The new Draw Steel adventures that MCDM announced has me very excited. One of them is a complete standalone shortish adventure—you explicitly don’t drop it into a larger campaign—in which you play as a group of criminals forced to do an impossible task or be executed (sound familiar?) I love adventures with very specific setups, to give the group a unified direction and a cool concept. Anyone got any other cool adventure (or homebrew) setups? Something that launched the group into the action?

Hey folks, Jonah and I try not to use the lab to spew our own cynical, penny-pinching schemes too often, but this is both pretty relevant to the lab and has a really big impact on our work, so I thought I’d share it anyway. You can preorder our book through Barnes and Noble here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-game-masters-handbook-of-collaborative-campaign-design-jonah-fishel/1147035456 Barnes and Noble is running a preorder discount on a bunch of books, including our own! Preorders make a huge, HUGE difference in the success of a book in physical retailers—they’ll decide how many books they want to buy/stock when it actually releases, so if you’re at all interested in our next book, please consider checking it out. If the book preorders well, they’ll place a larger order, which (1) helps us sustain our authorial careers, (2) makes our publishers more likely to approve future projects for them, and (3) helps us work on future cool projects for here! With that said, we always advocate for shopping with your friendly neighborhood bookstore, so if you prefer, hold off until they’ll carry it! There are other folks who’ll carry it as well, the easiest to access for most people being Amazon. We’re extremely proud of this book, and in many ways we think it’s an overall stronger work than the previous one (and we certainly had a lot more experience when we wrote it). You also don’t need to have read the proactive one if you want to read this one, although the two books can work well with one another. If you’re interested in any level of narrative in your game, consider checking it out! Thanks everyone, we’ll see you in the lab.

I want to run an OSR hexcrawl game whose story emerges from randomness. How do you bring randomness to your games, and what tools do you use to reference these sources of randomness? Sources of randomness could include flipping to a random page in a book, playing word association, combining the results of several random words to inspire creativity, or random tables. Tools could include pen and paper, a whiteboard, Google Docs, Apple’s notes app, etc.