RPG superbrain Justin Alexander finally puts all his GM advice in one book
RPG superbrain Justin Alexander finally puts all his GM advice in one book
It might be the last GM advice you'll ever need to read
NOTE: So You Want To Be a Game Master is now available in most places where books and e-books are sold.
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Hi Justin! Can you introduce yourself and let us know your connection to tabletop roleplaying games?
Hi, Dave! I've got a bunch of hats at the moment. I'm the RPG Developer at Atlas Games, where I co-created the second edition of Magical Kitties Save the Day and have been in charge of Ars Magica, Feng Shui, Over the Edge, and Unknown Armies. I'm also the creator of the Alexandrian, my website where I host a wide variety of GMing advice and RPG tools and resources. I'm also the author of So You Want To Be a Game Master, which is being released by Macmillan and Page Street Publishing later this year.
I broke into the industry back in the late '90s doing reviews, got hired to do some adventures and sourcebooks, then left for awhile, and ended up coming back with a passion for adventure design. Before joining Atlas I was the Lead Developer on the Infinity RPG for Modiphius. Somewhere along the line there I won an ENNIE Award, and I feel like I’m forgetting something, but I’m sure it’ll come back to me eventually!
You have created a large body of RPG advice, in blog form (which earned you that ENNIE award if I’m not mistaken), video form and now culminating in book form with So You Want to Be a Game Master. Your advice is great and we’ll unpack some of your philosophy here. But tell me first, why do you think this hobby has so much advice content?
Well, scratch the surface of any craft hobby and I think you'll find a bottomless pit of advice. I still have a bunch of my grandmother's quilting books. My dad was a hobby train enthusiast when I was growing up, and I remember paging through the magazines and reading all kinds of tips about making terrain, laying track, kitbashing engines, and the like.
Where I think RPGs kind of stand apart is as media fandom, right? Like, BookTok and the old Starlog magazine aren't filled with writing tips. You can find screenwriting books and the like, but those are aimed at professionals and would-be professionals. And it's because the audience for most media is passive. When we're fans of books or movies or comic books, we're spectators.
RPGs, on the other hand, are still, in the grand scheme of things, a brand new medium. A medium that we're still figuring out. And it's an interactive medium. So to be an RPG fan, whether as a player or a game master, is to be a creator. So it's much more like a craft hobby in that respect. Make your character. Make your adventure. Make your campaign. Make the game happen.
2. Here’s a great directory of many of your GM advice posts: Gamemastery 101. It’s dozens and dozens of posts. And from what I can tell, all of this sage advice and more is included in your book So You Want to Be A Gamemaster, a 544-page tome. How much reading and practical experience is required for someone to become a decent GM in your opinion?
Not a lot!
You need to know the rules of the game you're playing, so the triumvirate of D&D rulebooks can kind of give this impression that you need to read hundreds of pages. But if you want to use D&D 5th Edition, then you can start with the Starter Set, and that's just 32 pages. There are other games that are only 12 pages or 6 pages or even just 1 page.
In So You Want To Be a Game Master, there's a ten-page section introducing complete newbies to the concept of roleplaying games. Then there's another ten pages, and at the end of that I say, "You know how to do these things now, which means you're ready to run your first adventure."
And I really encourage the reader to literally put my book down and go and run their first game. Because I think it's important to understand that it IS that simple. You don't need more than that to run a game and have fun.
The other five hundred pages are about what you can build on that foundation. And by the end of it you'll be literally building entire cities. But Rome wasn't built in a day, right? It starts with that first building.
What does the book aim to do and how does it go about doing it in a way that hasn’t been done before?
This is the book that I wanted when I was 10 years old and trying to figure out how RPGs work.
There's a lot of GM advice out there that's useful, but mostly vapor for a new GM. Like, "Listen to your players." Good advice. Definitely something you should do. But it's kind of like telling someone, "Avoid blue shells" in Mario Kart. Again, good advice. But there's a lot of "draw the rest of the f'ing owl" there, and it's also not that useful to someone who's trying to figure out which button makes the kart accelerate.
So there's kind of two pillars that So You Want To Be a Game Master is built on.
