We’ve all been there. It’s game night. The guys are coming over in an hour, ready to throw some dice and decompress for a few hours. But you’ve been so busy with work and other things that you haven’t had a chance to do any planning for this weeks session, much less what NPCs they might run into.
Well, lucky for you there exists two books brought to us by the gentlemen over at Gnome Stew to help us with this all too common problem.
Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters was published in 2010. It is actually riffing on Georges Polti’s 1917 work Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, in which he argues that there are – you guessed it – only 36 basic plots or dramatic situations for any work. So, the authors took these 36 dramatic situations, distilled them into themes, and wrote a bunch of short adventure hooks around them. They are roughly split into Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror, but each of them provides a number of ways that they can be readily adapted to other genres of play or even more specific sub-genres under the main genre’s umbrella. The first 20 or so pages are spent giving you a quick overview of how to use the book, different terms they use, how they crafted the adventure ideas and the why. The next three chapters are the meat of the book, comprising the 501 individual adventure hooks, giving you all of the information you need to run a night of successful gaming. There are combat heavy dungeon crawls to games of high concept intrigue and everything in between. If you can’t find something that you can drop into your game either as written or with some amount of tweaking, well… you’re just not looking hard enough. There’s background information, major NPC roles that can be filled either from existing characters in your game or by new NPCs, and encounter ideas and set piece concepts for your game. The final few pages of the book are dedicated to not one, but four different indices allowing you to search for adventure hooks by tags or keywords or even individual author if you have a favorite contributor to the blog.
Published the next year in 2011, Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game is the same thing as Eureka, but for NPCs instead of adventure hooks. The first pages are spent going over the details of the book – how the NPCs were created, keywords and other terms that are used in the book, and how to take them and turn them into something bigger than the basic write up. The rest of the book is then devoted to the main thrust – the NPCs. They, like Eureka‘s hooks, are divided up by genre: Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Modern. Each chapter then further divides them into Allies, Enemies, and Neutral characters before further elaborating on their background, motivations, personality traits, and tips for effectively roleplaying the character and bringing them to life. The final few pages are, also like Eureka, filled with several indices that list the NPCs by trait, name, genre and faction, and finally by author.
Individually these books are powerful resources. But it doesn’t take much to figure out that by combining them, they can before even more effective. One of my favorite things to do with these books is to play a game called “Eureka Roulette.” Have your players pick a number between 1 and 501. There’s your adventure hook for the evening/convention slot/what-have-you. Give yourself the requisite amount of time to look through the adventure and come up with a plan. Grab some NPCs from Masks that you can use, throw together or pilfer and reskin the game stats that you need and you’ve got a game session for the evening.
So, if for whatever reason you still don’t have these books on your shelf, then run, don’t walk, over to Engine Publishing. And while you’re there, check out some of the Gnomes’ other products.
Ben Erickson
