Campaign Mastery

0. Preface I’ve been thinking about writing this article – and the rest of this series – for a while now. You may be wondering, what is The Sixes System? It’s a slight refinement of the sophisticated but minimalist game system that I’ve been using for my Dr Who: Lovecraft’s Legacies campaign for about 3 […]

When a deity shows up in your game, how do you make sure the PCs – and more important, the players – know what they are dealing with? How do they recognize that the being that stands before them is something more than mortal? Of course, sometimes it’s obvious that the creature before them isn’t […]

Some History It used to be so simple, back when I first started GMing AD&D. Each monster had a treasure type, and each treasure type had a table (or sequence of tables) that you rolled on, and a set of rolls on that table determined what treasure would be found in the vicinity. Room, Inhabitant, […]

Maximilian Hart puts out a daily newsletter with a short thought and some links to resources that may be of value to D&D GMs called Dungeon Master Daily (subscribe and read some more about this resource here. Of course, some of those links and resources have a broader applicability, which is the main reason I […]

Today is a Public Holiday in Australia, so I’m posting something far more concise than usual. The reason for the Public Holiday is that yesterday was Australia Day, which celebrates the arrival of white colonists from Britain, most of them transportees, in 1788 – the equivalent of the American 4th of July. While the country […]

I have a professional interest in Runes. The Mage in my superhero campaign (Zenith-3) uses Runes as the focus of his spell-casting, and I’m always looking for ways to invoke the resulting flavor, and for the implied limitations and benefits that come from this approach. It has been established, for example, that it’s not enough […]

Plans & Changes It’s strange how perceptions and plans can change as a project proceeds. This is the third in my series of articles about Prologues (spelt ‘Prologs’ in the US, and in the rest of this text) – but when I started, this was intended to be one single article, something relatively quick that […]

In part 1, I looked at the dictionary definition of Prolog (Prologue if you’re not from the US), and found it inadequate. So I formulated my own, and then took a good hard look at the implications. In a nutshell, used properly, and when appropriate, a Prolog can massively enhance an Adventure, novel, play, or […]

I’ve been re-reading my Knights Of The Dinner Table collection lately, and eventually reached the issue in which Brian discusses just how bad it can be for the players when the GM starts his adventure by putting a prophecy in the heads of the players. What happens, according to this character in the comics, is […]

I have a character to offer for your next D&D / fantasy game. His is a story of hope, and desperation – but mostly, hope. Introducing Solyn Solyn was nobody important, raised in the human community of Rospike. He tried his best to fit in, there, but never seemed quite on the same page as […]

I was watching a movie that’s an old favorite, National Treasure (now available with its sequel as a blue-ray double-feature at Amazon, click on the link – limited copies available), prompted by a combination of availability and renewed speculation concerning a third movie in the series. It’s not as though the first two were flops, […]

Have you ever heard of the “Strange Face In The Mirror” illusion? Or the Troxler effect? All right, I see the person at the back of the hall with their hands raised, and you up in the gallery. Anyone else? Didn’t think so. There’s a reason why both these terms should be included in every […]