Learning to be a Dungeon Master is a never-ending journey of discovery and advancement. Dungeons & Dragons holds infinite potential for creativity and storytelling to master. Though practice is, of course, the most important means of developing any skill, there’s also a lot to be gained by studying the hard-won experience of others.
These books are some of the best-written resources for advancing your DM talent that you’ll find. They cover a variety of topics and offer tips to run a better, smoother, more engaging game. Whatever element of GMing you need to improve on, there’s helpful advice for it somewhere on this list.
Updated July 6, 2024 by Davis Collins: There are a ton of different ways books can help you become a better DM. As originally published, this list understandably focused on books specifically designed to give GMing advice, but there are other kinds of books that are useful for running tabletop games. We’ve come back to this list to expand it with a wider variety of useful products for GMs.
Best Questions
The Ultimate RPG Game Master’s Worldbuilding Guide: Prompts and Activities to Create and Customize Your Own Game World
Flesh out your world
This excellent collection of questions and tips gives you a lot of tools to make the process of designing your own world easier. It’s explicitly made with GMs in mind, but it’s applicable to worldbuilding in other contexts.
- Extremely thoughtful and well-considered
- Very helpful exercises
- Covers a variety of genres
Part of a larger series full of creative tools for everyone involved in the tabletop role-playing process, this book is chock-full of world-building exercises designed to help you build a well-fleshed out setting.
It’s worth stressing that exercises are the bulk of this book. It is absolutely full of questions designed to prompt you to expand your world and make it more interesting. If you’re new to world-building as a whole, it’s a great resource for getting you the amount of depth that’s ideal for a TTRPG campaign in a custom world.
Best Writing Advice
World-Building for Writers: The Complete Handbook
A deep dive into several worldbuilding topics
Another great worldbuilding resource designed for those who want to dive real deep, this book was designed with fiction writers in mind, but is still a great resource for those who want to take their worldbuilding skills to the next level.
- In-depth, well-thought-out, detailed advice
- Concrete solutions to common worldbuilding problems
- Loads of examples from well-known fictional worlds
If the last item was a beginner’s guide to world-building, this book is an advanced course. Though it’s designed for writers rather than GMs, this book is still full of great advice that can allow an experienced GM to take their world-building to the next level.
It contains concrete solutions to common world-building problems, and advice on advanced world-building tasks like creating entire fictional languages. Those new to the art of world-building risk being bogged down by it, but those who already know a bit about what they’re doing, who want to take their work to the next level, will find a lot of help from this book.
Best Random Tables
The Great Book of Random Tables
An extremely useful resource
This enormous book contains tons of random tables that can be used to generate all sorts of things on the fly to fill out your fantasy adventures. It contains a ton of book titles, encounters, and other generators for practical use at the table.
- Extremely useful tables to help you out while you’re playing
- Easy to use
- Tons of stuff
Most of the books on this list are guidebooks and other sources of advice for writers, world-builders, and GMs. However, that’s not the only kind of book that can improve your GMing. There are also resources that are of immediate use to you while you’re actually at the table. This book contains lots of tables for randomly generating different things. If you need to, on the fly, generate titles for books on a shelf, or fill out a dungeon room with mundane items, or generate a concept for an encounter, this book contains loads of great suggestions.
It’s designed with on-the-fly use in mind, organizing its suggestions into rollable tables, but you don’t have to use it that way if you don’t want to. You’re free to look through its individual suggestions and use them as prompts to lead you on your own stories.
Best To Engage Players In The Story
The Game Master’s Handbook of Proactive Roleplaying
Let your players be the ones who take action rather than responding to action
Design a world open to change and let the players engage with your setting. This entry in a fantastic series of tools helps you build the best story you can in concert with your party.
- Comes from a reliable series of books
- Great price for tons of advice
- Covers many aspects of the topic
- Size doesn’t match others in series
The most unique and beautiful thing about TTRPGs is that the players can assist in building that story and world. This book shows you the path to share that power and let your players become part of your story. It begins with an introduction that explores the desire for evil campaigns from players, which it argues stems from an important need: player agency.
At its core, this book is about how to avoid encounters that only allow the characters to react. In most adventures, especially pre-written ones, players mostly react rather than act. They rarely affect the world as much as the world and its NPCs affect them. For many of us, the best moments of our TTRPG careers are those where the game goes off the rails, or there is an unexpected outcome. This book teaches you how to cultivate those moments, allowing them to flourish and thrive.
