Product Spotlight: GM’s Miscellany (system-agonistic)

All right, now for something completely different:

Raging Swan Press has, for some time now, provided the most helpful books at my table. You see, I love complex crunch, sure. I adore glorious modules. But know what I use literally EVERY session? Bar exceptions? Dressing-pdfs. I crunch quite a lot of statblocks for my main-game, simply because my players want a challenge and waltz through most vanilla books. Similarly, I run quite a few modules I wrote myself. The problem with them is that I tend to gravitate to a highlights-reel-type of design; chalk it up to my personality, but lavishly crafting all those details when I can improvise them…is just not what I consider time well-spent. However, there’s an issue: Every GM has a narrative voice, if you will; a style. And most of the time, well, you can tell when something’s improvised, no matter how good the GM is.

Three books changed that for me. Even the somewhat less brilliant one still is exceedingly useful – I’m, of course, talking about the Urban Dressing, Wilderness Dressing and Dungeon Dressing books by Raging Swan Press.

GM’s Miscellany: Urban Dressing may be the one of the original three books that it less detailed in some of its components than one would hope for – but in the system-neutral edition, the details do become somewhat less important…and even with my criticism intact, this book is extremely useful! If you’re not playing PFRPG, the system-neutral edition will certainly enhance your game, sans those pesky rules.

You can get this book here on OBS!

Now, while Urban Dressing was the first big book to sport the signature yellow of Raging Swan Press’ system-neutral books, it was not the first!

That honor belongs to the two winners of my Top Ten of 2014:

GM’s Miscellany: Wilderness Dressing ranks as one of the best resources you can get for any game; It will retain its usefulness in future editions and games and is simply awesome. My game has truly and noticably improved since I got this book – and bear in mind that I have to translate these entries into German on the fly while playing the game. Supremely well-organized (in contrast to most dressing/table pdfs out there) and chock-full with unique tables, this massive milestone of a book is now also available as a system-neutral edition.

So if you’ve refrained from getting the original PFRPG-version until now…well, there is literally no reason to not get the system-neutral edition. This book will improve your game, I guarantee it.

You can get this stellar book here on OBS!

And then, there would be the big guy: GM’s Miscellany: Dungeon Dressing. Or, as I like to call it – bland-dungeon-be-gone. Much like the Wilderness Dressing-book, it is one HUGE resource of collected, pure AWESOMENESS. There are no more “hotspot”-dungeons with two to one “interaction-points” per room in games that use these books; the world suddenly starts feeling alive, concise, lived in – and, in many a case, dressing has led to adventure in my games. It is my firm conviction that these books belong on the bookshelf of ANY GM. No exceptions, no excuses; even if you don’t run PFRPG, the new, system-neutral version has you covered. If these books hadn’t already won my Top Ten in 2014, they’d score again in their system-neutral iterations in 2015.

Seriously, get this book!

The original PFRPG-books can be found here:

GM’s Miscellany: Urban Dressing

GM’s Miscellany: Wilderness Dressing

GM’s Miscellany: Dungeon Dressing

Endzeitgeist out.

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