Curious about The Creative Game Master’s Guide to Extraordinary Locations by Duncan Rhodes (no, not the Warhammer painter guy, but me, the D&D blogger!)?
Well, you’re on the right page!
My first published book came out in January*, and it just picked up an ENNIE nomination for Best RPG Supplement in 2026.
ENNIE nominated for Best Supplement at Gen Con 2026
You can more info about the book, along with reviews, testimonials and previews, below.
*By which I mean published by a traditional publishing house. For my best-selling 5e D&D adventures / supplements stop by my DMs Guild profile!
What Is It?
In a nutshell, The Creative GM’s Guide to Extraordinary Locations & How to Design Them is a fantasy RPG supplement with tools for better world-building, and for running incredible open-ended adventures – with as little prep as possible.
Within the book’s 240 pages is a collection of 30 original, fully-mapped locations which GMs can drop into their existing fantasy roleplaying games, in order to run standalone adventures, or stitch together to create an ongoing campaign.
Try the house’s signature Anaconda Massage!
I designed the locations as “plug and play” so they can be dropped into any classic fantasy setting, be it your own homebrew world or one of D&D’s official settings (or any other RPG setting). Moreover, these locations function as “situations, not plots” for Game Master’s to use as they will… there’s no defined storyline or prescribed adventure that you have to follow for them to be useable.
Instead, each of the 30 locations features:
- Full-page, full-colour map by professional cartographer Nerdy Maps (digital versions for VTTs available for free with each purchase)
- Background lore on the location
- Some juicy details about the NPCs or Monsters that live there
- Area and room descriptions (with some secrets, treasures and potential boons for PCs to discover)
- 4-5 adventure hooks offering diverse ways to feature the location in your campaign, no matter what their level.
The locations are expansive “adventure locations” and each contains enough exploration, roleplaying and combat opportunities to drive at least one entire session of gameplay.
Also provided in the book are Adventure Paths with some ideas on how to link various locations together and play a longer adventure or mini-campaign with minimal prep.
The book comes with a thoughtful foreword by none other than Ed Greenwood himself!
Freshly delivered to Forbidden Planet in London…
Youtube Reviews & Features
Professor DM of DungeonCraft reviews Extraordinary Locations along with Ravenloft: The Horrors Within and Ath Cliath…
I offer my own preview of the book along with some of my design intentions…
D&D Lounge users one of the book’s locations to demonstrate how to set up a great combat scenario…
On a livestream with Luke from the DM’s Lair we chat about what makes a great adventure and I share some tips and secrets from the book….
Podcast Coverage
Here are some fun podcasts I’ve appeared on, in theory to talk about the book… but in reality to talk about anything D&D and RPG related! You can find them on Spotify and iTunes if you prefer, but here are the Youtube links:
Testimonials
Here’s what some of your favourite bloggers, Youtubers and authors have said about the book…
Reviews
At the time of press, the book is publicly rated 5.0 stars on Amazon.
Professor DM of DungeonCraft rated the book 9/10.
Related Articles…
My blog post on Designing Extraordinary Fantasy RPG Locations shares the same 12 tips you’ll find in the book itself, along with a preview of 12 of the book’s 30 maps!
In this post announcing the publication of the book, I talked about why I chose to write about Extraordinary Locations in particular, above any other topic.
Where Can I Buy Extraordinary Locations?
Bluestone (more buying links here).
Also available in most local hobby stores.
