For a hobby with a lot of techniques and ideas to master, we’re terribly short of advice books. Aside from a wealth of excellent blogs, there’s really only the occasional book that looks at how to start GMing. The chapters in RPG books can be variable at best, and there’s a lot to the craft of GMing.

One of the best blogs out there for GM advice is The Alexandrian, and Justin Alexander has focussed a lot of his thoughts from there, and expanded on them, to release “So You Want to be a Game Master?” – a book focused on taking you right from the beginning of prep to running successful games.

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Full disclosure, I was sent a comp copy for review after some talks with Justin – you can hear me and Gaz interview him on the Smart Party podcast here (there’s a later interview about the book here), and I’ve already used some of the techniques – you can see an example of his dungeon technique in the Clockwork Citadel adventure for Fabula Ultima in the post immediately preceding this.

“How To GM” if you haven’t before

The book is structured like a manual and takes its process seriously. The first 180 pages are devoted to The Dungeon, although of course this is relevant to every site-based adventure. There’s sections on really practical things that are often skimmed over, like keying rooms, and how to run a site-based adventure (I like the concept of ‘dungeon turns’ and agree that it’s something early D&D was much more explicit about).

It includes a full 1st-level example dungeon, Mephits and Magmin, which demonstrates a lot of the principles, and then moves into a more involved dungeon structure (the “5+5 dungeon”) which codifies different sections of the site.

Following this, there’s both structures for prep, and advice on running, Mysteries, Raids, Heists, Urban Crawls, Hex Crawls, and Point Crawls. These increase in complexity fairly incrementally, and it’s great to read more examples of key Alexandrian ideas like the Three-Clue Rule being used. I’ve long been a fan of Node-Based Design (and you can see The Goblins and The Pie Shop as an example of a simple mystery structure using it) and it’s great to read these in more detail.

But What If I Already Know What I’m Doing?!

While the book is presented as a how-to and begins at the beginning, you’ll certainly find lots of useful content in here whatever your experience level as a GM – I know I found lots of techniques useful, and while I was more focussed on the prep ideas than the “how to run this,” there are some absolute gems here. There’s two pages explaining Failing Forward (in the Heist chapter, where it’s most likely to come up) that do better than most of the other writing on the subject to explain it.

The later chapters also provide some really interesting marrying-up of ideas. Ways of structuring an exciting fantasy city (split into districts, have different tasks at each one, embed flavour encounters in travelling) are presented coherently and clearly, and the “now do this” tone of the exercises makes you, well, want to do it.

Limitations

So, as with everything, there’s a focus to this, and there are a few limitations it’s worth thinking about out of the block. Firstly, this is focussed on fairly “trad” GM / player games – few of these techniques are going to be immediately relevant to, e.g., a PBTA game. 

The vast majority of examples provided, and all of the longer examples, are in a fantasy genre, too. This is perhaps understandable given the hobby’s dominance by D&D players – but interesting when I think often Call of Cthulhu games are the ones that suffer most from the pitfalls the mystery structure works to avoid. 

Overall, this is one of the most exciting books on GM prep I’ve seen, and I’ve read a lot of them. I’m already using plenty of the ideas in play, and you can expect to see some examples of his techniques featured in one-shots on the blog immediately.