Recommended GMing Books

[DemoGraph]

- SYW I remember best for node-based advice on city crawls, because it coincided with my considerations for a game I'm in the process of making.

This was the most revolutionary part for me, too. I don't know of any other book with clear urban crawl procedures.

I wouldn't call it revolutionary, but rather pleasant due to confirmation bias.

As I mentioned elsewhere, recently I've been mulling on a modern day setting. It obviously has to be sandbox, because
- it's more interesting both for me and my player,
- I haven't GMd for a long time and would need a lot of redundancy (in case I **** up some hooks) that could be provided only by sandbox.
Another issue is, I never ran a modern day setting. From the get go it became obvious that traditional dungeons and hexmaps are ****** options for a 15 million people large megapolis. So I mucked with ideas for mechanics for a day and despaired.

Then I recalled that every dungeon is basically a vector with rooms being points and doors being edges. Each point also has some challenge (mob, trap, etc.) to pass. And the only thing that makes dungeon different from, say, an investigation story is geographical proximity of the nodes. So turning the dungeon into a series of points of interest dispersed through a metro area seems logical.

Then you told me about Nights Black Agents and Esoterrorists and I found there a "conspyramid" (sp?) that was basically a graph of challenges as well, and it clicked. So node-based advices in SYW (and GM) fell on fertile soil.

It's interesting that none of them touches upon the question of "GM fun" in the matter. It's as if it was obvious. It's not that way to me.

I hadn't thought about it before, but I do find it intuitively obvious. For me, it's the realization of the fictional world. I've posted somewhere before that it's the sharing of the world between minds that makes it feel substantial to me. Running a serious game in which everyone becomes invested is satisfying in and of itself. I suspect most GMs feel this way, which is why it goes unmentioned.

Well, it's not that obvious for me, but I'm old and grumpy.

In my own worlds, I had conceptualized the difference in power and potential between PCs and the average person as the PCs' being people born with greater souls.

Literally Hitler.

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[WhiteShark]

I've been going through the archives of https://thealexandrian.net/, Justin Alexander's blog. Many of his ideas made it into his book, but there's still a lot of good stuff to be found there (various game structures that didn't make it into the book, campaign logs, little tips and tricks, etc.). Apparently he's writing a second book as a companion to the first, so it seems he's trying to cover everything. I'm excited for it. I don't think there's anyone else who gives practical GM advice of this caliber.