System-Agnostic Books for Game Masters

Game masters all worry about the same thing. They worry that their GMing could be stronger, but aren’t always sure what resources will be worth their while. For newer GMs, this is even more stressful. With so much RPG content out there, it can be challenging to know where to turn. We’ve compiled a list of system-agnostic books for game masters that can help you with everything from designing your first adventure and world building, all the way to foraging items and improving your OSR game.

So You Want to be a Game Master by Justin Alexander

This must-have book for GMs is an ENnie Gold award winner, USA Today bestseller, and comes highly recommended by Monte Cook, the co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition. You don’t need to be interested in D&D to get massive value out of this tome, though. Justin Alexander couldn’t help but notice how many people have started looking towards RPGs as a way to spend more time with their friends. He created this book to help absolutely anyone wanting to get into the hobby.

The book offers a step-by-step guide to running your first adventure, including a beginner-friendly adventure to get you started. It’s also packed with everything you need to know about different kinds of crawl, world building, combat, random tables, learning different RPG systems, and so much more.

Pair with Death By Ooze 7-Piece Iconic Dice Set

Mothership: Warden’s Operations Manual by Sean McCoy

Despite being the core rulebook for Mothership 1E, we have it on good authority that this manual has some of the best general GMing advice out there, with plenty of reviews encouraging every GM to read it. It has an easy-to-read format with simple advice for prepping for sessions, running your game and turning successful one-shots into full-length adventures. One of the best resources in this book is the basic procedures for creating and preparing for great scenarios. The Warden’s Operations Manual is an excellent resource for any game master, but will be particularly valuable for parties on horror and sci-fi adventures.

Pair with Coderain 7-Piece Iconic Dice Set

The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell

This book may not be about RPGs, or even written for GMs, but it is a book that many of the best game masters around have in their arsenal. Trusted by universities and game designers from all over the world, The Art of Game Design can be particularly useful to you if you homebrew most of your adventures. It explores how the same tactics used in certain kinds of games can apply to others. For example, elements that make athletic games so much fun can also add more fun and tension to card games or board games. Looking at gameplay through a series of seemingly-opposed lenses can make your own RPG campaign, scenario or encounter more impactful.

Pair with Otherworldly Entity 7-Piece Iconic Dice Set

Tome of Adventure Design & Tome of World Building by Matt Finch

Matt Finch’s Tomes are the ultimate system-agnostic resources for GMs who are ready to start homebrewing their campaigns. The Tome of Adventure Design gives you hundreds of pages of tables and prompts for every stage of an adventure. You can use this book to build locations, brainstorm villainous plots, design and place monsters, and so much more. It’s also packed with general advice from the award-winning author.

If you want to take a step back and create an entire world for your players to enjoy across multiple adventures and campaigns, you’re going to need the Tome of World Building. Once imagination sparks, it may seem easy to create the fantasy world of your RPG dreams, but that doesn’t mean you’ve thought of all the intricate details that will make that world compelling to play in. This is designed for you to work through from beginning to end, with chapters on The World, Home and Other Continents, Countries, Terrains and Borders, Illuminarchies, Locations and Religions. As an added bonus, it also contains useful facts about our world that you can apply to your new one!

Pair with Labyrinth 7-Piece Polyhedral Dice Set

Prismatic Wisdom by W.F. Smith

Do you prefer old school roleplaying? Luckily for you, the revival is in full force and one of the most prevalent OSR bloggers, W. F. Smith has condensed all his knowledge (and spicy takes) into Prismatic Wisdom. Years worth of blog posts have been edited and condensed down into 200 full-color pages of essays and GM tools. This ENNIE-nominated tome offers a hand-picked selection of basic procedures of the OSR, hexcrawl and encounter checklists, ideas for making spell-casting more immersive, and much more.

Pair with Frazetta x Dispel Death Dealer 4-Piece Iconic D6 Dice Set

Dice Tales: Essays on Roleplaying Games and Storytelling by Marie Brennan

This massive wealth of resources is an ever-growing eBook by the freelance game writer and award-winning fantasy author, Marie Brennan. A lot of people play RPGs for the challenges, the traps and puzzles, the miniature warfare… But Marie and Dice Tales fans play for the story. Marie wants to make sure you’re using your time at the table to tell a good story, instead of getting so stuck in the weeds of the framework of your campaign, that you miss the narrative completely.

Dice Tales includes advice for rich and deep character creation, scaling the plot alongside the strength of your characters, finding the right balance between rules and improvisation, managing how your players collaborate with each other, and how to plan the narrative for every stage of your campaign. This is just the tip of the iceberg, and Marie revises Dice Tales regularly, keeping it a living resource with a story of its own.

Pair with Hunt of the Unicorn 7-Piece Iconic Dice Set

Anna Urbanek’s Primer Series

Anna is passionate about the natural sciences, witchcraft and folklore, and has created the resources you need to add all of the above to your RPG adventures. Much like us here at Dispel, she lives to make things pretty! Her books are beautifully designed and illustrated with scientific-style sketches of botanical, geological and mycological items. Each item includes information about its history in folklore, scientific uses in our real world, and system-agnostic rules to bring it into your campaign.

There are currently three books in her Primer series: Herbalist’s Primer, Geologist’s Primer, and Mycologist’s Primer. Crack them open for the ultimate guidance to real-world magical plants, gems, metals, minerals, fungi, lichen and slime molds.

Pair with Mushroom Vintage 7-Piece Iconic Dice Set

Do you have any of these books, and which ones would you recommend to fellow GMs? If we missed any of your favorites, let us know and we’ll roll for part 2!