Game Masters Toolkit Now Available!

The second of the core rulebooks for Adventures Dark and Deep™ is now available! The Game Masters Toolkit gives a ton of tools that the game master can use to help run his games, and almost everything is generic enough to be applicable to any sort of OSR-compatible rules. Here's just a few highlights:

• Guidelines on what sort of races (sub-races, underground races, etc.) can be included in a campaign, and the potential impact of the choices you make
• NPC generation (including two big tables of physical and personality traits to give NPCs a little color quickly)
• Dungeons, wilderness, and underwater environments and hazards (including pits, weather, privation, swimming, etc.)
• Non-melee combat-- tournaments, hunting, etc.
• Rules for creating detailed treasure hoards that are more than just coins and gems
• Ships and waterborne travel
• Notes on creating a campaign setting; bottom-up vs. top-down philosophy; classical, underground, and Mythos-inspired campaigns; religions and deities (including a complete sample religion from history-- the Norse); the various other planes of existence (including variant systems and cosmologies)
• Notes on creating adventures; storylines vs. sandboxes, wilderness adventures, and urban adventures; and tips on handling clues for players, meta-knowledge, and problem players
• A comprehensive listing of magic items, including rules for intelligent items, selling magic items, etc.
• An appendix with more than 80 random tables for the game master to use as inspiration, to fill in details, provide quick answers to common questions, etc. Everything from "What does that elf have?" to "What's on that evil altar?" to "What is that mountebank doing here?" to "Why are those humanoids raiding the village?" to "What happened to me in the tavern last night?" to "What is the city watch doing here?"
• And of course tons more stuff

The rules are being released under the OGL, and as usual all hard copies of the book come with a complementary pdf copy. The whole is copiously illustrated, and features a cover by awesome gaming artist Christian N. St. Pierre. 

Some folks have been asking if they missed the Kickstarter for this book, and the answer is "no". There wasn't a Kickstarter for it. My previous efforts made enough that I was able to pay for the art and editing for the GMT from them. I don't want to keep going to the Kickstarter well unless I really have to; if I can Kickstart something on my own, that's what I'm going to do.

So please-- even if you don't play Adventures Dark and Deep at your table, take a look at the Game Masters Toolkit. There's going to be a bunch of stuff you can use in your game, as soon as you crack open the book.

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And while you're at it, please consider backing the Bestiary Kickstarter campaign. As of right now we're only about $500 away from getting an illustration for 1/3rd of the 900 monsters that will be in the book. That's a terrific place to be, but I'd really love to see each and every one of those bad-boys get a picture. And you can help make it happen!