Campaign Mastery

This is (still) the fifth of these Ask-The-GMs that I’m tackling without recourse to my usual allies and fellow-GMs. Traps and puzzles are always a tricky problem for the GM. All too often they focus attention on one particular character and leave the rest sitting around doing nothing, possibly for what feels like an extraordinary […]

The Second Shelf: Villains & Famous Real People Heroes are nothing without villains, at least not in a Pulp environment (though it’s also true of most other forms of gaming). Each of them has to be distinctive and interesting and challenging in an entirely different way, requires their own personal style, their own flair, their […]

This is the (almost-) final part of a very intermittent series that examines alternatives and possible implications to the standard spell storage solutions built into D&D, Pathfinder, and, in fact, most fantasy games. Today, We look at Relics and Artifacts. Artifacts are some of the most misused magic items, amongst the most controversial, and most […]

The First Shelf: Heroes & PCs Heroes are at the heart of a Pulp campaign, as much if not more than any other genre (with the possible exception of Superheroes – but you could draw a continuous line running from Pulp Heroes through to powerless heroes like Batman, Green Arrow, Hawkeye, the Black Panther and […]

Music can provide an iconic trigger that instantly transports the listener into an associated memory. Soundtracks and scores for Film and TV have long recognized this effect and played on it. You might not know it, but every major character in a movie or TV show has their own “theme”, a handful of notes, usually […]

It started with a very simple idea. I had, some years previously, published a list of my top-twenty 3.x supplements (Part 1, Parts 2, 3 and 4, Part 5) – why not do the same thing for pulp reference books? Approach Because I don’t consider myself an expert on the genre (even after co-GMing a […]

I was watching an episode of “Who Do You Think You Are?” (a show that has inspired other articles here at Campaign Mastery) in which a number of photographs featuring the grandmother of the central focus* of the episode were presented, with the observation that his grandfather appeared in none of them (* I watched […]

I’ve been aware of the CCG, “Yu-Gi-Oh”, for some time. Collectible-card games are a staple of the games store to which the NSW Wargamers migrated when circumstances made the nearby venue we had been using for over a decade unavailable to us (shout-out to Good Games in Burwood – thanks for giving us a home […]