Good Books for Wannabe DM

[Galethorn]

As will I. Your recomendation was the bill that broke the accountant's desk, so to speak, and I finally ordered the thing from RPGShop a few minutes ago.

 

[JoeGKushner]

If you can find them, the old DMR books for 2nd edition have some great advice. I recommend the first two, then five. In addition, the World Builder's Guide and the Dungeon Building Guide, both very good.

In 3rd ed or neutral, you have Robin Law's Master's of Game Mastery. Then we have the book by the people who did Fudge, GM Secrets or something. It was okay. Good for a new GM. Then we have Johnn For. Look for his website, buy his book on NPC creation/use, buy his disk with all the articles indexed. Great resource there.

In terms of starting modules, yes, Orcfest is a great adventure. Goodman Games has many 'classic' or old style dungeons if you will that don't require a lot of work to integrate into the game and are easy to run, if you want to run a dungeon.

 

[The Cardinal]

I considered myself a "veteran GM", if not a master of the art, when I had been doing it for 20 years. Then a couple of years ago I got Robin Laws' Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering and I felt like I learned more in one evening's reading than I had in the last ten years I'd been GMing. I can't recommend this book enough in terms of what it teaches you about how to deliver what your players want in the game and how to do it, while making the game fun for yourself as well. Get it. Read it. Learn it. Love it.
Good luck.

ditto & seconded!

 

[Stone Dog]

You might also consider a subscription to Pyramid, the Steve Jackson Games webzine. It is not strictly GURPS material and many of the articles that come out every week give you something to think about. Also you get access to the entire archive of past articles including John Wick's excelent "Play Dirty" essays. Also Ken Hite's "Suppressed Transmission" articles are more than enough to get the right level of weird into any game.

 

[JoeGKushner]

You might also consider a subscription to Pyramid, the Steve Jackson Games webzine. It is not strictly GURPS material and many of the articles that come out every week give you something to think about. Also you get access to the entire archive of past articles including John Wick's excelent "Play Dirty" essays. Also Ken Hite's "Suppressed Transmission" articles are more than enough to get the right level of weird into any game.

Pyramid does have some great things going for it.

As a former subscriber, I say that last time I was there, they refused to go PDF format and that they dropped all art and removed all d20 content to do the d20 Weekly thing.

If it's PDF with art I'd love to resubscribe. Any info on what's going on with it lately?