Jeff Ashworth

The Game Master's Book of Magic and Mayhem is the perfect companion for young gamers aged 10-14, packed with everything they need to create unforgettable adventures for their tabletop role-playing games. Inspired by the bestselling Game Master series, this book is a treasure trove of ideas for young game masters and players alike. Inside, readers will find detailed descriptions of epic locations like ancient temples, mysterious taverns, and hidden lairs, each filled with fascinating lore and opportunities for exciting quests. Need a trap to foil an adventuring party? A monster to test their mettle. Or a puzzle to challenge their wits? The Book of Magic and Mayhem has them covered with creative, ready-to-use ideas for both Plus, non-player characters (NPCs) with unique personalities and backstories that will help bring any game to life, whether they're helping or hindering the players. The book also features a ton of random tables--perfect for quick inspiration when the story takes an unexpected turn. From treasure and magic items to random encounters and environmental hazards, these tables help game masters come up with new ideas on the fly. Designed to spark creativity and enhance every gaming session, the Book of Magic and Mayhem is a must-have resource for any young Game Master eager to craft amazing worlds and unforgettable adventures with their friends.

When your players are traveling through the wilderness from Point A to Point B, here's the key to making that journey as intriguing and exciting as possible! As every GM knows, you can spend hours preparing an adventure, but rarely is any map filled in so completely that you can easily define what lies waiting in the wilds between where they are today and where they'd like to be tomorrow. That's where The Game Master's Book of Legendary Locations comes in. Legendary Locations provides Game Masters with more than 150 fascinating sites, obstacles, legends and landscapes spread across eight environmental zones, designed to make every journey an unforgettable one. From poisonous swamps and bottomless wells to dragon skull temples and abandoned mines, each location includes a brief history, exotic lore, potential dangers to fight and treasures to be won, along with illustrations throughout. Larger entries include special Game Master notes and random encounter tables to ensure each incredible locale is as compelling as possible. Each environmental zone also includes a completely fleshed out lair, including monster stat blocks, a map and full page illustration. In addition, Legendary Locations also includes dozens of roll tables for determining random encounters, eerie occurrences, natural hazards and more, to ensure players are always experiencing something unique and unexpected.

The Game Master's Book of Instant Towns and Villages provides GMs with all of the inspiration they need to conjure up unique, vivid urban environments at a moment's notice, or when trying to come up with ideas for new places to be explored. This game-saving collection brings together nearly 170 fully-realized places organized by environment and divided up into villages, towns, cities and capitals, so that when players are trudging through a dangerous swamp, unrelenting desert or stormy coastline and need to find shelter, they can stumble upon a fully realised settlement, elven enclave or dwarven mining camp, without requiring any development in advance on the part of the game master. At its core, this book works a bit like the bestselling Game Master's Book of Non-Player Characters, but instead of providing information about the people one might meet, Instant Towns and Cities provides sketches of urban centers which can act as on-demand solutions to unexpected needs (ex. the characters need to find a physician right away and head for the nearest town, which until now, the GM had not developed) or as concepts that inspire entire adventure story arcs, depending on the party’s (or the GM's) wants or needs. Each location is packed with interesting people to meet, locations to explore and story hooks to investigate (or avoid!). It's a problem-solving tool unlike any other, certain to take the pressure off game masters who find themselves in need of a creative solution for urban areas at any time in any location.

As most TTRPG fans know, one of the most exciting elements of any roleplaying game is that the story can go anywhere at any time. Unfortunately, Game Masters can’t possibly prepare for every unpredictable request, unfortunate die roll or unbelievably bad player decision that might unfold at their table. That's where this book comes in: Featuring more than 500 more maps, roll tables and story hooks, The Game Master’s Book of More Random Encounters will save readers hours of planning by providing all new enchanting adventure maps, perilous plot twists and unexpected NPCs that they’ve come to expect from the Game Master series in an easy-to-follow format that's compatible with all their 5e adventures. Featuring plenty of practical places like taverns, inns and alchemist's labs as well as unexpected locations in far-off realms, farther-off planes and even the farthest reaches of the galaxy, it's everything readers loved about the first book - but EVEN MORE. This action-packed tome is the remedy for maladies Game Masters didn't even know they had. Includes: · Dozens of plug-and-play encounter locations suitable for most fantasy settings · Variant roll tables to mix up the action for every map · Three one-shot adventures to flow into your own campaigns · And much more!

