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Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters |
$16.95 |
Average Rating:4.6 / 5 |
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Yes, yes, yes! It contains really 501 plots split by genre, with an amazing tag system that summarizes what the plot goes about, and an index that uses these tags in order for the reader to find plots that have a certain thing. They are all uniquely written and there is an amazing advice section that gives ideas on how to use them, combine them and customize them. Worth it every single penny. RPG System agnostic.
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I raid this regularly for ideas to use during game prep. The PDF could be linked and indexed a little better, but the content is fantastic. Just spending an evening reading it will give you more to work with than you could feasibly use in years of gaming. You will definitely find a plot - really, many plots - that work for you and your group, no matter your playstyle or preferred game.
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So far it's pretty great. But if i had one complaint it would be that the index section is not hyperlinked. It would be immensely more useful especially in pdf format to navigate the book.
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I find this pretty useful. I'm not very good at coming up with plot ideas, but once I have an idea, I am good at fleshing it out. This book helps me with my weak point, so I can focus on what I am good at.
I'm not saying they're all amazing ideas, but for me, it's much easier to improve a starting point than a blank canvas.
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This review starts with the (this time very few) bad things then gets to the more positive things. Please keep that in mind.
First of all, having all those indexes is neat - except for the rather awkward fact that they are using page numbers instead of the plot numbers. Each plot is numbered in the book, with the number printed in big letters in the same line as the individual plot's title, really easy to see. Thus, I don't see a reason why the plot numbers are not used for indexing. Instead, we get page numbers in plain face and in bold, depending on whether one or two plots on that page fit the index criteria. Definitely not elegant, especially since the plot numbers would immediately identify the genre under which an item is initially presented (1-167 = Fantasy, 168 - 334 = SF, 335 - 501 = Horror)
Secondly, it is a bit disappointing that the individual plots are not clearly marked as being one or more sub genres as presented. Instead, you only know the main genre (fantasy, SF, horror) and to which sub genres it can be adapted easily. It would have been nice if next to the title of the plot, there was also in lighter colour the sub genre the author had in mind when writing the plot.
Third, on a personal note, I find the definition of anime actually used in tagging plots rather ideosyncratic. That is, I would have expected it to be strongly linked to emotions and emotional issues, but I have the impression that the easily adaptable to column more joins it with action stunts.
Fourth, it is noteworthy that there are no real repetitions, not even cross-genre. Each of the 501 plots is unique, maybe sometimes similar in the initial situation to an earlier plot, but in its meat a beast of its own.
Fifth, this is definitely noteworthy given just how much material is in there. Think about it, 501 plots, each of which is a small tale with one or more surprises or twists. There is a lot of inspiration to be found.
Sixth, combined, this also results in there being probably something for every taste, although I sometimes had the impression that certain genres and certain styles combined rather often (like a seemingly high adaptability of horror plots to action horror). If you are looking for inspiration, you are likely to find it. Especially if you consider the broader usage of the plots - many include ideosyncratic NPCs which you can add to your own campaigns adventures without necessarily adopting the entire plot. There is really a lot of material you can mine to support whatever you are up to.
Personally, I think this is a very good product, which is why I gave it the top rating despite the minor negative points I mentioned above. If you want some inspiration or just a nice read of various plots, I heartily recommend this book.
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Wow! Being a very busy person all-around (wife & 3 kids, demanding job, Church responsibilities, obligatory gaming, etc), this saves me a lot of time as a GM. And I, like many, even though pretty well-read & well-gamed, I still seem to gravitate to the same sorts of plots. Bad Guy Takes the McGuffin, PCs Need to Get it Back; NPC Dead, PCs Need to Find the Killer; and all of that gets old for both me the the players. This offers me 501 fresh breaths of creative air and I couldn't be more happy with the purchase.
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I found some samples of Eureka and Masks on Engine's website and was very impressed with the information, samples, and ideas provided, so I decided to buy the full ebook for both.
This book is very well written and provides lots of easily expandable/tweakable plots that work with any system.
I've already used a couple of the plot ideas in my game night and even with only a couple days prep time, the players the original storylines and twists that they dealt with.
I'm looking forward to delving deeper and finding more that I can use to add to my game.
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Have you ever found a sandwich that’s so big, juicy, messy, and full of sandwichy goodness that you can’t figure out where to start eating it? That’s kind of what happened when I grabbed a copy of Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots To Inspire Game Masters by the authors of GnomeStew.com. This book should be like crack to not only roleplayers in general and gamemasters (GMs) in specific, but should also provide infinite ideas for novelists and short story writers seeking inspiration for their own works.