Engaging players can be difficult at times, but when you commit to an experience that is built from their own actions and choices, player investment becomes natural. The entire series of game master tools this book is from are masterclass teachers and resources, and this is one that any DM needs to own. If you want to try out a campaign that is more player-driven, or will lead to unique outcomes, then you want this in hand as you prepare for your next game.
Best Resource For Newer DMs
So You Want To Be A Game Master
Work your way through the entire DM process with this valuable guide
This system-neutral book gives you a strong beginning to your GM journey. Even if you are already an established game master this guidebook will help you build and reinforce your skills.
- Step-by-step tips and tools
- Covers the basics and the complex
- Includes adventure and hook setups
Beginner and veteran DMs alike, this will offer you plenty of content to chew into. This wonderful dictionary of DMing has complete walkthrough tools and materials to get you running your first game. The tips and examples inside are great for the storied game masters who want to freshen up their talents as well.
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Use these DM tools during your first session as a Dungeon Master to make sure you don’t get overwhelmed.
Regardless of your current skill level, this is a solid choice for your reading list. It’s not kidding when it states everything you need to run games is inside. There is even the framework for your first grand adventure laid throughout the book. Simply following along will have you building skills in no time. It breaks down the elements of being a great game master and lets you apply those methods into any game you run.
Best Way To Improve Encounters
The Monsters Know What They’re Doing: Combat Tactics for Dungeon Masters
Make the dungeons and delves dangerous and unique
This collection of strategies and tactics will equip you with everything needed to level up your combat. Set traps, use monsters intelligently, and make every fight distinct. This is the premiere guide to making combat not just difficult, but interesting.
- Examples for running any monster you can imagine
- Incredible expertise and tips to keep combat engaging
- Little help if you’re not interested in combat
The collected knowledge and wisdom of a popular blog series and musings of an experienced DM, this is a treasure trove of encounter planning. More than just a guide for making encounters more difficult, this book grants you a window into tactics and encounter design at large, how to make different monsters feel different, and how to make all of them behave in interesting and logical ways.
Finding the right difficulty for encounters can be challenging, but making them unique is even more so. This will guide you on both fronts and allow you to tune monsters to a razor edge while making every encounter feel fresh.
There’s discussion here on a wide variety of different monsters and how they’re likely to behave. For example, there’s a section on lycanthropes, which discusses how a werewolf does not act or fight similarly to a wereboar, and the differences are discussed with examples of how to run them. These tactical preferences are sometimes minute, but provide a rich and lively world portrayed through the actions of monsters.
Best Guide For Efficient Preparation
Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
Build the superior session night without the difficulty or annoyance
Prepare whats needed for the best game without expending extra time or energy. This will show you the tips and secrets to the best roleplay your table’s seen, without all the frustration and stress.
- Contains expertise from acclaimed creators
- Great looking art and layout
- Amazing methods and guidance
- Focused squarely on preparation rather than actual play
When you think about adjectives you’d like your players to use to describe you, lazy probably isn’t at the top of your list, but you will appear anything but lazy when following the advice in this book. Built upon years of play and thousands of experiences, this is not about doing less, but instead being more with less.
Time is a high-value commodity. The less time you need for prep, the more time you can commit to playing, gaming, and your daily needs. Return Of The Lazy Dungeon Master shows you every trick of the trade imaginable to get more out of your games without sinking in extra hours of preparation. The golden rule for this method can be summed up simply as preparing only what you need to prepare.
That sounds simple, but the depth involved in understanding and learning this in practice is shocking. There are so many things we assume we need to do, but could actually do without. With this book, we can learn what really matters for play. Further, we can learn to ease the expectations of ourselves, and truly find joy in creating a world to explore with friends. Any game master of any system would enjoy this on their shelf for the wisdom and encouragement it brings.
Best For Creating Worlds
A Worldbuilder’s Guide to Societies
Learn the engineering of fantasy worlds and create your masterpiece
Construct a world that’s worth exploring. This breakdown of the creative process shows you what to include when building your cities and nations. Containing numerous examples to give you plenty of inspiration.
- Endless examples and fantasy breakdowns
- Makes creating unique societies easy to mange
- Fairly writing focused, but with plenty for DMs
This book is authored by Brent Stypczynski, who lives and breathes writing and has a PhD in English Language and Literature. He has released multiple books about creating fantasy worlds and writing better stories. This one in particular is a good choice for the aspiring ultimate Dungeon Master. If you are interested in crafting an entirely new world and setting, this is a great find. It will not be an easy study, but you’ll learn how fantasy civilizations work and how to make one well.
