Justin Alexander - So You Want To Be A Game Master

So You Want To Be A Game Master: Everything You Need to Start Your Tabletop Adventure for Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, and Other by Justin Alexander
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What an amazing book on GMing.

What I really liked about this book is that it gives you ways to structure your campaign notes and ways to go about creating a campaign, or a dungeon, or one shots.

The book is like an organised collection of remarks that can help you:
- Avoid GMing mistakes (make the games as much fun)
- Structure your notes (it will tell you which notes structures to use, but it also gives you more if you want them)
- See campaigns and adventures as a collection of specific scenarios (dungeon, mystery, heist, …), so you can use them as kind of “mental models”
- It also tells you how to keep things dynamic, so your players won’t notice that you are using these mental models.
- Start GMing, by giving you a one shot dungeon adventure :D

The concepts are presented on different examples, usually with a fantasy and a sci-fi setting example of the concepts. So if you want you can take the structures and run a non-fantasy adventure with them - I ran a call of cthulhu one shot and a cyberpunk-esque campaign session while reading this book :D.

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