Whether you’re an experienced Dungeon Master looking to spice up your table or a newcomer (like myself) who wants a little help fleshing out the world they’re trying to create, The Game Master’s Fantasy Toolkit from the fine folks at Roll & Play Press may be exactly what you need.  This 102-page spiral-bound A5 book is packed with random tables for anything you could possibly encounter during a session with your favourite RPG.

Looking for a name, appearance, motivation and career history for the randomly-inserted background NPC that the party now apparently wants to know everything about? Fire up the D20s and this book will sort you out.  Want a name, musical style and instrument choice for the band playing in the corner of the tavern your heroes find themselves in? Sorted. Need to spice up a particularly dramatic natural 20 during a climactic combat sequence? Done!

The book is broken down into logical sections: People & Quests, World Building, Journeys & Events, Combat & Injuries and Items & Rewards, each with their own additional subcategories, making it really easy to find what you want without dragging the game to a halt. It’s available in both physical and digital formats, and one thing I absolutely loved about the PDF version is that it features embedded hyperlinks in the index section that take you right where you need to go, rather than having to scroll through wildly on your tablet or laptop.

Even if you’re not a fan of leaving things up to the fickle will of the dice, the tables in this book are likely to provide you with all the inspiration you need during the planning stages of your latest session. So if you’re struggling to add some extra storyline flavour, populate a local tavern or throw some eye-widening random encounters into the mix, a few minutes spent browsing the relevant section should have your creative juices bubbling away again.

The content is straightforward and to the point.  No-frills artwork frames a series clearly laid out tables, and the fact that it’s 100% system agnostic means there’s no need to convert stats to your RPG of choice (although you may need to do a little additional digging some some of the random encounter tables that feature monsters, etc.) Honestly, for someone who’s keen to get into the world of DMing and who struggles mightily with improvisation when his players inevitably venture off the beaten path and start doing their own thing (damn them!), this is an absolute godsend.  Not only that, but Roll & Play Press also publish a sci-fi version if you’re more Starfinder than D&D, as well as a pair of ‘Character Kits’ for the player side of the equation. Brilliant stuff, and an essential addition to every DM’s Bag of Holding.

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The Game Master’s Fantasy Toolkit is priced £19.99 for Book + PDF, or £11.99 for the PDF on its own. If you want to try this out for yourself (or any of the other awesome goodies that Roll & Play press publish), you can get a lovely 10% Big Comic Page discount from the Roll & Play Online Store by either CLICKING HERE or using the code GUILDLPVPUVOBED when checking out.

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The writer of this piece was: Craig Neilson-Adams (aka Ceej)
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