GM's Toolbox

Welcome to The GM's Toolbox!

Get a brain dump from an old friend with decades of RPG experience, from OSR games to 5E. Tons of tables, magic, and wisdom.

What's This Book About?

GM's Toolbox is the result of a devoted tabletop roleplaying nerd sifting through a box containing 35 years' worth of notebooks and scraps of paper and realizing he had a ton of great stuff he could share.

If you're a roleplaying game referee - whether you call yourself GM, DM, Labyrinth Lord, Crypt Keeper, Storyteller, or whatever - you know that it's smart to take good notes and jot down ideas when they come to you. Later, you file away those ideas you know are good but can't use immediately. That's what I did. In trying to digitize and organize the stuff from The Box, it occurred that maybe other people might get some use from it.

This book is about giving you resources for your own GM's Toolbox!

What You Get

* Two NEW classes for Fifth Edition and OSR games
* Dozens of Adventure Seeds: ideas for adventures I never used but you can
* 100 magic items I never got to give as treasure
* Hundreds of trinkets to spice up your treasure hoards
* 6 all-new monsters your players have never seen before
* Twisted versions of "core" 5E magic items
* Weird quirks to give a character or NPC
* Dozens of Rumors for players to chase down
* Essays on the art and craft of roleplaying gaming
* Tables. LOTS of tables, for stuff ranging from Spooky Sounds to Permanent Injuries.
* Magic Swords, each with names and lore to help you root them in your world
* More than 150 pages of outstanding content you can use in your game right now

Most of the tools are system and setting-neutral; you can use them in any fantasy game. If it has mechanics, I tried to keep it system-neutral, but it'll certainly have Fifth Edition mechanics. Monsters have stats for D&D 5E, OSR games, and our own Spears & Spells game.

The Adventure Seeds, Rumors, and other purely narrative content are designed to work with any fantasy game, from Dungeons & Dragons to our own Spears & Spells game, to OSR games like Basic Fantasy or Dungeon Crawl Classics. It doesn't matter! Everything in this book is either totally system-neutral or compatible with the Fifth Edition of D&D. Whatever game you play, you're going to find something spicy to kick it up a notch.