A Collection of Extraordinary Locations…

What is the most valuable resource that I – as an RPG creator – can provide for my fellow Game Masters? That was the question confronting me around this time last year when an American publisher slipped into my DMs to discuss a new book publication.

So many possibilities… and yet, so many potential pitfalls too. It’s all too easy for us RPG writers to pour all our energies into a passion project, only for it to disappear without a trace.

So I wanted to consider the issue carefully, especially if other people’s time and money were also on the line. I started to draw up my topic shortlist, determined to find a theme that would both resonate with the majority of GMs and find use on their table.

A Book Of Monsters?

A book on monsters was my first thought. Monsters are one of the resources that I value most as a DM, and I think I have a good flair for the mechanical aspect of monster design, at the very least, even if spinning several hundred new ones would be a daunting prospect. In any case, I quickly decided that the RPG world probably has more than enough critters already to play with. There are scores of stat blocks from the 2014 Monster Manual that have never even made it onto my table, let alone the new 2025 version, while the majority of Mordenkainen’s foes have never left their tome to appear in my Multiverse… and I figure the same probably applies to the average GM. When I also took into account the popularity of several well-known third party products, I had to concede that the need for more gremlins and ghoulies is fairly low right now.

The world probably has enough monsters right now…

A Book of Magic Items?

What about magic items? Every longterm GM could do with some new and original loot to scatter in their dungeons, while experience says books with arcane goodies in them tend to sell well – perhaps because such publications appeal to players too, as well as GMs. So magic items were definitely on my shortlist, and it would make sense to package them up with some new spells and player options to form a kind of ‘arcane compendium’. However, with the new core rulebooks about to drop later in the year, I decided it would be somewhat foolish to try to predict what holes the 2024 Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide were going to leave unfilled. I also reasoned that spells and player options are also the sort of material GMs prefer to buy from the official publishers, with all their design experience and playtesting capabilities.

A Book of Adventures?

A book of adventures would be what I’d perhaps be most passionate about writing. Adventure writing is one of the greatest creative challenges in the RPG space, and nothing beats the satisfaction of fellow DMs writing to you to tell you how much their group loved a scenario you wrote (thanks to those who have got in touch with me to share their stories over the years!).

However, experience tells me adventure products are the hardest sale of all. I remember years ago reading a survey asking DMs what products wanted to see more of on the DMs Guild, and the top answer was adventures… but take a look at the best-selling DMs Guild products of all time and tell me how many adventures you see? A few Christmas-themed or horror-themed entries, but precious few after that.

My own sales figures back that up. My little Assassin’s Guild supplement (with some massively OP poison mechanics!) has far outsold my flagship product DRAGONBOWL, for example, even though the latter was painstakingly developed, play-tested and written over 1.5 years. And while my murder mystery adventure puts up some respectable figures, sales of that pale in comparison to my book on magic weapons.

While I do feel that a well-written, exciting and innovative adventure provides more value to a DM than any other product, the major problem with adventures is they need incredible buy-in from the Dungeon Master to first invest in, and then later use, the material. The DM has to be willing to take a punt on an author they’ve probably never heard of, then take the time to carefully read through the adventure to see if it’s really something for their table. If they decide it’s good enough for them to devote several sessions to running (or maybe an entire year if it’s a campaign!), they then have to adapt it to their table’s needs and probably fix a bunch of stuff that doesn’t make sense to them, or isn’t to their tastes. Even if a DM is open to using 3rd party adventures (many aren’t!), the time saved often isn’t as much as they would like vs. preparing their own scenarios from scratch.

With a sourcebook full of smaller ‘modular’ components, be it monsters, spells, traps etc., Game Masters can invest in the product fairly safe in the knowledge that they will find something useful they can drop into their game; but with an adventure book you’re either all-in, or it gathers dust on the shelf. (I guess an anthology of various different adventures might solve that problem to a degree… but, with the exception of reworking classic modules, even WOTC struggles to sell anthologies! While adventures in general are some of WOTC’s worst-selling titles).

A Book of (Adventure) Locations!

Once I had ruled out monsters, cast doubts on an arcane compendiums, and decided against adventures, one powerful theme was left calling me… and that was locations. But not just the typical taverns, same-old shops or classic castles that we often see rehashed over and over again. Rather, I wanted to offer up truly “Extraordinary Locations”: places that GMs might struggle to imagine by themselves, and which are much more than just places to drop by to rest, shop or fight a single encounter, but which are capable of supporting an entire adventure session thanks to the NPCs, intrigue and dangers present at each one.

And so that’s what I pitched to the publishers… a book of adventure locations!

Thankfully, they not only accepted the proposal, but also heeded my advice that the book should be a full-colour production with stunning full-page cartography for each location, and that these maps should be made available digitally to all book purchasers as well for use on VTTs.

The result is that the Creative GMs Guide to Extraordinary Locations (and How to Design Them!) is coming out in Jan 2026 and available to pre-order now on Amazon.com.

Coming out in January 2026! Pre-order here.

Penning this tome in just a few months was one of the most intense experiences of my life, and designing the maps in particular was the cause of much hair loss and sleepless nights… but I am pretty satisfied that the resulting 30 locations are ones that most GMs will be very happy to drop into their games. I am extremely satisfied that I chose to get in touch with the amazing Arturo of Nerdy Maps, who realised my location designs and who – to my tastes at least – has produced some of the best-looking hand-drawn maps I’ve seen in the RPG space.

Sample Maps from My “Extraordinary Locations” Book

Anyway, here are five of my favourites…

A cult of star-gazing frost giants await the Astral Ark at this ashram, adrift in polar seas…

Surely those clockwork machines won’t animate and attack the peaceful villagers?

Everyone from Lord Havelock’s tax collectors to light-clawed lizardfolk are after this community’s pearls…

A silver dragon trains acolytes in martial arts and magic at this priory, to aid them retrieve her father’s stolen treasure hoard…

Of course the Anaconda Massage is perfectly safe! It’s the Lazy River you need to watch out for…

A big part of my concept for the book is that each location is modular and can be cut and paste into everything from the Forgotten Realms to your own homebrew fantasy setting, and each location comes with detailed sublocations, background info and NPCs, and a range of potential adventure hooks you can use to help integrate the location into your campaign, either for a one-shot or possibly even a recurring setting. The idea was to make each location as versatile as possible to really give these settings the maximum chance possible to make it onto your table!

Anyway, there’s much more I could write about this book, and a few secrets and reveals to come, as well as some outtakes that had to be cut, which might make it onto this blog instead. But that’s enough from me for today… do take a look at the book’s Amazon page and consider if it’s something for your shelf (…by which I mean for your table!). A few pre-sales will certainly help encourage the publishers to print more copies and push out the distribution further… so any support or shares much appreciated.

New Posts Coming Soon…

Right, what with writing the book, and then frantically catching up with my daily work as a Barcelona travel blogger, I haven’t published here on H&D anywhere often as I would like. So as a little incentive / kick up the jacksie, let me promise you guys a few specific articles that are currently sitting in “drafts”…

Coming soon are a one-page NPC generator for improvising background characters on the fly, some thoughts and techniques on running intrigue adventures in D&D and (hopefully) those stripped back critical hit and fumble tables I promised in a previous post. Yes, that’s me bribing you to stay tuned! Hasta pronto…