A friend recently pointed out an interesting book on the topping of running RPGs, and while I was browsing Amazon for it, I stumbled across Gamemastering Secrets, by Aaron Rosenberg. Which may seem like an awkward introduction to a book report, but the truth is I found this one a little more useful in concept than the other, considering my relative newbie status as a GM.
It's out of print, so the price you'll pay varies; I wouldn't recommend going much higher than $15. That said, if you're a relatively new GM, there is some very useful information in here. It's hard to condense such a treatment of such a broad topic into a single blog post, but I would say that the book provides a good overview of the GM process, then includes a lot of tips and tricks to pick and choose between. The first half or so is by the main author, and it breaks down everything you need to do; the latter half is a series of essays by various others who cover topics that are both interesting and boring, depending on your personal preferences. For instance, I skipped the entire ten-page article about map making, because I couldn't care less. On the other hand, the single page about the adventure flowchart was worth the price of admission for me.
Basically, the essays are the sorts of things you'd find on RPG forums, but pre-screened, which anyone who has ever spent any time on RPG forums can tell you is important, so you aren't wasting your life away sorting through crap.
The book isn't perfect, of course--they gratuitously overuse pull quotes to fill space, which is a technique I'm very conscious of having done so for several semesters in laying out the school paper. It also contains way too many Dork Tower strips. Some of which aren't even vaguely related to the content of the page they're on. One was repeated on the very next page in the very next spot, and my personal favorite was the one that wasn't finished; there was only the first half of the comic. So the editing could have been a little bit tighter too, I suppose.
Basically what I'm saying is this book isn't particularly polished, but it is worth a few bucks if you're in need of such a thing. If you've been at it for a while, though, this is probably not the book for you.

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