The first is that there is, in fact, a step-by-step process you can follow to become a game master. It's not some occult tradition that only the hooded masters are allowed to do. It's not even that complicated. At the beginning of the book, in those first ten pages after the introduction, what I’m doing is walking new GMs through two simple skills: Making a ruling and running a room. That's all you need to run your first adventure. In fact, the book will then give you that adventure and tell you to go run it. Honestly, you can run some pretty good campaigns with just those two skills and the adventure design tips that follow.
The second thing is that arguably the most important tools a GM can have are the scenario structures they know. To boil it down, each scenario structure is what you prep and how you use that prep to run the adventure.
Despite this, most GMs, even veteran GMs, only have a couple of scenario structures, and they probably picked them up largely through osmosis without really thinking about what they are or how they can be used. They know how to prep linear plots, they know how to prep a dungeon, and they might know how to prep a mystery. Although a lot of "mystery" scenarios are actually just prepped as linear plots. And since the D&D core rulebooks don't teach you how to key or run dungeons any more, this scenario structure is atrophying for a lot of GMs, too.
So what you'll find in So You Want To Be a Game Master are the scenario structures: The dungeons, yes. But also mysteries, raids, heists, urbancrawls, faction-based adventures, wilderness exploration, node-based campaigns, and more. Each one showing you exactly what to prep and exactly how to use that prep at the table, and every one of those scenario structures unlocking an infinite variety of possible stories and adventures.
What you'll find in So You Want To Be a Game Master are the scenario structures: The dungeons, yes. But also mysteries, raids, heists, urbancrawls, faction-based adventures, wilderness exploration, node-based campaigns, and more.
And what this lets the book be, at its heart, is a step-by-step guide. Not just a bunch of good general advice that gets tossed in your lap with a, "Good luck!" But do this, then do this, and now you're ready to do this at the table.
That all sounds very exciting. Circling back to my previous question, I have to say that I personally find RPGs to be difficult to engage with in comparison to board games and video games, so what you’re offering in this book is potentially life-changing. Can we zoom in on an example of some of this advice? For example, can you briefly describe what an “urbancrawl” is, and what kind of advice you give for that particular structure?
Let’s build Rome!
Urban campaigns are awesome. You can run all kinds of adventures in cities: Heists, mysteries, raids, all kinds of stuff. But if you're talking about an urbanCRAWL, specifically, then you're talking about a campaign where the city -- and exploring the city -- is no longer merely a backdrop, but becomes the core experience and focus of the game.
Something you might expect to hear a player say in an urbancrawl is, "We know Doctor Synthario is operating out of North County. Let's see if we can figure out where he's storing those kaleidoscope cars."
So it comes back to prep and then play. In a basic urbancrawl, you're going to prep a map of the city and you're going to divide the city into districts. Then you'll key content to those districts. You might key short scenes or encounters. For example, in Uptown the PCs might find Doctor Synthario's synthdroids robbing a bank and fight them in a combat encounter. If they poked around the Port district, on the other hand, they might track down a snitch in the Kraken beach bar who could give them information on Synthario's operations in a roleplaying scene.
But you can also key entire scenarios: An abandoned synthdroid lab in the East Village has clues that draw them into a mystery scenario. Up in North County, on the other hand, they need to stage a full raid on the Kaleidoscope Garage.
So it's a very flexible structure. You might have very simple urbancrawls with only a couple districts keyed with simple content, or you might have a full urbancrawl campaign with lots of districts keyed with lots of full-fledged scenarios. There's also stuff like having multiple layers and restocking that I walk you through in the book to add even more depth to urbancrawls when you want it, but we can keep it simple: You have districts. You key content to them. That's the prep.
At the table, the key to play is the investigative action: The players pick a district and they take an investigative action to figure out what's going on in that district. The GM then triggers the content they prepped to that district.
There's some finesse that happens with that, too: should the players know this is the structure? If they don't, how do you interpret what their characters are doing through the lens of your prep?
But if you've got the right prep, the urbancrawl will just naturally feed the action at the table.
Okay, so the advice in this book is from the ground up. A GM with a blank notebook can learn how to create scenarios using some key guiding principles and then run them effectively. Do you include any advice about how to adapt and run traditionally presented (and by that I mean painfully linear, plot-driven) scenarios? And if so, what are some major tips on how to adapt one like that?