Though this book is most useful to GMs endeavoring to create their own campaign settings, there’s plenty here that’s useful even if you’re running a pre-published module, as, even when you have some guidelines given to you ahead of time, there’s always an element of world-building in the act of bringing a setting to life at your table.
Learning from many sources and understanding as many examples of a topic as you can improve the worlds you run. Especially when dealing with large groups, cities, and other major points of interest.
Best Toolkit For Improving Your Wilderness
Landscapes for Writers and Game Masters
Give the open world a feeling of reality and interest
Don’t let the wilds between places become stale. Immerse your party in a real and varied landscape. Brought to you by an expert in earth sciences, you can rest easy that your creations will have substance and validity.
- Written by a PhD geologist
- Makes terrain engaging
- Can feel like work at times
Another book by an expert, this guide was written by a PhD geologist here to give you insight on what makes a realistic landscape. This author possesses an enormous wealth of relevant knowledge. Many real-life locales are more fascinating than fiction, and many iconic fictional locations are based on real-world ones.
Learning earth science can do a ton to help you create more interesting environments, especially when the resource you’re studying is specifically designed to be useful to world-builders, as this one is. Reading this guide is a fortification of the imagination. Knowledge of how to apply real-world concepts to the world of fantasy lets you create deep and satisfying lore and landscapes.
The book includes discussion on how its scientific principles interact with common forms of magic, so even if you’re designing a deliberately unrealistic environment, this book is still useful to you. You can see the love for gaming that is poured into Scott Rice-Snow’s work and how they apply their knowledge to the more mythical nature of RPGs.
The effects of magic can affect terrain, and the terrain could even affect magic. If you will be traveling a lot in your games or playing in the wilderness, then pick this up. You won’t regret the purchase.
Best To Improve Campaign Planning
Session Zero: The DMG to Writing Great Campaigns
From before you ever play until the final conclusion, hone your game to perfection
Session zero is a common term in the D&D space and this book will expand your view of it. Here you learn to actively write and adjust your campaign to ensnare the player’s love and attention.
- Great guidelines for building and maintaining games
- Teaches you from the start to finish of your game
- Simple layout without much art
In TTRPGs, session zero is a common term for a pre-game planning session where players and GMs discuss their characters and plan for the game ahead, but that planning process isn’t confined to time spent with players. The plotting and preparation of a campaign can make or break your adventure. Prepping for your game doesn’t stop after the beginning of the campaign, either.
This book is a guide to planning at every stage of your campaign. A strong game requires foundations as well as continued construction, and Robert Walker works to keep you well-prepared.
Many games taper off before they approach the grand finale, but that awkward phase is dutifully covered in the material here. He even continues all the way to the foundations of the next game after your campaign reaches a satisfying end. This, paired with the many great titles on this list, becomes a host of knowledge to begin and end well.
FAQ
What Do I Need To Start GMing?
We wrote an entire article about this question, but, to summarize, you need the rules for whatever system you’re running. For Dungeons and Dragons, you can start with the free rules Wizards of the Coast has made available online, or the starter set, but these products will give you the bare minimum to begin a campaign, and will eventually need to be supplemented with the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide.
If you have everything you need to run your system, the books on this list are what you’re looking for. Either Session Zero or So You Want To Be A Game Master are great start-to-finish guides for running games. Resources like these are good to get after you know you enjoy the process.
Should I Make My Own Campaign?
Your first campaign should probably be from a pre-published module. Once you’ve gotten the hang of a system, you can then graduate to creating your own adventures. Running a game and designing an adventure are two different skills, both difficult enough that you should try to learn one of them before you force yourself to also manage the other.
Plus, seeing competently written adventures will give you guidance in writing your own. Once you can confidently run an adventure, you’re ready to start experimenting with making one. If the campaign you start with is a long one, you’ll probably reach this skill level partway through it, and can dip your toes into adventure design by supplementing your game with original material before you go all the way to making your own campaign.
Where Can I Learn More?
There are dozens of incredibly talented creators on YouTube and writing for blogs online. You can find many helpful sources by searching up the adventure you wish to run or seeking out how-to videos on topics you don’t feel confident in. For new GMs common sticking points are running adventures, how to portray interesting NPCs, or how to handle combat encounters. As long as you and your players are having fun, don’t sweat the details and continue improving as you play.
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