Last week, I posted the first preview from the Stew’s soon-to-be-released book, Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters.

The sci-fi plots chapter has come back from layout, so without further blathering, here’s the second sample: Eureka sample PDF #2.
This time around, you’ll see a different group of authors — all of the gnomes contributed 55 plots apiece to Eureka, give or take a plot or two.
You’ll also see the tools we’ve included to make these plots crazy-easy to use in your game: the theme (“The Enigma,” which appeared on the page just before the first sample page), genre, genres you can adapt each plot to, and tags.
Our next sample will either be from the GMing chapter or the horror plots chapter. In the meantime, other Eureka news will be posted on the Engine Publishing blog (which features a handy RSS/email feed, if getting news delivered to you sounds good).
In trying to strike a balance between a) turning the Stew into a giant ad for our book and b) never mentioning it and having no one buy it and crying ourselves to sleep on our wee giant pillows, I’m going for “big meaty stuff is posted here, and big stuff plus smaller stuff is posted there, on the Engine website.” I hope that approach is a good one.
Got questions or comments? I’d love to hear them — after eating, sleeping, and breathing this book for the better part of a year, talking about it with anyone but my Beagle mutt is a real treat.
Oh, and happy Towel Day!
If it helps, I would probably rather see the GMing chapter sample. I like the plot samples thus far, and I am interested in the horror plot seeds since that is my genre of choice, but I also know now what kind of structure the plot fragments follow. I would like to see what kind of advice you have in the GMing chapter to evaluate that rather than more plot ideas.
Thanks.
Thanks for the feedback, Dunx! We’ll get to both in the next couple of weeks, and in fact GMing is more likely than horror since GMing is back from layout and horror isn’t. 😉
Short of seeing the whole chapter, what specifically would interest you most? We cover each tool individually (themes, tags, genres) plus adapting the plots to your game, changing a plot’s genre, and more.
Buzz about the New Cell Tower is a good one. I actually ran that one in a fantasy game (slightly modified) and made my players hate the word bee from then on out. It is definitely one of the great plots, but with the 501 we have in there it is hard to judge any plot against another. They cover so much ground and are incredibly diverse.
I agree! That’s one of the things I love about the book, and reading all 501 for the first time was a real proof of concept for me: There are zero identical plots, even among those that share a genre and theme.
I think the samples so far show that pretty well, too.
[Martin] The bits I’m most curious about are genre adaptation and tags, but partly it’s just to get a sense of the tone so the precise sections are unimportant. Thank you for asking.
I think this is a really cool book idea, though – I am looking forward to seeing the completed product.