Archive for September, 2012

Value for money and the pricing of RPG materials – Part 2 of 2

Introduction: The Online World The internet changes everything it touches. New production models, new distribution models, even new funding models. It blurs the line between professional and hobbyist by enabling the hobbyist to produce work of a professional standard – simply by replacing the infrastructure that an old-style game manufacturer needed to have with technological […]

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Causa Domasura, The Home Of Reason

This entry is part 4 of 7 in the series On Alien Languages

Today’s article contains another Kingdom write-up from my Shards Of Divinity Campaign. My players will be examining this one carefully for any additional nuggets of additional information that I include because this particular group are tied up in their current in-game situation. They think they know who’s responsible and have a working theory – are […]

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Value for money and the pricing of RPG materials – Part 1 of 2

I’m going to step aside from the usual practice of talking to GMs about how to improve their game for a few weeks in favor of what used to be a popular subject around the watercooler-analogue – and still causes game companies angst and sweaty nights, even today: the perceived value-for-money of game products. If […]

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Bher Yuralvus, The Home Of The Endless Library

This entry is part 3 of 7 in the series On Alien Languages

* This article was updated on 23 Sept 2012 * Metagame Origins & Status Bher Yuralvus is one of the least-detailed of the Shared Kingdoms. Several Paragraphs of information concerning it appear to have gone missing during the editing process of the House Rules, so that what little remains is full of non-sequitors. As a […]

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Boxed In: A problem-solving frame of referance for players & GMs alike

We’ve all had mental blanks from time to time. When we’re players, a GM presents a problem that should be a slam-dunk to solve – but we can’t seem to grasp the blindingly obvious. Similarly, there are times as a GM when a problem has an obvious solution that we completely overlook, and times when […]

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The Shared Kingdoms: A Premise from the Shards Of Divinity campaign

This entry is part 2 of 7 in the series On Alien Languages

Here’s where we’re at: In order to complete my series on Names, I need to deal with non-human languages; and the best – in fact, the only – approach that I have found for explaining the procedure that I’ve come up with for the creation of such languages is to describe how I do it […]

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Turning Reaction into Proaction – plotting techniques to get your players moving

A number of my recent articles here at Campaign Mastery have been derived from conversations with other GMs on Twitter (yes, readers, we GMs do actually talk to each other – and no, it’s not to find better ways to screw the players, well usually not.) Today’s article derives from just such a discussion between […]

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The Non-Human Languages Generator

This entry is part 1 of 7 in the series On Alien Languages

I’ve tried every way I can think of to set this topic aside until after I had finished the series on names, but it just doesn’t work. So I guess it’s time to take a side-trip into the wonderful world of creating and simulating Alien Languages in RPGs… I once, back in the early 1990s, […]

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