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| Worlds of High Adventure (Non-Final Mockup Using Cameron Hawkey's Cover Art) |
“Heavy is the head that wears the crown! In role-playing games, the position of the gamemaster carries the most responsibility, as it is a formidable task to entertain and challenge an entire group of players from session to session while preserving the game’s continuing appeal and mystery. Fortunately, the tricks and techniques required for gamemastering are easily learned with a little practice, and perfected through continuous play. All it takes is a lively imagination, sound judgement, and a pinch of ambition.
This volume provides guidance and time-tested techniques emphasizing the practical side of gamemastering to assist in fulfilling these ambitions. Building on the philosophy of classic adventure gaming, and focusing on player agency, gamemaster creativity, and fast, open gameplay, it offers comprehensive guidance for running old-school games, and designing adventures, campaigns, and game worlds. The book provides not only advice, but also a rich toolset to help both during preparation and at the table: procedures of play to facilitate a smooth game experience, a broad selection of monsters and magic items, as well as a large set of random generation tables to inspire gamemastering creativity.”
After all kinds of delays that took a year and then some, I am happy to announce the forthcoming release of my book, Gamemaster’s Guidelines Beyond Fomalhaut. This is going to be a large, comprehensive guidebook focused on providing practical advice on designing and running old-school adventures and campaigns, from basic philosophy to tested design methods and a whole lot of supplemental material (including optional rules, monsters, treasure, and random generation tables). You may have seen some of the book’s contents on this blog in less polished form; this volume has a lot of that, but most of it would qualify as new for the international reader.
The book will be a 292-page, illustrated hardcover retailing for $60. We are currently at the point where final proofreading is coming in, the cover design is being finalised (what you see above is my sorry mockup superimposed on Cameron Hawkey’s outstanding cover art), and we are gearing up for printing and binding. It is expected that copies will be available in mid-October, and if things go well, as a debut release at Cauldron Con 2026.
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| Antique Mysteries and Dark Magic |
What it is
In modern old-school gaming, despite a generous supply of solid materials, there is a conspicuous absence of reference books to help people learn gamemastering from the ground up, or pick up additional techniques beyond the basic level. There is solid guidance out there, but an accessible, detailed how-to is mostly missing. The main game systems in circulation are rather laconic on this matter, focusing on rules and “stuff” rather than guidance in their GM sections. The reasons for this are partly historical: when this thing started in the 2000s, the people involved were assumed to be old hands who knew the AD&D DMG and the B/X rulebooks inside out, and didn’t really need more than what those works and some forum discussion couldn’t provide. Over 20 years later, this is no longer the case – there is a lot of information out there, but much of it is disorganised or tucked away on obscure sites; likewise, as old-school gaming lost its focus, a lot of its assumed knowledge base became muddled and uncertain. OSRIC 3 is an excellent game aid where explaining the rules are concerned, but it is not a book focused on telling you how to be a GM, or how to improve your skills.
Gamemaster’s Guidelines, whose first version was released in 2008 as the GM’s booklet for my old-school RPG, Sword and Magic, seeks to fill this gap. It is intended to supplement your ruleset of choice (OSRIC by default, but easily applicable for other old-school systems), and focus on the practical side of gamemastering – the nuts and bolts of running a game, creating various types of adventures, managing a larger campaign, and designing fantastic settings. It gives readers the basic and advanced techniques, as well as a complex view of how the pieces fit together, and how to make it your own (which is the natural and really fun part of it). It follows the philosophy of Classic Adventure Gaming with its focus on campaign-level play and high player agency, and the Judges Guild tradition of sandbox campaigns and sword & sorcery-flavoured adventure gaming with a hint of weirdness. It is not exhaustive, but it is intended to provide a full picture.
As all good things, it is also something with a personal stamp – not entirely the D&D of Gary Gygax and Bob Bledsaw, although indebted to both and standing on these giants’ shoulders. It is what we have made of it over years of play. Therefore, the book also presents optional rules that have stood the test of time in our campaigns, discussions on world design the way we have enjoyed them, and creatures and magic items that came from these games too, along with a bunch of random tables which served me and my friends in numerous campaigns. Ultimately, your game is yours, and it is up to you where you take it. This is where we did.
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| "A-ha! I knew it had a section on summoning the Colour Invisible to Man!" |
What’s in it
Gamemaster’s Guidelines is organised into nine chapters as follows:
I. Guiding principles: A primer for CAG-style play, thoughts on sword & sorcery as a distinct style of fantasy, and sources of inspiration (calling it “Chapter I” is a bit less mysterious than “Appendix N”, but we will live).
II. Gamemastering: This chapter offers an introduction to basic and advanced GMing techniques. It discusses “invisible” issues such as effective descriptions, questions of time management at the table, improvisation, and so on. It offers advice on common problems cropping up in a game, as well as different game styles and how individual player preferences can impact the campaign. It considers issues of simulation and verisimilitude (along with their limits), how to run NPCs, and matters of game balance and the level of challenges. Finally, it offers simple, robust tools for harnessing randomness for creativity.
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| "Now was that Blade Venom, Type III, or Purple Worm Extract?" |
III. Optional rules: The chapter is a collection of rules drawn from our games. These are fairly small, modular rules that can be adopted piecemeal into your own game. The section adds simple combat options including abstract positioning and pursuit rules, and a simple mass combat system (with naval and siege options). It offers options for experience and magic, including notes discussing the interpretation and extension of common spells, the role of divinations and illusions (both prominent in our campaigns), as well as magic item creation. Survival rules, poisons, disease, and a bunch of traps round out the chapter.
