• he/him

A tabletop enthusiast, for better or worse.
Where to Find Me After Cohost:
Blog

Projects & Campaigns:
Clouder's RPG Spreadsheet
dungeon23: The Tree & The Tower
D&D: Old Flames
Break!!: Mossgrave
Erasure Adventure Prep

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @Scampir's post:

The Holmes Basic and the Moldvay-Cook Basic and Expert sets for D&D get brought-up a lot in the dungeon game scene. I read their BECMI successors and those are set-up to teach B/X D&D to both players and GMs in a way a lot of D&D books aren't.

They're not explicitly GMGs, but Aaron Allston's 1986 Strike Force supplement for Champions and the 1990 Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide by Jennell Jaquays and William Connors get cited as early published attempts to provide practical GMing advice. I think Robin Law also published stuff that did something similar in the 80s and 90s, but I'd have to go digging to confirm that.

If I remember, I'll page through my pdfs and books when I get home from work and add any others that come to mind here:

  1. B11 King's Festival - The first half has some solid D&D-specific GMing advice, but the adventure is mid-at-best.
  2. Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier - Another adventure, this one does a good job of explaining the philosophy and purpose of its design choices to GMs. Not strictly GM advice, but depending on how broad a scope you're taking it might be worth looking at.

Is this like "Games often brought up in how they vary in running games" or "Things that get Discoursed about a lot" or just like "This game does neat things from the GM perspective"?