Campaign Mastery

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 [...]

Campaign Qualities Are Like Feats For Game Worlds
I’m flipping through FantasyCraft, a new d20 OGL RPG from Crafty Games. The first place I always go to in such books is the game master section. And amongst the 80 pages or so that brim with great tips and advice in FantasyCraft, I home in on the [...]

Someone once asked me why D&D bothers to include skills at all. After all, the GM generally tells the players anything they really need to know (rather than seeing all his hard work in preparing the game crash and burn); and even if he doesn’t, players can always take a twenty.
After further discussion, this person [...]

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 [...]

How do you give your campaign realistic weather without overloading the GM with Admin tasks?

Hi, both of you,
First I would like to praise you for a wonderfully done job!
My question is about weather in role-playing games.
Let me expain: I’ve been running a campaing for a while now where the PCs evolve in a world [...]

Within The Flói Af Loft
Finally, the characters have reached the floor of the great chasm, and started looking around. It is even colder than expected, no more than 10°C, and there is perpetual dust and ash in the air. The sand dunes underfoot are treacherous; seemingly-solid surfaces offer no more support than smoke. As [...]

Fólk Afsteinn (The People Of Stone)
These are a race of people capable of living in this environment not through physical adaption so much as through intelligent manipulation of their environment. I chose a blending of Dwarf and Halfling and called them Dwarvlings, because I wanted them to make a reasonable basis for PCs, but always [...]

The following is based on material prepared for My ‘Seeds Of Empire’ campaign in mid-2006. It has been rewritten to form a standalone setting for an encounter with an original creature to be found there (amongst others), as part of the February blog carnival. A day or so late, but better late than never…
It also [...]