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The Covetous Poet's Adventure Creator and Solo GM Guidebook

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The Covetous Poet's Adventure Creator and Solo GM Guidebook

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Covetous Poet Publishing

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The Covetous Poet's Adventure Creator and Solo GM Guidebook is a supplement for roleplayers who would like to write their own adventures, or play their favorite roleplaying games solo.

The first section of the book, the Adventure Creator, will guide you through the process of creating your own RPG storyline using a pre-prepared act structure. The Story Charts found in the middle of the book contain hundreds of ideas for things, actions, locations, plot devices and more for fantasy, horror, and sci-fi genres, which will help inspire you as you create.

The second section, the Solo GM Guidebook, uses the Adventure Creator as the basis to begin playing roleplaying games solo. This supplement doesn't provide an RPG system or rules set, instead it lets you take your favorite RPG system that you already own and build stories for it as you play. Using the Adventure Creator and improvisational techniques you will make up your story scene by scene, discovering what happens as you go, but still creating a coherent narrative thanks to the act structure which continues to guide the story.

The book also has additional chapters that covers different types of act structures so you can design your stories however you want, as well extra charts and information for creating characters and locations!

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Reviews (9)

Discussions (14)

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Dean W November 07, 2023 2:37 am UTC

Is there a chance to get this book with the super-hero and mystery sections added in? I am waiting to purchase until then.

Lee S August 05, 2023 10:40 pm UTC

PURCHASER

It's been almost ten years since the kickstarter. I recommend adding the super-hero, mystery and spy charts to either this product's page or to a bundle here on DTRPG.
I often mix the Mystery chart with the Horror chart.

Heather M November 09, 2020 10:19 pm UTC

PURCHASER

Really enjoying this book mostly for idea generation. I keep coming back to the NPC generator, in particular, although I enjoy the random plots and ideas as well. In fact, I liked them so much that I manually input the table into an app (that's actually an app for teachers to randomly call on students in class) so I can make new NPCs on the go.

Any chance of a POD version? Or dead tree version in general?

Abraham Z April 24, 2020 6:38 pm UTC

PURCHASER

I strongly recommend against downloading anything from the links provided in the old Covetous Poet Kickstarter page; I downloaded the additional tables (spy, mystery, etc.) and my Antivirus stopped a virus attached to them. Some others may not have a potent antivirus, I recommend caution.

Ricardo Arturo Y March 19, 2020 7:09 am UTC

PURCHASER

Is there any chance of this PDF ever getting bookmarks? It'd help so much with navigation

Matt S April 16, 2020 10:21 am UTC

Adding your own booksmarks to a PDF is pathetically easy, and, quite often, those bookmarks turn out better.

Shaun S July 10, 2022 9:53 pm UTC

Certainly, if it's "pathetically easy", there's even less excuse for them not to be included in a product you're paying for. Right?

Ron V November 08, 2018 2:49 am UTC

PURCHASER

There are Word templates for the plot and act story sheets linked to in update #30 at the old Kickstarter page, still working as of now.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/584302999/the-covetous-poets-adventure-creator-and-solo-gm-g/posts/896994

Abraham Z April 24, 2020 6:37 pm UTC

PURCHASER

I recommend against downloading anything from the old Kickstaster page; I downloaded the additional tables (spy, mystery, etc.) and my Antivirus stopped a virus attached to them. Some others may not have a potent antivirus, I strongly recommend caution.

Joseph B November 06, 2018 11:57 am UTC

PURCHASER

This book is a great tool for designing adventures and an awesome resource. The solo play adventure generation is icing on the cake. The PDF desperately needs bookmarks though!

Alex G November 05, 2018 4:53 pm UTC

PURCHASER

Just thought I'd pop in here because this book is the 2018-11-05 Bargain of The Day. This book's spurred and inspired many enjoyable solo games. Worth the investment, because it's a book I've come back to again and again.
As a publisher, I'm unable to leave a rating or a review, so I'll leave my five stars and glowing praise here.

Ricardo Arturo Y July 18, 2016 3:35 am UTC

PURCHASER

Anybody got a favorite system to use with the Solo GM Guidebook?

Konrad Z September 02, 2015 6:17 am UTC

I was a kickstart backer, so while I've got a copy it wasn't via Drive Thru RPG. I'm sorry to say that there isn't a kickstart project that I regret backing more then this one.

The book is frankly awful. The art is not just repetitive, its the same iamge used again and again. The tables where clearly not filled in to an even factor of 1000, and hence have random jitters in them, making some entries arbitrarily more likely than others.

And the rules section is frankly half finished. Its not a system but the theory on which a system could possible be built with enough work, and playtesting.

Damian H March 17, 2015 11:19 pm UTC

PURCHASER

Any chance for bookmarks in an updated PDF? Takes me a long time to jump around, and the page loading is slow.

