Campaign Mastery hosted the November 2017 Blog Carnival and had some really great submissions in addition to my using the Carnival as a springboard for a whole heap of articles.

The theme this time around was “The Past Revisited: Pick a post (your own or someone else’s) and write a sequel. Should include a link to the original article if it is still online.”.

In a way, that was the hardest part of compiling this round-up: do I bundle Campaign Mastery’s together in a lump so that readers who have already read them can skip over them? Do I list the submissions by everyone else before mine, or after? Which approach doesn’t come off as big-noting my own horn? Chronologically by date of publication is fairest – but also a lot more work.

In the end, I decided that I was overthinking the problem, and just got to work.

1. Campaign Mastery

• I always like to bundle an article with my hosting anchor post so that non-participants in the Carnival have something of value to read. This time around, that was The XP-less NPC, which proposed a methodology for eliminating XP for NPCs entirely without eliminating character progression from game session to session. This was a sequel to Objective-Oriented Experience Points, which proposed eliminating XP from all sources except as a measure of the progress toward plot-based goals, and awarding it (effectively) as a percentage of the progress toward the character?s next level.

2. Wormy’s Worlds

• Wormy’s Queue were next up, offering Race and Culture and a Carnival, which not only followed up a post from 2012 (in German, but he kindly offered up an English Translation, What I wrote back then (which, ironically, was also a sequel), but which was inspired by a couple of articles by the Angry GM about the interaction of race and culture. Check out the article, and the links to the inspirational posts.

3. Campaign Mastery

• My second contribution was The Influence Of Distance Part 3: Far (The first half) and bonus worldbuilding tools. The first two parts of this series looked at the impact on lives and local culture of being located close to the capital or cultural center of a society (Part 1, Part 2). Part three begins looking at the impact of being remote from the capital or cultural center. Ironically, this (and the still unfinished fourth part) were the original articles that I had in mind when I started the series; the first two parts were afterthoughts. As a bonus, the article includes a system for simulating regional trade which jigsaw-puzzles simple information to build a complex picture very quickly and easily.

4. Terminally Nerdy

• Clay from Terminally Nerdy was the next cab off the rank. This was his first Blog Post, so he chose to do a sequel to a video podcast that he had done on Perception Vs Reality (link is to the contribution to the carnival which contains the inspiration source embedded within the page). The original article was highly critical of shows like Critical Role for having a possible negative impact on the D&D Community at large, by creating a skewed idea of how D&D works out – but Clay admits that his was an opinion unsupported by any investigation at the time. Since then, he’s done that investigation and changed his mind – so this offered him the perfect opportunity to set the record straight and reassess his prejudices. The whole thing makes a great combination which ends up exploring both sides of an issue that I think we will hear a lot more about in coming years, as others go on personal journeys similar to Clay’s.

5. & 6. Campaign Mastery

• My third submission to the carnival was a sequel to my very well-received post of April 2009, The Right Quip at The Right Time: Humor in RPGs, which examined a number of types of comedy and how to use (and not use) them in RPGs. This revisit to the question of comedy in RPGs, named for one of the more memorable lines from Ghostbusters, Dogs and Cats, Living Together: Comedy In RPGs (Again) also drew heavily on insights gleaned from a Guest Article at Campaign Mastery by GF Pace, The Psychological Dynamics of RPG Groups about the way relationships form and evolve amongst participants in an RPG, written by a Professional Psychologist and Psychotherapist – so he knows what he’s talking about! My article won’t turn a GM into a Comedy Genius, but it will give GMs a direction and the basis of understanding what humor works in an RPG and what humor doesn’t, and how to harness the power of humor without falling into one of the many pitfalls.
   
• I followed that post with a piece of straight in-game-perspective pseudo-physics taking a fresh look at Parallel Worlds and the probability of events, with a side excursion into a new approach (to me) of dynamic campaign pacing. This was a sequel to a number of articles based around my development of a new Campaign, which can be found listed here (in reverse chronological sequence, be warned), but which was spiritually a successor to other pseudo-science for RPGs articles like my exploration of Faster-than-light travel in August 2011, Fascinating Topological Limits: FTL in Gaming, and my look at Heisenberg?s Uncertainty Principle and RPGs, The Physics Of Uncertainty from August 2012. It also puts into practice, and provides a concrete example, of the principles enunciated in my four-part series on Game Physics in general, which you can find as the Plunging Into Game Physics series – elements of the Physics were deliberately chosen because they supported the RPG and the act of Adventuring, and at the same time, the Game Physics was designed to both Justify and fold into the campaign concept.

7. Tales Of A GM

• Phil was the next to put his hand up with Betrayal Revisited. Phil’s original article was Betrayal In The Throne Room?, which describes some dramatic events and in-PC fighting in Phil’s Eastern Isles story arc, and which led to that campaign imploding. The revisit not only highlights “how much my gaming group has evolved over the years,” as Phil put it in his submission, but also reviews the exact nature of the evolution and articulates the “Social Contract” under which the current group operates. Although I don’t think he realized it, both articles also dovetail nicely with the Guest Post at Campaign Mastery that I linked to earlier. There are profound lessons for all of us in Phil’s article!

8. The Other Side

• At almost the same time, Timothy S Brannon was submitting Skylla: Quest of the Ancients, which is a sequel to a whole bunch of posts relating to both a character (Skylla) derived from the AD&D Module “XL1 Quest For The Heartstone” and another group, adapting material from Quest Of The Ancients for use in Timothy’s campaign, or was that adapting the character for use with the Quest Of The Ancients rules? I’m not quite familiar enough with D&D 5e to be 100% certain. Either way, it gives an interesting NPC who has clearly figured prominently in Timothy’s campaign on several occasions.

