Campaign Mastery

I started to write this as a comment to Johnn’s post “Undead Are Taking Over. What Happens?”, but realised that my comments were so extensive as to require a post of their own. Note that this is an extra post, my usual blog entry for the week will follow in a day or two. Here’s […]

Help! In my Carnus D&D 4E campaign the PCs failed to stop a permanent rift to the Shadowfell opening. Now undead are pouring out like hallelujahs at a Pelor rave. So, what are the consequences? Got any ideas? Here are a few I’ve thought of: Wildlife flee in the path of undead. Most animals will […]

Ryder asks in my previous post about level of readiness in your campaign planning how I find time to work on my campaign between game sessions. My current recipe is very successful, based on years of trial and error and from facing a ton of time theft from other parts of my life. Bi-Weekly Game […]

The Google Problem Has anyone noticed Google becoming less user-friendly lately? It started with the heavy domination of blogs in search results, and worsened with the loss of numbered results recently. It worsened further when Google started failing to find results that you KNOW are there because you had found the pages searching Google for […]

Imagine a spectrum of planning effort. On one end you have every possible detail worked out, including complete world development, all the adventures until campaign end, a complete cast of NPCs, everything. Let’s call this end 10. On the other end of the spectrum you have nothing planned. You show up to the table and […]

(Too many GMs, not enough players!) NB: This is an extra post outside the normal schedule. My usual post will take place in a day or two. One of the duties I have reluctantly taken on for my fellow gamers is the organisation of the timetable. When I started playing with the eclectic collection of […]

Of all the board games I could raid for props and DM tools, Scrabble tops my list, especially for D&D 4E. Enhance battlemats, track minis, and make combat easier with those crazy, square lettered tiles. Use Scrabble Tiles for the Monsters Wizards of the Coast uses letter identification in its modules for monsters. For example, […]

Special effects in TV and Movies these days can sell just about anything, in the context of making it look real, and do it for less money than was dreamed possible only a few decades ago. But this morning, a couple of stray neurons in my brain happened to fire at the same time and […]

I agree with Uncle Bear that New Years is an opportunity to make goals, not wishes, for another 12 months. The Christmas holidays provide downtime and renewal time to clear your head of the daily treadmill and get back to values and priorities. In addition, the calendar year provides a convenient crucible for measuring progress. […]

The DMG II for D&D 3.5 defines Prestige Classes as representing organisations; Taking a prestige class is synonymous with joining the organisation that the Prestige Class represents. At least, that was the original theory. The fact is that it was only ever partially true in D&D 3.5, and D&D 4 has a completely different paradigm […]

A couple of years ago, I was approached by a player who was considering getting back into roleplaying after an extended hiatus from the activity. It transpired that he had dropped out because he found himself objecting to the concept of magic on religious grounds – the idea itself was blasphemous to him, and he […]

And so 2009 begins, and with it the countdown to the third most popular date in Science Fiction (behind 2000 and 2001). Funny, it doesn’t look all that different to the tail end of 2008. That shouldn’t be surpising, since it takes the passage of several years and quite a bit of hindsight to be […]