The Dungeonmeister Deck Of Side Quests by Jef Aldrich & Jon Taylor

subtitled 75 Mini Adventures to Empower Your Fantasy Campaign.

I genuinely enjoy every Dungeonmeister product Jef Aldrich and Jon Taylor put out. A lot of this is due to the fact that I’m a busy Dungeon Master myself, so every little bit helps in bulking up my Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. This is especially true of the game I’m currently running, based on the Ghosts Of Saltmarsh 5E book. I love my nautical adventures, but the GoS campaign book is really just a string of sea-themed modules sandwiched between two hard covers, with very little connecting tissue between each. Thus I’ve had to write a bunch of my own side quests to flesh out the story, often relying on any suitable pre-written ones to help liven things up and give my player characters something to do while traveling between point to point in the book.

So this deck was a definite godsend, with seventy-five oversized cards and an accompanying guidebook. The cards themselves are printed front and back: the front has the hook/description, while the back has possible outcomes depending on how the PCs plan to deal with the issue presented. The scenarios, while all fantasy-themed, range the gamut from urban to rural, from benign to potentially lethal, from whimsical to potentially campaign-changing. Ofc, this means that you’re probably not going to be able to incorporate every card into one campaign, but that’s okay.

Mssrs Aldrich and Taylor further allow you to customize the cards for your game by providing random tables in the guidebook to help drill down on some of the details left intentionally vague on the cards themselves. These tables encompass possible friends and foes, loot and several manner of events. DMs are, ofc, welcome to write in their own details, especially as they complement the campaign so far.

In my GoS campaign, my PCs were in the middle of travelling deep into the marshes to hunt down a creature out of nightmare. The travel, hunt and combat went pretty well but I decided to spice up the ending by incorporating two of the cards from this side quest deck, Unseasonable Fog and Babbling Brook, which both triggered on the death of my PC’s adversary. Combining these not only built a mysterious new location for them to potentially explore in future sessions, but also promised adventure and loot! I also appreciated that one of those cards helped me cut down significantly on the boredom of travel time. But probably the thing I loved most about this combo was the ability to creep out my players while making dad jokes that cracked me up despite my players staring at me balefully, lol.

This is a handy, versatile TTRPG aide that deserves to be in the arsenal of any DM running a fantasy campaign. While it’s primarily coded to D&D, it’s flexible enough to be adapted to any system (and with a little more effort, to any setting, honestly.)

The Dungeonmeister Deck Of Side Quests by Jef Aldrich & Jon Taylor was published September 30 2025 by Adams Media and is available from all good booksellers, including