Campaign Mastery

It’s time for another of my occasional Lessons From The West Wing. This draws heavily on concepts put forward in a single episode, Episode 16 of Season 2, “Somebody’s Going To Emergency, Somebody’s Going To Jail”. Some people have decried the episode as one of the weakest in the West Wing’s repetoir, others found it [...]

This article deals in subjects that are sensitive issues to a lot of people. Everything contained within is written from a roleplaying context and no judgements are intended regarding the validity of any individual perspective on theology or on any social issues that may be referred to; no offence is intended. It’s just a game, [...]

This is not the post that I expected to make this week. I simply ran out of time and could not finish either the article I had intended to post this week [about time travel] or the one for next week [the long-awaited followup to last year's Pillars of Architecture article], in time. Instead, I [...]

There are times when an Ask-The-GM’s question doesn’t inspire one of us, or is too attached to the mechanics of one specific game system, or doesn’t have enough depth to justify a full blog post, or has already been answered by one of our articles, or for some other reason simply doesn’t suit the approach [...]

In part one of this series, we presented a guest article by Garry Stahl, “The Conundrum Of Alignment”. Part two discussed the justification for alignment being part of the rules, looked at the arguement against oversimplified moral arguements, and concluded that the real problem with alignment was misuse attributable to the judgemental and morally-extremist labels [...]

In part one of this 5-part examination, we presented a guest article by Garry Stahl, “The Conundrum Of Alignment”. In Part two, “A Neccessary Evil?”, I discussed the justification for alignment being part of the rules, looked at the historical precedent for oversimplified moral arguements, and concluded that the real problem with alignment was misuse [...]

What are the best ways to handle splitting the party up – especially over the long term? An interesting question was asked of us recently: I’m planning a pretty good science fiction game that will most likely involve party splits during a good percentage of the game. While this seems like it may be a [...]

Some mistakes you (hopefully) only make once; the mistakes that I’ve blogged about so far as part of this month’s carnival fall into that category. But some mistakes are bound to recur by their nature, and it is just as important to know how to recover from those. These mistakes might derive from a flawed [...]

How do you extrapolate from existing rules to cover new situations? Recently, Campaign Mastery was asked, If a giant has rapid shot can he throw 2 rocks in a full round action? (d&d 3.5) This sparked some debate over whether Campaign Mastery should answer rules questions of this sort; we aim to deal with big-picture [...]

In a previous blog, I discussed converting prices from “…and a 10-Foot Pole” from I.C.E. and mentioned a number of campaign-related issues and background elements from “Fumanor: The Last Deity” that complicated the discussion, which I promised to tell everyone about at another time. Since it’s a good example of how to take a rules [...]