An interesting concept but one that I haven't really found helpful. I've tried it a couple of times and decided it doesn't add much to the solo experience.

Set your expectations correctly. It's worth noting what the Location Crafter isn't:

• It's not lists of room types, encounters, furnishings, doors, tricks, or traps for dungeons, haunted mansions, spaceships, supervillain lairs, box canyons, or anything else. It's not tied to any genre, setting, or game system. (Whether that's good news or bad news is up to you.)
• It's not a mapping tool. There's nothing to tell you where the exits are, how big anything is, what sort of cavern you're seeing, or how to get from one location to the next. There's no world-building guidance.

Location Crafter is about helping you build as you go, using inputs you've provided about the sorts of things that should be included.

Would Location Crafter help if you already have tables and generators for room types etc.? Maybe. You could let Location Crafter drive your building process, and use your generators for populating Location Crafter's lists. More on that below.

Would Location Crafter help if you had an existing map, but little or no content? Yes. You could have Location Crafter flesh out each map location, in advance or as you play.

Would you need Location Crafter if you already had a detailed setting? No, unless you use Location Crafter to extend what you already have.

Location Crafter uses a mix of planned and random elements.

Your prep work involves populating your lists of Locations, Encounters, and Objects. You're not tying them to a map or to each other at this stage. You might know you want guardrooms and a Temple of Awful Evilness on the list, for example, so you add them to your Location list, but (so far) you don't know where or when they'll appear.

You can make entries for unique locations, encounters, and objects (a named NPC, a one-of-a-kind object). You can make entries for reusable locations, encounters, and objects (a guest room, a band of goblins, a sack of coins). You can use None as an entry. You can repeat entries if you want them to come up more often. You can use Expected as an entry, meaning you won't specify what it is now, except to say it'll be something ordinary and expected when it comes up. If you have outside tables and generators, you could use them to help you populate the lists. You can use Special as entry to trigger a roll on a table that adds a twist to something you roll up. You can add Random as an entry, which will be determined randomly when you use the lists later. You can add Complete as an entry type so you can mark the end of exploration.

There's more art than science in deciding how to make up your lists. How far down should "Complete" appear in the Locations list? How far down should the evil boss appear in the Encounters list? How many "None" entries do you want? Do you want lots of "Random" and "Special" entries, or just one of each, or none at all?

That's the prep work. You could stop your preparations there, and not use the lists until game time. Alternatively, you could start using the lists ahead of the session to start fleshing out the content, but you'd probably still leave some of it for the session so you can be adaptive during play.

Using the tables involves rolling against the lists you've created. You're creating scenes. You create a scene by rolling up a Location, an Encounter, and an Object, and you give the PCs a way to reach the scene. You add and subtract Progress Points as you go, which biases your die roll toward the earlier or later parts of the lists. In other words, you'd put the stuff to find early near the top of each list, and the stuff to find later near the bottom. If you wanted to separate earlier and later content entirely (e.g. stuff on this side of the river vs stuff on the other side of the river), just make separate lists for each; you'd probably include a location in the first set that will lead you to the second set.

You could wind up with many combinations of Location, Encounter, and Object when you roll up a scene. To me, this helps you stay flexible. It avoids the old problem of opponents who sit in one room forever, waiting for an adventurer to wander by. If you have set pieces in mind (THIS encounter must happen in THIS location with THESE objects present), you can do that, but mostly the lists are for mixing and matching on the fly in random combinations.

While you're rolling stuff up, the various entry types mentioned earlier could kick into action. "Expected" is something you make up on the spot, or maybe you have an outside generator to help you. "Random" means you use Location Crafter's description oracle to roll up two terms (e.g. "Jovially" + "Fancy") that inspire you to create something. If you roll up a unique element, you cross it off the list so it won't come up again. You add and remove Progress Points as you go to modify later rolls. If you roll up Complete, there's no further exploration to be done.

If you need help with things like whether there's another way out of the room, or whether a door is currently locked, you could use one of Location Crafter's included oracles (Simple Questions, Complex Action Questions, or Complex Description Questions), or some other answer oracle you might prefer. The "complex" oracles have you roll up two terms and use them for inspiration.

A nice feature is that you can expand your lists as you use them. If a new Location, Encounter, or Object comes up during play, and if it might come up again later, add it to the appropriate list. This can add continuity and coherence to your setting.

You could use Location Crafer and Adventure Crafter in tandem, although neither mentions the other. Adventure Crafter is more about what happens and why it happens whereas Location Crafter is more about where it happens. When Adventure Crafter does make location references, you could use Location Crafter to flesh them out or to replace them. Location Crafter's Encounters list is largely redundant with Adventure Crafter's Characters list. You could use one or the other for both purposes, or you could make one the master list while the other helps populate the master list when needed.

To recap: Location Crafter is helpful for building an area as you go.

This product's contents is very different than Mythic and the related Creature and Adventure crafters. The other books provide you with large, imaginative charts that fuel your games. They are very helpful, and save time.

The Location Crafter provides you with the process to make your own. As far as concept and methodology goes, the product is as good as the others, but it stops short! Instead of providing you with pre-made sets for you to use/modify like battlefield, castle, alien base, office building, fairy forest, modern day slum, and such, it just shows you the process. It seems like the whole book should be the last chapter of a much larger product.