I don't actually go into this very much in the book. This was a deliberate choice, and it was something I thought about for a long time.
One of the challenges I actually had with So You Want To Be a Game Master is that I've spent years writing GMing advice for my website, the Alexandrian, but that advice is all very much aimed at experienced GMs. I'll say things like, "We've all been there before. The players have missed a Spot check and now our mystery scenario is doomed. So what can we do?" But if I'm writing a book for first-time GMs, that's meaningless. They haven’t been there before.
So I had to spend some time consciously shifting my authorial voice. Which can be harder than it sounds.
Along these same lines, though, I had to think about how I wanted to approach topics like railroading. I mean, there's a ton of GM advice out there that's basically framed like the Ten Commandments. It's all Thou Shalt Nots, and Thou Shalt Not Railroad stands at the pinnacle of Mt. Thou Shalt Not.
And for good reason. I've written The Railroading Manifesto and done a deep dive into what railroading is, why GMs can fall into the trap of railroading, and why it has such a caustic influence on your games.
For So You Want to Be a Game Master, though, I decided to turn away from Mt. Thou Shalt Not and focus more positively on the tools GMs can and should be using to prep. I have a thesis, actually, that railroading is a broken technique seeking to fix a broken scenario: The GM enforces a preconceived outcome because they've prepped a linear plot of predeteremined events. And they've prepped a plot because they don't know any other way of prepping adventures. So my hope is that by giving GMs the tools and structures they need to prep great adventures and putting a focus on active play, they'll never feel the need to railroad.
Now when it comes to fixing published scenarios, I've spent a lot of time over the years remixing these painfully linear adventures, some of which I've shared on the Alexandrian. The core of it actually comes back to these same scenario and campaign structures: You identify the broken structure -- the railroad, for example -- and then you look at the cool elements in the adventure -- the NPCs, the locations, that type of stuff -- and figure out how to key that stuff into a better structure.
Another example of a broken structure is the fragile mystery: These are the scenarios where the players need to find one specific clue in one specific way, or maybe take some hyper-specific action, and if they don't the whole breadcrumb trail is broken and the mystery can never be solved.
In the book, I talk about the Three Clue Rule, which states that for any conclusion you want the PCs to make you should include at least three clues pointing to it. And I also talk about node-based scenario design, in which the Inverted Three Clue Rule expands that basic concept so that mysteries can become non-linear. These, and the adventure recipes in the book that you can follow to quickly create your own adventures using these structures, are robust structures built around redundancy.
So, for example, this is a very simple test that I do when I read a published mystery adventure: I make a revelation list -- a list of all the conclusions the adventure expects the PCs to make -- and I list all the clues provided for each revelation. And anywhere that the adventure hasn't included enough clues, I add more clues.
Maybe that seems too simple. But I guess to some extent that's a lesson I want people to take away from So You Want To Be a Game Master: Running an RPG really CAN be that simple. We don’t have to over-complicate it.
You have written no fewer than 20 well-organized blog entries about node-based scenario design, starting with this one: Node-based Scenario Design. And as you’ve mentioned, its all codified in your new book. Nodes are clearly an important and powerful concept in your opinion. Can you summarize what makes the concept of node-based scenario design so valuable?
A "node" is a conceptual tool for scenario or campaign design. Each location is, broadly speaking, a location, person, organization, or event that the PCs can go to, interact with, and/or investigate. The concept is kind of fractal, so you might think of a node as being a specific "scene" in a campaign, but it could also be an entire scenario in a node-based campaign.
Like, a location node might be digging up Anthony Brown's grave. Or it might be an entire dungeon scenario.
PCs can move from one node to another in a few different ways, but the fundamental method is following a lead. In other words, they have a clue -- the lead -- which tells them they need to dig up Anthony Brown's grave or that the bandits are hiding out in Old Gold Cave.
The basic principle of node-based design is, as I mentioned, the Inverted Three Clue Rule. So rather than the Three Clue Rule, which is that for any conclusion you want the PCs to reach you should include at least three clues, the Inverted Three Clue Rule states that as long as the PCs have access to ANY three leads -- no matter what nodes that leads are pointing to -- the players will be able to figure out at least ONE of them, which will allow them to continue their investigation.
