Dungeon Master's Guide II: Dungeons & Dragons Rulebook [Hardcover]

This is the latest book from WOC and I found it to be very useful. It is primarily for DM's but players will find things helpful.

Chapter one opens with particulars of running a campaign. There are discusions with the DM's responsibilities for running a campaign with various styles of gamers and your particular style of running campaigns. Most of it is basic like letting your players know before hand about any house rules you may have, ways of imparting information to the players about their environment and rough guidelines for preparing a game.

Chapter two deals with the particulars of running an adventure, both using published and your own materials. the third chapter deals with specifics of running a campaign. Things like guilds, law and order, and building a city are contained in this chapter. I felt this part was better than the information about cities in the complete adventurers guide.

Chapter four contains the city of Saltmarsh, was part of a series of modules years ago. It is expanded and really could be a useful part of a campaign. I will probably adopt it at some point myself.

chapter 5 deals with npcs and their care and feeding.

Chapter 6 deals with the characters themselves and introduces apprenticeships, mentors and teamwork options for the players. I have done similar things in the past and I feel that it is a good idea as it gives the players more continuity with the campaign and plot hooks. There is a section on designing your own prestige classes and pc organizations.

Chapter 7 is about magic items. A section on signature magic items and bonded magic items is discussed and rules for doing such things. There are new magic items and new templates like the hellforged template which allows a magic armor to have additional hardness, hit points, maximum dex bonus, arcane spell failure modificiations to it. it closes with a section on artifacts, their introduction and use in a campaign.

As I said in the title its a very useful but not necessary. I would recommend that new DM's, DM's who might be a little jaded and for players to check out the new options for the players. There is nothing amazing new but it has many things collected together for you to look and use.

As the other two reviewers have stated, this book would be great for new or struggling DM's, however if you've been behind the screen for any length of time much of what is contained here will be common sense.

That's not to knock the book at all. I really enjoyed reading it from cover to cover and found several nuggets of information burried in it that will be making their way into my campaign. The archetyical and special encounters in chapter 2 come to mind right away for their interesting handling of the rules. The magic items section of the book was also an interesting read.

My biggest problem with the book was the "psychology of role playing" section in the beginning. This seems to be a recurring subject on the boards at WOTC and in their magazines, however they really love beating the dead horse... not everyone enjoys the same game, 'nuff said.

Presentation and artwork were all first rate, as was the writing for a sourcebook of this type. I reccomend it for all DM's, if not as a "every session reference," at least for a good read.

The Dungeon Master's Guide II is not a replacement for the DM's Guide but rather a complementing supplement that adds much more additional information for the DM to use. In all there are seven chapters in the book covering the following topics:

1. Running the Game

2. Adventures

3. The Campaign

4. The Saltmarsh

5. NPC's

6. Characters

7. Magic Items

Running the game provides tips on knowing your players...their behaviors, their personalities and tendencies. Examples are given on how to add drama and developing a story in your games. Suggestions are provided for using house rules and laptops to assist the DM. While this information is nice, it's more geared towards inexperienced DMs.

The adventure chapter covers things such as many new traps, map and grid design, building encounter tables, and encounters for such areas as the Abyss and Infernal planes, graveyards, haunted buildings, lost ruins, and several other specific type locations.

The campaign section provides information if you want to develop your own campaign as opposed to buying an off the shelf product such as the Forgotten Realms. It provides all the information you need on setting up a medieval-type world including social and political structures, lifestyles and more. There are also 50 rumors/adventure hooks provided that the DM can use to flesh out adventures.

The Saltmarsh is recognizable to older fans of D&D as the name of an old module. The Saltmarsh is provided here as a kind of drop-in city for use in any campaign. It's ready made with all the information you need to run if you don't feel like making a city from scratch, providing maps, business locations, NPCs, guilds, adventure hooks and more. It's one of the best sections in the book.

The chapters on NPCs and characters are ok. The NPC section is short and fairly forgettable but the character section features information on designing prestige classes which is very well done. There's also info on working with other players as a team when attacking and combining spells for maximum effect.

The last chapter is on Magic Items and goes into customizing items with signature abilities or items that are bonded to their creator. A new type of magic item, sort of, are magic locations. These are ancient, and very powerful sights that can be found within a world which can imbue a character with certain abilities for up to one year. For example the Heart of Fire is a location that can imbue a spellcaster with magic that increases his casting level by +1 for one year when casting fire-based spells. There are a bunch of these locations as well as tons of new magic rings, rods, armor, weapons, and miscellaneous items.

The Dungeon Master II guide is kind of like the whipped cream and cherry on a sundae. It's not necessary and you can certainly live without it, but it does add a little flavor and certainly makes it more filling. Take what you want out of the book. I personally like the section on designing prestige classes and the inclusion of Saltmarsh is a great aid to the DM.

Reviewed by Tim Janson

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