Not precisely what you asked for, but very useful resources so I'm plugging them anyway because I love them:
this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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The Dungeon Alphabet seems great! I will add that to my list to check out.
Fire on the velvet horizon also looks interesting, but maybe a little intense for my current game. Kind of giving me some SCP vibes. Would be fun to run a Fringe-like campaign in a dark fantasy setting with these kinds of creatures. Reminds me of The Tales of Durand series, too, where when certain things happen, the world kind of starts to unravel and unbinds a lot of dark creatures and things.
Yeah. The "Fire on the Velvet Horizon" stuff is really too powerful to be used as-is in my experience; generally I'll insert them in much reduced form. "Hostage Frog" becomes a big frog monster that tries to swallow and digest the adventurers. "Ice Age Eye" becomes a particular frozen part of the map that's unusual and strange in a certain way. That is why I love it though; any one of those entries easily contains enough powerful content that it could take over and consume the entire campaign structure, so there's plenty of creative strength to use for adding flavor to the adventure even if it's not safe to use undiluted.
I usually see https://thealexandrian.net/ mentioned for new GMing advice, especially the Don't Prep Plots article. I also personally enjoy the Angry GM's advice.
If you aren't specifically worried about converting statblocks and mechanics but just porting the general story over, you can take the characters and plot points from any system really.
That is fantastic. That don't prep plots makes a lot of sense and is very helpful. I will bookmark these.
Thank you!
How about creating your own customized stories, monsters, items, through a fun and entertaining game?
I found Storycaster completely by chance, bumping into its creator in the Fate Discord. I've playtested it a couple of times. They regularly publish adventures created with it for free too. Highly recommend it.
I do, I try to do as much creation as I can to exercise those skills, but having some prepared adventures to steal things from makes it a lot easier. Like going to the gym with a professionally made program before learning to write your own programming. And I don't want stuff so pre-prepared that I don't ever learn to make my own stuff - I'm not so much just running the pre-made stuff as I am dissecting it, trying to understand it, and taking what I like to plug into my game.
When I have prompt or encounter ideas I write them down in a notebook and flesh them out later, but a lot of the time when I sit down to prep it's hard to think of things out of thin air. I'm getting a lot better at creating new things and integrating things the more we play.
So yeah, any resources on how to better design stuff is very welcome too. I have watched a lot of the Matthew Colville running the game videos that have helped a lot (especially the "Prep Can Be Literally Easy and Actually Fun" video)
Something like Storycaster looks interesting. I have heard of some other story prompt / plot cards (Fabula and Narata) and I might look into those too... That kind of thing is exactly what I'm looking for. Something that can help me generate ideas to flesh out into encounters or side quests that I can keep in my GM notes and stick in different locations so when the players decide to go into the mountains instead of the forests I have a general idea of what might be there...