different, unlabeled dungeon maps for those times when you need a bit of help coming up with the layout of that temple or thieves den or whatever. An excellent addition that the author could probably have gotten away without had he been less rigorous.

I have a digital copy of this book and it is professionally laid out in an easy to read two column format, although it could have done with more thorough proofreading. If my previous experience with DrivethruRPG is anything to go on, a physical copy should have good print and construction quality.

The cover image is gorgeous and evocative and there is plenty of art scattered through the book that will appeal to the thirteen year old boy in all of us.

The contents page actually stretches to a page and a half and unless you can remember the exact name of the section you're looking for you may have to search for a while to find just what you want.

How to game master like a fucking boss is a solid title with much to recommend it. If you run a game, you will almost certainly find a lot in this book to help you improve your game and to make you more enthusiastic about running it. I'm going to be implementing the Draconic Method in my game, I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

Venger Satanis takes game mastery seriously, maybe you should too.

How to Game Master Like a Fucking Boss is available from DrivethruRPG.com