Tome of Adventure Design arrived over the Christmas, something that had been on my radar for quite a bit. I had been keeping an eye out for it on this side of the Atlantic in vain so finally it needed to be ordered in. Minor ding in the cover but it got here.
What we get is about 500 pages, a tome as advertised of all sorts of inspirational ideas for setting up adventures. This is very much a DM's tool for long haul DM's.
It hast a nice clean style double column throughout any of the text bits and the rest, the vast majority of the book, is tables. Sometimes these are single column where the prompts expand a little, sometimes they are up to four plus the index columns on the page for where it's just single words.
Each chapter is it's own small book as they characterize it. You've got:
1. 86 pages in chapter one: Principles and starting points
2. 86 pages in chapter two: Monsters
3. 226 pages in chapter three: Dungeon design
4. 80 pages in chapter four: Non-dungeon adventure design
So what is in here chunk by chunk?
Principles and starting points opens with the philosophy for the whole book - a creativity aid, not the specific monsters and stats found in a DMG. The idea behind the book is to feed the human facility to pattern match - the capability that has us seeing shapes in clouds. After the general principles of the system there is a workflow of elements to build an adventure. For some of these elements there are tables in the rest of the chapter. The tools presented here do not fit together in one neat single workflow, such as might be found in other adventure generators where you roll on a table and those results direct you to other tables in a fairly closed loop. These are more a collection of generators that stand more freely - overall adventure concepts, locations, missions, patrons/targets, villanous plans - and you then look at whatever is generated and let your mind fill in the blanks.
This is the high concept behind the whole book - it gives you interesting pieces for your brain to assemble which makes it broader than most other similar adventure generators but also requires more work from you to get it table ready. This is not a minimal prep tool, this is for those who like the prep - I like it, but if you are crushed for time and you need something that gets you to table ready directly, this is not that tool.
The second chapter on monsters has two parts; the first contains tables for fourteen classes of monsters which detail appropriate things for those tables. As it says at the start - this is not for on-the-fly use at table, this is for thinking about monsters to drive adventure ahead of time. Parts of This section land in a bit of a funny spot for me - there are plenty of situational elements that you can roll up and then drop in whatever monster you want, but there is a fair few things in here that imply some mechanical changes over a standard stat block. One could always 'Just Use Bears' it and keep your standard stat block and use these rolled up elements purely for flavour but if you want these elements to mean something then this is the part where you end up with homework you have to figure out yourself. I would probably 'just use bears' and simply reskin an existing beast.
Chapter three on dungeon design is nearly three times larger than the others. It opens with Part One, an eleven page block on the creative process that I might argue would be better situated at the front of the book among other wisdoms about process that apply even to non-dungeon stuff. Even the first 25 pages of Part Two is great stuff about creating mysteries and clues that is pretty universally relevant too. We do then get into actual dungeon design - maps and the areas, ways between them and contents of those areas. We get tons of tables to generate the architecture of the place, the contents, names, traps, landmarks, everything you need.There is a big block of 'tricks', another of 'traps' and more generally useful things like curses and treasures both magical and mundane.
And then we get another 80 pager for the non-dungeon adventure design with sections on Aerial adventures, Castles & Ruins, Cities & Settlements, Planar adventures, Underwater adventures, Waterborne adventures and Wilderness adventures. Wilderness and Cities & Settlements both have lots of bits within the sections - either different terrain types or the different aspects of urban adventuring like maps, events, religions etc. The other sections have half a dozen to a dozen relevant tables but are fairly high level otherwise. All these really serve to be the 'wrapper' - the general aesthetic to paint over the adventure framework created out of the first section content. These are the specific flavour touches that localise the adventure.
Wrap up - using these in anger myself, I liked the loose, open workflow where I just ran through the first book rolling up a pile of stuff and then stirred the things I'd gotten around to see how they all fit together. This is unlike other adventure generators I have been testing this past year where there is a more fixed structure, this is a creativity aid. It is meant to help people who generally know the basics of what they're doing but need a hand to create content for your standard weekly table or the like. It is a collosal book of spark lists.
As mentioned above, this is advanced stuff, it gives you nothing on stats or any mechanical advice. This is all the ideas, ideas, ideas, ideas, and a system to convert these ideas into playable stuff for the table. It makes this more of an evergreen resource because you can use it for all of your games, whatever the system, whatever the levels. This is help for the creative inspiration part, which is not the mechanics. I would not recommend this as the first book you buy after the DMG but it is a good addition to the shelves for long-haul DM's.
For other reviews see Roleplay Rescue’s Blog or Uncle Matt's Blog or @vestige on RPGGeek
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