My friend Mike Lythgoe (who I am totally stoked is getting ready to run Torg for us soon) asked for some suggestions on various sources to help Game Masters put together campaigns and run good sessions. He wanted system-agnostic stuff that would help make things go smooth (sorry, Mal). Thus was born GM Toolkit Week, a collection of some of my favorite sources for those who appreciate some advice, planning strategies, and handy tools for off-the-cuff needs.
PREMISE BUNDLE: PLOT IDEAS
Welcome to GM Toolkit Week here at SPOD. Thanks to my friend, Mike Anthony Lythgoe, you get a week’s worth of Picks specifically oriented on products that any Game Master should consider putting into their “box of tools and useful bits.” These are things a GM can call upon to help pull together a session of gaming and handle challenges in a clean, easy, and fun way.
I’m opening up with a bundle full of “Indie Rock Star” Berin Kinsman‘s Premise products. These are roll-grab-and-go hooks and adventure seeds that you can use to stoke the imagination furnace and get something interesting going at the table. This bundle pretty much sets you up for almost any kind of game for as long as you are likely to helm a table.
Here’s an example you can roll in the Fantasy iteration (on a result of 17):
On the eve of having honors bestowed upon them by the king, the protagonists finds their social and professional lives turned upside down by vicious rumors.
Protagonists
This premise does not require the protagonists to have any special abilities or a specific sort of background. The rumors should be credible, but can be based on the events of adventures played out at the table rather than events from the protagonists’ back stories.
Story Goal
The objective is to have the protagonists prove their innocence and worthiness, avoiding scandal and scorn. Their lives aren’t necessarily in danger, but their reputations are. Once the protagonists have accomplished this, you have reached the end of your story.
Obstacles
For this premise, obstacles will revolve around finding out who is spreading the rumors and proving that they are false. The least difficult obstacle will be discovering why people are suddenly treating them differently, and why the king is canceling the ceremony. This will escalate in difficulty as the rumors become widespread and the accusations become more terrible. The final obstacle should be confronting the antagonist, getting a confession, or acquiring the evidence to prove that the protagonists have been smeared.
Antagonists
The goal of the antagonist is to destroy the reputations of the protagonists. Their motivation might be based on revenge for some past defeat. They might need to remove the protagonists before they can perform some future mission for the king, which would mess with the antagonist’s plans. This premise works best with an established, recurring antagonist.
More than simple plot hooks or adventure seeds!
A premise is the heart of a story summed up in a single sentence. It should provide a general overview of what happens, without spoiling anything. A good premise contains, explicitly or by implication, four key elements of the story: who the protagonists are, what the goal of the story is, the sorts of obstacles that need to be overcome in order to achieve the story goal, and who the antagonist is.
Each premise provided in this book is more than just a story hook or adventure seed. It is the beginning of a story, your story, that you can flesh out and develop to suit your specific needs. These can be used again and again by varying the details, changing the four key elements, and altering details like locations, themes, and the rewards and complications that stem from whether or not the protagonists can achieve the story goal.
ENNEAD GAMES
It’s rare I pick an entire company’s catalog of products, but with it being GM Toolkit Week, how can I not point out the entire collection of amazing game aids that Ennead Games provides? A randomized list for just about every single thing I might imagine needing a list for, and tons of stuff I never imagined (but they did!). Names, equipment… rules for defining an entire plane of existence!
Ennead Games – A company dedicated to making materials for use in rpgs and writing, from Fantasy to Sci-Fi.
Seriously, just click the link and wander around their page.
ULTIMATE TOOLBOX
No GM Toolkit Week would be right without bringing out AEG‘s Ultimate Toolbox. This one really is system-agnostic, meant to help GMs running any game with a fantasy motif.
Based on the award-winning RPG book Toolbox, the Ultimate Toolbox starts off where the original stopped. Focusing on inspiration, the Ultimate Toolbox is 400 pages of the best charts, tables, and seeds of gaming adventure. From character backgrounds and world building to pirate lore and magical portals, every page is the key to adventure.
Covering seven distinct and ever-important topics, the Ultimate Toolbox is a must for any GM. Whether your games take place in the city, dungeon, wilds, or even at sea, there’s a chapter dedicated to it. Even PCs, NPCs, and magical creations get their fair share of attention, as well as advice and charts for building an adventure or campaign from scratch.
Begin your journey now.
This book can be used with any fantasy game system. There are no rules, no powers, no stats of any kind-merely page after page of charts, tables, advice and good solid gaming inspiration. With over 1,000 never-before-seen tables and a fully-loaded index, what else could you ever need?
