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Kobold Guide to Dungeons
You can’t control what players are going to do. That’s half the fun. But you can control where they do it. That’s a whole other half!
The Kobold Guide to Dungeons gives both new and experienced Game Masters over 100 pages of insight and ideas into making dungeons great. In-depth essays from industry luminaries teach you to think outside your own boxes, and into a larger realm of challenge, discovery, and good old monster bashing.
Practical essays gives you insider tips and tricks to:
• Design non-linear dungeons to explore
• Think in 3D to make amazing spaces
• Make every room count, even when there’s no monster
• Create solutions in addition to combat
• Dole out treasure—without blowing the bank
The Kobold Guide to Dungeons features essays from classic voices of the RPG canon such as David “Zeb” Cook, Frank Mentzer, and Lawrence Schick. It also includes newer voices including Dominique Dickey, Sadie Lowry, and Erin Roberts.
Open this book and level up your half of the game!
The Kobold Guide to Dungeons gives both new and experienced Game Masters over 100 pages of insight and ideas into making dungeons great. In-depth essays from industry luminaries teach you to think outside your own boxes, and into a larger realm of challenge, discovery, and good old monster bashing.
Practical essays gives you insider tips and tricks to:
• Design non-linear dungeons to explore
• Think in 3D to make amazing spaces
• Make every room count, even when there’s no monster
• Create solutions in addition to combat
• Dole out treasure—without blowing the bank
The Kobold Guide to Dungeons features essays from classic voices of the RPG canon such as David “Zeb” Cook, Frank Mentzer, and Lawrence Schick. It also includes newer voices including Dominique Dickey, Sadie Lowry, and Erin Roberts.
Open this book and level up your half of the game!
- GenresFantasy
105 pages, Paperback
Published March 14, 2023
3 people are currently reading
28 people want to read
About the author
John Joseph Adams
368 books982 followersJohn Joseph Adams is the series editor of BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as ROBOT UPRISINGS, DEAD MAN'S HAND, BRAVE NEW WORLDS,WASTELANDS, and THE LIVING DEAD. Recent and forthcoming books include WHAT THE #@&% IS THAT?, OPERATION ARCANA, PRESS START TO PLAY, LOOSED UPON THE WORLD, and THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH (consisting of THE END IS NIGH, THE END IS NOW, and THE END HAS COME). Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated nine times), is a seven-time World Fantasy Award finalist, and served as a judge for the 2015 National Book Award. John is also the editor and publisher of the digital magazines LIGHTSPEED and NIGHTMARE, and is a producer for Wired's THE GEEK'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY podcast. You can find him online at www.johnjosephadams.com and on Twitter @JohnJosephAdams.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
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November 7, 2023THIS IS NOT A REVIEW OF THIS BOOK. This is a review of a bundle of D&D adventures from the Arcane Library, aka Kelsey Dionne (who has an essay here) and is also the author of the retroclone Shadowdark -- which also doesn't have an entry here!
How? A Bundle of Holding purchase.
What? A bunch of 5e D&D adventures, whose premise I will rehearse here for reasons that will become clear, if I have any:
- Black Rose -- there's ghouls in the basement of an inn and a vengeful ghost who you can set to rest.
- Crypts of azarumme -- there undead in the basement of a church, go stop them
- Curse of wardenwood -- after the PCs figure out a witch is bad, they rescue some kids who are actually werewolves and their progenitor werewolf attacks. (There's a fun mechanic of using a bond to reach a wolf child, but making the kids fall unconscious if they hit 0 hp seems a little cheap.)
- Fires of Iskh -- for 20th level adventurers, a volcano from the Plane of Fire is ruining your day -- kill the efreet who took it over, and the dragon they’re trying to wake.
- Horror within -- it’s a dungeon crawl in a theater with a Cthulhu monster after a bad play
- Masque of Worms -- a Poe joint: rescue the lady from the masque where the murderer accidentally summoned monster ("conquerer") worms through his madness and murder
- Snow Stalkers -- fight monsters made by a mad scientist in a blizzard
- Gilded Tower -- fight monsters made by plant monster in a mausoleum tower
- Watchers in the dark -- a series of fights, from crazed boars, to crazed ankhegs, to the monster from the meteor that is controlling everything.
Yeah, so? OK, what's the point of all that plot? Just that the plots are pretty straightforward and a little repetitive when read as part of a bundle.