For those of you who aren’t gamers or roleplayers, there’s a huge and growing population of people who play tabletop roleplaying games (RPGs) who also write articles throughout the blogosphere. Gnome Stew (GnomeStew.com) is one of the more focused, schizophrenic (i.e. multiple-writer), and excellent gaming resources on the web today. I typically peruse the Gnome Stew RSS feed at least once a week to get an idea for what’s going on in gaming and stealget ideas for my own gaming blog (the Moebius Adventures blog).
The amazing folks at Gnome Stew evidently had their “eureka” moment in June 2009 and it took twelve months from that point to create this huge storehouse of ideas and inspiration for the community. As Martin Ralya, the owner of Gnome Stew, points out in his introduction – “To call Eureka a labor of love would be an understatement.” And the love shows.
Before launching into the plot descriptions themselves, the authors chose to provide a chapter about how to use the book. That takes up less than 20 pages of the 300+ the book fills. But without that information, it would be much more difficult to hunt for ideas on a particular topic. They have provided four different ways to find the perfect plot – by theme, primary genre, sub-genres, and tags.
The themes they use are the 36 Dramatic Situations written by Georges Polti in 1917. The book poses that there are only 36 basic plots used in all the dramatic works ever created or that ever will be created. It’s quite an idea and it’s still in use today by drama students, authors, playwrights, and many more. You can read the book in the public domain here. In terms of RPG plots, this helps by boiling down the initial idea succinctly and then building on it in the text of the plot description.
Genres are broken into four general categories. In this case, a genre is just a set of criteria for a setting that also lends itself to describing the overall tone or assumptions for stories fitting those criteria. In this case, they use three main categories – Fantasy, Sci-fi, and Horror – and add a catch-all “Other” category for any plots that don’t fit in the first three.
And when you get to tags, that’s where the real fun comes in. It’s obvious the editors and authors thought long and hard about how to make this book useful for readers. Like genres, tags in this case are just additional descriptive words to categorize a particular plot. These tags describe things like the type of Challenge involved in the plot, what Creatures and Enemies will be encountered, what kinds of Non-player Characters (NPCs) and Relationships are central to the plot, the Play Style, and the Setting. Beyond that, there’s also a broader “Features” general category for elements that don’t fit anywhere else.
Each of these descriptive methods is used to create a detailed index (four indexes are included – by theme, primary genre, sub-genres, and tag) so that you can simply peruse any of the indices for a particular idea or term. That certainly helps when you’re faced with the sheer volume of work presented in this book. Your other approach is simply to start at the beginning and read until inspiration strikes or you find what you are looking for. My problem with that is that I have hardly dented the Fantasy plots, which come first, so who knows if I’ll ever make it all the way to the Horror section!
There’s no way to do justice to the myriad plots described in the book, so I’ll just talk about one to provide an example of what you can look forward to.
“Vengeance Taken for Kindred upon Kindred” has a long title, but immediately I knew it was describing what I call the “Hatfields vs. the McCoys” problem. It’s a family feud at its heart. And in the fantasy version described in Eureka, it’s a tribe of orcs that’s split down the middle after a chieftan dies and his twin sons want to take the tribe in different directions. Stuck in the middle is a local town. With a war coming between these two factions, the player characters (PCs) must figure out how to save the town.
The plot goes on to describe the problems at hand, including the fact that they can’t face down all the orcs by themselves and what happens when the town mayor tries to make a pact with one camp for protection from the other… There’s just enough information to provide a framework for an enterprising GM to roll an adventure around it.
And at the end of the plot description, there’s a section describing what other genres it can easily be adapted to, including Action Horror, Cyberpunk, Grim and Gritty Fantasy, Post-Apocalyptic, Sci-fi, Traditional Fantasy, and Western. The section also describes all the various tags associated with the plot idea – alliance, deadline, innocent, isolated area, mass combat, sandbox, tactical planning, and villain.
As a GM, I think I could take this idea and spin it at least three ways right off the bat, which is awesome. It’s this kind of inspiration with crunchy details that really sets my brain on fire.
So if you’re a GM, a player, a writer of any sort, or just like noodling about story ideas, Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots To Inspire Game Masters by the authors of GnomeStew.com should provide you literally hours and hours of gaming fun. One review I saw mentioned that with 501 plots at your disposal, that’s more than a year’s worth of adventuring time for even the most aggressive gaming group!
