Product Description
A follow-up to the Dungeon Master’s Guide, designed to aid Dungeon Masters and reduce game preparation time. The Dungeon Master’s Guide II builds upon existing materials in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. It is specifically designed to facilitate play, especially when the Dungeon Master has a limited amount of preparation time. Chapters include discussion on running a game, designing adventures, building and using prestige classes, and creating campaign settings. Ready-made game elements include instant traps, pre-generated locations, treasures, and a fully realized and rendered town.
MICHAEL BEAVERS @ 7:18 pm
This is the latest book from WOC and I found it to be very useful. It is primarily for DM’s but players will find things helpful.
Chapter one opens with particulars of running a campaign. There are discusions with the DM’s responsibilities for running a campaign with various styles of gamers and your particular style of running campaigns. Most of it is basic like letting your players know before hand about any house rules you may have, ways of imparting information to the players about their environment and rough guidelines for preparing a game.
Chapter two deals with the particulars of running an adventure, both using published and your own materials. the third chapter deals with specifics of running a campaign. Things like guilds, law and order, and building a city are contained in this chapter. I felt this part was better than the information about cities in the complete adventurers guide.
Chapter four contains the city of Saltmarsh, was part of a series of modules years ago. It is expanded and really could be a useful part of a campaign. I will probably adopt it at some point myself.
chapter 5 deals with npcs and their care and feeding.
Chapter 6 deals with the characters themselves and introduces apprenticeships, mentors and teamwork options for the players. I have done similar things in the past and I feel that it is a good idea as it gives the players more continuity with the campaign and plot hooks. There is a section on designing your own prestige classes and pc organizations.
Chapter 7 is about magic items. A section on signature magic items and bonded magic items is discussed and rules for doing such things. There are new magic items and new templates like the hellforged template which allows a magic armor to have additional hardness, hit points, maximum dex bonus, arcane spell failure modificiations to it. it closes with a section on artifacts, their introduction and use in a campaign.
As I said in the title its a very useful but not necessary. I would recommend that new DM’s, DM’s who might be a little jaded and for players to check out the new options for the players. There is nothing amazing new but it has many things collected together for you to look and use.
D. M. Ninos @ 8:15 pm
As the other two reviewers have stated, this book would be great for new or struggling DM’s, however if you’ve been behind the screen for any length of time much of what is contained here will be common sense.
That’s not to knock the book at all. I really enjoyed reading it from cover to cover and found several nuggets of information burried in it that will be making their way into my campaign. The archetyical and special encounters in chapter 2 come to mind right away for their interesting handling of the rules. The magic items section of the book was also an interesting read.
My biggest problem with the book was the “psychology of role playing” section in the beginning. This seems to be a recurring subject on the boards at WOTC and in their magazines, however they really love beating the dead horse… not everyone enjoys the same game, ’nuff said.
Presentation and artwork were all first rate, as was the writing for a sourcebook of this type. I reccomend it for all DM’s, if not as a “every session reference,” at least for a good read.
Tim Janson @ 9:41 pm
The Dungeon Master’s Guide II is not a replacement for the DM’s Guide but rather a complementing supplement that adds much more additional information for the DM to use. In all there are seven chapters in the book covering the following topics:
1. Running the Game
2. Adventures
3. The Campaign
4. The Saltmarsh
5. NPC’s
6. Characters
7. Magic Items
Running the game provides tips on knowing your players…their behaviors, their personalities and tendencies. Examples are given on how to add drama and developing a story in your games. Suggestions are provided for using house rules and laptops to assist the DM. While this information is nice, it’s more geared towards inexperienced DMs.
The adventure chapter covers things such as many new traps, map and grid design, building encounter tables, and encounters for such areas as the Abyss and Infernal planes, graveyards, haunted buildings, lost ruins, and several other specific type locations.
The campaign section provides information if you want to develop your own campaign as opposed to buying an off the shelf product such as the Forgotten Realms. It provides all the information you need on setting up a medieval-type world including social and political structures, lifestyles and more. There are also 50 rumors/adventure hooks provided that the DM can use to flesh out adventures.
