Games With Good GM Advice

[BayardSPSR]

I recently got Apocalypse World, and found the GM/MC section of the rules fascinatingly instructive for how the game wants to be played. The ideas in it even have potential applications in other games. Overall, I feel like I've learned a lot as a GM just from reading it.

What other games have interesting and thorough instructions for GMs, or provoke ideas about what running a game well is? I'd like to expand my horizons further.

[Koo Rehtorb]

In that vein, Dungeon World's GM section is also fantastic.

[Knaight]

REIGN has some solid material (although it's made by the same person as Apocalypse World, so it's probably pretty familiar at this point).

[Martin Greywolf]

FATE has a really, really solid framework for creating adventures, if you bother to actually use it properly. Structuring the adventure into scenes and giving them driving questions can really help you to keep the game going when you are starting out.

Planet Mercenary has a nifty system in place to make sure that no matter what PCs do, things will go wrong in entertaining ways. It's essentially something like an automatic plot twist generator, pretty good if you want to give your adventure a little bit more plot.

[The Cats]

Pathfinder's Game Mastery Guide is great. Full of useful advice and knowledge and tons and tons of random tables for everything.

[Mr Beer]

GURPS How to be a GURPS GM is great. Shame it wasn't in the core rulebooks really.

[Jama7301]

In that vein, Dungeon World's GM section is also fantastic.

I'm going to second this. It has a lot of information that I thought was system-independent that could be useful to people.

[Nifft]

Dresden Files RPG (a FATE system game) has the best collaborative city building / setting construction section that I've ever seen.

I have stolen and adapted that methodology for every sandbox game going forward.

[Airk]

Tenra Bansho Zero is a huge brick of good advice, most of which is completely system agnostic.

[truemane]

Tenra Bansho Zero is a huge brick of good advice, most of which is completely system agnostic.

I second that. You'd think that TBZ is such a specific kind of game, but the GM section is full of great stuff.

There was a little indie game called Full Light, Full Steam. It was okay, but the GM'ing section, especially the section on constructing adventures, was amazing. I was better at GM'ing after I read that than I was before.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Dresden Files RPG (a FATE system game) has the best collaborative city building / setting construction section that I've ever seen.

I have stolen and adapted that methodology for every sandbox game going forward.

The GM advice in general in that book was just top-notch.

[1337 b4k4]

I'm going to second this. It has a lot of information that I thought was system-independent that could be useful to people.

I'm going the third Dungeon World. The GM advice section (and the third party Dungeon World Guide) should be required reading for almost any GM.