(This review first appeared here: http://blogcritics.org/rpg-book-review-eureka-501-adventure/)
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This is truly a fantastic product. The writers and editors put in a lot of work to “get it right,” and it certainly pays off. As the subtitle states, Eureka gives you 501 “adventure plots.” Each plot starter contains enough information for you to expand the plot into a single adventuring session or perhaps a longer arc. The plot starters are sorted into three broad genres—sci-fi, fantasy, and horror—but are also tagged with more specific descriptors that cover both settings and plot features. Suppose, for example, that you’re running a superhero game and you want a lighthearted scenario. With Eureka, you can flip over to “Index 1: Plots by Genre,” and look for plots that are listed under both “Supers” and “Comedy” (#27 is the first one that fits both genre designators). Or maybe you want to take the superheroes into outer space; cross-references “Supers” in Index 1 with “interplanetary” in Index 2 to find a useful plot. Production values are very high. The PDF is thoroughly bookmarked, and the table of contents is hyperlinked. The download includes both “full” and “plain” (lacking background/border graphics) versions of the PDF. Eureka truly deserves the highest possible praise for an “adventure seeds” product.
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WHAT WORKS: Utility is the watchword here. I didn't even scratch the surface of the plot seeds available in this book, and that's not getting into the twists, genre shifts and so on that you can apply to every plot seed in the book. The genre index breaks it down by sub-genre as well, so it's not just three big lists of horror, fantasy and sci-fi, but Grim and Gritty Fantasy, Gothic Horror, Supers, Western, etc. The hyper-linking throughout the PDF makes it incredibly user friendly above and beyond the searchability and book marking.
WHAT DOESN'T WORK: While digital books are gaining more and more ground, Eureka does seem priced above the sweet spot that I have unscientifically found the average PDF purchaser to have...especially for an art-lite, black and white book. However, with the "free PDF" deal, the biggest strike against this book is practically a non-issue. Sure, you will find a few plots that don't do anything for you, but there are plenty, plenty more plots for you to play with.
CONCLUSION: And in this case, art-lite is a huge boon to the book as it is CRAMMED FULL of material, and it is completely system-free, so it's not just a great addition for one of your RPGs, but for EVERY RPG. Unless you just never, ever get stuck for ideas, then this is practically a must-buy for any GM.
For my full review, please visit: http://mostunreadblogever.blogspot.com/2012/01/tommys-take-on-eureka-501-adventure.html
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Forenote: I'll copy and paste these very same words for both Masks and Eureka+Masks bundle. Actually there is no reason (apart from starvation) to NOT buy the bundle.
I don't think it is worth the pain of writing a full-blown review for Eureka. Trolling the net you will stumble upon tons of enthusiastic opinions about this product. Here is mine!
I'll cut is short. If you fall in one of following descriptions:
- game master (or GM wannabe)
- designer/author
- writer
- illustrator/visual artist (yep, I'm serious)
then, simply put, buy this book. Maybe you still don't know but you need it. Dot.
If you don't, keep away! Reading such material could spoil years of gameplay, even if your master doesn't use it. Believe me!
This is one of that books that should be kept right behind GM screen (or in a writer secret drawer) to express its full potential.
With Crimson Exodus, this is the best product I've ever bought on this site.
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(originally posted at TenkarsTavern.com)
Does anyone else remember the AD&D Encounter Cards? They were my GoTo Resource when I had nothing planned for Sunday's Weekly Game (which happened more often then I would lie to admit). I'd pull a few cards at random, figure out which one (or more) had a seed of something larger in it, and ran with it.
Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters is similar, but for the most part the plots are deeper on role-play the those old encounter cards ever were. The pieces here also tend to have more depth and dangling threads, as these are plots - or plot seeds if you will.
167 plots each for fantasy, sic-fi and horror, but you can tweak nearly all to fit outside their default genre. Which puts this at less then 4 cents a plot.
Did I mention this is a full bookmarked PDF? And that they are further broken down by Dramatic Structure? Nicely done. This, my iPad and Goodreader will have me making notes right on the PDF for the plots I want to use.
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Other reviewers have gone into detail about what the book covers, so consider this more of a testimonial.
This is a book that any GM should have. Period. It has gotten me past GM's writer's block. It has helped me finish half-formed ideas for story arcs.
The fact that it's available in pdf makes it even better. While the indexes are impressive (to say the least), the ability to search for a keyword like "horror" or "space opera" and flip immediately to those entries is a huge value.
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Great product. it really helps get the creative juices flowing when you are having problems coming up with adventure ideas.
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This one is going to be pretty short. This book is exactly what it says it is . . . 501 plot hooks. The helpful part of the book is that it is organized and indexed in several ways. Chapters focus on Sci-Fi, Horror, and Fantasy. Within the chapters, the hooks are organized by the general theme you are trying to convey. The book is then indexed so that you can pretty much pull anything out by any combination of the tags in a matrix. There is a broad set of themes, tons of cool hooks, and some introductory advice on building adventures.
This is a good book for GMs wanting to put some fun hooks into their games.
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