Node-based design is powerful because it breaks you out of linear thinking. If you think of an adventure as a bunch of cool stuff, node-based design means you no longer have to try to force that stuff into a specific sequence and then figure out how to force the players to follow the sequence. Instead, you can connect your cool stuff in lots of different ways, have confidence that the scenario will remain robust, and then play to find out. It's exciting for the game master because they get to be surprised and delighted and actively playing with their players. It empowers the players by putting them in the driver's seat of the scenario.
…Node-based design means you no longer have to try to force that stuff into a specific sequence and then figure out how to force the players to follow the sequence.
As you spend more time working with node-based designs, though, you also discover something else: It's just a very natural way of describing the game world.
Like, if you think about the world, it's filled with people and places and organizations and events. And these are all connected to each other: People work for organizations. Organizations want to own places. Events happen in places and people attend them. And so forth. Those natural connections are leads. So when you're playing through a node-based scenario you're following those natural connections; and when you're designing a node-based scenario, you're creating a world.
Nodes aren't everything. But they're very powerful, very easy to work with, incredibly broad in their application, and are frequently the glue that holds everything else in a campaign or scenario together.
You lament the fact that most adventure books just provide one of three scenario templates: railroads, dungeon crawls or mysteries. And you provide many more structures they could choose from which might better fit the kind of scenario they want to run (all deeply explained in So You Want to Be A Gamemaster, of course). Is there a single publisher out there that GETS it? As in, are there any that genuinely and regularly break out of the box of the three same old scenario structures?
Well, the unsurprising answer is that Atlas Games has done a wide range of scenarios during my time there as the RPG Producer, if I do say so myself: Greg Stolze’s heist scenario Bring Me the Head of the Comte de Saint-Germain for Unknown Armies. The party-structured adventure “Seversen’s Mysterious Estate” that Jonathan Tweet and I wrote for the Over the Edge anthology Welcome to the Island. The sector crawl used in Paul Stefko’s Apeworld on Fire! or the festival-based Burning Dragon by Jonathan Killstring, both for Feng Shui.
There are a growing number of places where you can see people and publishers pushing the envelope by exploring a single scenario structure. John Harper’s Blades in the Dark, for example. There a bunch of hexcrawls as part of what I call the Hexcrawl Renaissance. A prominent example being Jacob Hurst’s The Dark of Hot Springs Island.
Slightly more common – or, at least, more high profile, for better or worse – are publishers who seem interested in exploring alternative structures, but when you read the adventures, you can see they aren’t really “getting it,” because they end up just collapsing back into linear plots. Although maybe I’m being overly generous or overly hopeful there, because it’s probably just as likely we’re seeing designers who WANT to do something cool and unique – an epic fantasy war campaign; a riff on Seven Samurai; an adventure all about Machiavellian political intrigues – and the only tool they have is a hammer, so everything becomes a nail.
You have spent some time and energy fixing Wizards of the Coast’s D&D supplements like Dragon Heist (Dragon Heist Remix), and Descent into Avernus (Remixing Avernus). With Dragon Heist, your re-write emphasizes the “heists” in the adventure, emphasizes all the named villains, and improves continuity and overall scenario structure. Let me be blunt here: why put so much precious mind energy into trying to fix any of WotC’s stuff?
When I'm using published modules, I tend to think in terms of either prepping the module or remixing the module.
Prepping a published module is usually about tweaking stuff to integrate it into my campaign. I'll reincorporate lore from the campaign by, for example, swapping out generic NPCs from the adventure for established NPCs my players already know. I might reskin the gods to match the gods in my own campaign. That sort of thing. WotC adventures I've just prepped for play include The Sunless Citadel and Lost Mine of Phandelver.
Remixes are more expansive. They might just be adding lots and lots of cool new stuff to an adventure that's already great. I've done that with the phenomenal Eternal Lies campaign for Pelgrane Press' Trail of Cthulhu and Monte Cook's Banewarrens campaign. With Eternal Lies, for example, I developed 300+ props, 150+ diorama elements, and added two completely original scenarios to the campaign.
