This book has 25-50 pages of interesting ideas — sadly it’s 239 pages long.

The focus on GMing tips for fantasy games doesn’t help because I’m not interested in tropey fantasy stories told “straight” — most of the book assumes that’s what the reader is interested in.

This seems like a whole book digging into a version of the Beat system from the Heart - The City Beneath (Grant Howitt) RPG with the serial numbers filed off.

Using goals set by players to help guide the GM’s hand towards building the kinds of roleplaying experiences and character beats that the players want their characters to have is genius and writing a whole book about how to maximize the effectiveness of this tool makes sense.

But moving forward I’ll be sure to make this goal setting process an explicit part of the character creation process and end of session wrap-up in my campaigns because I’ve had mixed results when I’ve given players the opportunity to do this but I haven’t forced it.