IV. Adventures and campaigns: The book’s largest section, encompassing the adventure styles you can find in classic adventure gaming. It offers a general discussion on open—ended scenario design and player agency. It offers guidance and procedures for location-based adventures including dungeons, wilderness exploration (with a variety of approaches from journeys to point-crawls and hex-crawls, and procedures which interface with them), and cities. In all cases, it focuses on what is gameable, and how to focus design work on actual play. It also delves into the conundrum of situation-based adventures, which tend to have an often justifiable bad rep in old-school circles, and discusses how they can be used well in our paradigm. The chapter closes with an in-depth discussion on constructing and running larger-scale campaigns, and how to do so without being overwhelmed. This section thus discusses issues like the information economy, why you need STRICT TIME RECORDS, and bottom-up sandbox design.
V. Fantastic worlds: This chapter delves into creating game-friendly settings, the implications of fantastic societies, with a discussion of level demographics, civilisation vs. wilderness, the role of magic in a fantastic society, the dreaded magic shop issue (something the book supports), and so on. A larger section deals with religion, and how characters can sacrifice to, defeat, and perhaps become gods. A shorter section rounds out the chapter with a discussion of variant fantasy settings, from prehistoric milieus to the weirder end of the post-apocalypse.
VI. Taxes & death: This is a slightly more complex rules module offering basic domain management guidelines. It comes with procedures for taxation, regional development, construction, and army upkeep. It is not a “deep” system (as they say, “ACKS already does that”), but it is one which can be run in a reasonably pain-free way if your players happen to become the lords of a small city-state or satrapy.
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| The Floating Fungus is Introduced to a Company of Adventurers |
The reason for this duplication (which I ruminated over a lot during development) is to offer a complete on-hand resource, but particularly because the book also includes a very large, complex set of random encounter tables which use this particular monster selection. In the proud tradition of AD&D’s Appendix C, it includes tables for wilderness encounters for various climates and terrain types, as well as ruins, seas, cities, and the Underworld (as in the kind of massive megadungeons which stretch deep downwards into the depths of the earth). We have played the hell out of these tables over some 20 years (and they have developed gradually), and this together forms the “implied setting” of the campaign.
The chapter also includes a large section of typical NPC stats for human encounters, a fun one-page section for generating adventurer parties (which I am incredibly happy with), and notes on monster customisation.
VIII. Treasure: As the name implies, this is a whole bunch of magic items, again mixing old and new, and rounded out by a bunch of random tables. These items are usually on the lower and middle part of the power scale, with an emphasis on “tricky” items with odd powers and interesting drawbacks – even some cursed items which can be fun and useful! There is a lot here, from the sword of lions (which rusts in the hands of a cowardly user, but is restored in the hands of the bold) to the figurines of the lesser lords (tribal fetishes offering their own idiosyncratic advice) and the pendulum of graves (which divines a grave’s contents when swung above it). Of course, this book would not be an EMDT production without a selection of technological devices, so those are here, with rules for laser pistols, but also the weirder edge of sinister future technologies such as reversal, a horrible serum inducing rapid reverse evolution, and the doctrinator, a device implanted in the skull to compel correct behaviour. The chapter includes its own treasure generation system, and tables for jewellery and exotic goods.
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| What is Over here? |
Tables are offered for exotic ruins (such as a ruined step-pyramid once used as a garden, and now as a refuge), islands (such as an island with a lake and several streams, covered by strange mists, and hiding plantations and lost statues, as well as a garrison), and weird civilisations (such as a depopulating, militaristic society striving to achieve a bucolic utopia, plagued by mysterious disappearances and ruled by a cadre of philosophers).
Tables for curiosities include some usable to stock places like laboratories or temples (e.g. with drapes, an orb, and braziers), some to generate archaeological rubbish (going from broken pottery to the wreckage of great machines), and some to discern the functions of magical things (e.g. a benevolent oracle), or random teleporters and gateways (e.g. to a similar, but subtly different reality).
There is a table of 100 curses (including the Curse of the Fire-Worshippers, which draws the character towards all manners of fire, and compels their worship), carousing complications (e.g. gaining an influential, but very temporary friend), and downtime events for missing characters (e.g. being challenged to a duel, or finding a trail to a treasure).
How it can be ordered
There are simple answers and, regrettably, complicated answers.
Outside the US, the book will just be available from my Bigcartel store, as well as partnered stores. If you are in the EU, there is a small but non-zero chance that the EU has effectively destroyed its single market and all small, independent webshops therein with a retarded environmental regulation a few days ago. If this is the case, and the regulation gets enforced instead of withdrawn, then EMDT is a dead company walking, and so are most small RPG publishers in Europe, along with all other small creators selling custom jewellery, art prints, or handmade baby clothes. I sincerely hope it is not enforced. It is some insane shit, the kind that defines modern Europoor politics, and makes you wish for the return of the Habsburgs.
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| No! Don't Do It! There Will Be Ways to Buy the Book! |
Furthermore, the book will be available from Dark Future PDX in Portland, OR. They are a small, friendly old-school game store who have accumulated a good rep, and I am happy to note that they carry my stuff. So buy with confidence – if you buy from them, you are eligible for free PDFs as always. There may be other distribution partners too in the future.
If you come to Cauldron Con, I may have advance copies available through the organisers. See you there!
Preview – Dungeon adventures
Finally, after all this long talk, here is a 12-page preview of Chapter IV’s section on dungeon adventures, discussing mapping, encounters, and gamemastering procedures. Enjoy!
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| "I ain't afraid of no Level V encounter table!" |