But a remix can also be, as you say, about fixing WotC's stuff.
And the simple answer to the question of, "Why?" is that there's something so cool in the published adventure that I want to run it.
Dragon Heist, for example, is the adventure that actually pulled me into D&D 5th Edition. I'd looked at the playtest material and the first campaign they published, Hoard of the Dragon Queen, but concluded that I was perfectly happy with the version of D&D I was playing, I had immense resources (both purchased and developed through years of play) and personal mastery, and nothing about 5th Edition was compelling enough to get me to switch.
The pitch for Dragon Heist, though, was a heist-based conspiracy campaign set in an urban fantasy megalopolis that would link directly into a sequel campaign set in the Undermountain megadungeon! That sounded incredibly cool to me, and so I picked up a copy.
... which completely failed to deliver any of that. No heists. Weird railroading. And no connection to Undermountain.
But what it DID have was a really awesome McGuffin motivating the whole campaign, solid set-pieces, and four really cool villain factions with awesome hideouts. (Hideouts which, oddly, the published adventure told the DM they should never, ever allow the PCs to go to.) Basically, just a bunch of cool bits either glued to a railroad or bizarrely locked in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying BEWARE OF THE LEOPARD BEHOLDER.
Long story short (too late!), it was exactly the kind of adventure that's hopeless as published, but which can be turned into something really special by just replacing the structure connecting all the awesome bits.
Which also meant that it was a perfect teachable moment. Here is an adventure that has, due to poor structure, failed to deliver what it promised. Maybe you've seen other published adventures like this. Maybe you've had an epic vision for an adventure, but found you couldn’t translate that vision to the table. Remixing these D&D adventures is a way of showing DMs how they can use scenario structures to escape the railroad and deliver the experiences they and their players really want. In the case of Dragon Heist, I could showcase the simple powerhouse of node-based design. Descent Into Avernus, on the other hand, let me showcase pointcrawls, streetcrawling, and hexcrawls.
Can you describe your current relationship with Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition?
It's been said that D&D 5th Edition's success, when it launched, was that it could be everybody's second favorite edition of D&D. Whether their favorite edition was 4th, 3rd, or 1974 D&D using only the Blackmoor supplement, but not the Greyhawk supplement, because the Thief ruined the game, 5th edition was... fine. It was a place where everybody could come and play D&D together.
Literally speaking, that's less true now that there's an entire generation of new gamers for whom 5th Edition was their first and, in some cases, only roleplaying game, but I think it remains true in spirit. Its flaws are myriad -- an incoherent skill system, lackluster combat, and so forth. But none of these flaws are so acute as to make playing the game truly painful, and so it can remain a lingua franca.
It's a game that could not possibly succeed if it didn't say Dungeons & Dragons on the cover. But because it says Dungeons & Dragons on the cover, its bland inoffensiveness is lets it prosper, allowing it to benefit incalculably from a vast wealth of support material and a player base that's multiple magnitudes of order larger than anything else while being "just fine."
Professionally, as an RPG designer, I can't fully ignore it.
Personally, I'm in an open relationship, D&D 5th Edition is never going to be my main partner, but I'm definitely the one they text when they're lonely.
So hot. Okay, so Planegea is this full-color, fleshed out 3rd party 5e game that did pretty well on Kickstarter. I have several questions about it: 0) How do you pronounce the name of this game? 1) what was the decision-making process for Atlas Games to publish a 5e game? 2) What makes Planegea one of your favorite Atlas Games publications?
The name is playing on Pangaea, the name of the most recent supercontinent – when all of the continental plates were all jammed together into one giant landmass. Planegea is set during a primordial vision of what a prehistoric version of the 5th Edition cosmos might look like; a time when the planes of existence had not yet separated from each other. Thus, in Planegea, you can still literally walk from what will one day be the Plane of Fire to what will one day be the Plane of Air. It’s a fantastical Stone Age setting, with a big emphasis on the fantastical.
So the pronunciation reflects the reference: Plane-JEE-uh.
