Game Master's Book of Random Encounters, The: 500+ customizable maps, tables and story hooks to create 5th edition adventures on demand

I am relatively new to DMing and am running a homebrew campaign for some friends. I have some general ideas and some initial locations/adventures/NPCs planned out, however filling out the world beyond the core details can be hugely time consuming and having backup ideas for when your players go entirely off your carefully laid routes is always a worry. I've spent many an hour trawling the Internet forums for ideas and useful resources. This book is a perfect resource to help with this. It's got loads of great location and encounter ideas with maps and there's plenty of ways provided to link these into your campaign or make them lead to standalone quests. Location and shop designs are often what I find to be most time-consuming to come up with, so this is a great way to quickly give a town some sense of life. No more shall my players catch me short when they desire a shop or tavern. I think what some people rate this down for is that you can't always literally just drag and drop all the stuff from the book into your campaign, but why would you want to? As a DM what I am after is new and fun ideas and inspiration, but I'll always want to tweak the details to suit my campaign. I also really like that it includes some one-shot adventures which you can either use as they are or adjust to fit your own campaign. Some people also rate down the maps, as they are not easy to use from the book in a campaign. This again doesn't bother me, as I like to create my maps in my own format and I view these as a design guide to what the map layout and key elements should be and I make my own version. Overall, I think the amount of effort and content here is fantastic and it's presented beautifully, with lovely illustrations and a lovely cover. I would whole-heartedly recommend this to any would-be DMs out there as a source of inspiration.

I bought this product on a whim, browsing for items useful for D&D. For such a nicely presented hardback, this book was a great price. Many Game Masters might be hoping for a big book of random roll tables. This is not that book, although there are some of those presented here. What this book really provides is a large selection of locations with accompanying maps, and optional short adventures that can be plugged into your game. Need a thieves guild/cave/tavern etc, complete with NPC's? Look no further! need a short adventure to go with it? Its got that too. It won't suit every gaming group. The maps presented here are nice, but they are not full colour, and the map keys are printed right on the page. I'd have loved thos book to include download codes for digital printable versions of these maps though. All in all, a really useful tool though. I've had it a couple of weeks and have already stolen pieces of it for a couple of my recent gaming sessions. I spend a lot on useless stuff for D&D, but I'm actually using this.

Can honestly say that I love this book. It’s incredibly creative, brimming with amazing ideas for scenarios, encounters, and places, with beautiful battlemaps for every location. I bought this for a little bit of inspiration and I feel like it’s amazing value for money, considering it contains at least 5 oneshot games, as well as all of the randomising tables and pre-made places. Shipping was quicker than expected and the book is hardback and good quality. Would definitely buy more from this creator - and highly recommend if you’re looking for something to bring a bit of excitement to your game prep AND your players’ experience!

A well made book full of great and useful material. Constructed to a very high quality I highly recommend this product

It was perfect

I am a complete beginner at D&D and have crazily volunteered to DM for members of my family and so was looking for ideas to present to their characters. My copy of this book arrived just over an hour ago and already I have multiple ideas for adventures, locations, encounters, etc. As many have mentioned the presentation of the maps could be better and anyone expecting the art style of official Wizards of the Coast books will be disappointed. However, the written content and the ideas they create make this book worth more than the cover price. I'm excited to try out at least 2 of the many one shot adventures contained within (I'm sure it's more but haven't had chance to read them all yet) and they are a good way to banish writer's block. I'd certainly recommend this to beginning DMs or anyone looking for new ideas.

I bought this on sale on a whim and I'm pleased with it. Has decent maps and background for them and even contains several small adventures that can be easily dropped into almost any campaign (mostly D&D 5E, but also other systems). Has statblocks for NPCs related to the locations and quests - saving even more prep time.

A lot of the scenarios in the book are very adaptable there’s a bunch of things to help you make them your own.

Livro excelente pra quem é GM e precisa criar uma aventura ou uma localidade. Um livro cheio e repleto de ideias novas. Contêm mapas, aventuras, e diversas localidades/NPC's prontos. OBS: não é um livro focado em Random Tables.

Husband/DM is over this moon about this. Great for quick encounters with ratings for battle difficulty.

I picked this up on a whim as it was on a sale price of under 17 bucks and looked interesting. The moment I opened the box I was immediately impressed with the quality of the book. The hardcover and binding is really nice, especially for a book in this price range. I'd say the initial quality of the book surpasses what you get in WotC offerings that cost much more. After sitting a couple of weeks I finally got a chance to start going through the contents. It has several one shot adventures that you could incorporate into you campaign with ease. What really caught my eye when I was looking at it on Amazon was the locations. Those did not disappoint as there are numerous locations, complete with maps and tables for random activities going on in the location. I thought that was pretty cool and will make the areas come to life. You get some good NPCs and magic items in the book as well but some of the magic items seem as if they could be a tad over powered. In the end this book is well worth the money if you want to add some flavor to your world. More thoughts below on why I like this and what 5E is lacking in my opinion but my main reasons for liking the book are already noted above. Like the title of the review says, this is what was lacking in 5e for me. I did most of my playing and DMing in the late 80's early 90's in high school. I ventured back briefly in the early 2000's with 3e coming out. What I recalled for source material of the 2e days was campaign boxed sets that gave you general locations and maps and ideas for your own story hooks. They usually had NPCs of note as well. It gave you the world and useful tools to help pre populate it. The campaign settings were augmented by monster compendiums and stand alone modules to augment the world and give the DM some premade adventures to work into their take on the campaign setting. A year or so ago my son expressed interest in role playing so I started picking up 5e books. I've been a little disappointed that most of it is books of ready made adventures that are linked together to form a very linear campaign. They are like campaigns in a box. I was expecting more of what there was in the 2e days with a lot more left up to the DM. The new stuff works and seems a great way to get new players and DMs into the game but seems to be mostly ready made. With the time constraints of a full time job, running an outside small business, and raising two teenagers this seems like it would be perfect but I have found what I really wanted was just some general world info that I could just customize with my own flair. You can still do this but it just seems a little harder. This particular book is more what I had in mind as an aid. After running some of the premade stuff I decided my next attempt will be a complete homebrewed world starting with the small town the party starts out in. I'll populate that town with a lot of the stuff in this book and some of my own as well.

Libro que todo DM debe tener

One of my favourite third party supplements. So far everything I've purchased from this series of books has hit the mark in terms of generating new ideas for a game.