Who am I as a newbie DM giving advice? How do I know what to advise another new Dm needs to read and pay particular attention to from the core books?

Luckily the Dungeon Dudes talked about this in a video Christmas Eve. Yes I know this might seem a bit late to be telling you about it. But to be fair I wasn’t going to do a post about it. Then Sly Flourish did a post about reading material for DM’s and I thought you know what I should make a record of this for myself (and share it with others).

So I have screen grabbed the summary from the Dungeon Dudes video (link below) of the pages that they think a beginning DM should read. I added the image to the notes app on iOS (it seems to be my go to note keeping place at the moment).

You can watch the video HERE, or jump straight to the detailed good stuff that they put into a Google doc HERE.

Personally I think I have distilled a lot of this stuff down to a single A4 page!

I call it a cheat sheet, and is something I can refer to quickly (it’s something I keep wanting to do for the likes of Genesys or Judge Dredd too). It’s basically all the dice based checks as simple formula (as the snippet above shows). You can pick up a copy from Dropbox HERE (it’s a word doc so you can edit to fit your own needs if you want).

In the DM Guide there is the infamous Appendix D: Dungeon Master Inspiration with a list of books to “help you become a better storyteller, writer, performer,and mapmaker.”

However Sly Flourish recently (in the last couple of days as I write this) wrote a post with an alternative reading list for DM’s (link HERE). Which I thought was a particularly good reading list (with links), and not just because I had more than one of the books on the list (and felt a little smug having them already).

I like lists like this because they often suggest titles that I may never have considered or even known about. And new sources of inspiration and knowledge are always welcome.

I hope folks have found this a useful post.