Planegea is one of those projects you don’t really plan for. It just falls in your lap. David Somerville had been working on the setting for awhile and had begun thinking about how he could crowdfund it. He actually approached Atlas as a fulfillment company: We have a warehouse just outside of Duluth, MN, and in addition to distributing our own games and fulfilling our own crowdfunding campaigns, we also work with other creators and companies to help them with their game distribution needs.
David had sent a copy of the work he’d done to John Nephew, the founder of Atlas Games, and John sent it to me and said, “You should take a peek at this.” So I curled up on the couch and started reading… and then stayed up WAY too late that night compulsively turning the pages.
David had created something really special, and we all knew that Atlas Games could use our expertise and our infrastructure to help him not only take the project to the next level, but also bring it to a much wider audience. So I took a meeting with David, we talked things through, and worked together to bring Planegea to life.
There’s a lot of really cool stuff that managed to pull off: The beautiful poster map of the setting by Brian Patterson. Honestly, I’m so proud of all the amazing visuals our team of artists brought to the page. The soundtrack by Sonor Village was a delightful surprise.
But the reason I love Planegea is really the same reason we ended up publishing it in the first place: Every single is just brimming with David’s creativity. He had this vision, inspired by Keith Baker’s work on Eberron, to create a setting where anything you could do in 5th Edition, you can do in Planegea, and the result is a Stone Age setting unlike anything else I’ve seen. But more than that, every single page is just packed with stuff aimed at the GM: It’s not just describing a world; it’s relentlessly describing what you do in that world. It’s one of those books where, when you’re done reading it, you’ll have literally filled pages with all of the different adventures and campaigns you want to run with it.
Magical Kitties Save the Day is a really wholesome, rules light game that seems very well-honed for kids and for casual, cute play. Can you describe the game and the process of creating it?
Magical Kitties Save the Day is an RPG in which every player plays a magical kitty; every magical kitty has a human; and every human has a Problem. (Some people think the humans own the kitties, but that's clearly ridiculous.) Worse yet, every magical kitty and their human lives in a Hometown which is filled with Hometown Problems -- things like werewolves, aliens, mischievous faries, and troublesome time travelers. The Hometown Problems make the Human Problems worse, and so the kitties have to use their magical powers to solve problems and save the day!
It was created by Matthew J. Hanson. He published a PDF-only version on DriveThru and was running it at local conventions, including Con of the North in the Twin Cities, which is where Michelle Nephew, the co-owner of Atlas Games, discovered it with her kids. They loved it so much that Michelle started running a campaign for her kids... and then another and then another.
The thought was, "I wish more people knew about this great game." And then we remembered that we ran a game company.
So as the developer and co-designer of the second edition of the game, I really had two goals: First, to help this amazing game find its audience. Second, to enhance the core experience of the game.
While everyone who loves kitties will love Magical Kitties Save the Day, the game was primarily designed to be the game that roleplaying parents could run for their young kids, and then for those kids to run for themselves. So it's not only a game for first-time roleplayers. It's a game for first-time Game Masters.
From a purely practical standpoint, it was immediately clear that the game should be sold in a box: I wanted game stores to put the game on the shelf next to their board games, so that people who were playing games like Descent or Gloomhaven or Mice & Mystics would have an opportunity to find Magical Kitties Save the Day and make the transition to a full-fledged roleplaying game. I also wanted kids to have the magical experience of opening the box. It was a game that I imagined being given as a gift by parents or grandparents. You rip the wrapping paper off. You open the box. There are treasures inside.
The second thing I really focused on were those two key audiences: First-time roleplayers and first-time game masters. How could the game be presented and what tools could I provide that would make it as easy as possible to take those first steps?
So the first thing you see when you open the Magical Kitties Save the Day box is actually a comic book that I designed and wrote, with illustrations by Kat Baumann: Magical Kitties and the Big Adventure! This is a choose-your-own-adventure comic book that will walk you through creating your first kitty, teach you the rules of the game, and guide you through your own adventure. By the time you're done reading the comic, you know how to play and you can take your character straight into your first tabletop adventure!
This comic also means that someone opening Magical Kitties Save the Day for the first time can immediately get a solo play experience. It's not the full experience of what a roleplaying game can be, of course, but it gives a little taste. It helps them cross that threshold.
