GM’ing Resources

House Rules and House Setting

  1. House Rule: The Wandering Walk
  2. House Setting: The Scarp

Best Books for GM’ing

  1. Prepless GM By Paul Camp.
  2. The Monsters Know What they’re Doing: Combat Tactics for Dungeon Masters by Keith Ammann
  3. Explorer’s Keys
  4. So You Want To Be A Game Master: Everything You Need to Start Your Tabletop Adventure for Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, and Other Systems

Other GM’ing Books

  1. Your Best Game Ever I haven’t read it yet but seems to have some good info.
  2. The Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master I haven’t read it yet but seems to have some good info.

Best Videos

  1. 7 Types of NPCs excellent youtube video by Guy Sclanders.
  2. Ginny D’s 50 Questions to Flesh out PCs.
  3. Numenéra Movie: Strand short movie that is good at setting the stage.
  4. Railroading, Agency and Choice
  1. 7 Tips for Numenera Players excellent tips for players by Infinite Construct.
  2. Play Counter Strike, Make Better D&D Dungeons excellent tips for making non-linear dungeons that carry a narrative thread. Really helps avoid a rail-roady linear map.

Other Resources:

  1. Consent in RPG Check List Excellent resource.
  2. The Infinite Construct (YouTube Channel) has some great music and Numenera Q&As.
  3. List of Free Cypher System Resources
  4. Cypher Unlimited YouTube Channel for a podcast on Cypher System.

Keys

In Numenera’s Instant Adventures two neat concepts are introduced. (books: Weird Discoveries and Strange Revelations and Explorer’s Keys) Instant adventures rely on these to drive the quick mostly improvised adventures, and they can be useful in your own adventures. Rather than a set path these adventures rely on keys or story points that drive the story forward. There are two kinds of keys.

  1. Keys that are Probably Necessary. These are story points that are necessary for the progress in the adventure.
  2. Keys that Make things Interesting. Their main purpose is to “inject drama into the meta-game.”

By using this keys the PCs don’t know if it is a necessary key or one meant to make things interesting. They have to figure it out.

Other Cypher Systems

There are other RPGs that use the Cypher System, like The Strange and Predation and the Generic Cypher System.

The Strange

In The Strange there are portals to different worlds; worlds that seem to be born from the tales and imagination of people on earth but are real… and someone has to stop these worlds from spilling into ours…

The Strange meshes so many genres it can be used to have many different kinds of games in one campaign.

Cypher System

These are the general rules that allow you to play in many genres like Fantasy, Modern Urban, Sci-fi, Superhero, etc.


Other Resources

Glossary of landforms

Image Resources