Simon C November 29, 2014 1:34 pm UTC

I got this product as part of the original Kickstarter and have been using it extensively over the last few months to create a range of adventures from fantasy through sci-fi, horror and mystery. Unfortunately, due to the requirement to buy the product on Drivethru before being able to review it, I can only post my comments in this section. This is not a review but more a commentary on the uses I have put the product to and my experiences with using it.

I have not used the product for solo GMing so I can't comment on its usefulness in this regard but have created about a dozen adventures starting from the original formula given and slowly adjusting to suit my tastes and tweaking to be more efficient.

The book has been at its most useful to me when creating an adventure from scratch, without any preconceived ideas. At the beginning I tried to use it to flesh out a preconceived idea I had for an adventure and almost never used the system again, which would have been a great shame. The ideas...See more produced by running through the adventure creation process as written were quite random and tended to be incongruous with any set ideas I had before starting, except perhaps a general idea of genre.

However, when completely stumped for an adventure idea the system really comes into its own. It is ideal for brainstorming and inspiration. Running through the process, whilst being flexible about ignoring the odd incongruity and also moving an idea from one section to another where warranted, was very satisfying from a creative standpoint, and generally led to a cohesive and viable adventure outline. I have experimented with using charts from different genres when creating a horror scene or a mystery scene within a fantasy adventure and on the whole these experiments have been successful.

There were a few improvements I made and/or would like to see in any future amendments:
1. The process outlined compared with the order in which the idea generation charts are laid out don't quite match. In the beginning I started by skipping back and forth between charts, which quickly became tedious. I am lucky enough to have Acrobat Pro so in the end I simply copied and pasted the charts in the correct order into a new PDF so I could easily follow the procedure, which I summarised myself at the beginning. It would be ideal if this type of additional file could be offered to new purchasers.
2. Unlike the other sections, the section covering the Initial Oddity and the Inciting Incident doesn't appear to refer to a chart that should be used to generate these situations and also doesn't specify if it's something I should have just made up based on what had been generated already. Either a chart generating Initial Oddities and Inciting Incidents should be included, direction to which chart(s) to use otherwise or more guidelines on creating these situations if charts are not to be used would have been helpful.
3. The order in which the charts are used to create a scene did not suit my preference for idea creation. I found after a while that I switched to a different order of scene generation that produced a sentence that described the scene in a more fluid and time-orientated way, from the PCs arriving at the location, the plot for the scene, the opposition, action and thing and finally the challenge, rather than the standard order of presentation. This helped me think about the way I was going to present the scene to the players and even the wording of boxed text where relevant.
4. I'd like to have seen more structure or advice on creating the Finale. This section felt less potent than the initial plot and scene creation sections, whereas it should have felt more so. Perhaps a chart for resolutions, plot twists and/or cliffhangers could have been helpful here along with the normal scene charts.
5. It would have been really useful to have included an integrated dice roller within the pdf itself (not sure if or how that could be done but would be a really cool and useful gadget).
6. An app or program to autogenerate the results would also be a cool addition for this product.
7. I created a new additional set of data myself for a range of archetypal fantasy villains to add to the Fantasy Oppositon chart as I felt this chart could easily have been expanded on.
Overall, the basic premise of using massive random charts to generate inspirational ideas within a structured approach to adventure creation is great. Even odd juxtapositions of ideas can stimulate very interesting concepts for scenes and whole adventures. The weakness of the product lies perhaps in the organisation of the charts and the ease of producing the results, but this is relatively easy to overcome. Anyone with the capacity to be both flexible and imaginative with the tools provided by this adventure creator will find their money well spent.

Ranjith B July 16, 2014 3:18 am UTC

PURCHASER

Hello!

I found that I could not answer directly to the publisher's reply to my review. Therefore, I am taking it here.

First of all, I wanted to thank Frank for his kind and understanding response.

Frank wrote:
> The solo system is designed to be very open and freeform, but in an effort to not tell you what to do, I recognize sometimes it may provide too little direction for some players. I think everybody who is into solo roleplaying is bound to be pretty creative on some level, but the book is aimed more at the kind of player who enjoys making up a story as they go, and the authorial challenge that goes along with that.

I have to admit that I am a bit confused there, for my main problem with the system was the impression that it had too much pre-determination. Truth be told, I compared it internally with Mythic, which I really like and enjoy playing solo, and I felt that Mythic is much more making up the story as you go. For example, your system...See more

Frank L July 17, 2014 2:45 am UTC

PUBLISHER

Hey,

I think I see where you're coming from, so I hope I can help. The initial plot sheet is meant to give you a lot of results and ideas, but they're just meant to inspire and help fill in the gaps of the story you want to play. It's not meant to tell you what the story must be, just give you options about where you want the story to go. And if you find it's giving you too much to deal with, too many spoilers, or too many unhelpful results you can pare down the story sheet to just include results you want. For example, if you're playing a group of travelling heroes in D&D, you might already know before you start that they will find some problem to be solved when they get to the next city, so you just roll up three plot devices and pick the one you like the best or combine results to create what that problem/plot is. And that might be all you need to get started for your particular game.

