The Game Master’s Book of Villains, Minions and Their Tactics: Epic new antagonists for your PCs, plus new minions, fighting tactics, and guidelines ... RPG adventures (The Game Master Series)

Some great villain ideas that can be dropped into a campaign. As the author states, these are not fast and hard rules but ideas and additions to put into a one-shot and the backstories again are ideas and not hard and fast rules. Everything from a group of charlatan tax collectors to the sort of boss that is an end world BBGE.Hardcover, sits on the shelf and great paper stock.

I now have 5 books out of this series and I'm certain I'll end up with all of them! As a new DM that needs to work on his NPC and role-playing skills, this book has been a lifesaver!The book gives you a ton of options for excellent NPCs and their minions that can easily be plugged into a new or ongoing adventure.It helps you strategies and put together interesting tactics for monsters within dnd that rapidly improves your speed and quality of building encounters that are both challenging and interesting.Finally, more 1 shot adventures! As a new DM they've been extremely helpful in helping me learn how to create my own standalone adventures and my players (3 of 4 are veterans) have loved them so far!My only knock on all the books is that though they're hardback, the corners of the book get worn and frayed easily. But it doesn't really matter. These books are so good I will eventually have all of them in the set and a second copy of each so I have a nice copy for the bookshelf and my DM copy that's beat up and worn.I would say out if the 5 I've purchased so far, I'd buy 1) Random Encounters 2) NPCs 3) this book. If I'm on a limited budget and I need to start my adventure right away!

A tool for the DM to help build great stories

Another book in this helpful line. While there’s nothing super ground breaking about this entry I think a lot of DMs will find it helpful with stat blocks, ideas for enemies, and possible encounters. There’s usually some decent background info as well. It has the occasional note specific to the gm and offers some scaling for different party levels. There’s also a small section on how to create a villain, battle tactics, and some one shot ideas. I say it’s worth the price if you like the other books in the lineup. I’m glad I picked this one up for my large book collection.

Let's start by saying that this book is of an extremely high quality as far as material and art goes. These are the types of books you show your friends to show how cool TTRPGs can be. I don't have any concern about these two areas.The content is also varied and offers a great glimpse into what could be villains on a fantasy game like D&D. Interesting tactics when running encounters are accompanied with interesting personalities and motivations. The content is solid.The reason for 4 stars is that I bought on reviews that mentioned that this is a great resource to any GM, but I disagree. This book is geared towards D&D 5e and if you are a starting GM on any other system, like Pathfinder or any other fantasy setting, a big chunk of the book will not provide great insight. If you are an experienced DM, then you will probably love some of the material, but more than likely, most you will already know most of it.So, this is a great 5e product, probably better for DMs than most other Wizards' own publications, and I highly recommend it for any DM, specially new ones who want to learn. A good read for any other system.

I'm getting ready to run Nicodemus past a new group of players. Page 15 of this book.Well written backstory and goal prompts make the villains very easy to 'drag and drop' into any story.They also have a book of NPC'S that I used to let Dumas the orc help my new crew into hoard of the dragon queen. The night 1 fight where you need to take back the portfolio or whatever. Dumas made a great add on to a small team that we co-controlleed while the ranger tried to take over the draco-dog in the encounter.These books are so worth it for the ideas alone. Buy all the books. They are WORTH it!

This book offers a handful of unique villains for D&D campaigns, complete with motivations and backstories. They're great to use as they are, but they also spark the imagination re: creating my own ttrpg villains. Great stuff!!

Great resource for any game master running different TTRPGs. This is the fourth book from this publisher which I have purchased. I highly recommend this as a resource to add some depth and strategy to villains who may otherwise feel one dimensional in combat.