As you may have noticed, I write a lot about 3d printing and mini’s here on my blog. I write not a lot about my tabletop rpg’s. That seems a bit weird, since all the other things are directly related to that. On the other hand it is not that weird, because as a gamemaster, a lot of what I could write concerning the adventures in my games would be spoilers for my players or give away plot-backgrounds. And we do not want that. But, I can write about how I “work” because tabletop rpg is a big deal in my life and I do want to write about it, so here we go: let’s talk gamemaster adventure resources!
First off, for those who may not know: in tabletop role playing games a group of players have characters they play with in the game. These characters life in a made-up world and discover things that are happening that they may decide need their attention. Being the heroic persons these characters are, they may want to fix problems, improve quality of life in general, defeat evil beings (or join them, it happens), and so on. But they do not know all the details, how things came to be or where an adventure will take them.
That is where I come in. As the gamemaster I come up with the world, the challenges, the adventure start-points and all the things the adventurers may encounter. Coming up with the world, it’s political situation, the challenges and all the other folks that may live in that world can be a challenge. While I do very much enjoy to let my imagination run free and create all of that myself, that is a lot of work and takes a lot of time. Which I do not always have, because life (chores, job, etc) often takes up a lot of my time.
Fortunately I do not have to do all this by myself, there are a lot of sources out there for gamemasters. My pile of books consist of a lot of published adventures that I can use or take inspiration from, and there are a lot of online resources to be found that can be very helpful.
One of those resources is the RPG tier of EverOn Games. I already was a test-printer for their other two 3d printing branches, Props&Beyond and The Printing Goes Ever On, so I already knew their work and was very happy they started this. The creators are tabletop gamers themselves and know what is involved in making worlds and adventures that are a fun challenge.
For me, these adventures are very easy to use. They do not provide an entire world or setting, just a single adventure or quest in a certain type of terrain or landscape. That means that when I have to prep for a session of tabletop adventure fun and I do not have a lot of time or energy or brainspace I can just grab one of those. Mind you, I still need to do some work, adjusting it to the adventure I am running. But that can be as little or as much as I feel the need for, and sometimes that is ‘nothing at all’.
I have my subscription through the patreon of The Printing Goes Ever On, and I got the all-inclusive one. So each month I get a big pile of PDF resources, with a whole adventure book, npc stats, monsters, the whole kaboodle. And what do I use the most? The single page cheat-sheet! I even ran a session on just the cheat-sheet, because I did not have the level of concentration I needed to read the whole lot. This does take some improvisational skills from the gamemaster, but I am fortunately blessed with that. If need be, I can run an entire session without prep, improvising my way through it (and derailing my own campaign with my Great Idea’s, sigh). But having that kick-off point and inspiration and mostly a pre-made challenge to put on the table really helps me in my games.
Now, you may wonder why I am focusing on this particular resource now, other than me being a big fan of their work and being allowed to test-print stuff.
I do have a very good reason:
Starting October (2024, so next month) they are going to add a free subscription where you can get the whole PDF stash for free. If you make an account on the EverOn website and subscribe to the newsletter you will an email each month with a link to the resources, for free. Since this is for me such a big help in my prep I really recommend it.
A nice bonus with the all-inclusive subscription is that I also get all the mini’s for the NPC’s and monsters and the terrain along with the adventure. So yeah, I am a big fan of this, and it is so nice to have this in my gamemaster-kit available.