Customer Reviews

Dungeon Master's Design Kit (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Accessory)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a nice little tool, and remarkably useful even for D&D products several generations down the road. Easily the most relevant section today is "Book III: Adventure Cookbook," which is a fun brainstorming tool for getting adventure and campaign ideas flowing. The DM rolls dice for theme, setting, villain and various plot points, and the results, although random, often amount to the beginnings of a promising adventure. The charts and forms in the first two books are a little overcomplicated for my taste, but they could still generally be used with third-generation-era D&D. Note that there is basically nothing here on overall world-design. Included is a module with some fun ideas.

I stumbled upon this thing years ago in the bargain bin of a gaming store in Oslo, Norway and it has scince been THE single most used TSR product I've ever owned.

I've been among the organizers of a local gaming Con, RegnCon, for 10 years, and this baby has enabled me to make and run adventures when there just didn't seem to be enough time to get it done. The strength of the product lies in that it formalizes a lot of the things a good DM/module designer is aware of, or should be aware of if he/she wasn't organizing 1000 other things at the same time.

It's also easy to adapt to any other system, and I've used it for Cyberpunk, WoD and Warhammer FRP as well as for DnD. Just remember not to feel too restricted by your initial results. Buy this, roll the dice and feel the ideas flowing!

This is one of the best products ever put out by TSR. Harold Johnson and Aaron Allston created a near-perfect system to streamline the adventure creating process. Starting with just a few ideas, you can turn out a quick, dramatic, original and uniquely detailed adventure, incorporating ideas you never thought of before, using an ultra-fast layout system that's very similar to planning out a complicated novel. If you write your own adventures, or just modify modules to fit perfectly into your own campaign, you need this set! Includes a long-forgotten module, laid out in the format so you can see how it's done. Perfect!

Adventure modules do the fishing for you, but this book will teach you to fish, enabling you to create lively, entertaining adventures for your players for years to come. Of all the accessories, rulebooks, etc. I got for D&D, AD&D, GURPS, etc., this has been by far the most tapped, and it can be used for any RPGs system, particularly ones that provide a framework for fantasy campaigns.

I agree that the third of three booklets in this package is the most useful, but it alone has been well worth the price of this book over the years. Other reviewers overlook the fact that this book also comes with a complete adventure, presenting even more bang for your buck.

I have actually bought this little gem twice. The first time I found it in a bargain bin a KayBee toys for a dollar at the end of the 1st edition AD&D era and figured I'd give it a shot because it was cheap. It wasn't cheap, it was a bargain. I lent it out to a fellow DM who moved out of area with it and despaired of ever seeing it again, until the internet and EBay came to my rescue. It's still a pretty uncommon product, so don't expect to see it there all the time, and I always check Amazon before bidding on anything to see if I can get the item cheaper here. Very often it is the case.

In short, even if you don't use it as written and just read through it scanning for ideas, it's worth the price of buying it used. I wouldn't pay a lot of money for it unless I was a collector though, more and better stuff is widely available now, much of it for free on the web from old school gamers.

There were a few good ideas in here, but they also had a lot of junk and old-school, grimtoothesque random murder of players for no apparent reason, weak design material.