The Player’s Handbook is a well rounded icon of flavor, crunch, and portions. The story elements stand strong and reflect their classical counterparts, the mechanics support the flavor, and there’s plenty of it to go around. What then of the Dungeon Master’s Guide? To summarize, the Dungeon Master’s Guide is a book on being the referee of a game. If the players are the guests or customers, then the Dungeon Master (henceforth the DM) is the host or chef. He creates the scenarios for the players to navigate with their characters and together they craft a story. So what precisely does the Dungeon Master’s Guide provide and is it as flavorful, crunchy, and proportionate as the Player’s Handbook? Just about everything you can think of.

Because the DM simulates the game’s world, the task of enriching his world also falls on his shoulders. Fortunately, the Dungeon Master’s Guide helps provide the tools to do exactly that on nearly any scale you can cook up. It offers guidelines on things as small as villages to as vast as whole continents, as plain as normal medieval fantasy to as weird as futuristic sci-fi, and as fragile as the everyday man to as invincible as divine (or more likely unholy) beings. Names, populations, government, faiths, and more are covered in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. One might decide an elvish city of stuffy, theocratic bureaucrats is where the adventure will start. Another perfectly valid route is the classic small village just trying to make ends meet while avoiding meeting their end at the hands of barbarians. Or maybe your world and its adventures aren’t even in a normal realm at all? All manner of alternate dimensions (called “planes”) can house an adventure. The Feywild is comparable to a bright fairy tale land with a pinch of Wonderland throw in. The Shadowfell is the opposite, a realm of lingering dead heeding the call of dark masters. Heavenly realms and Hellish counterparts are present too, along with just about anything one could imagine and beyond. In short, when it talks about world building, it MEANS world building.

The flavor might be there, but are there crunchy mechanics to back it up? Absolutely. For example, to support a sense of danger in the wilderness, random encounters (that is, monsters and dangers the players might come across at any given moment) are rolled for at different rates depending on how shady the area is, which the DM typically decides himself beforehand. Simply put, a dangerous area will result in more encounters, which makes the players think hard about when they should rest. Going back to the planes, traveling from the “Material Plane” (normal lands) to the Feywild and back has a chance to send the characters into the future because time passes differently (and sometimes arbitrarily) in the Feywild. They might step into the realm for only a few minutes and come back to find it’s been fifty years since they left. Of course, if a prospective DM doesn’t want to deal with that, he doesn’t have to if it doesn’t fit his story (or his comfort zone, if he’s new at being a Dungeon Master). The crunch doesn’t end there either, there’s tables and charts for random magical items, creating and stocking a dungeon on the fly, making new spells, it has everything. The one major mechanical problem, however, is how to properly build encounters and make custom monsters. The encounters building rules and the monster making tools are too complicated. The monster making charts are at least manageable (with practice), but the encounter building just has too much on different pages to keep track of. At least with monster building, you can read across a row of stats and make a monster pretty easily (if you keep it simple, that is).

It has flavor, it has crunch, but does the Dungeon Master’s Guide have the proper portions? Given the breadth of themes, locations, and solid rules on display, yes.

So how does the Dungeon Master’s Guide fair? It it a toolkit for effectively endless world building, campaign managing, rules variants, item creation, madness, plagues, monster creation, and too much more to name succinctly. The Dungeon Master’s Guide is like an all you can eat buffet and everything is on the menu. A-, go buy it.

-The Clark Side