Campaign Mastery

This blog post was originally going to be a review of Master Dungeons M2: Curse of the Kingspire by Goodman Games. However, once I got well into reading the module, I decided I was going to run this adventure for my Carnus D&D 4E campaign. It’s an excellent adventure, full of combat, puzzle, and roleplaying […]

What do you do when one character doesn’t trust the other characters, and it starts to degrade game play? A game master asks: Hi Mike and Johnn, I am new to GMing and play with a group of close friends every week. One of my player’s characters doesn’t trust the rest of the group. Even […]

This is the final part of a four-part article. The first part gave a relatively straightforward technique for creating a unique society; the second and third parts identified four ways of communicating the uniqueness of the result to the players, selling them on its credibility, and exploiting it for scenarios and subplots, and examined these […]

I received a box of Campaign Coins for review and they are fun, high quality game props. They must be great because the box packaging has no less than six exclamation marks in the text. :) Each box contains 121 detailed coins depicting four metal types in 1, 10, 100, and 1000 denominations and 1 […]

This is the third part of a four-part article. The first part gave a relatively straightforward technique for creating a unique society; the second identified four ways of communicating the uniqueness of the result to the players, selling them on its credibility, and exploiting it for scenarios and subplots, and examined the first two, Expression […]

This is the second part of a four-part article. The first part gave a relatively straightforward technique for creating a unique society; this part and the next (which were originally intended to be the whole article) gives some techniques for conveying the uniqueness of the resulting culture to the players, selling them on its credibility, […]

This post is being simultaneously posted here and as the feature article in Roleplaying Tips issue #433. Subscribe to the e-zine here if you haven’t already, and check out some of the GMing Articles (including three by yours truly: ‘Dragon Characters For Eberron’, ‘Putting The Fear Back Into Disease’, and ‘On Feats’) while you’re there. […]

I never understood mindmapping until I read one of Tony Buzan’s books, saw numerous examples, and clued-in. For game planning and tracking, mindmapping is now one of my essential tools. My mindmapping tool of choice is FreeMind, a free application you can download for Windows, Mac, and Unix. It’s a natural fit for documenting relationships. […]

“We can make it better than it was before – better, stronger, faster.” (Well, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad) Well, it’s done. Almost 6½ hours of effort. That’s what it took to completely remove and replace every category and tag, and then reassign them according to a new and comprehensive scheme of organisation that […]

“Don’t Bore Us, Get To The Chorus”— conventional wisdom in the popular music industry, also used as the title of Roxette’s Greatest Hits compilation album. I’ve blogged before about my Seeds Of Empire campaign. Following our last session over the New Year’s holiday, a problem arose that I had not had to deal with before, […]