Jeff Ashworth, author of the bestselling Game Master series of resource books for the world's most popular roleplaying game, combines his depth of knowledge about the mechanics of dice-based RPGs and the universal experiences gathered while playing a campaign to create a ruleset for leveling up your own life. Featuring invaluable lessons drawn directly from TTRPGs such as Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Starfinder, Blades in the Dark, Fiasco and other TTRPGs (“Always check for traps;” “Never underestimate the power of a short rest;” “Don’t feed the trolls”) as well as in-depth analyses of the ways in which these games’ character archetypes can be successful models for varying approaches to life (“Rage is My Armor: How to Live Like a Barbarian and Keep Your Job”), this player’s handbook for the game of life also features high concept illustrations of (and strategies for defeating) horrifying real-world monsters like that pile of junk in the garage, the soul-sucking ghost of nostalgia and the many-headed hydra that is the work/life balance. With more hilarious, practical lessons than you can fit in a bag of holding, and referencing more than a dozen popular tabletop roleplaying games, it’s a self-improvement book for anyone seeking guidance (both the spell and the advice) in their daily lives.

This magical boxed set collects all three of author Jeff Ashworth''s bestselling volumes in the Game Master 5E RPG book series. Inside, gamers will find: - The Game Master''s Book of Random Encounters, with a foreword by Michael Shea - The Game Master''s Book of Non-Player Characters, with contributions from Ben Egloff, Jasmine Bhullar and fantasy artist John Stanko - The Game Master''s Book of Traps, Puzzles and Dungeons, with contributions from Jasmine Bhullar, Three Black Halflings, Jim Davis & Jonathan Pruitt and artist Kyle Hilton It''s enough tables, traps, story hooks, adventures and characters to keep your players engaged for years to come!

The Unofficial Yellowstone Puzzles Collection is a celebration of America's favorite show. Yellowstone, in all its grit and glory, is a modern successor to that long and proud tradition. Inside you'll find trivia, brainteasers, puzzles and much, much more Enjoy sweeping Western vistas and classic Yellowstone moments as you test yourself with the finest brain teasers this side of the Mississippi.

The Game Master's Book of Traps, Puzzles and Dungeons provides GMs with endless options for populating their adventures with challenging riddles, puzzles, spiked pits, Rube Goldberg-style deathtraps and much more - eveything they need to push player character to their limit and bring new levels of excitement (and anxiety) to their game play. Whether part of a pre-planned adventure or a random encounter, these brain teasers, puzzles and traps will make every dungeon crawl, fortress break-in, or temple sacking that much more fun. GMs will find more than 60 challenging puzzles, 60 unique traps and 50 modular dungeon chambers, each with its own set of possible encoounters, meaning GMs can generate a fully-functional (or completely dilapidated) dungeon in a few rolls of a dice. With intricate technical illustrations, beautifully rendered top-down location maps and three one-shot adventures, written by RPG inflencers including Jasmine Bhullar and the creators of the Three Black Halflings podcast, The Game Master's Book of Traps, Puzzles and Dungeons is the ideal tool for any GM hoping to put the fun back in fun-geon*. *not a word.

For many tabletop RPG players, the joy of an in-depth game is that anything can happen. Typical adventure modules include a map of the adventure's primary location, but every other location?whether it's a woodland clearing, a random apothecary or the depths of a temple players elect to explore?has to be improvised on the fly by the Game Master. As every GM knows, no matter how many story hooks, maps or NPCs you painstakingly create during session prep, your best-laid plans are often foiled by your players' whims, extreme skill check successes (or critical fails) or their playful refusal to stay on task. In a game packed with infinite possibilities, what are GMs supposed to do when their players choose those for which they're not prepared? The Game Master's Book of Random Encounters provides an unbeatable solution. This massive tome is divided into location categories, each of which can stand alone as a small stop as part of a larger campaign. As an example, the "Taverns, Inns, Shops & Guild Halls" section includes maps for 19 unique spaces, as well as multiple encounter tables designed to help GMs fill in the sights, sounds, smells and proprietors of a given location, allowing for each location in the book to be augmented and populated on the fly while still ensuring memorable moments for all your players. Each map is presented at scale on grid, enabling GMs to determine exactly where all of the characters are in relation to one another and anyone (or anything) else in the space, critical information should any combat or other movement-based action occur. Perhaps more useful than its nearly 100 maps, the book's one-shot generator features all the story hooks necessary for GMs to use these maps as part of an interconnected and contained adventure. Featuring eight unique campaign drivers that lead players through several of the book's provided maps, the random tables associated with each stage in the adventure allow for nearly three million different outcomes, making The Game Master's Book of Random Encounters an incredible investment for any would-be GM. The book also includes a Random NPC Generator to help you create intriguing characters your players will love (or love to hate), as well as a Party Makeup Maker for establishing connections among your PCs so you can weave together a disparate group of adventurers with just a few dice rolls. Locations include taverns, temples, inns, animal/creature lairs, gatehouses, courts, ships, laboratories and more, with adventure hooks that run the gamut from frantic rooftop chases to deep cellar dungeon-crawls, with a total of 97 maps, more than 150 tables and millions of possible adventures. No matter where your players end up, they'll have someone or something to persuade or deceive, impress or destroy. As always, the choice is theirs. But no matter what they choose, with The Game Master's Book of Random Encounters, you'll be ready.