There’s recently been a few books published about gamemastering, and I’m all for it. So much gets written online in a haphazard and sometimes contradictory way (as a visit to any forum will attest); it’s great to see people with genuine experience put down their thoughts in an organised manner. This is what Adventure Crucible does, a short chapbook available in print from All Rolled Up, and online from Drive Thru, in which Robin Laws gives a surprisingly deep dive into adventure structure and prep.

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Full disclosure – I did some proofreading on this book – but I’m certain my checking of spelling and grammar had only marginal impact on the finished product! It’s a nicely put together 52-page A5 book, art-free but designed nicely with clear layout and typography. There’s a whole series of Kraken chapbooks available, including Robin Laws’ earlier Sharper Adventures in Glorantha which is worth picking up for any lore-heavy mythic setting, not just for duck-fanciers.

As any readers here will know, adventure structure is a bit of an obsession of mine – it’s crucial to planning one-shots in particular to ensure pace and running to time, and it’s the main developer of player choice in games. It’s also, I think, relatively unexplored, with a few exceptions – and it’s interesting to contrast this book with Justin Alexander’s So You Want to be a Game Master, which also looks at structure as a core building block.

After a brief discussion of Core Activities of games – and imploring the GM to know what that is to begin with – it breaks down each of seven classic structures, and explores how they differ and a bit about how to construct them.

Seven Structures

In order, then, the book explores Dungeons, Mysteries, the Chain of Fights, Survival, and Intrigue in depth, with a short discussion of Picaresque and Drama structures. Rather than explore what it says about each, I’ll pick some highlights based on what stood out to me. The whole thing goes deep on understanding the core premise and the nature of obstacles in each structure..

In particular the Mystery section is a really great, concise insight into how to get started with writing a mystery scenario – I’ll be using it to prep some games, and there’s lots of practical tips to make it fit together. The Chain of Fights is the classic Feng Shui 2 scenario structure, and it’s deconstructed here to make it more broadly applicable – the classic scenario for supers games. The Intrigue section includes an idea of how you can play an adventure based on gaining favour from NPCs, sketched out in rough but easy to adapt.

The final two structures are presented as outliers – Drama, of course, is often best served by games that are designed to emulate it – Robin Laws’ own Hillfolk, or many of the newer PBTA games. 

The Picaresque structure left me wanting a bit more – it’s presented as being the usual structure for Paranoia and Dying Earth games – but I’ve got a feeling it’s a bit more common than that. The core activity – “morally ambiguous or foolish protagonists wander about meeting other fools and scoundrels” – sounds a like a lot of convention scenarios I’ve played, sometimes irrespective of what the GM had in mind.

Theory vs. Practicality

It’s fair to say that there’s a bit of theory front-loaded here in the structure descriptions. Following this there’s some practical advice on how to actually use these structures, including a step by step method and summary tables of each structure’s core ideas. There’s some discussion of hybrid structures as well, and I feel like these are a jumping off point that will be enough to get a GM started in order to progress to prepping a full game.

If there’s one thing that could be a criticism of this, it’s a bit short of examples. This is of course a feature of the form – it would be amazing to get an expanded version of this that can really dig deep – maybe a Robin’s Laws Second Edition – that could really dive into more detail. 

For this reason, comparisons with So You Want to Be a Game Master are a bit unfair – that’s almost 12 times the page count – but I’d still say the latter offers a bit more to the new GM. If you don’t want or need to read five chapters about designing dungeons, though, I’m sure that GMs will get a lot of interest and practical value out of this short chapbook – and I’d give it a full recommend. More of these sort of things please!

What’s your best GMing advice book? Let me know in the comments!