Fantasy books for new game masters

A new game master is often told to read the rulebook twice and the adventure once. That is sound, and it is also how a campaign ends up sounding like the adventure. Novels are the other apprenticeship. They are not hidden rulebooks. They are a supply of situations: a door with a price, a journey that goes wrong in the middle, a city where three people want the same key.

This is a short list on purpose. Three books, three uses, and a method for taking something home without dragging the plot in behind you. The dice can wait until someone is sitting down to play. A two-player board game can wait until you want a night off from preparing anything at all.

Read for situations, not for speeches

The mistake is to underline a paragraph and read it to the table as if it were boxed text. Players can hear when a sentence was written for a page. What travels is the situation underneath the sentence.

A useful note after a chapter is one line, in your own words:

• Who wants something, and who is in the way?
• What does it cost to get it, besides hit points?
• What changes in the place if the characters leave it alone?

If you cannot answer those, the chapter was a pleasure and not a prep note, which is a perfectly good outcome. These are novels first. The game is allowed to come second.

Steal the problem. Leave the proper nouns where you found them.

The Hobbit

The Hobbit is a journey with a shape you can feel. There is a reluctant specialist, a company that is too large to be efficient, a series of places that each want a different skill, and a treasure that solves one problem by creating another. You do not need to send anyone to a mountain. You need the rhythm: travel, a set piece, a cost, a change in who trusts whom.

It is also a lesson in leaving. The journey home is not an empty corridor, and the treasure is not a full stop. Campaigns that end at the hoard often feel shorter than the sessions that led there. Tolkien spends the return. A new GM can steal that instinct without stealing a single riddle.

The tone will not fit every table. It is told, it is often funny, and it is lighter than the games that treat every corridor as a threat. If your group wants that lighter register, the book is a map of it. If they do not, take the structure and change the weather.

A Wizard of Earthsea

A Wizard of Earthsea is the book to read if your spells have started to feel like a menu. Ged learns names. The names are power, and the power has a residue. Islands are small enough that a reputation arrives before the person does. None of this requires you to run a game about wizards. It requires you to decide what a spell costs after it has been cast.

The limitation, for a GM, is the cast. The novel belongs to one young man. A party of four will not fit inside it unless you widen the frame: a master and a student, a boat, a village that already has an opinion. Do that widening yourself. Dropping a party into the plot as written is how you end up narrating at people.

It is a short book. That is part of the recommendation. A GM who is also meant to shop, cook and read a 300-page adventure does not need a third doorstop before session one.

The Lies of Locke Lamora

The Lies of Locke Lamora is a city. Camorr has gangs, rituals, debts and a confidence game that only works because several powerful people want different things from the same night. That is the useful part for the table. A heist session fails when the only obstacle is a lock. It works when three factions would each pay to see a different person holding the prize.

Read it for the arrangements, not for the jokes. The jokes belong to Lynch, and they will sound borrowed if you repeat them. The arrangements — a crew, a costume, a mark, a thing that goes wrong because someone else was running a plan too — are sturdy enough to move to another city with the names filed off.

It is not a family book. The violence is explicit and the language is, too. If the table includes younger players, or anyone who wanted the tone of The Hobbit, leave this one on your shelf and steal more quietly from the other two. It is also long. You do not need to finish it before you use the idea of a city that keeps score.

How to turn a chapter into a session

Keep a page, not a folder. After each of these books, write five situations and stop. Five is enough for a month of play, and a folder of fifty becomes a source of guilt rather than a source of games.

Then change three things before you use one: the place, the names, and the prize. If a player who has read the book can still call the next beat, you kept too much. The table should feel the kind of trouble, not the chapter number.

A situation is ready when you know how the scene starts if the characters do nothing. The book has already done that work. The Hobbit is full of places that continue without Bilbo. Earthsea is full of islands that had a history before the mage arrived. Camorr is running cons on the days Locke stays in.

Where to go next

The fantasy books shelf is for this kind of note. The RPG shelf is for the evenings when the note becomes a session. If you are still gathering the table itself, the practical companion is the guide to dice, which is about the objects, not the plot.

The editions linked at the end are ordinary paperbacks to search for, not a claim that one printing is blessed. Check the format and the price on Amazon when you are ready to buy. A library copy will teach you the same situations.