Sunday, April 2, 2023

Book Review: Arbiter of Worlds


Arbiter of Worlds: A Primer for Gamemasters is the definitive guide to building and running fantasy role-playing game campaigns. Its goal is to teach you how to build living, breathing worlds for your players to explore; how to host game and manage game sessions; and how to create powerful experiences of adventure that your players will talk about for years to come. Learn the secret to becoming a judge, an adversary, a worldbuilder, and a storyteller and become an arbiter of worlds!

Alexander Macris published this book independently in March of 2019.

I was watching a YouTube video about running games of Dungeons and Dragons recently, and the host had mentioned this book. Not having heard of it, I ordered a copy online to check it out. As a relatively new DM of 5th edition D&D, I am always open for sources of potential tips to help me better run my games.

For the price of the paperback (under $9), I managed to glean a bit of useful information from the nineteen chapters (twenty if you include the appendix on alignments). The information itself is mostly game system agnostic meaning the lessons learned can apply to most any type of game one might be running. And though the word "worlds" is in the title, this book is not so much about building your game world but overseeing (thus the "arbiter" in the title) and managing sessions, players and such. A lot of this I knew from experience, but that just means that this book reinforces what so many have already said about running games.

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