The Saltmarsh is recognizable to older fans of D&D as the name of an old module. The Saltmarsh is provided here as a kind of drop-in city for use in any campaign. It’s ready made with all the information you need to run if you don’t feel like making a city from scratch, providing maps, business locations, NPCs, guilds, adventure hooks and more. It’s one of the best sections in the book.
The chapters on NPCs and characters are ok. The NPC section is short and fairly forgettable but the character section features information on designing prestige classes which is very well done. There’s also info on working with other players as a team when attacking and combining spells for maximum effect.
The last chapter is on Magic Items and goes into customizing items with signature abilities or items that are bonded to their creator. A new type of magic item, sort of, are magic locations. These are ancient, and very powerful sights that can be found within a world which can imbue a character with certain abilities for up to one year. For example the Heart of Fire is a location that can imbue a spellcaster with magic that increases his casting level by +1 for one year when casting fire-based spells. There are a bunch of these locations as well as tons of new magic rings, rods, armor, weapons, and miscellaneous items.
The Dungeon Master II guide is kind of like the whipped cream and cherry on a sundae. It’s not necessary and you can certainly live without it, but it does add a little flavor and certainly makes it more filling. Take what you want out of the book. I personally like the section on designing prestige classes and the inclusion of Saltmarsh is a great aid to the DM.
Reviewed by Tim Janson
Nicolau C. Quinta @ 10:15 pm
It took me Dungeon Master’s Guide II to find out that I had bought too many D&D books already. I am used to flipping through a D&D book and sorting things that I like and might be useful from things that are a waste of space. I didn’t find anything useful in this book. If you’re an experienced DM, you won’t either. Here’s why:
Chapter 1 – Running a game provides you with tips on how to deal with different kinds of players, and different tastes for games. The approach is almost therapeutic, and deals with communication issues on the game table.
Chapter 2 – Adventures has more new traps, some tips on using published material, and rules for aerial battles, crowds, mobs… to save you from the effort of coming up with them yourself.
Chapter 3 – The Campaing Has tips about preparing a campaign. That’s where my biggest disappointment is – at the session on how to create towns, it has very few numerical statistics. It basically lists what kind of professionals and shops you’ll find in a fantasy-medieval city.
Chapter 4 – Saltmarsh describes the city of Saltmarsh. Pretty generic.
Chapter 5 – Non Player Characters have a lot of ready-made multiclass NPCs (as if they were hard to create) and a list of powers to make NPCs unique (but unfortunately they have no rules to use them in PCs).
Chapter 6 – Characters has rules on apprenticeship and masters (that is actually nice), and general guidelines (nothing numerical) on designing custom Prestige Classes.
Chapter 7 – Magic Items has actually no new magic items! Just a new approach to old ones.
Novice DMs may find it actually quite useful and inspiring. So may lazy DMs. If you’re used to running campaigns and using your own material in your game, you’ll find this book nothing more than a collection of nice illustrations and things you already know.
Anglobotomy @ 10:50 pm
I’m in agreement with some of the other’s who’ve reviewed this book here. I don’t think it’s very useful to someone like me who’s been playing the game since the mid 80s, but this book has its charm, and it is very useful for the highschool kid who’s been stuck with the task of DMing for the first time and needs some advice. Sure, there are useful section on cities, NPCs, prestige class creation, etc, but the bulk of the book is an aid for those who need to hone their Dming skills. I’ll admit, it made reassess my own style as I read it. One thing I found to be really important about this book is that it specifically states, several times, that you don’t have to DM one specific way, that FUN is the goal. It’s all about putting the FUN back into the game. It tells those of us, who’ve become set in our ways, to step back and ask ourselves if our players are enjoying the games we run. This is one of few DnD books of late that hasn’t been choke full of prestige classes, feats, spells and other fluff. I recommend it to everyone if for no other reason that it makes you think, instead of offering you a pile of junk your players will get pumped on and you’ll have to find a way to incorporate in your game.