Heart has a pretty good GM guide but funnily enough, it gets best in the tips specifically for running fights. The Combat and NPC sections lay out their topics the best. Maybe the general tips for running roleplaying games just aren't for me, but I just found that the sections pertaining to heart had a wider application than the book implies.

"Pick a mannerism and go at it hard. Catch‐ phrases are good too. You’re aiming for professional wrestler grade characterization, not the main character of a seven-season HBO drama. Try and get your point across in ten seconds or fewer. Don’t be afraid to kill them. Every character is disposable, non-player characters doubly so. The story will continue even if your favourite NPC is dead, and it might be better for it (especially if it’s the player characters’ fault that they died)”

I love the NPC that goes hard. I love when you know what you're up to and having fun with it. There's other advice (for beginners and beyond) about what different NPCs should play up and I think that's really good to have in a story game.

What are you trying to evoke with these adversaries? What are they saying about your
Heart? Is the cannibal cult who’ve been plucking the weak and infirm off the streets of Derelictus a vast and powerful conspiracy with mutated foot‐soldiers bedecked in bolted-on armour, or are they desperate scavengers trying to satisfy an alien hunger in back alleys and deserted basements? Either works"

Heart tells you not to plan but it does ask you to think through the game you're about to play. I think that's a good technique to have. It's one thing to have notes, but I personally feel more at ease as a Game Master when I just deeply understand the moment we're playing through so I can provide a foundation for players to build upon, instead of being a mystery rube goldberg machine where I take a minute to look through my notes to see if anything wild happened that i jotted down in the line at the grocery store. I think Heart definitely has good GM advice for staying in that moment.

The Mechanics, eh that's another story. There's a comment on this old spire review I wrote that sets up a good point about Heart, that the GM is both inflicting consequences through stress/fallout and by introducing new things to the fiction to escalate it. Maybe there's a need for more gm advice that explains a kind of scenario-exploration-action-consequence process.

Today on my journey to read more GM sections in ttrpg rulebooks, I read some PbtA stuff. The principles really stand out and I think it's an interesting way to communicate/instruct technique! Every time I read pbta moves my opinion continues to crystallize; the move is a technique used in the ttrpg to anchor and pivot the fiction back into the conventional genre/convention/aesthetic of the game.

I read Fellowship Books 1, 2, and 3. Now I am reading the 4e DMG.

If you need a Game Master's Guide for ICON I would recommend reading the 4E DMG.

oh my god it actually explains mapping in the game terms that it needs. It's an encounter flowchart. Fuck. Those School Games better be taking notes.

I have read a lot of dungeon-creating advice since I started listening to the Adventure Zone in 2016, and never have I seen a design process advised where the contents should be created prior to the container. It's always build your map and fill it.

I've seen adventure flowcharts before (FFG's Edge of the Empire) but the specific example I always remember pivots based on if the players achieve a certain goal in a stage of the adventure. But here I feel a little more compelled to envision a series of self-contained activities (combat minigame, room investigation, roleplay scenario) that once decided, are organized first into a flow chart to appraise them for sequencing, then afterwards coated with a paint of "dungeon map." I thought I would just be reading over GM books and sections but I want to take a shot at getting a dungeon together in this way for ICON.

So far I have

• 4e
• Apocalypse World
• 5E
• Blades in the Dark
• Heart
• The Mothership Wardens Manual
• Pathfinder 2E GMG

Are there any other heavily discussed tomes that I should pick out to read over?