book report: x-treme dungeon mastery

So.  In the prior review of game materials, I mentioned that I had originally been trolling Amazon for a book recommended by a friend: X-treme Dungeon Mastery, by Tracy & Curtis Hickman.  This is going to be a relatively mixed review, but I will note that their website currently has S. J. Tucker's "D&D" video right at the top, which endears them to me greatly.  So ... good, then.

On the one hand, this book is written by Tracy Hickman, so there's no question about the credibility of the author.  I mean, this guy's been gaming since been gaming, if you know what I mean, so even if one happens to disagree with almost every single thing he does or says, it's not like his opinion on the matter doesn't have merit.

On the other hand, this book presents one man's approach to gaming as The One True Way, which isn't necessarily what I look for in a game supplement.  Frankly, there's infinite variety in GM styles, and while some of them work better than others, which is which is going to vary from player to player, and there's no one right answer.

On some hypothetical third hand, however, I think the authors were aware of that problem, which is part of why they buried the "do this and nothing else" in the absurdity of a secret society.  (Well ... maybe it's absurd.  These are nerds we're talking about, though ...)

Make no mistake, there is a lot of absurdity in this book.  There's so much at the beginning that I was really reaching my limit; if they hadn't gotten down to brass tacks right when they did, I probably would have rolled my eyes and given up.  But they did, so I didn't, which was good, because there is some useful information here.

Special mention should be made of the chapter dealing with Campbell's monomyth, using both Star Wars and Lord of the Rings to show how it really does apply to the stories we use.  I'm not a literature nerd, so I don't claim to know whether it's accurate, but it is a useful treatment of story theory.  By itself, though, it doesn't stand as a reason to buy the book.

All told, I feel like this is the sort of publication that's only really useful for lifestyle gamers who are settled.  If you own a house, your weekly game session is your primary social outlet, you've been running the same campaign for years, you want to go above and beyond, and you have money and friends who can help set up, well, hey, go for it.  To put it another way, if you already own a table from Geek Chic, this is the book for you.  Otherwise it's mostly just a lot of pie-in-the-sky stuff that might be cool some day but you'll forget about it by the time you actually can make it happen.