From a vast survey of primary sources ranging from eighteenth-century strategists to modern hobbyists, Playing at the World distills the story of how gamers first decided fictional battles with boards and dice, and how they moved from simulating wars to simulating people. The invention of role-playing games serves as a touchstone for exploring the ways that the literary concept of character, the lure of fantastic adventure and the principles of gaming combined into the signature cultural innovation of the late twentieth century.

    Included as well are handy rules references, convenient price lists, and extensive random treasure generation tables, all organized to help you find what you need, when you need it. With this vast catalog of tools and treasures, the days of boring dragon hoards are over, and your hero will never be caught unprepared again.Pathfinder RPG Ultimate Equipment is a must-have companion volume to the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook. This imaginative tabletop game builds on more than 10 years of system development and open playtests featuring more than 50,000 gamers to create a cutting-edge RPG experience that brings the all-time best-selling set of fantasy rules into the new millennium.Pathfinder RPG Ultimate Equipment includes:- Thousands of items both magical and mundane, including the best weapons, armors, magic items, and gear from the Pathfinder RPG hardcover line and select other Pathfinder sources, as well as hundreds of never-before-seen items.- Tons of special materials and magical abilities to help you create exactly the magic item you've been looking for.- A wealth of specific magic items, organized by type to ensure your character is always wearing as much magic as possible.- An innovative new treasure generation system, designed to help GMs roll up exactly what they need, every time.- New alchemical weapons, tools, and poisons.- Kits to help your character get the most out of her skills or profession, plus new mounts, animal companions, and retainers.- Descriptions of every item, plus hundreds of full-color illustrations to aid in window-shopping.... and much, much more!Cover art by Wayne Reynolds

    Raise armies! Research spells! Spy on your enemies! More than just a set of rules and charts, this book also describes a style of play that assumes your character becomes more interested in influencing the world around them. You’ll still adventure and fight monsters, but this supplement gives you tons of fun things to do during your downtime. It only takes one character building a stronghold to radically change the nature of a campaign and introduce new narrative opportunities for GM and players alike! Huge new story opportunities arise! This book includes tons of examples for GMs to inspire them.

    . . or literally anything else! GURPS has been the premiere universal roleplaying game for almost two decades. The new Fourth Edition makes it even better!GURPS Basic Set: Campaigns combines information from the Third Edition GURPS Basic Set and GURPS Compendium II�plus our new core setting, with infinite possibilities for timeline-hopping adventure! (You don't have to play in the core setting�there isn't some game-altering metaplot�but it's there if you want it.)

    Within this book you’ll find demiliches and demodands, grave knights and goblin snakes, norns and nephilim, imperial dragons and unfettered eidolons, and so much more! Yet not every creature needs to be an enemy, as winged garudas, crafty tanukis, and leonine lammasus all wait to join your party and answer the call of glory.The Pathfinder RPG Bestiary 3 is the third indispensable volume of monsters for use with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and serves as a companion to the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook and Pathfinder RPG Bestiary. This imaginative tabletop game builds upon more than 10 years of system development and an Open Playtest featuring more than 50,000 gamers to create a cutting-edge RPG experience that brings the all-time bestselling set of fantasy rules into the new millennium.The Pathfinder RPG Bestiary 3 includes:- More than 300 different monsters.- Classic terrors from myth and literature, from the frumious bandersnatch and the righteous valkyrie to the cunning dybbuk and elusive kappa.- Hordes of new creatures you can construct, grow, or summon to aid your party in its adventures.- New player-friendly races to let you adventure as canny ratfolk, genie-blooded sulis, and more.- New familiars, animal companions, and other allies.- Challenges for any adventure and every level of play.- Some of the strangest and most beloved creatures from fantasy roleplaying history and the Pathfinder campaign setting.- Hosts of new templates and variants.- Appendices to aid in monster navigation, including lists by Challenge Rating, monster type, and habitat.- Expanded universal monster rules to simplify special attacks, defenses, and qualities.... and much, much more!Cover art by Wayne Reynolds

