It Doesn’t Appear to be Trapped:
So, You Want to GM

You love RPGs, having played in others’ games for years. Or maybe you’ve never played, and the idea of leading friends, old or new, through collaborative storytelling around a table, real or virtual, while rolling dice and having fun just sounds amazing. But where do you start? It can all feel super daunting, like you would need advanced degrees in organization, storytelling, game design, and theater—at least. Well, there’s a book that can help you with all of that without needing to go back to school.  

The Tales of the Valiant™ Game Master’s Guide gives you the tools to be the awesome GM you’ve imagined, from learning how to better facilitate a sense of fun at the table to understanding how to build immersive roleplaying opportunities and exciting encounters. Whether you’re new to the game or a seasoned adventurer yourself, you’ll find the guidelines, tips, optional rules, and general inspiration within to be invaluable to your game:  

• Chapter 1: How to Be a GM provides advice on the interpersonal and organizational elements of being a GM, including finding players, creating effective session notes, dealing with player conflict, and maintaining healthy, long-term campaigns.  

• Chapter 2: Adventures and Campaigns breaks down the basics of what constitutes great fantasy adventures and campaigns. It also includes guidance for building your own adventures from scratch and for incorporating published modules and settings.  

• Chapter 3: Worldbuilding covers strategies and considerations for fleshing out the world of your game—a process called worldbuilding. Within, you’ll find guidance for creating evocative locations, cultures, civilizations, pantheons, and more.  

• Chapter 4: Advanced Combat expands on the basics of creating thrilling combat encounters, providing detailed guidance on everything from ways to depict the battlefield to new mechanics for unique encounter scenarios. It also includes new options for players in martial-focused campaigns.  

• Chapter 5: Advanced Exploration presents new ways to make exploration a thrilling pillar of your campaign, including guidance on building dungeons, spicing up travel, and crafting effective puzzles. It also covers new options for running hex crawls and adventuring in unusual environments.  

• Chapter 6: Advanced Social dives into enhancing social encounters and provides extensive guidance on creating and portraying memorable NPCs. It also includes mechanics to help guide roleplaying, including systems for tracking attitude and status. 

• Chapter 7: Adventuring Options contains a compendium of game elements ready to drop right into your game. Make your adventures even better with this suite of rewards, hazards, traps, downtime options, weapons, vehicles, and so much more.  

• Chapter 8: Homebrewer’s Toolbox sets you up with all the tools you need to modify existing content or create new options from scratch. Learn the theory, components, and math required to make great monsters, magic items, and character options. 

• Appendix A: Random Encounter Tables lists random encounters perfect for filling in the gaps of any adventure—covering every environment type and tier of play. 

• Appendix B: Fantasy Inspiration suggests books and other media to further inspire and guide you on the path to becoming a great fantasy storyteller.

For New GMs

For those who are new to the role of GM, chapters 1–3 provide guidance on how to get started and walk you through what you need to know. In a nutshell, you are the one that makes sure everyone is having fun. Everything else is secondary. Inventing cool mechanics, telling stories, running campaigns, and making maps are all just dressing. If all your players have a good time, it doesn’t matter what your story is about or how many notes you made. The faster you internalize that facilitating fun is your number-one job, the faster you become a great GM.  

For Seasoned GMs

Once you’re comfortable with the basics, maybe have a few games under your belt, this book helps you take it to the next level. In fact, no matter what level of experience you have, there are elements to both make your job easier and make your game better. For instance, chapters 4-6, respectively, are devoted to making your combat, exploration, and social encounters better. For combat, there are extensive details on how to build appropriate and balanced encounters, going in depth into your encounter budget and providing templates for specific encounters. Need a boss fight? Or a horde fight? You’re covered. There are also details for special combat situations, such as aerial or underwater combat, siege combat, vehicle combat; details for special monster scenarios, such as brawls/mobs and colossal creatures; and a slew of variant rules, such as called shots, lingering injuries, morale, and more.  

Chapter 7 brings you a ton of new adventuring options, expanding on what’s presented in the Player’s Guide with new curses, diseases, hazards, and traps, plus guidelines on how to create your own. For downtime options, there are rules for crafting magic items. Beyond that, there are new optional rules for incorporating dread, firearms, artifacts and sentient items, poisons, siege weapons, and vehicles—each with both guidelines and a slew of usable samples. There are also extensive guidelines on rewarding PCs with treasure and optional rules for new mechanics like chases and monster harvesting.  

Chapter 8 is all about giving you guidelines for building your own original elements, including character options, magic items, spells, hazards, and monsters. There are also templates to slap on existing creatures to make them bigger, stronger, faster, such as the clockwork construct or dragon lich or zombie. 

The book closes out with a double appendix. The first is full of random encounter tables designed to give you a quick encounter based on terrain type and party tier. The second provides lists of inspirational media to help inspire your game. So, if you’re ready to step behind the GM’s screen, ushering players through your own adventures, then Game Master’s Guide has you covered.

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Scott Gable lives in the beautiful underwater city of Seattle, where he edits, writes, and publishes all the merry day. He is an editor at Kobold Press (having just finished Game Master’s Guide and working hard on something else!), lead designer at Zombie Sky Press (producing strange new gaming options), and publisher at Broken Eye Books (purveying fine weird fiction).