KOBOLD GUIDE TO PLOTS AND CAMPAIGNS
The KOBOLD folks provide an entire excellent series of advice and tools for GMs to use in improving their craft and enhancing their games. Alongside the fantastic KOBOLD Guide to Worldbuilding, I highly recommend this useful tome to aid Game Masters seeking step-by-step guidance in putting together a campaign. Just look at the list of writers!
Run Your Best Campaign Yet
Whether you’re a new gamemaster or a seasoned vet looking for a new angle to shake up your game, these 19 essays by expert gamemasters help construct your campaign from the ground up—and keep your players engaged until the dramatic conclusion.
Kobold Guide to Plots & Campaigns shows how to begin a new campaign, use published adventures or loot them for the best ideas, build toward cliffhangers, and design a game that can enthrall your players for month or even years. Want to run an evil campaign, or hurl the characters into unusual otherworldly settings? Want to ensure that you’re creating memorable and effective NPCs and villains? We’ve got you covered.
Complete with discussions on plotting, tone, branching storytelling, pacing, and crafting action scenes, you’ll find all the tips and advice you need to take on the best role in roleplaying—and become an expert gamemaster, too! Featuring essays by Wolfgang Baur, Jeff Grubb, David “Zeb” Cook, Margaret Weis, Robert J. Schwalb, Steve Winter, and other game professionals.
This latest volume in the best-selling and award-winning series of Kobold Guides tackles the storytelling and campaign planning at the heart of any great RPG. Improve your game and expand your plotting and scheming skills with the Kobold Guide to Plots & Campaigns!
ULTIMATE GM-ING TOOLKIT: IMPROV, CAMPAIGNS, PREP, TOOLS
Of course, I must end GM Toolkit Week with the eponymous bundle that shares the name. The folks at Engine Publishing are friends, I won’t lie, and I highly respect their contributions to the state-of-the-art when it comes to discussions and guides for making gaming better. Mike Lythgoe, if you want the “boxed set” of awesome for your digital shelf, this is it.
(Text from Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters, one of the six amazing sources in this bundle.)
“Much more than a simple book of plots, Eureka! stands as one of those essential tools that GMs and game designers will find themselves reaching for again and again.” — Game designer Wolfgang Baur, Kobold Quarterly review
2010 Golden Geek Award nominee for Best Supplement
Featuring a foreword by gaming industry legend Monte Cook, Eureka contains 501 complete adventure plots usable with almost any roleplaying game, plus GMing advice and tools for making the most of every plot.
If you game once a week, that’s nearly 10 years of adventures, all right here in the largest collection of its kind ever published. Written by nine veteran game masters — the authors of the most widely read game mastering blog on the planet, Gnome Stew — Eureka is more than just adventure seeds.
Each plot includes a hook to draw your players in, an outline detailing enough material for a complete adventure, generally in the form of 3-5 meaty encounters, and any game mastering notes, plot twists, and advice you might need to turn that plot into a fun night of gaming.
Adventure hooks alone don’t give you much to work with, but fully developed adventures can be hard to personalize and fit into an ongoing game. Eureka is the perfect middle ground: We provide the main ingredients, and you decide how to prepare them.
Packed with ideas and inspiration and including DRM-free PDF, EPUB, MOBI, and text versions of the book, this massive collection is designed to be the ultimate adventure toolkit:
-----
And there's this week's special Theme Week set of Picks. As always, I hope you find some good stuff here (especially, in this case, if you're a Game Master or wish to be), and I hope you have a fantastic weekend of gaming and fun ahead of you.
Tonight, it's back to the inter-dimensional quest to find the five Integers for the Hand of God for the Storm Wardens in my Prowlers & Paragons epic mega-campaign, The Archos Imperium. With it being Donavin "Redeemer" Santini's birthday, I have something very special planned.
Tomorrow, a special birthday supers game, in which Carinn and I are guest players. That promises to be interesting, to say the least.
Finally, on Sunday, it's the Storm Knights and their interstellar quest to find the five cosmic members of the Pentat, which is the other storyline in The Archos Imperium mega-campaign. This time out, we have a very special guest player in the guise of Ron Blessing!
Wow, a seriously superheroic weekend!
The Adventure Continues!
Note that I use affiliate links in all my posts as a way to generate additional revenue for my efforts; I make my Picks and other article choices, however, based on the desire to share a wide variety of things with you. Thank you for your support.
Sean Patrick Fannon
Writer & Game Designer: Shaintar, Star Wars, Savage Rifts, much more
Please check out my Patreon and get involved directly with my next projects!
