500+ unique bartenders, brawlers, mages, merchants, royals, rogues, sages, sailors, warriors, weirdos and more for the 5th Edition RPG adventures.

From the #1 Best-Selling author, Jeff Ashworth, comes the latest addition to The Game Master series, with more than 500 NPCs ready to populate your campaign whenever you need them!

As is often the case in tabletop roleplaying games, players often venture into locales or look for answers in places and among people busy Game Masters simply didn’t anticipate. Or, just as often, an adventure won't have fully fleshed out characters in place for the locations and encounters outlined for gameplay.

The Game Master's Book of Non-Player Characters solves these issues and more by providing Game Masters with the information they need to “fill in the holes” in their campaign play. It will enable GMs to instantly add depth, color, motivation and unique physical characteristics at a moment's notice to unexpected or underwritten characters as they pop up during gameplay, ensuring every session is a memorable one for players and GMs alike.

This edition also includes more than 50 hand-drawn illustrations of select NPCs detailed in the book, 3 bonus one-shot adventures, and a foreword by online influencer Jasmine Bhullar.

Hardcover, 272p

500+ customizable maps, tables and story hooks to create 5th edition adventures on demand

For many tabletop RPG players, the joy of an in-depth game is that anything can happen. Typical adventure modules include a map of the adventure’s primary location, but every other location - whether it's a woodland clearing, a random apothecary or the depths of a temple players elect to explore - has to be improvised on the fly by the Game Master.

As every GM knows, no matter how many story hooks, maps or NPCs you painstakingly create during session prep, your best-laid plans are often foiled by your players' whims, extreme skill check successes (or critical fails) or their playful refusal to stay on task. In a game packed with infinite possibilities, what are GMs supposed to do when their players choose those for which they're not prepared?

The Game Master’s Book of Random Encounters provides an unbeatable solution. This massive tome is divided into location categories, each of which can stand alone as a small stop as part of a larger campaign.

As an example, the “Taverns, Inns, Shops & Guild Halls” section includes maps for 19 unique spaces, as well as multiple encounter tables designed to help GMs fill in the sights, sounds, smells and proprietors of a given location, allowing for each location in the book to be augmented and populated on the fly while still ensuring memorable moments for all your players.

Each map is presented at scale on grid, enabling GMs to determine exactly where all of the characters are in relation to one another and anyone (or anything) else in the space, critical information should any combat or other movement-based action occur.

Perhaps more useful than its nearly 100 maps, the book's one-shot generator features all the story hooks necessary for GMs to use these maps as part of an interconnected and contained adventure.

Featuring eight unique campaign drivers that lead players through several of the book's provided maps, the random tables associated with each stage in the adventure allow for nearly three million different outcomes, making The Game Master's Book of Random Encounters an incredible investment for any would-be GM.

The book also includes a Random NPC Generator to help you create intriguing characters your players will love (or love to hate), as well as a Party Makeup Maker for establishing connections among your PCs so you can weave together a disparate group of adventurers with just a few dice rolls.

Locations include taverns, temples, inns, animal/creature lairs, gatehouses, courts, ships, laboratories and more, with adventure hooks that run the gamut from frantic rooftop chases to deep cellar dungeon-crawls, with a total of 97 maps, more than 150 tables and millions of possible adventures.

No matter where your players end up, they'll have someone or something to persuade or deceive, impress or destroy.

As always, the choice is theirs. But no matter what they choose, with The Game Master's Book of Random Encounters, you'll be ready.

By Jeff Ashworth
Hardcover, 256 pages

A punishing collection of bone-crunching contraptions, brain-teasing riddles and... RPG adventures

The Game Master's Book of Traps, Puzzles and Dungeons provides GMs with endless options for populating their adventures with challenging riddles, puzzles, spiked pits, Rube Goldberg-style deathtraps and much more - everything they need to push player character to their limit and bring new levels of excitement (and anxiety) to their game play.

Whether part of a pre-planned adventure or a random encounter, these brain teasers, puzzles and traps will make every dungeon crawl, fortress break-in, or temple sacking that much more fun. GMs will find more than 60 challenging puzzles, 60 unique traps and 50 modular dungeon chambers, each with its own set of possible encoounters, meaning GMs can generate a fully-functional (or completely dilapidated) dungeon in a few rolls of a dice.

With intricate technical illustrations, beautifully rendered top-down location maps and three one-shot adventures, written by RPG inflencers including Jasmine Bhullar and the creators of the Three Black Halflings podcast, The Game Master’s Book of Traps, Puzzles and Dungeons is the ideal tool for any GM hoping to put the fun back in fun-geon*.

Hardcover, 256p

This challenging book provides GMs with more than two dozen major villains and their followers for use across all levels of 5E RPG play. A game master's biggest challenge can be prep time. With busy lives in mind, this book provides new and exciting content to help GMs save hours of time preparing for a game. Inside, readers will find twenty-five "Big Bosses," along with insights into how they use their minions strategically in order to decimate any heroic threat that might cross their paths.

HC, 256pgs, FC

This unique new RPG guidebook is designed to transform gameplay in ways that empower players to create their own motivations and goals, then proactively pursue them-in effect, guiding the narrative of their characters, rather than having the Game Master do it.

Traditional TTRPGs have for decades relied on reactive player responses in order to function. In other words, there is an evil wizard out to take over the world. The player characters are good, therefore it's their duty to go stop the wizard. Game play then follows a traditional storytelling narrative of protagonists working to return their world back to the status quo, or an improved position. Bad guy makes a move, good guys move to stop him. The problem with this style of gameplay is that players are always reacting to what's put in front of them.

SC, 224pgs, FC