So You Want To Be A Game Master: Everything You Need to Start Your Tabletop Adventure for Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, and Other Systems Paperback – 21 Dec. 2023

Well written, well thought out and useful.

I'm 75% done and I love this book so much. Although a lot of it is covered on the Alexandrian website there are certainly new parts which make the purchase price worthwhile. I highly recommend buying a physical copy so you can highlight and bookmark especially helpful parts to use during your prep. There's plenty of generalised advice, but I love how there's chapters on how to run different types of adventures such as dungeons, mysteries, and heists.Bottom line: Best GM Advice book I've ever read. Buy a physical copy to make full use of it.

My husband writes role playing games professionally but sometimes struggles to think of scenarios. He says this book is absolutely brilliant and is packed full of really great ideas. The delivery was in super quick time. My husband ordered two copies by mistake (one on his account and one on mine) but it was a fuss free return and an instant refund. Fabulous all round!

This is a superb book for those players who want to be, or are, gamesmasters. It is a detailed guide on how to prepare and run the vast majority of the types of adventure and campaign that you might want to. All the advice is specific and actionable. It provides guidelines and scaffolding for the design, with lots of practical tips, notes on how the preparation interacts with the roleplaying and rulings on the table - and importantly, the limitations and constraints inherent in the different adventure types. For example, wilderness travel might be best played via a 'route' adventure, a hexcrawl, a pointcrawl...or just 'the party arrives after 5 days of travel' and it explains why you might choose one over another in a given situation. The section on writing mystery adventures is genuinely superlative, as are some of the techniques around urban adventures. Just reading it made me start sketching out some mysteries and some campaign ideas to run at my table.It isn't a book which re-invents the wheel or radically changes how we think about adventures. What it does is show, in the simplest terms, so the newest GM can follow, is how each type of scenario works, how you can build one which will work, and if you want, how it can be incorporated into a campaign which can vary from the simple and effective to the almost incredibly subtle and complex.The book is rounded off with lots of sound and subtle GM advice on all kinds of things, from when and how to split the party, how much (or little) to prep, which types of adventure or campaign use the most prep and which the least, and when that prep is best done, how to roleplay parties and combats...all kinds of things.It is entirely system agnostic, although with more nods to D&D than any other individual system. No type of system is left out.The writing is friendly, clear and witty. The tone is spot on, certainly not taking itself too seriously but the author's enthusiasm for this form of entertainment is absolutely infectious. It is honestly the best book of its type I have read - it is a little difficult to imagine how it could be better at what it does. I am a bit sorry in a way that this review perhaps sounds a bit gushing in case that puts people off reading it. Don't be! If this is a subject you are interested in, it gets the highest possible recommendation.

You see a lot of reviews saying this is better than a DM's guide, and it kinda is. Labels things which you will probably overlook by the fluff of normal formats. Instead of inspiring you to think of how to do something this book breaks in up into practical chunks.Its not very flash tho and you might get overwhelmed by the format but its definitely great to skim through a relevant chapter to get a refresher on some core rules/approaches.

Whilst at first the book appears dense, the way in which the book is structured helps build from the ground up, with nuggets of wisdom that I found really insightful. Justin Alexander brings real clarity - putting words that crystalise notions that were half-formed in my head. It's accessible for new Game Masters, whilst being full of insight to hone the skills of more experienced GMs.

A complete guide both for beginners and experts!

As much as I like the book & author I can not in good faith recommend the Kindle version. Used the product in the desktop Kindle app, where I found it to be very laggy to flick through pages. Due to the DRM in place, it is not possible to download as PDF for easier viewing. Being unable to easily print individual pages for "at the table" use, is also a huge deal breaker. Refunded the product.