An idea book for Fantasy Roleplaying Games offering answers to such eternal questions as "What's in the Giant's Lunchbox?" and "Why is there an Underworld?" The Dungeon Dozen provides over 200 system-agnostic random tables designed to fuel game ideas for GMs and players of fantasy role playing games. These tables run the gamut from quick monster generators, encounter tables, strange treasures, weird hirelings, and solutions to at-the-table quandaries for when the players take an unanticipated turn.Loaded with black and white old school dungeon art calculated to spur on the imagination, the PDF is thoroughly book-marked and has a quick-reference guide and full index.

A place to which a wizard withdraws from the world to pursue mastery. A place of magic and plasms and grotesques and horrors and treasures and doorways to other worlds. A place which, when abandoned by the wizard but with its treasures and dangers remaining more or less intact, is a terrible and antic catastrophe in process. A place which makes for marvelous location-based adventures. This book provides rules, guidelines, tables, and suggestions for creating wizards seclusia for your own campaigns, and features three sample seclusia in various stages of completion, including the Seclusium of Orphone of the Three Visions. Suitable for characters of all levels, usable with Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Role-Playing and other traditional role-playing games.

A fantasy adventure game, at its very heart, is about developing an open-ended "story" of the characters. The referee is in charge of the fantasy world, and the players direct the actions of their characters in that fantasy world. Neither the referee nor the group of players has complete control over what's going to happen, and the result is an evolving set of surprises for both the referee and the players. Unlike the players, as the referee and creator of the game world, most of your "work" is done ahead of time. To some degree or other, you have to create the groundwork for the adventure before the game starts. Even though no battle plan survives contact with the enemy - and if you're an experienced referee you know exactly what I mean - the game has to start ... with a starting point. This might just be a vague set of ideas, or it might be as complex as a set of maps with a detailed key and well thought-out encounters for the players to run into. The Tome of Adventure Design is organized as a series of "books," each one providing resources at every step of the way. The vast majority of the content of each book is made up of random generation tables that we created over a quarter of a century (sigh) for our own use. It shoud be said up front that these are tables for deep design - in other words, most of them are too long, and contain too many unusual or contradictory entries, for use on the spot at the gaming table. There are already many excellent books of tables for use on the fly; the tables in these books are different. They work best as a tool for preparation beforehand, providing relatively vast creative resources for browsing and gathering, rather than quick-use tables designed to provide broad, fast brushstrokes. Our shorter tables tend to deliver cryptic results designed to shock the reader's creativity into filling in the gaps, whereas the longer tables are unusably vast for easy random generation, being designed to shock the reader's creativity into operation by presenting a sea of possibilities.

From the creator of the popular blog The Monsters Know What They’re Doing comes a compilation of villainous battle plans for Dungeon Masters. In the course of a Dungeons & Dragons game, a Dungeon Master has to make one decision after another in response to player behavior—and the better the players, the more unpredictable their behavior! It’s easy for even an experienced DM to get bogged down in on-the-spot decision-making or to let combat devolve into a boring slugfest, with enemies running directly at the player characters and biting, bashing, and slashing away. In The Monsters Know What They’re Doing, Keith Ammann lightens the DM’s burden by helping you understand your monsters’ abilities and develop battle plans before your fifth edition D&D game session begins. Just as soldiers don’t whip out their field manuals for the first time when they’re already under fire, a DM shouldn’t wait until the PCs have just encountered a dozen bullywugs to figure out how they advance, fight, and retreat. Easy to read and apply, The Monsters Know What They're Doing is essential reading for every DM.

"An entertaining, race-against-time narrative." —Kobo review "A fast-paced look into seven-day roguelikes, something so niche most people wouldn't have heard about, but the book is well written and shows how important it is to get your thoughts down so you can sort out your ideas." —Goodreads review Eleven game designers. Eight grand ideas. Seven days to will them into reality. Every year, programmers around the world compete in the 7-day roguelike challenge, or 7DRL, a weeklong game jam where participants endeavor to design and program a roguelike role-playing game. Their obstacles: day jobs, family responsibilities, sleep deprivation, and visionary concepts too big for 168 hours to contain. Told over a series of daily journal logs, One-Week Dungeons: Diaries of a Seven-Day Roguelike Challenge chronicles the journeys of eleven 7DRL participants as they race to build their dream games before the clock expires. David L. Craddock writes fiction, nonfiction, and grocery lists. He is the author of over a dozen nonfiction books about video game development and culture, including the bestselling Stay Awhile and Listen series and Arcade Perfect: How Pac-Man, Mortal Kombat, and Other Coin-Op Classics Invaded the Living Room, and fiction for young adults, including The Dumpster Club and Heritage: Book One of the Gairden Chronicles. Find him online @davidlcraddock on Twitter.

Mankind has been under attack for fifty years by the awesome power of bosses and monsters who are the denizens of dungeons. Monsters started these attacks when a mystical beast named Raekast appeared and threatened the world, eradicating human life from several continents. Raekast threatened all human life until a mysterious ceremony called 'Rebirth' unlocked the hidden potential of humans strong enough to repel and defeat her. Raekast's final, desperate act caused dungeons to spawn across the globe. The greatest of these dungeons is known as Titan. Dungeons are a threat to humanity and nature alike. Powerful reborn humans known as 'Slayers' enter their dangerous depths to kill the monsters and bosses that live within and retrieve treasure, items and more. Tad Harrington, a video game loving 16-year-old high school student, was bullied relentlessly throughout his life. Tad's Rebirth date has come. His last hope is to be reborn a slayer strong enough to enter the toughest dungeons where a life of power and luxury could await him.When things don't go according to plan, Tad finds out he has a special Rebirth, one that can level up and grow stronger by defeating monsters. Starting from level one, how high can Tad climb? Can he overcome the challenges and become the ultimate dungeon slayer?