My next focus was on the first-time game masters: I wrote a bunch of material focused on teaching the essential skills and best practices of the GM, focusing on practical, concrete stuff the first-time GM can do. I also wrote a whole chapter on adventure design, including a bunch of different adventure recipes. The adventure recipes return in So You Want To Be a Game Master, but the basic concept is that each recipe is a set of containers: You simply pour "ingredients" of the appropriate type into each container and -- presto! -- you've got an adventure. The rulebook and Hometown setting books for Magical Kitties Save the Day are all designed to provide lots of ingredients, so that those first-time GMs can just pick stuff that looks cool, put it in an adventure recipe of their choice, and go!
Over the Edge is another incredible game published by Atlas Games. Can you describe the premise of the game and what you like most about it?
Over the Edge is set on the fictional island of Al Amarja, a strange nexus point of reality in the Mediterranean Sea where all the secret conspiracies of the world come together to fight their proxy wars for control of reality. That includes stuff like the CIA or DGSE, but pushes beyond the boundaries of reality with -- in some rough order of ascending weirdness -- a still-extant Abwehr; the alien Kergillians; the transdimensional Exiles (criminals from other realities bound to human bodies); the Neanderthal Underground (they didn't actually die out); and much more besides.
The tone is deliberately hallucinogenic, and I tend to think of it as some weird distillation of Burroughs' The Naked Lunch, the stark paranoia of a Tim Powers novel, the bleeding edge esoterica of William Gibson, and the sly satire of Terry Pratchett (if Pratchett had been American). But that's an entirely idiosyncratic response... which is perhaps the most appropriate response to have to Over the Edge.
There are sort of five broad ways a campaign can approach this setting: You can have Agents, who get hired by a wide variety of strange patrons to do even stranger things. You can have Cloaks, who are neck-deep in the conspiracy war. You can have Burgers, who are completely new to the Island and unpeel its secrets one by one. The Gangs, on the other hand, are the street-level conflicts on the Island; over-shadowed and influenced by and also the manifestation of the conspiracies happening above and around them. And, finally, the a Mystics campaign, where the PCs have direct access to some of the mystic weirdness that flows through Al Amarja.
So much like the Island itself, Over the Edge is many things to many people.
If I had to pick just one thing that I liked most in this wonderful, kaleidoscopic madness, it would be the concept of the One Weird Twist. Jonathan Tweet, the creator of the game, applies this most directly to character creation: Whatever concept you first come up with -- Vampire, Secret Agent, Stage Magician -- is fine... but it's not enough. You need to give it a twist. Not just "vampire," but a vampire who's allergic to blood; or a vampire who's been cured; or a vampire who drinks motor oil from cars. Not just "secret agent," but immortal secret agent whose 400 years old or a secret agent cursed by the knowledge of his own (ever-changing) death. And so forth.
But this One Weird Twist also unlocks the whole setting: Apply it to anything mundane, and you will discover its Al Amarjan equivalent. That's how you get fast food joints that advertise, "Certified prion-free beef!" Or an ant with eight legs. Or a cat with a trademark visible on the back of its pupil.
Trying to figure out your next adventure? Take any real world conspiracy theory and give it the twist. Paul is dead? Well, sort of. It’s true that the Karla Sommers who performed from 1998 to 2001 was onboard the 9/11 flight that crashed into the Pentagon, but that wasn’t the original Karla Sommers. She was a celebrity clone, bred and programmed to continue the career of stars and starlets who grow bored of the limelight. The real Sommers had to come out of retirement to keep the whole thing from coming into the light… at least until another clone could be prepared.
Shakespeare didn’t write his own plays? Don’t be ridiculous. But Alexander Pope did carefully restructure them in his oft-definitive editions so that they could encrypt messages that can only be decrypted using the Al Amarja Today from July 7th, 2024 as a one-time pad.
Where can people find your new book So You Want to Be A Gamemaster?
Everywhere! Well… almost. So You Want To Be a Game Master is being published by Macmillan and Page Street Publishing, and they’ve also made sure that game distributors will be carrying the book. So you’ll be able to find it in or order it from your favorite bookstore or local game store. The e-book is available through every mainstream e-book retailer. There’s a page on my website where you can find links and more info about the book!