PREMISE BUNDLE: PLOT IDEAS
Welcome to GM Toolkit Week here at SPOD. Thanks to my friend, Mike Anthony Lythgoe, you get a week’s worth of Picks specifically oriented on products that any Game Master should consider putting into their “box of tools and useful bits.” These are things a GM can call upon to help pull together a session of gaming and handle challenges in a clean, easy, and fun way.
I’m opening up with a bundle full of “Indie Rock Star” Berin Kinsman‘s Premise products. These are roll-grab-and-go hooks and adventure seeds that you can use to stoke the imagination furnace and get something interesting going at the table. This bundle pretty much sets you up for almost any kind of game for as long as you are likely to helm a table.
Here’s an example you can roll in the Fantasy iteration (on a result of 17):
On the eve of having honors bestowed upon them by the king, the protagonists finds their social and professional lives turned upside down by vicious rumors.
Protagonists
This premise does not require the protagonists to have any special abilities or a specific sort of background. The rumors should be credible, but can be based on the events of adventures played out at the table rather than events from the protagonists’ back stories.
Story Goal
The objective is to have the protagonists prove their innocence and worthiness, avoiding scandal and scorn. Their lives aren’t necessarily in danger, but their reputations are. Once the protagonists have accomplished this, you have reached the end of your story.
Obstacles
For this premise, obstacles will revolve around finding out who is spreading the rumors and proving that they are false. The least difficult obstacle will be discovering why people are suddenly treating them differently, and why the king is canceling the ceremony. This will escalate in difficulty as the rumors become widespread and the accusations become more terrible. The final obstacle should be confronting the antagonist, getting a confession, or acquiring the evidence to prove that the protagonists have been smeared.
Antagonists
The goal of the antagonist is to destroy the reputations of the protagonists. Their motivation might be based on revenge for some past defeat. They might need to remove the protagonists before they can perform some future mission for the king, which would mess with the antagonist’s plans. This premise works best with an established, recurring antagonist.
More than simple plot hooks or adventure seeds!
A premise is the heart of a story summed up in a single sentence. It should provide a general overview of what happens, without spoiling anything. A good premise contains, explicitly or by implication, four key elements of the story: who the protagonists are, what the goal of the story is, the sorts of obstacles that need to be overcome in order to achieve the story goal, and who the antagonist is.
Each premise provided in this book is more than just a story hook or adventure seed. It is the beginning of a story, your story, that you can flesh out and develop to suit your specific needs. These can be used again and again by varying the details, changing the four key elements, and altering details like locations, themes, and the rewards and complications that stem from whether or not the protagonists can achieve the story goal.
ENNEAD GAMES
It’s rare I pick an entire company’s catalog of products, but with it being GM Toolkit Week, how can I not point out the entire collection of amazing game aids that Ennead Games provides? A randomized list for just about every single thing I might imagine needing a list for, and tons of stuff I never imagined (but they did!). Names, equipment… rules for defining an entire plane of existence!
Ennead Games – A company dedicated to making materials for use in rpgs and writing, from Fantasy to Sci-Fi.
Seriously, just click the link and wander around their page.
ULTIMATE TOOLBOX
No GM Toolkit Week would be right without bringing out AEG‘s Ultimate Toolbox. This one really is system-agnostic, meant to help GMs running any game with a fantasy motif.
Based on the award-winning RPG book Toolbox, the Ultimate Toolbox starts off where the original stopped. Focusing on inspiration, the Ultimate Toolbox is 400 pages of the best charts, tables, and seeds of gaming adventure. From character backgrounds and world building to pirate lore and magical portals, every page is the key to adventure.
Covering seven distinct and ever-important topics, the Ultimate Toolbox is a must for any GM. Whether your games take place in the city, dungeon, wilds, or even at sea, there’s a chapter dedicated to it. Even PCs, NPCs, and magical creations get their fair share of attention, as well as advice and charts for building an adventure or campaign from scratch.
Begin your journey now.
This book can be used with any fantasy game system. There are no rules, no powers, no stats of any kind-merely page after page of charts, tables, advice and good solid gaming inspiration. With over 1,000 never-before-seen tables and a fully-loaded index, what else could you ever need?
KOBOLD GUIDE TO PLOTS AND CAMPAIGNS
The KOBOLD folks provide an entire excellent series of advice and tools for GMs to use in improving their craft and enhancing their games. Alongside the fantastic KOBOLD Guide to Worldbuilding, I highly recommend this useful tome to aid Game Masters seeking step-by-step guidance in putting together a campaign. Just look at the list of writers!
Run Your Best Campaign Yet
Whether you’re a new gamemaster or a seasoned vet looking for a new angle to shake up your game, these 19 essays by expert gamemasters help construct your campaign from the ground up—and keep your players engaged until the dramatic conclusion.
