Campaign Mastery

Pieces Of Creation is an occasional recurring column at Campaign Mastery in which Mike offers game reference and other materials that he has created for his own campaigns.       All images used to illustrate this article are public-domain works hosted by Wikipedia Commons or derivations of such works. Introduction The Magna Carta was […]

Have you heard of the five minute adventuring day? The characters blow their powers in the first combat each day and then choose to rest so they are fully charged tomorrow for the next challenge. This is not only boring, it’s terrible storytelling. We just posted a new lesson in the Faster Combat course for […]

Pieces Of Creation is an occasional recurring column at Campaign Mastery in which Mike offers game reference and other materials that he has created for his own campaigns.     Welcome to part two of this series of articles introducing the history of Earth-Regency. Part 1 showed how a small change in one weak Baron’s […]

Introduction Let’s talk about the art of naming characters, especially NPCs. This is one of the (thankfully few) aspects of the GMing craft that doesn’t come naturally to me. I can usually get there in the end, but off-the-cuff names can be a real struggle. To deal with this handicap, I have evolved a system […]

Pieces Of Creation is an occasional recurring column at Campaign Mastery in which Mike offers game reference and other materials that he has created for his own campaigns.     Introduction A couple of weeks ago I described my ground rules for handling alternate histories in RPGs and promised to excerpt the writeup I did […]

From time to time, gaming companies offer us products to review here at Campaign Mastery. Past such reviews include Tome Of Monsters from 4 Winds Fantasy Gaming in ‘Perfect Skin: Some Musing On The Design Of Monsters’, Players Option: Flaws in ‘On The Nature Of Flaws’ (also from 4 Winds), Nobis: The City-States from Pantheon […]

Written by Michael Beck, with contributions and editing by Da’Vane. As we started with in the Introduction, Michael Beck provided four reasons for writing the GM’s Toolbox. We only presented two of those reasons since they made ideal opening statements from Michael explaining his motivation for the series, without having to have read the series […]

The latest iteration of my superhero campaign has just gotten underway. Being set (mostly) on an alternate-history Earth, it holds a number of elements that may be of interest to readers, especially if I explain the thinking that led to the various choices that were made and my approach to the construction of a detailed […]