I would wait for the full release, and make do with the other excellent products until then.

Clearly an amazing product, just look at who produced it! Valuable for any RPG setting it is invaluable for the solo gamer. It creates such an amazingly rich enviornment The Location Crafter is well worth your hard earned cash, and for around $3 USD, its a steal.

Excellent product for structuring encounters into a great night's session. I used this in Traveller to set up a city quickly that the players explored and then created a second 'location' being the journey out of a city towards a destination town in a forest.

It gave me a simple way of moving the story along - roll again on the table I had generated. It also provides for Random and Special locations, objects and encounters that stimulate your imagination. At a key point in the session I rolled two random words that changed the direction of the story.

I would absolutely recommend this product for all GMs who need a quick way of keeping players interested when they don't have time to draw up maps.

This was a great product, full of good ideas i love the abstract exploration model that is used. Makes those random houses that thieves like to entet much easier on me, and special for them.

It is simple to use, genre neutral and let me tell you: it just works. A great add-on to Mythic GME. All you need to come up with is a good imagination and about 15 to 30 words for a small to medium location.

Your words are then divided into three categories on which you roll randomly to fluff out a location. Easy, simple to use, no frills and really well explained. You cannot get wrong with this.

Cool location generator. Short book compared to Mythic. Worth the price. This is a universal "play as you go" location generator, or could be used before the adventure. There are many other tools online that have ways of doing this, some are free and could generate seeded maps with encounters.

You don't need other Mythic books to use this. It's for GMs who want to generate areas from scratch, or solo players who don't want to know what happens next. I enjoy supporting the author, because the Mythic books are trendsetters and are often imitated.

The writing is comfortably conversational, lead-in to new concepts is clear and friendly, and new terms are pretty self-explanatory. The parts of the system are explained in the order they come up in use.

Location generation procedure is straightforward, and there's a nice blend of randomness and increasing tension as rarer or conclusive elements become more likely. The system is scope-agnostic, so you can generate a planet or a single room with the same method.

These are my favorite things about the Location Crafter system:

1. Setup sheets you create are reusable! I could build any number of, say, wizard's towers from a single prep sheet, maybe making things just a little more generic if I intended to reuse them.
2. Creating a location can be a game in itself. I had a great time just building out and mapping an area, filling out all kinds of details, and wondering when and where the more unique or endgame-type rooms and encounters would come up.

I had a little trouble figuring out how best to weight and prioritize the potential contents of a location, but the text definitely does give hints here.

Great system for developing interesting locations, and a lot of fun to use.

A wonderful product, this will be my favored GM emulator over Mythic (yes, it does that too, and more elegantly, without the big Fate Chart you find in Mythic). It's fun creating lists of things that can go into a setting, and it's amazing how the elements can come together.

Using it mostly for solo play without a GM, it's particularly great at 'crawl sorts of adventures. This can be of all sorts, not just classic subterranean realms, but anywhere you wish.

Some great and solid ideas here of which I will be making use for quite some time. Highly recommended for those who wish a more improvisatory approach to building not just locations (as it says on the tin), but adventures...because story will be generated too. Some creativity required.

I love the Location Crafter.I can use this to detail setting or I can keep drilling down adding layers of detail as needed. Even better though. is that I can use the Location Crafter to randomly generate a setting, on the fly, when playing solo and add as much or as little detail as needed. No matter how you play or what you play, you'll certainly find this book a valuable in your role playing toolkit.

This is a random location generator mechanic, that is, you don't get ready tables to roll, this requires a bit more work from the GM. You prepare the tables yourself according to the rules and then roll on them to get the location schematic (which can be quite easily drawn as a map). It really is very freeform and system/setting agnostic, a very good thing for a tool like this. I can see this working very well with some improvised scenarios or adventure seeds, where the specific locations are not premade. This can be used on the fly during a session (I'm not really sure about this, it takes up to 1-2 minutes to get another location element in some cases, so it would be a noticable stop during gameplay) or during session preparation. I like how this scales from small locations like a single room to cities, planets or even galaxies.

I cut a star from my rating because of technical mishaps. The text should be justified to left&right (it' only left aligned) and there are extra empty pags at the end, also the lines on the worksheet are misaligned. If any of this gets corrected in a future version, then you can ignore this part.

Overall, this is a useful tool, the price is a bit high for the amount of pages, but this will be used very much in my games so I don't really mind. It takes a bit of effort to use but that's the cost of being universal.

If you're familiar with the Mythic System, you'll feel comfortable with this random amalgamator. To use it, you'll throw together a few lists of elements that will describe the different locations within your setting; the rules then give you a system for mashing these lists together to come up with meaningful encounters on the fly. Since it's completely freeform, you'll have no problem slipping in your scripted locations and encounters to form the backbone of the adventure. The system is heavily subjective, so don't expect any rules assistance, but its narrative emphasis allows it to work equally well with just about any RPG system out there. This book is great if you're comfortable with extemporaneous GMing. If you like for everything to be scripted beforehand, don't bother--this book isn't for you.