9. Campaign Mastery

• It was clearly a productive day for the Blog Carnival, because at the same time both those articles were coming in, I was posting Nostalgia in RPG Characters, which – while not technically a sequel – looks at why sequels make for interesting articles, and how to use Nostalgia to help define and grow a PC or NPCs personality, as a means of injecting relevance and interest into a campaign background, and as a direct source of adventure content. As an example, I take two small pieces of campaign background and use the power of Nostalgia to not only expand on them but also to derive a cluster of four adventures, subplots, or acts of characterization (i.e. good roleplay).

10. Board Enterprises

• John Josten of Board Enterprises was the next to take the plunge, bringing up a concept that I had never heard of before – and when you’ve been gaming and GMing for as long as I have, that’s saying something! He chose to follow-up an article from March of this year on PCs setting up Safe Houses to house their armor, caches of spare weapons, etc, for times when wearing it would be committing a social faux pas. Follow up – Safe Houses enlarged on the subject by considering some of the alternatives available for the location of such Safe Houses, and some of the ways the GM can integrate those choices into an adventure.

11. & 12. Campaign Mastery

• My article on Nostalgia got me thinking about the ways societies evolve, which led to my synthesizing a theory of social development to use as “a tool to make the politics and societies within their game more realistic and more vibrant at relatively low prep-overhead” and to help the GM understand the real world around them. Influences, Styles, Trends, and Oscillations built on an older article (from April this year), A Political insight for RPGs & Life, which had identified and harnessed the social patterns in question but not provided any substantive analysis of the underlying forces. The new article plugs that gap.
   
• I always like to provide multiple articles whenever I host the Blog Carnival, and choose topics for which I have multiple angles up my sleeve. November 2017 was clearly no exception to that rule, which helps make up for the fact that I can’t always think of an article for other hosts of the Carnival – or get one finished in time for it to appear, anyway (that’s one of the downsides of having done this for so long – the ‘easy articles’ have all been written). My final submission to this particular Blog Carnival was The Greater Society Of Big Bad Wolves: RPG Villains of the blackest shade. A lot of advice out there (including at Campaign Mastery) advocates introducing nuance and shades of gray into organizations, groups, and individuals in order to make them more interesting and give you more ways in which to involve themselves in your adventures. This article is all about when, how, and especially why, you should disregard that advice, arguing that every campaign needs an outright villain even if they are not the campaign’s primary antagonist. It builds on a long series of past articles on the subject of Villainy – see the links at the top of the article.

13. & 14. Daemons & Deathrays

• Brian Rubinfeld, aka Doctor Necrotic, was the next to contribute to the Carnival with Bizarre Bazaar – Strange Magical Items Revisited, which returns to a series of blog posts inspired by the old Dragon articles of the same name, previous entries into which include Bizarre Bazaar – Magical Items of the Fae for D&D 5th Edition from February 2016, and Bizarre Bazaar – Fantastic Items from the Planes for D&D 5th Edition from November 2015. This article offers eight rare and unusual magic times for D&D 5e, but which could be adapted to serve in other settings. Some were old, and were being redressed and revised, others were new originals.
   
• Brian followed that up with Bizarre Bazaar – Even More Strange Items Return and another dozen magic items. He (apologetically) states, “Since this is a return to previous magic item themes (Gothic, Science Fantasy, Fey, Goofy, Planar), it’s a bit of a jumbled mess” – no need to apologize, Brian, that just makes it more likely that there will be something there for everyone!

15. Codex Anathema

• On the last (official) day of the Carnival (more on that in a moment), Gonzalo Campoverde offered Once More With Feeling, which is a sequel to an article in Spanish called RPGing chronodynamics about Time Travel, especially in a Fantasy setting. For the record, Chrome’s automatic translation does an OK job of translating the article but leaves some paragraphs untouched; but copy-and-paste those into Google Translate and they magically become quite legible. For anyone even contemplating introducing Time Travel into their D&D / Pathfinder campaigns, or who wants a reasonably gentle introduction into the metagame issues and decisions involved in doing so, these are must-reads and well worth the effort of translating the original.
  

  Gonzalo was initially frustrated in his attempts to make a submission, but he reached out to me on Twitter and we sorted the problem out: comments are held for moderation if they have two or more links, or if you haven’t had a comment approved previously. Multiple attempts in too short a time automatically moves the comment from ‘awaiting moderation’ to the spam folder, which I’m diligent in checking, but others may not be. So, for the record (and not just for Campaign Mastery), be patient, and contact the site if there’s still a problem after a couple of attempts.

16. Nuketown

• I always consider the Carnival to still be “open” for at least a week after the end of the month. Almost every time, there has been a late entry – bloggers are people, and real life happens to people. This time around, the person needing to take advantage of that policy was a long-time associate through Twitter, Ken Newquist, from Nuketown. From amongst several contenders, he chose to update his gaming prep article from August 2008, The Three-Page Manifesto, because the technique had evolved over the 9 years since the original was posted. Comparing the differences between the original and the current-day approach described in The Three-Page Manifesto, Revisited is almost as interesting as the game-prep approach itself. If you’re having time-crunch issues in your game prep, or simply want to explore a possible alternative, this article is worth checking out.

The Wrap-up

I always expected that there might be a rush of articles toward the end of the month. As several contributors noted, in one form or another, when you’ve been at this for a long time, it can be hard to choose which article to use as a foundation. Ultimately, there was a very pleasing turn-out, and a wide range of subjects – and that’s always good to see.

By now, the Blog Carnival has moved on to Pitfalls & Pixies, and Brynvalk’s topic, “It’s In A Book”, on the theme of literary sources, and literature applied to, RPGs. Entries seem to be a little slow, so if you have a gaming blog and you’ve ever stolen – ahem, drawn inspiration from – a literary resource, it’s time to tell the world about it!