The Game Master's Book of Random Encounters: Variant Castles
2020 / Roleplaying game mini adventure / 2+ players
Most of the suggested traps and denizens were too grim or mundane for our magical friendship pony game, but this helped me to come up with some rooms to expand our prefabricated module, and I loved the idea of letting the dice decide what was on the other side of each door, that's a keeper.
My Little Pony: Tails of Equestria – The Haunting of Equestria
*****
This adjustably spooky instalment is the best one we've played so far. Its higher level requirement for the characters also gives GMs a chance to gain enough experience to not be terrified by its more flexible approach, rather than jumping straight into the one with the exciting cover.
The writer has professionally penned RPG modules for decades, so I tried not to feel too intimidated that some people can turn the blank document into all this. But we're nearly out of adventures, and the next saga may be all random tables and Story Cubes.
2022 / Skill game / 2 players
**
An inevitable addition to the dedicated unicorn games cupboard, when it was eventually found cheap enough. They at least had the courtesy to change the buzzer to a quieter shudder.
***
Though atmospheric, this bare framework could have done with expanding to a book on its own, but that would have meant losing the anthology format, and writer James Fleming encourages GMs to fill in the blanks ourselves. I'm getting more confident there, incorporating an unrelated non-franchise encounter to fill time on the journey and segueing in directly from our last adventure to help maintain the illusion of a cohesive "campaign." As with the other tails in this book, there's a rich setting, a nice lesson (though the four-year-old picked her side and saw no need for compromise) and more friendly NPCs who we may run into again.
