Improv Almanac: Dangers and Discoveries for 88 Places is a 467-page resource for the busy Game Master. Did your players take a shortcut through a swamp, and you are looking for ideas for encounters? Are they trying to cross snow-capped peaks, and you don’t want to evoke The Fellowship of the Ring? Are they sailing, and you’ve run out of ideas for what’s on the next island they’ll encounter?

The primary way to use this ebook is to look up the type of location your adventurers will be exploring. You’ll find questions to ask the players, impressions, terrain tables, discoveries, and dangers. The following are system neutral sections for each location:

  • Questions (to ask players to co-create a location)
  • Impressions (for the GM to use when describing the location)
  • Terrain (a random table for describing a place within the location)

The following sections were spec’d out for Dungeon World but can be used with minor adaption with most fantasy PbtA games:

  • Discoveries (a random table and then interesting artifacts and treasures)
  • Dangers (monsters and hazards)
  • Custom Moves

Otherwise, if you are playing using 5e, a d20 system, or something else, when the dangers are monsters, you will need to look them in your system. 

This is PWYW (Pay What You Want) to fund further development. I’ve invested in licensing the cover graphic, help creating the new tables, and copyediting so far.

You can download the ebook from Itch.io.

Background

Improv Almanac coverWhen I first ran a couple completely improvised one shots of Dungeon World, I was nervous about not being able to come up with good ideas in the moment. So I used Lampblack & Brimstone’s 20 Dungeon Startersas backup for creative prompts, as a reference depending on where the adventurers might choose to go. After the players in my first one-shot envisioned a trek to a mountain affected by malign magic, I used the starter “Eldritch Island” by Mark Tygart for ideas for descriptions and a magic portal.

Now Mark wrote 15 of the 20 starters in that book, but in fact he’s written nearly a hundred starters. Mark has created more dungeon starters than anyone! (Mark has since shifted to the EZD6 system. You can see his latest creations on The Cats of Tindalos blog.)

Mark’s DW starters are so valuable, but I’ve long thought that there’s not as much demand for adventurer starters as there is for support of ongoing campaigns. So I thought I’d combine the starters together with a few other starters and other materials that I’ve found useful for improv, provided they were licensed under the Creative Commons (special thanks to Shawn Tomkin for his great tables from Ironsworn).

I made the location descriptions easier to reference and added terrain and discovery tables.

What if adventure starters were rewritten to follow best practices pioneered by Jeremy Strandberg’s Stonetop Book II? That’s a question that no one but me has ever asked, but Improv Almanac is one answer.

Illustration credit: Cover illustration copyright 2023 by Yassine Sye. Used under license.