Deep dwarven cities of the underworld, Infested by conquering orcs, Enslaved by demons of skull and pyre ... Black labyrinths of mad demigods, Proving grounds for daring adventurers And graveyards for greedy fools ... Twisting passages, all alike, Where lurking trolls and shadow beasts Guard the deepest riddles of the nether ... If you have ever wanted to know how to quickly and masterfully create your own mega-dungeon for your pen-and-paper Fantasy Role-Playing Game (PNP FRPG) campaigns, this is the perfect book for you. This Game Master's guide will show you, step by step, how to take your vague-yet-promising ideas and how to sculpt them with precise and careful design decisions (enhanced, if you prefer, by random die rolls), allowing you to conceive an endless mega-dungeon in record time. Best of all, the CASTLE OLDSKULL CLASSIC DUNGEON DESIGN GUIDE is also system-neutral. No matter which of the many FRPGs you choose to play, from basic skill level to advanced, a first edition or a fifth or anything in between, the lessons you master here will serve you in your gaming for years to come. Learn how to make the most of your ever-dwindling prep time, so that you can spend those saved hours gaming with your friends! This old school Guide is filled to overflowing with more than 450 pages of design material and dungeon generation tables. Highlights include: * Hack and slash and beyond. 39 adventure scenarios, with 20 diabolical twists, totaling 780 great ideas for your next campaign. * A myriad of options. Over 10,000 unusual benefactors ("quest givers"), unusual wilderness encounters your players will never forget, and extensive rumor and dungeon history generation systems. * Every endless labyrinth ever, under one cover. Extensive details on realistic underworlds, hundreds of dungeon dressing ideas, over 10,000 room types, and much more. * The imagined made real. A complete second book is included herein as a detailed example of dungeon design, featuring over 60 pages of specific examples. The Goblin Head campaign environment supplement reveals exactly how a 13-level mega-dungeon can be conceived in a matter of hours. The CLASSIC DUNGEON DESIGN GUIDE is brought to you by Kent David Kelly of Wonderland Imprints, a role-player and Game Master with over 30 years of play experience. Best of all, if there are any other materials you would like to see relating to dungeon design, feel free to contact the author. Many more CASTLE OLDSKULL supplements are being prepared specifically to support the players, initiates and Game Masters of the Old School Revival (OSR). This Guide is your gateway to the realms of sword and sorcery. Join us for the adventure! (A complete reference work designed to supplement existing pen-and-paper Fantasy Role-Playing Games. 12 chapters, over 100 section topics, 60,000 words, 475+ pages; organized via a fully ordered table of contents. Just one of the proud creations available now from Wonderland Imprints - Only the Finest Works of Fantasy.)

For many tabletop RPG players, the joy of an in-depth game is that anything can happen. Typical adventure modules include a map of the adventure’s primary location, but every other location?whether it's a woodland clearing, a random apothecary or the depths of a temple players elect to explore?has to be improvised on the fly by the Game Master. As every GM knows, no matter how many story hooks, maps or NPCs you painstakingly create during session prep, your best-laid plans are often foiled by your players' whims, extreme skill check successes (or critical fails) or their playful refusal to stay on task. In a game packed with infinite possibilities, what are GMs supposed to do when their players choose those for which they're not prepared? The Game Master’s Book of Random Encounters provides an unbeatable solution. This massive tome is divided into location categories, each of which can stand alone as a small stop as part of a larger campaign. As an example, the “Taverns, Inns, Shops & Guild Halls” section includes maps for 19 unique spaces, as well as multiple encounter tables designed to help GMs fill in the sights, sounds, smells and proprietors of a given location, allowing for each location in the book to be augmented and populated on the fly while still ensuring memorable moments for all your players. Each map is presented at scale on grid, enabling GMs to determine exactly where all of the characters are in relation to one another and anyone (or anything) else in the space, critical information should any combat or other movement-based action occur. Perhaps more useful than its nearly 100 maps, the book's one-shot generator features all the story hooks necessary for GMs to use these maps as part of an interconnected and contained adventure. Featuring eight unique campaign drivers that lead players through several of the book's provided maps, the random tables associated with each stage in the adventure allow for nearly three million different outcomes, making The Game Master's Book of Random Encounters an incredible investment for any would-be GM. The book also includes a Random NPC Generator to help you create intriguing characters your players will love (or love to hate), as well as a Party Makeup Maker for establishing connections among your PCs so you can weave together a disparate group of adventurers with just a few dice rolls. Locations include taverns, temples, inns, animal/creature lairs, gatehouses, courts, ships, laboratories and more, with adventure hooks that run the gamut from frantic rooftop chases to deep cellar dungeon-crawls, with a total of 97 maps, more than 150 tables and millions of possible adventures. No matter where your players end up, they'll have someone or something to persuade or deceive, impress or destroy. As always, the choice is theirs. But no matter what they choose, with The Game Master's Book of Random Encounters, you'll be ready.

Ripped from the pages of Empire magazine, the first collection of film critic, film historian and novelist Kim Newman’s reviews of the best and worst B movies. Some of the cheapest, trashiest, goriest and, occasionally, unexpectedly good films from the past 25 years are here, torn apart and stitched back together again in Kim’s unique style. Everything you want to know about DTV hell is here. Enter if you dare.