Campaign Mastery

Inspiration I have to be honest and say I’m not completely sure who to thank for inspiring this article. At some point in the last month or so, a tweet appeared in my Twitterfeed proclaiming that the GM sending the tweet always liked to hand out useless magic items – or possibly it was a […]

Every time there’s a fifth Saturday in the month (with the occasional exception), I run my Dr Who campaign. This uses a simple home-brew game system that I’ve been tinkering with for more than a decade. As the game proceeded (a good time was had by both GM and Player), I noticed the way that […]

In the first half of this two-part article I described a game-show format designed for my use in an RPG. A quick reminder: The License The game-show format and key elements thereof, as described in this blog post and its predecessor, are © 2018 Mike Bourke. Licensing is free for any RPG-related purpose. Licensing for […]

This series is a concordance of Seasonal Summations for different locales around the world. That serves a number of different functions: it provides a climatic baseline from which any number of analogues, regardless of campaign genre, can be generated; it compares and contrasts different locations, enabling the reader (and the author) to start getting a […]

A month or two back, I perceived the plot need in my superhero campaign to have one of the PCs appear on the celebrity edition of a game show. The complication: Licensing of formats The problem was that Game Shows are licensed for big money and the owners are very protective of their rights. While […]

I get asked questions all the time. Those coming at me through twitter I usually answer extremely briefly; if the 280-character limit (was 140) is not enough, I will either add more replies or set the question aside for answering here, if there is likely to be sufficient interest in the question. Those I get […]

Looking at the photographs of the “March For Our Lives”/”Never Again” rallies, you can’t help but feel that an entire generation, who have grown up under the shadow of gun violence in schools since Colombine (April 20, 1999), have run out of patience and been energized. Calls for compromise, like those of Mark Rubio, who […]

Long-time readers of Campaign Mastery will know that it was co-founded with Johnn Four of Roleplaying Tips fame. The most recent posting by Johnn (I’d provide a link but I think it’s probably too soon for there to be one) dealt with creating encounters on the fly, or improv encounters. While it contained a lot […]

Obscure Knowledge can be a great source of uniqueness in an RPG Campaign, but it needs to be handled with care. No-one enjoys being lectured to, and the more obscure the subject, the less likely it is to be of obvious interest to those receiving it. There are ways around the difficulties and problems, and […]

A short post this week, cobbled together at the last minute when the article I was going to write fell apart on me, and at the same time, I contracted a massive head cold that’s impairing me mentally. It happens. And yes, I have hidden a ninja in the image to the left. Subtle, but […]

There’s a bit of a rambling backstory to this article which I would omit if it weren’t central to the subject. Since that’s the case, I’ll have to ask you to bear with me for a bit. I was musing in the shower this morning of the significance of the Australian Music TV show, “Countdown” […]

With the 2nd part of the series containing some of the locations of greatest climatic diversity or other significant recent history that needed discussion, it threatened to grow far too large for ready consumption. That necessitated a restructuring of this series into twenty parts instead of the sixteen originally planned. Actually, the original plan was […]