But here's a few other things I've noticed, and some things to steal:
* Kelsey Dionne really likes skill challenges where you track a goal on a slider. Like in Black Rose, the final combat includes a slider on the ghost: she starts with 3 hostility points, if she gets to 7, she'll attack, if she gets to 0, she's at rest. You can lower her hostility by performing funeral rites and attacking the ghouls who killed her; you can raise her hostility by attacking her or by letting harm come to the girl she thinks is her daughter. There might be some tension in keeping a tracker like this, especially if you let the players know it's moving but not _why_ it's moving. BUT it's funny to me that the slider has three possible end states (peace, rest, still neutral) but that third state isn't covered. I might just keep it as a clock: it gets worse if you don't complete the ritual in time.
* Each adventure has a tri-partite hook for getting adventurer's involved: appeals to reward, heroism, discovery. That's a fun little thing to add to an adventure.
* Presentation is really tuned to one-shots with minimal prep: each adventure is short, and like Shadowdark and some OSR stuff, the descriptions are bulletpointed to make it easy to see each element (rather than read a chunk of flavor text); there's also a quick background and summary of what is likely to happen in the adventure; and a lot of the encounters are purposely written to be a single page.
How? A Bundle of Holding purchase.
What? A bunch of 5e D&D adventures, whose premise I will rehearse here for reasons that will become clear, if I have any:
- Black Rose -- there's ghouls in the basement of an inn and a vengeful ghost who you can set to rest.
- Crypts of azarumme -- there undead in the basement of a church, go stop them
- Curse of wardenwood -- after the PCs figure out a witch is bad, they rescue some kids who are actually werewolves and their progenitor werewolf attacks. (There's a fun mechanic of using a bond to reach a wolf child, but making the kids fall unconscious if they hit 0 hp seems a little cheap.)
- Fires of Iskh -- for 20th level adventurers, a volcano from the Plane of Fire is ruining your day -- kill the efreet who took it over, and the dragon they’re trying to wake.
- Horror within -- it’s a dungeon crawl in a theater with a Cthulhu monster after a bad play
- Masque of Worms -- a Poe joint: rescue the lady from the masque where the murderer accidentally summoned monster ("conquerer") worms through his madness and murder
- Snow Stalkers -- fight monsters made by a mad scientist in a blizzard
- Gilded Tower -- fight monsters made by plant monster in a mausoleum tower
- Watchers in the dark -- a series of fights, from crazed boars, to crazed ankhegs, to the monster from the meteor that is controlling everything.
Yeah, so? OK, what's the point of all that plot? Just that the plots are pretty straightforward and a little repetitive when read as part of a bundle.
But here's a few other things I've noticed, and some things to steal:
* Kelsey Dionne really likes skill challenges where you track a goal on a slider. Like in Black Rose, the final combat includes a slider on the ghost: she starts with 3 hostility points, if she gets to 7, she'll attack, if she gets to 0, she's at rest. You can lower her hostility by performing funeral rites and attacking the ghouls who killed her; you can raise her hostility by attacking her or by letting harm come to the girl she thinks is her daughter. There might be some tension in keeping a tracker like this, especially if you let the players know it's moving but not _why_ it's moving. BUT it's funny to me that the slider has three possible end states (peace, rest, still neutral) but that third state isn't covered. I might just keep it as a clock: it gets worse if you don't complete the ritual in time.
* Each adventure has a tri-partite hook for getting adventurer's involved: appeals to reward, heroism, discovery. That's a fun little thing to add to an adventure.
* Presentation is really tuned to one-shots with minimal prep: each adventure is short, and like Shadowdark and some OSR stuff, the descriptions are bulletpointed to make it easy to see each element (rather than read a chunk of flavor text); there's also a quick background and summary of what is likely to happen in the adventure; and a lot of the encounters are purposely written to be a single page.
August 27, 2024
Great book to read if you are a new or old DM looking to build their own dungeon adventure.
January 6, 2024
This is a mixed bag of short articles - former blog posts? - on the theme of dungeon design in the game Dungeons & Dragons. The earlier essays may be useful for someone just starting to run a campaign; several offer fairly cliche and unhelpfully non-specific advice, but might be more appealing to someone encountering those ideas for the first time. I found the last five essays most useful, with specific ideas that it could be fun to incorporate in my campaign (for example: vertical spaces, escape routes, ways to design around logical inconsistencies of the game that can derail suspension of disbelief).
October 31, 2024
Much like the Kobold Guide to Monsters, this is more about getting you in the mindspace on the topic and things to keep in mind in order to improve your dungeons and thus adventures, rather than practical tables and such. Plenty of stuff I already knew, but much like with KGM, it is always good to have certain stuff reiterated.
November 1, 2024
Not great. Mediocre. There are a couple of gems though
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews