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Originally published in 2009, the Tome of Adventure Design, by ENNIE Award-winning author Matt Finch, now has a revised and expanded edition. This critically-acclaimed book (see quotes from reviews below) contains over 500 pages of deep adventure-design tables and advice usable with any fantasy TTRPG game.
This huge, full-color book is a limited edition. When we run out of the print run, we plan to sell the book in a black and white, print on demand version, which will have to be split up into two volumes because of the binding quality on print on demand books. So if you want a one-volume, color-interior version of the book, the only way to guarantee you can get a copy is to back the Kickstarter.
The main addition to the Revised Edition is the Apophenia Engine. The outer margins of the pages contain thousands of micro-prompts, very short phrases such as "Images are reversed," "Webs aren’t from spiders," "Unintended consequences," and even simpler ones such as "Chains," and "Jousting." The main purpose of these is to keep a constant set of minimalist ideas visible in the corner of your eye at all times, acting as a secondary creative source to add subconscious depth to the tables. The mind constantly tries to connect datapoints into patterns (a trait called "apophenia"), and the micro-prompts provide fuel for that background mental process. They can also be used as an "oracle" for when you need an answer to "what comes next," "what is the complication," or "what is the solution." Just flip to a random page and select one of the micro-prompts, treating it like an indirect answer to the question you asked. It works surprisingly well!
Tome of Adventure Design offers a comprehensive method for designing an adventure all the way from the starting concepts to the finer details. Just as with creativity, it’s not a linear method: starting points can include a mission, a villainous plot, a location, or a new monster, but tables are provided for all of these common inspiration-points. For obvious reasons, the highest level of detail is provided for subterranean dungeon adventures, but a wealth of tables are also provided for cities and settlements, planar adventuring, and wilderness adventuring.