Campaign Mastery

Intro Rather than present another excerpt from Assassin’s Amulet, I thought that today I would take the time to extract a few valuable lessons from the experience of writing it. Several reasons commend themselves for doing so: first, there are some ideas there that we would be happy to see adopted by our peers in [...]

Our Biggest Contest Ever? I want to take a moment to thank everyone who participated. Unless I am misremembering, this is our biggest contest ever with 102 entries – if not, it’s certainly right up there. The Results After tabulating all the votes, including the preferances of Johnn and myself, Cover #6 has won the [...]

Here’s another excerpt from Assassin’s Amulet while you’re all waiting for the announcement of the winner of the cover contest. This is taken from the GM Advice chapter and first appeared in this week’s Roleplaying Tips. Many GMs struggle with running killer NPCs. One big goal of the book is to arm you with enough [...]

I’m as proud as punch to announce the forthcoming release of Assassin’s Amulet by Michael Tumey, Johnn Four, and myself. Currently weighing in at well over 200 pages (we’re still doing layout so there’s no final page count yet), this game supplement will give you everything you need to integrate assassins into an existing campaign. [...]

Introduction Back in late February or early March, Holly Lisle’s books came to my attention – I’m no longer sure how, but it was probably a Twitter link to her blog. Several of her e-books sounded interesting, so I passed the information on to Johnn, who surprised me in late March by giving me several [...]

As someone who writes about RPGs a lot, I am naturally interested in game design techniques and philosophy. As a former I.T. professional, I have discovered that a lot of the principles of sound program design practice also apply to rules design. With those as my starting point, I thought I would have a stab at defining [...]

Anyone who has visited Campaign Mastery over the last few months will have noticed the advert for our book “Filling The Empty Chair“. Written by Johnn Four with contributions and editing by myself, it’s packed with strategies and techniques for finding and recruiting new players for your games. And it’s yours for the bargain price [...]

It is time for you to get selfish here and get some GM advice customized just for you. What ebook would you like me to write next that you would use to make your GMing better, easier, more fun? I am wrapping up the editing on my latest product. It’ll be released in 2011, though [...]

How to tell compelling stories about your campaign to non-gamers. This month’s RPG carnival, held at Mad Brew Labs, covers the topic of growing the hobby. Topics of new player recruitment and teaching come to mind. We might also consider the industry’s image, how game companies market their products, which companies get shelf space in [...]

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 [...]