Campaign Mastery

We all have problems with our imaginations freezing up on us every now and again. While there are a number of things that you can do to kick-start your creativity when this happens, I have always found that it’s a good idea to have a stockpile of ideas that can be developed as needed for [...]

When mapping, I tend to focus on the corridors, rooms, streets, caverns and buildings. However, every map has more than just these areas; each has three zones in your design control. Next map you build, think of these zones and how you can change things up to be fun and interesting for your gaming.
This post [...]

In one campaign years ago, the PCs did so much travel it seemed far-fetched to give them an encounter every time they hit the road. However, I still wanted to pace things so the party was not instantly appearing at their destination each time. A fun solution we came up with was campfire chats. This [...]

We hesitated before running this piece, which was written prior to the disaster on Haiti. It is certainly not our intent to trivialise what has occurred or in any way to be insensitive to the ongoing emergency there. Ultimately, we chose to run it at this time so that we could encourage all those reading [...]

Tony Scott, in the interviews that accompany “Beverly Hills Cop II” states (while discussing the casting of Brigitte Nielson for that movie) that his background is in painting, and that casting is like putting colours on the canvas.
I found this to be a really interesting comment. I’ve written articles in the past about giving each [...]

The following ideas could be used for player characters stuck on a PC background and purpose. Game masters could also use them for interesting NPC wizard hooks. If you have any ideas for more hooks, just comment below, maybe we’ll get to 100.

Master’s experiment goes wrong, transforming the PC and cursing the master. PC quests [...]

I thought I’d talk a bit about Drama vs Melodrama and how the two function in an RPG. This subject came to mind when reading “Hooked” by Les Edgerton, a book which I would not recommend for most aspiring authors because the author defines “good writing” as something suitable only for general fiction and posessing [...]

In the first post about gods and the Cypher Gate in my upcoming Riddleport campaign several readers supplied great ideas. Thanks to that feedback, I have a better picture of how things are in the pirate city. The secrets of the Cypher Gate as it is in my game, with reader feedback interwoven, are now [...]