Campaign Mastery

I’ll take good ideas for an article from anywhere, even from a piece of spam. Below is an extracted quote from just such a spam comment: I was interested to find out how you center yourself and clear your mind before writing. I have had a tough time clearing my mind in getting my ideas […]

This is the first of a four-part* series outlining the house rules that Blair Ramage and I have adopted over the years for the Adventurer’s Club campaign, a Pulp-genre campaign run using Pulp Hero, which is a Pulp-genre variation on the Hero System. There are four major chunks of rules, that have developed at four […]

A list of the hand-picked best posts from Campaign Mastery that were published in 2011

I was half-listening to the commentary from the Tour De France a few moments ago (as I write the first draft of this opening paragraph), and I misheard something. No great surprise there, that happens all the time when you’re only half-listening. But what I thought I heard gave me a great idea for a […]

So we’ve looked at Themes, and we’ve looked at Concepts, and even touched on the relationship between the two. But now it’s time to address the elephant in the room – twin elephants in fact – Genre and Style, and how these modify that relationship, how it all comes together to form a unique fingerprint […]

This is an extra, out-of-normal-time blog post to explain the new anti-spam policies that I’ve been forced to implement here at Campaign Mastery. The real price of Spam Spam is an unfortunate reality. It will never go away. Most of the time, Spam is like an itch that has to be scratched. But there are […]

A few weeks ago, I described my processes for creating Partial NPCs, a methodology that determined how much NPC definition was needed for that NPCs role in an adventure, in Creating Partial NPCs To Speed Game Prep. This was described as essential know-how for the article that I was originally going to write and publish […]

Part 2 of the article trilogy looks at concepts within an RPG, how they relate to the campaign themes, and throws in some free game content as a bonus.

The Perils, pitfalls, and potential benefits of using an RPG to write a fantasy novel.

I was watching an interview with Jim Keays from 1975 the other day, discussing what was then his latest album. He was explaining that he had started with three or four songs that all had similar subject matter, and realized that he could build the entire album around that subject. The interviewer, as part of […]