Campaign Mastery

The Campain Structure series: Back To Basics Part 1: Adventure Structures Back To Basics Part 2: Campaign Structures Back To Basics Part 3: Example: The White Tower Back To Basics Part 4: Example: The Belt Of Terra In my recent posts on campaign structure (refer the panel above), I made a big point of the [...]

Introduction to ‘Everyman Skills’ As GMs develop in experience, and begin to develop their campaign worlds more extensively, they generally arrive at the idea of everyman skills. Typically, this idea will first emerge in a modern-setting campaign, or future-tech campaign, though this is becoming less true all the time. The idea is that characters, by [...]

This irregular column resurrects (relevant) lost blog posts from Mike’s 2006 personal blog on Yahoo 360 and updates them with new relevance and perspective. From December 2006: There’s never enough time to do everything right – so concentrate on the little things that make everything else tolerable. It’s easy to underestimate how big a contribution [...]

This is part four from two (yes, you read that right) in a discussion of the basic principles of creating adventures and hooking them together to form a campaign; I wasn’t originally going to include these examples, feeling that the principles would be clearer to the reader if they weren’t distracted by another narrative threat [...]

This is part three from two (!) in a discussion of the basic principles of creating adventures and hooking them together to form a campaign; I wasn’t originally going to include these examples, feeling that the principles would be clearer to the reader if they weren’t distracted by another narrative threat running concurrently – and [...]

A short time ago, we received an ATGMs question that made me stop and think for a minute. The question was straightforward; Angeline wrote, “I need some help, I’m a starting DM and I just have so much trouble coming up with Campaigns or good plot lines. Please help!!” Last week, in Part One of [...]

Melodies & Rests is intended to be an occasional recurring column at Campaign Mastery in which Mike plucks a CD at random from his collection and sees how much creative inspiration for gaming he can squeeze out of it. You don’t have to agree with his musical tastes – but play close attention to the [...]

A short time ago, we received an ATGMs question that made me stop and think for a minute. The question was straightforward; Angeline wrote, “I need some help, I’m a starting DM and I just have so much trouble coming up with Campaigns or good plot lines. Please help!!” Every now and then in this [...]

Today I’m going on a journey a long way down memory lane, in support of the Kids In Gaming initiative at RPGNow. Specifically, I am trying to remember what it was like GMing for my brothers Paul and David. It must have been around 1981, which means that David would have been about 15, and [...]

Well, it’s that time of the month when, following a Blog Carnival, the hosting site compiles a list of the blogs posted on their chosen subject and officially passes the baton on to the next host. Hold on a minute – this month the person that has to do that is me! I guess I [...]