100 Fantasy Adventure Seeds, by James "Grim" Denbrough Published by Chronicle City Review by Andrew Merzetti, from review copy offered gratis by publisher.

In this review, I'll go over my expectations and the author's stated goals, then cover three areas: I'll discuss the layout, move on to the utility of the content, and conclude with value for money.

Introduction: Expectations and Goals.

I expect a plot aid to have ideas that are better than what I come up with when it's half an hour to game time and I've spent all day working on excuses and watching football. 100 Fantasy Adventure Seeds pretty much sets this as its goal -- "Grim" Denbrough offers a book of rough sketches to spark our wits a bit, with twists that can be applied to complicate things. The fair question, is, then, I think: "Is this book worth buying for the GM who has the imagination to meet the author in the middle? In other words, do these plots help, or leave the good GM with as much work as, or even more than, before?" Let's move on and find out.

Layout and Structure.

The layout is very well done. The cover art is a fine piece of work (very much a by-the-numbers monster vs party scene, but it's what's in the tin). The layout is very efficient: the typography, white space and organization of the book are excellent. It's all very legible, the words sit easy on the page, and there is one page per seed. The structure as well (Title, Seed Description AKA the plot, Twist 1, Twist 2, Twist 3, Epilogue, Callout) is straightforward. Structure and layout, then, are excellent, and allow the content to come to the fore.

The Content.

Here I will mimic the structure of the book itself, and review each feature on average. I have read each seed at least twice, and have privately rated each on several facets, but I will be general here.

Descriptions (ie, Plots): Not many of the plots are lemony fresh. Several instances of border wars, pirate takeovers, landgrabs, fairyland time-dilations and materials fetching. That's okay. This is a book of fantasy adventure seeds, and few ideas are original. I won't fault Denbrough for not inventing a new art form here, but I will say that about every fourth seed evinces a "Next". Nobody needs Adventure 73: Shrooms, which tells us that the fey cross over into our world by mushroom ring and, twist! the whole thing was a fairy dream or twist! y'all got ten years older because of that one wild weekend in downtown Las Feygas. (Although that might just be me; I'm an old dude, and pretty well read. A twenty-year-old GM might never have come across the idea of time's passage in the land of the Fey.) But moving on from the negative, I will say that as much as you won't many times be bowled over by original ideas in these base concepts, Denbrough comes through several times with a very solid people-oriented seed, such as Adventure 29: A Little Tied Up, about orcish slaver tribes and their conflict with civilization. This is only my bias, alright, but this is what I want. Social conflict, not arcane blacksmiths who can't fetch their own magic charcoal because feudalism. I'd say maybe one idea in twelve breaks away from timeworn ideas and gives us real meat this way. Obviously, I wish the number of this kind of plot were higher. In my view, all of these fantasy cliches are done done done. The only thing that can save them is a great twist! How does Denbrough do in that regard? Read on.

Twists (three for each seed): Quite variable in quality, but Denbrough's good for about one neat twist per seed. He strikes out a few times, and hits a two-run homer a few times, but his average is around one good twist per page. That's decent. A twist will sometimes save what is otherwise a fairly hack idea, as in Adventure 30: Pilgrim's Progress, where there are a couple of sound twists to the old escort deal (i.e, twist! there's a murderer in the ranks, and twist! the destination of the pilgrimage is the belly of a Lovecraftian horror.) There aren't too many ill-thought out twists, as in Adventure 53: Sanctions, a border-war seed with a twist that undercuts the PCs and turns their sanctioned acts into banditry in a way that would probably raise a lot of protests at my table.

(Parenthetically, I'd like to mention that I would like to see a seed book include what I call "turns" to its twists. By "turn" I mean a note that helps the GM introduce, conceal, or reveal the twist. Twists are easy to write. "Twist! The vicar is actually a demon, and, subtwist!, the people all know it". Great. How do I hint at this? What might be the item, or the moment, of revelation? A note on a test of wit, or of sense, or of strength or what have you; it would help a lot. For example, "Adventure 9: Monkey On My Back" is predicated on some form of parasitic zombie creatures taking over a town as symbiotes for a greater entity. Fine. But how do I introduce, conceal, or reveal any of this? It's a fine seed as a springboard to further the GM's own writing, but too complex for an emergency when there's no help in how to make this plot roll out, simmer, and explode. Again, Denbrough's objective is not to do this -- it's just something I'd like to see more of.)

Epilogues: They're there. Nothing shocking. Descriptions of obvious fallout or other consequences to the plot.

Callouts: The boxed advice is, again, mostly obvious, with not too many useful bits. A few nice ones, like in Adventure 10: Demon Stalker ("As an alternative to killing the cult members in order to get home, the demon might be killing them in an extended ritual of some sort..." but also unhelpful stuff like in Adventure 36: Trading Places where we get "This plays out best with lots of Machiavellian plots and intrigues", which has all the helpfulness of somebody telling you to be careful after you've already wiped out on the sidewalk. There is also the sort of stuff that I try to avoid completely, as in Adventure 12: Whips, Zips, Clips & Chains, where the GM is advised to nerf the abilities of mages and thieves via magical collars so that the plot can work. I mean, on the one hand, yes, if it's a world of mages and rogues, slavers are gonna nerf these folks somehow. But I'm always leery of picking up a plot that requires such spiking to work. I don't care how high-fantasy things are expected to be, I just will not initiate this plot. YMMV.

Value For Money.

I'd say that $10.00 USD is a little too dear for this book. Denbrough has certainly done a lot of work -- there's a lot of writing here, a lot of cataloging and following up -- but the ideas are, in many cases, the things that you and I have run for our players too many times already. So you probably won't flip to a random page and get inspired, but if you read it cover to cover, you'll have a dozen sound ideas. So, in conclusion, having read it through several times, this guy, AKA me, who's GMed since 1985, and who has purchased through DriveThruRPG alone a library of hundreds of titles, says that $10.00 is a bit too much, when similar products of the same stripe are offered for less, or for free, or having much more content at a comparable price-per-entry (for example, 650 Fantasy City Encounter Seeds & Hooks or 100 Roadside Encounter Ideas by roleplayingtips.com, or Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters by Engine Publishing). Cut the price down a couple of notches and I'd say we're in business. This is solid work that, in itself, many or most will find useful.

Thank you for reading, and thanks to Angus Abranson at Chronicle City for reaching out to me and providing me with a copy of the work, and to "Grim" for his good work.

Andrew Merzetti