Campaign Mastery

Today’s article contains another Kingdom write-up from my Shards Of Divinity Campaign. This one isn’t quite as developed as the others (but the last time I said that, I wrote 11300 words and it became one of the most developed of the Kingdoms. I don’t expect history to repeat itself, but you never know…. Postscript: […]

GMs are called apon to make decisions all the time. Sometimes we can make our choices off the top of our heads using common sense and our knowledge of the in-game environment/circumstances, sometimes we can be guided by the rules after identifying an analogous situation, and sometimes when both of these fail us, we can […]

Today’s article contains another Kingdom write-up from my Shards Of Divinity Campaign. So far, these have appeared in exactly the same order as they were presented to my players in the initial pre-campaign briefing notes apon which these articles are being based. With this part, that changes; the next item on the agenda, if that […]

Hero Game’s Policy on publishing house rules is both enlightened and occasionally maddening. They have no problem with people posting their own characters, or discussing their rules, or publishing house rules – provided that you don’t quote directly from their rulebooks and your rules don’t exceed 5,000 words in length. You can’t publish variations on […]

I’m sneaking in after the deadline for last month’s blog carnival, hosted by Dice Monkey… The benefits of an established setting There are a lot of obvious benefits to the use of an established campaign setting. Because I expect a number of other carnival participants to have weighed in on this aspect of the topic, […]

Introduction: The Online World The internet changes everything it touches. New production models, new distribution models, even new funding models. It blurs the line between professional and hobbyist by enabling the hobbyist to produce work of a professional standard – simply by replacing the infrastructure that an old-style game manufacturer needed to have with technological […]

Today’s article contains another Kingdom write-up from my Shards Of Divinity Campaign. My players will be examining this one carefully for any additional nuggets of additional information that I include because this particular group are tied up in their current in-game situation. They think they know who’s responsible and have a working theory – are […]

I’m going to step aside from the usual practice of talking to GMs about how to improve their game for a few weeks in favor of what used to be a popular subject around the watercooler-analogue – and still causes game companies angst and sweaty nights, even today: the perceived value-for-money of game products. If […]

* This article was updated on 23 Sept 2012 * Metagame Origins & Status Bher Yuralvus is one of the least-detailed of the Shared Kingdoms. Several Paragraphs of information concerning it appear to have gone missing during the editing process of the House Rules, so that what little remains is full of non-sequitors. As a […]

We’ve all had mental blanks from time to time. When we’re players, a GM presents a problem that should be a slam-dunk to solve – but we can’t seem to grasp the blindingly obvious. Similarly, there are times as a GM when a problem has an obvious solution that we completely overlook, and times when […]

Here’s where we’re at: In order to complete my series on Names, I need to deal with non-human languages; and the best – in fact, the only – approach that I have found for explaining the procedure that I’ve come up with for the creation of such languages is to describe how I do it […]

A number of my recent articles here at Campaign Mastery have been derived from conversations with other GMs on Twitter (yes, readers, we GMs do actually talk to each other – and no, it’s not to find better ways to screw the players, well usually not.) Today’s article derives from just such a discussion between […]