From there you can decide what you want the main conflict to be for the heroes: they may need...See more to discover who killed all those villagers so that they can stop them, or they may quickly find clues that tell them it was a vampire but now they need to find out how they can kill a vampire, and so on. Let's say you picked that they need to discover who is responsible for the killings, in that case you can have them spend the next several scenes investigating, looking for clues around the village, trying to find nearby homesteaders they could talk to, and search the local woods for monster lairs. You can create all those scenes on the fly with the tools on the Answer Oracle. The clues list may say you find tracks, so your heroes decide a monstrous creature must have been involved. The conversation chart, NPC personality list, and Yes/No chart can help create a local ranger character who tells the party that he's heard strange bird calls in the night. And during a search of the woods you can use the interruption scene table to determine something bad happens to all the PCs, which means they must get attacked by some owlbears! Or however you want to play it.

The book is meant to encourage you to customize the system into whatever suits your needs by providing you lots and lots of charts and tools along with a basic story structure. The results are only meant to be as specific as you want them to be, like with the plot devices I tried not to be annoyingly vague when I wrote them all out, but each one is really meant to provide dozens of possible directions around the same type of event. So a result may say the PCs friend gets arrested but it could easily be their neighbor/brother/mentor/guy who owes them money who gets arrested, or a result may say a local cult is taking over the minds of local citizens but you could easily take to mean they are actually replacing local citizens with shape changing goo monsters who will follow their orders. I hoped each person would customize the system around their own games and tried to design it so that this would be easy to do, so please change things around however you like to see if you can get it working better for your games. All the story charts, the scene design charts, the character charts, all the stuff on the Answer Oracle can be rearranged and used in whatever way helps give you the system you want. And I'm happy to try and help in any way I can and answer any questions, I really appreciate people's support and want everyone to be as satisfied with their purchase as I can make them.

-Frank

Ranjith B July 17, 2014 2:51 pm UTC

PURCHASER

Dear Frank,

Thank you for your extensive explanation.

Mmmmhhhhhh, as for running a solitaire game, I think I do prefer Mythic for GM simulation/putting in the details.

However, I am thinking now about ways how to maybe use your engine at least in parts. For solitaire gaming, I may try to re-interpret the plot sheet to make it more of an introduction/background for act 1. Creating scenes one by one first with the poet's system and then applying Mythic rules and running them using Mythic may be an interesting combination.

For multiplayer gaming, I am actually not sure yet whether I really want to experiment with the act structure. But I think the scenes and table could be inspirational tools.

As for the tables, as I said, the plot device table is really great. It is really the other tables that can be a problem for people exploring unknown terrain. And that was the problem I was facing: I am planning to introduce a friend to roleplaying, and to make...See more

Frank L July 17, 2014 9:44 pm UTC

PUBLISHER

Sounds good, and I'm more than happy if people already have a system they like and use my book to supplement or expand what they're already doing. And thanks for spotting those typos, it's so hard to catch all of them!

-Frank

Mark S June 06, 2014 12:34 pm UTC

PURCHASER

This is a really great book. I've reorganized my 1st edition AD&D campaign with the 3 act structure as instructed in this book. I also enjoy playing solo using the Mythic Game Master Emulator in the past, but I'm thinking of switching over to this system. I like the approach to solo in this book...especially the improvisation tips. The book has a huge amount of charts to stimulate ideas to write your own adventures. The amount of charts in the book are huge using a d1000 for just plots alone! It has excellent character generation tables as well. (NOTE: I'm not affiliated in any way with the author... I'm a real customer who really recommends the book.) I think this book in combination with the "Tome of Adventure Design" would be an unlimited resource for designing your own campaigns.

Jonathan H June 16, 2014 4:18 am UTC

PURCHASER

What compared to Mythic has you contemplating a switch in systems?

Mark S June 21, 2014 7:07 pm UTC

PURCHASER

I like the elements of poets system which is an emphasis on improv in scenes as well as clearly working out a 3 act structure so I can know where the story is going more clearly. Mythic is tough to know where things are heading as far as a villian.... It just more random.

Overall, poet's system seems more structured with a 3 act format but less structured in how you play that out scene by scene whereas Mythic is more structured in actual gameplay with a virtual DM but how you get through the plot is more random. I think I may use the best of both systems to make up my own solo gaming or virtual DM for my 1ed ad&d campaign.

I think mythic is the most established system and is awesome for solo or a virtual DM.

Poet is great for designing a campaign adventure with 3 act plot, scenes, etc. it does have a yes/no like mythic but very basic . Poet has tons of charts to design the adventure. Solo is more loose in how you play out the scene which may be good for some...See more