Campaign Mastery

How do you design your dungeons? For me, the only technique worth contemplating is the Narrative Approach, in which the dungeon’s location and structure derive from the adventure in which they are to be found, and the encounter content and similar details derive from the location, structure, and adventure. Sounds good, doesn’t it? But, as […]

Being invited recently to participate in play-testing for Pathfinder 2.0 (or whatever they are calling it) – an invitation that I had to, regretfully, decline – has, nevertheless, fired my imagination. I keep returning to the question, “If I were one of the authors tasked with updating the game system, what would I do?” Surprisingly, […]

There’s a TV Series that every GM, regardless of the genre of their games, should be watching. It’s a show that I’ve discussed before, in a completely different context – in The Expert In Everything, and it’s name is Scorpion. Why? Simply put, because it contains so many lessons for the GM. To be specific: […]

Just a brief note to advise that voting has opened for the 2018 Ennies. These are the tabletop RPG equivalent of the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes and the Pulitzers – they celebrate excellence within our hobby. There have been over 500 submitted products from 72 publishers in 23 categories, and the judges have […]

The topic of “Why Do You Love RPGs? Why Do You Love GMing?” seems such a simple one, but it’s actually very challenging to articulate why you love something. It seems to me that this is one problem that’s actually holding the hobby back from broader acceptance – it’s really hard to “sell” someone on […]

Yesterday, the list of nominees for the 2018 Ennies was announced and Campaign Mastery is one of them, nominated once again for Best Blog! Sincere congratulations to my fellow nominees, in both my category and in all the others (full list here). No-one who isn’t there can know how much hard work goes into achieving […]

I’ve been reading a fascinating book lately: “The Biology Of Human Survival” by Claude A Piantadosi, M.D. This relatively hard-to-find book from Oxford University Press deals with the biological processes by which humans react to various conditions, and hence the hazards posed by those conditions, in a way that is both technically accurate and yet […]