Kobold Guide to Plots & Campaigns shows how to begin a new campaign, use published adventures or loot them for the best ideas, build toward cliffhangers, and design a game that can enthrall your players for month or even years. Want to run an evil campaign, or hurl the characters into unusual otherworldly settings? Want to ensure that you’re creating memorable and effective NPCs and villains? We’ve got you covered.
Complete with discussions on plotting, tone, branching storytelling, pacing, and crafting action scenes, you’ll find all the tips and advice you need to take on the best role in roleplaying—and become an expert gamemaster, too! Featuring essays by Wolfgang Baur, Jeff Grubb, David “Zeb” Cook, Margaret Weis, Robert J. Schwalb, Steve Winter, and other game professionals.
This latest volume in the best-selling and award-winning series of Kobold Guides tackles the storytelling and campaign planning at the heart of any great RPG. Improve your game and expand your plotting and scheming skills with the Kobold Guide to Plots & Campaigns!
ULTIMATE GM-ING TOOLKIT: IMPROV, CAMPAIGNS, PREP, TOOLS
Of course, I must end GM Toolkit Week with the eponymous bundle that shares the name. The folks at Engine Publishing are friends, I won’t lie, and I highly respect their contributions to the state-of-the-art when it comes to discussions and guides for making gaming better. Mike Lythgoe, if you want the “boxed set” of awesome for your digital shelf, this is it.
(Text from Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters, one of the six amazing sources in this bundle.)
“Much more than a simple book of plots, Eureka! stands as one of those essential tools that GMs and game designers will find themselves reaching for again and again.” — Game designer Wolfgang Baur, Kobold Quarterly review
2010 Golden Geek Award nominee for Best Supplement
Featuring a foreword by gaming industry legend Monte Cook, Eureka contains 501 complete adventure plots usable with almost any roleplaying game, plus GMing advice and tools for making the most of every plot.
If you game once a week, that’s nearly 10 years of adventures, all right here in the largest collection of its kind ever published. Written by nine veteran game masters — the authors of the most widely read game mastering blog on the planet, Gnome Stew — Eureka is more than just adventure seeds.
Each plot includes a hook to draw your players in, an outline detailing enough material for a complete adventure, generally in the form of 3-5 meaty encounters, and any game mastering notes, plot twists, and advice you might need to turn that plot into a fun night of gaming.
Adventure hooks alone don’t give you much to work with, but fully developed adventures can be hard to personalize and fit into an ongoing game. Eureka is the perfect middle ground: We provide the main ingredients, and you decide how to prepare them.
Packed with ideas and inspiration and including DRM-free PDF, EPUB, MOBI, and text versions of the book, this massive collection is designed to be the ultimate adventure toolkit:
- Fantasy, science fiction, and horror plots: 167 of each, all easily adaptable to multiple genres
- Clear, concise game mastering advice: We show you how to adapt plots to other genres (effectively giving you 464 fantasy, 420 sci-fi, and 338 horror plots) and how to turn Eureka plots into full-blown adventures
- The tools you need: Plots are grouped by theme, from “Revolt” to “Mistaken Jealousy,” and categorized by tags like intrigue, exploration, and combat-heavy
- Four indexes: Quickly find a plot for any situation by genre, tag, title, or author
- No game mechanics and no proper names: These system-neutral plots are simple to use and easy to personalize to your game
- Fully hyperlinked and bookmarked: We’ve made Eureka as user-friendly and GM-friendly as possible
-----
And there's this week's special Theme Week set of Picks. As always, I hope you find some good stuff here (especially, in this case, if you're a Game Master or wish to be), and I hope you have a fantastic weekend of gaming and fun ahead of you.
Tonight, it's back to the inter-dimensional quest to find the five Integers for the Hand of God for the Storm Wardens in my Prowlers & Paragons epic mega-campaign, The Archos Imperium. With it being Donavin "Redeemer" Santini's birthday, I have something very special planned.
Tomorrow, a special birthday supers game, in which Carinn and I are guest players. That promises to be interesting, to say the least.
Finally, on Sunday, it's the Storm Knights and their interstellar quest to find the five cosmic members of the Pentat, which is the other storyline in The Archos Imperium mega-campaign. This time out, we have a very special guest player in the guise of Ron Blessing!
Wow, a seriously superheroic weekend!
The Adventure Continues!
Note that I use affiliate links in all my posts as a way to generate additional revenue for my efforts; I make my Picks and other article choices, however, based on the desire to share a wide variety of things with you. Thank you for your support.
Sean Patrick Fannon
Writer & Game Designer: Shaintar, Star Wars, Savage Rifts, much more
Please check out my Patreon and get involved directly with my next projects!