    Give somebody a floorplan and theyll GM for a day show them how to make 30 floorplans in 30 seconds and theyll GM forever. Need to know how to get from here to there even if neither here nor there are listed on a map? Even if there is no map? Need a random encounter? Need instant stats for that random encounter? Need to know why there was a random encounter? This book was designed to help you make a city happen now. In addition to details on Vornheim, adventure locations, and player commentary from the I Hit It With My Axe girls, every single surface below this jacket including the back of the jacket, the book covers underneath, and the inside covers has been crammed full of tools to help you build and run a city no matter what edition game you play.

    Explains how to play the Wheel of Time roleplaying game, discussing abilities, backgrounds, classes, skills, feats, heroic characteristics, equipment, combat, encounters, the One Power, and geographic terrain.

    The samurai is an unstoppable armored warrior who lives by a strong code of honor—with or without a master. The gunslinger combines the fighter’s martial prowess with a new grit mechanic that allows her to pull off fantastic acts with a pistol or rifle. All this plus tons of new armor and weapons, a complete treatment of firearms in the Pathfinder RPG, a vast array of martial arts, finishing moves, vehicle combat, duels, and new combat-oriented spells for every spellcasting class in the game!Ultimate Combat includes:- New player character options for 14 Pathfinder RPG base classes, including alchemist discoveries, barbarian rage powers, cavalier orders, combat-cleric archetypes, animal shaman druids, new fighter archetypes like gladiator and armor master, inquisitor archetypes like witch-hunter or spellbreaker, combat-themed magus arcana, monk archetypes based on mastery of martial arts, new paladin archetypes like angelic warrior, ranger archetypes like big game hunter and trapper, new rogue tricks, and wizard archetypes like the gunmage.- The ninja, samurai, and gunslinger, brand-new 20-level alternate classes specially designed to get the most out of combat.- Hundreds of new combat-oriented feats including martial arts feat trees, finishing moves, and combination feats.- In-depth overviews on a variety of combat-related topics, such as armor, Asian weapons, duels, fighting schools, guns, siege weapons, and more.- A complete system covering vehicle combat, including wagons, boats, airships, and more.- Tons of optional combat rules like called shots, armor as damage reduction, and new ways to track character health.…and much, much more!Cover art by Wayne Reynolds

    What's more, player rules for a host of creatures let players not just fight aliens, but be them!Inside Starfinder Alien Archive, you'll find the following:- Over 80 bizarre life-forms both classic and new, from the reptilian ikeshtis and energy-bodied hallajins to robotic anacites and supernatural entities from beyond the realms of mortals.- Over 20 races with full player rules, letting you play everything from a winged dragonkin to a hyperevolved floating brain.- New alien technology to help give your character an edge, including weapons, armor, magic items, and more.- A robust NPC-creation system to let Game Masters build any aliens or creatures they can imagine.- New rules for magical monster summoning, quick templates to modify creatures on the fly, and more!Cover art by Remko Troost

    You may think you know all about Zeus, Odin, and Gilgamesh and the other gods of myth and legend, but you'd be wrong! Mythological gods done Rifts style! Dimension spanning beings of inhuman nature and power, impostors, cyborgs, bio-wizards, the Atlas robot, the Gilgamesh clones, The Olympian Club, alien intelligences, interdimensional mercenaries, vampires, devouring monsters, gods of light, gods of darkness, demigods and supernatural fiends - all with a distinctly Rifts flavor.

