Masters Of The Game

Kate Blackwell is the symbol of success—a beautiful woman who has parlayed her inheritance into an international conglomerate. Now, celebrating her 90th birthday, Kate surveys the family she has manipulated, dominated, and loved: the fair and the grotesque, the mad and the mild, the good and the evil—her winnings in life.

For many tabletop RPG players, the joy of an in-depth game is that anything can happen. Typical adventure modules include a map of the adventure’s primary location, but every other location?whether it's a woodland clearing, a random apothecary or the depths of a temple players elect to explore?has to be improvised on the fly by the Game Master. As every GM knows, no matter how many story hooks, maps or NPCs you painstakingly create during session prep, your best-laid plans are often foiled by your players' whims, extreme skill check successes (or critical fails) or their playful refusal to stay on task. In a game packed with infinite possibilities, what are GMs supposed to do when their players choose those for which they're not prepared? The Game Master’s Book of Random Encounters provides an unbeatable solution. This massive tome is divided into location categories, each of which can stand alone as a small stop as part of a larger campaign. As an example, the “Taverns, Inns, Shops & Guild Halls” section includes maps for 19 unique spaces, as well as multiple encounter tables designed to help GMs fill in the sights, sounds, smells and proprietors of a given location, allowing for each location in the book to be augmented and populated on the fly while still ensuring memorable moments for all your players. Each map is presented at scale on grid, enabling GMs to determine exactly where all of the characters are in relation to one another and anyone (or anything) else in the space, critical information should any combat or other movement-based action occur. Perhaps more useful than its nearly 100 maps, the book's one-shot generator features all the story hooks necessary for GMs to use these maps as part of an interconnected and contained adventure. Featuring eight unique campaign drivers that lead players through several of the book's provided maps, the random tables associated with each stage in the adventure allow for nearly three million different outcomes, making The Game Master's Book of Random Encounters an incredible investment for any would-be GM. The book also includes a Random NPC Generator to help you create intriguing characters your players will love (or love to hate), as well as a Party Makeup Maker for establishing connections among your PCs so you can weave together a disparate group of adventurers with just a few dice rolls. Locations include taverns, temples, inns, animal/creature lairs, gatehouses, courts, ships, laboratories and more, with adventure hooks that run the gamut from frantic rooftop chases to deep cellar dungeon-crawls, with a total of 97 maps, more than 150 tables and millions of possible adventures. No matter where your players end up, they'll have someone or something to persuade or deceive, impress or destroy. As always, the choice is theirs. But no matter what they choose, with The Game Master's Book of Random Encounters, you'll be ready.

Veteran legal issues reporter Kim Eisler takes us behind the scenes into mega law firm Williams & Connolly, guiding us on a journey through the many storied cases that have served to shape current policies in public and private sector alike For the past twenty years, author and journalist Kim Eisler has covered the law firm of Williams & Connolly, first at American Lawyer Magazine, then for Legal Times and since 1993 as National Editor of Washingtonian Magazine. More than any other writer, Kim has unprecedented and unusual contacts and relationships with the partners, as well as a background knowledge and familiarity with the firm's history and personnel over the past two decades. In Masters of the Game, Eisler sets out to demonstrate how the disciples of Edward Bennett Williams went beyond anyone's expectations and came to occupy key roles in American culture and business. In the last ten years of his life, Williams, the founder of Williams and Connolly, often said he was building not just a law firm but a monument. Masters of the Game is not only about a law firm, but about how the philosophy and practices of this particular law firm have spread out beyond Washington to dominate business, finance, sports and the American psyche itself through its influence with past, present and future political, corporate and media figures.

The Master Game is a rollercoaster intellectual journey through the back streets and rat runs of history to uncover the traces in architecture and monuments of a secret religion that has shaped the world. Pivotal historical events and processes, not least the Renaissance, the birth of scientific rationalism, and the French and American revolutions, are radically reevaluated in the light of new investigative evidence presented in The Master Game. Even the belief that the United States has a "global mission," so obvious today, may ultimately prove to be less the result of a shortterm reaction to terrorism than the inevitable working out of a covert plan originally set in motion almost two thousand years ago. The Master Game refers to a scheme or "game" played on the world stage to bring about a world order governed by a lofty goal which, today, we term the "Masonic Ideal." The Master Game traces the origins of this game of symbols and words and talismans from ancient Egypt all the way to modern times, and places it squarely on the elitist Scottish Rite Freemasonry, headquartered in Washington, DC, and ruled by a secretive and powerful brotherhood of men who have attained the thirtythird degree. The Master Game exposes this world order's true purpose and, more importantly, shows how it has affected the United States of America and badly backfired on 9/11. The book is adapted and expanded from the authors' earlier, outofprint book Talisman.

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Masters of Doom is the amazing true story of the Lennon and McCartney of video games: John Carmack and John Romero. Together, they ruled big business. They transformed popular culture. And they provoked a national controversy. More than anything, they lived a unique and rollicking American Dream, escaping the broken homes of their youth to co-create the most notoriously successful game franchises in history—Doom and Quake—until the games they made tore them apart. Americans spend more money on video games than on movie tickets. Masters of Doom is the first book to chronicle this industry’s greatest story, written by one of the medium’s leading observers. David Kushner takes readers inside the rags-to-riches adventure of two rebellious entrepreneurs who came of age to shape a generation. The vivid portrait reveals why their games are so violent and why their immersion in their brilliantly designed fantasy worlds offered them solace. And it shows how they channeled their fury and imagination into products that are a formative influence on our culture, from MTV to the Internet to Columbine. This is a story of friendship and betrayal, commerce and artistry—a powerful and compassionate account of what it’s like to be young, driven, and wildly creative. “To my taste, the greatest American myth of cosmogenesis features the maladjusted, antisocial, genius teenage boy who, in the insular laboratory of his own bedroom, invents the universe from scratch. Masters of Doom is a particularly inspired rendition. Dave Kushner chronicles the saga of video game virtuosi Carmack and Romero with terrific brio. This is a page-turning, mythopoeic cyber-soap opera about two glamorous geek geniuses—and it should be read while scarfing down pepperoni pizza and swilling Diet Coke, with Queens of the Stone Age cranked up all the way.”—Mark Leyner, author of I Smell Esther Williams

A quirky Dungeons & Dragons-inspired adventure that will appeal to gamers and readers of the Mr. Lemoncello's Library series. What if your favorite fantasy game characters showed up on your doorstep IRL? Sixth graders Ralph, Jojo, Noel, Persephone, and Cammi are hooked on fantasy tabletop role-playing games. When they somehow manage to summon their characters to Ralph's house, things take a truly magical turn! The five are soon racing around town on a wild adventure that tests their both their RPG skills and their friendship. Will Ralph and crew be able to keep their characters out of trouble? Trying to convince a sticky-fingered halfling rogue not to pickpocket or a six-foot-five barbarian woman that you don't always have to solve conflicts with a two-handed broadsword is hard enough. How will they ever send the adventurers back to their mystical realm? "Epic...for young fans of Stranger Things."--SLJ "An exciting new adventure exploring friendship...[with] often humorous commentary on social issues."--Booklist "Both funny and heartfelt...[The Game Masters of Garden Place] has as much to offer diehard fans as it does newcomers to fantasy role-playing."--Bulletin

"Bibliography found online at tonyrobbins.com/masterthegame"--Page [643].