A campaign killer is falling behind on planning and preparation, especially once a campaign starts. You soon lag and feel unready to GM. Then stress builds, fun flees and sessions get cancelled.
This post is inspired by tips on beating procrastination over at RPG Atheneum. Alric discusses four procrastination motivators and a few tips to overcome [...]
I recently had the need to design a Drow Outpost for my Shards Of Divinity campaign, and in the process, I made a few mental notes concerning how I go about designing cities, and population centres in general, that I thought I would share with our readers.
Design First, Draw Later
I don’t put pencil to paper [...]
It doesn’t take much more than a quick flip through the pages of “…And A 10-foot Pole” to realise that it’s an extensively-researched volume. Aside from breaking history into twelve periods covering everything from the stone age (prior to 9000 BC) to the information age (1980+), it divides commodities into standardised categories and gives prices [...]
Summary
Alea Tools sent me a sample pack of their magnetic markers for review. I have played with them for several sessions now and I give them a thumbs up.
Details – Alea Markers in Use
Alea markers have a great feel to them. Smooth surfaces all around and a nice weight. The plastic seems durable, though I [...]
A couple of weeks ago we chatted about the top dungeon master screen hacks. This week, we cover a related topic – do-it-yourself screens.
Have you ever made your own dungeon master screen? If so, how did you do it, and what materials did you use? Through the years I’ve cobbled together my fair share of [...]
Let me start off our discussion of doing game session post-mortems with some definitions:
Retrospective: contemplative of past situations (dictionary.com)
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results (Albert Einstein)
Kaizen: a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life (wikipedia.org)
The goal of many Campaign Mastery readers is to [...]
RPGs use rules, usually relating to dice rolls and modifiers, to simulate the world around the PCs, resolve character actions, and provide an interface between the game mechanics and the simulated environment. But this is not the only approach that can be used, and there are times when alternatives should be considered by the GM.
This [...]
This is the final part of a four-part article. The first part gave a relatively straightforward technique for creating a unique society; the second and third parts identified four ways of communicating the uniqueness of the result to the players, selling them on its credibility, and exploiting it for scenarios and subplots, and examined these [...]