    With this book, you can prepare dishes delicate enough to dine like elves and their drow cousins or hearty enough to feast like a dwarven clan or an orcish horde. All eighty dishes—developed by a professional chef—are delicious, easy to prepare, and composed of wholesome ingredients readily found in our world.Heroes’ Feast includes recipes for snacking, such as Elven Bread, Iron Rations, savory Hand Pies, and Orc Bacon, as well as hearty vegetarian, meaty, and fish mains, such as Amphail Braised Beef, Hommlet Golden Brown Roasted Turkey, Drow Mushroom Steaks, and Pan-Fried Knucklehead Trout—all which pair perfectly with a side of Otik’s famous fried spiced potatoes. There are also featured desserts and cocktails—such as Heartlands Rose Apple and Blackberry Pie, Trolltide Candied Apples, Evermead, Potion of Restoration, and Goodberry Blend—and everything in between, to satisfy a craving for any adventure.

    — one of the original publishers of paper roleplaying games and has been in business for over 30 years. Chaosium is famous for the excellence of its game designs, and has won many Adventure Gaming Industry awards.All you need to play Call of Cthulhu for the first time is this Quick-Start guide, some polyhedral dice, plenty of imagination and your friends.Welcome to the worlds of Call of Cthulhu!

    In The Monsters Know What They’re Doing, Keith Ammann lightens the DM’s burden by helping you understand your monsters’ abilities and develop battle plans before your fifth edition D&D game session begins. Just as soldiers don’t whip out their field manuals for the first time when they’re already under fire, a DM shouldn’t wait until the PCs have just encountered a dozen bullywugs to figure out how they advance, fight, and retreat. Easy to read and apply, The Monsters Know What They're Doing is essential reading for every DM.

    Completely reorganized, largely rewritten, and jam-packed with new art, the second edition of Unknown Armies isn't just better. It kicks metaphysical ass! We've remixed the book based on the level of campaign you want to play: Street, Global, or Cosmic. At street level, you're outsiders to the secret world of magick, ordinary people entering a land of mystery and peril. At global level, you're mojo-wielding cabalists in the occult underground, pursuing your arcane agendas and plotting against your rivals. At cosmic level, you're in tune with the cosmos itself, fighting to shape the next incarnation of reality. Background material is divided up as well, so new players in a street-level campaign only read what the GM wants them to know. But the beats don't stop there: Much more information for new players, to get them into the mindset of the game and help them make better characters and stronger campaigns. * New character-creation options, including Trigger Events, Paradigm Skills, and power levels scaled to match the level of campaign you're playing. * Numerous rules tweaks, including a new initiative system, Fuzzy Logic skill checks, player-directed combat modifiers, amped-up martial arts rules, a new experience system, and more, all dedicated to upgrading UA's innovative percentile system into a lean and precise tool for fast play and player empowerment. * More magick for non-adepts: Authentic Thaumaturgy, new rituals and artifacts, and revised versions of Proxy Magick and Tilts allow the freewheeling use of symbolic, sympathetic magick by anyone with the will to make it happen. * Twelve schools of magick (up from seven in UA1) for obsessed adepts, including revised versions of published schools (Bibliomancy, Personamancy, and Urbanomancy) and two new schools (Videomancy and Narcotic Alchemy). * Fourteen avatars (up from eight in UA1) for archetypalists, including revised versions of published avatars (The Messenger, The Mother, The Mystic Hermaphrodite, and the True King) and two new avatars (The MVP and The Warrior). * More resources for the GM, including specific guidance on combat, wounds, skill checks, campaign building, and other critical issues. * New cover art and design, new interior art and design, and a hardcover binding to keep this game in line.

    Featuring amazing illustrations and expert insights on some of D&D's most dangerous monsters, the guide shines a spotlight on the beasts that scare, excite, and cause trouble for adventurers, from creatures that live underground, to those that dwell in the wilderness and boneyards or soar in the sky. In these profiles you will find information on the size of each monster, its danger level, and tips for how to survive an encounter. The perfect entry point for young fans of fantasy eager to become D&D adventurers, this book also features introductory "Encounter" stories so readers can practice the problem-solving skills they'll need to fight these monsters when they play a D&D adventure of their own.