Campaign Mastery

Last week, I proposed an alternate approach to plotting mysteries that made them more suitable for RPGs and could also be of benefit to mystery writers generally. Due to time pressures, I didn’t include examples – and I wasn’t entirely sure they would be necessary (that’s why I spent some time working on the diagrams; […]

Voting for the ENnies has opened! Cast your vote at http://www.ennie-awards.com/vote! You have until the 29th of July, but you can only vote once. The voting procedure is simple – vote 1 in a category to rank that product #1, 2 for #2, and so on. If you don’t know a product or have an […]

(As any viewer of Babylon-5 knows, a Zocolo is a marketplace or gathering place). The unusually observant may have noticed a new link in our right-hand Navigation. AetherCon is an idea that has arrived at exactly the right time – just as the required technologies and their distribution intersect with the realm of possibility that […]

I was running an adventure this weekend from a module that I had downloaded from the net. Central to the plotline was a mystery, a political situation in a small town, stories of an ancient Curse, all calculated to drive the PCs to an above-ground dungeon which could also be called a Mansion. While the […]

Campaign Mastery is incredibly proud and humbled (and not a little excited-exuberant-exultant!) to learn that we are amongst the five Nominees for Best Blog at this year’s ENnies (Wikipedia Page) – (full list of nominees here). The competition will be stiff, there are many other fine blogs nominated (and even more that didn’t make the […]

One of the big questions that every GM should consider when creating their D&D campaign is how to resolve the anarchy of the theological implications of the cosmology. It’s a simple question: In a world where miracles are readily apparent at the hands of every cleric, where Gods and Demons and Devils and Heaven and […]

Milestones are special. Campaign Mastery has just had two – 300,000 visitors and 550,000 page views. We want to thank each and every one of you. But even more than that, we want to thank our many readers for their loyalty; more than 37% of those visits are from returning visitors. Ten percent is usually […]

My history with RPGs encompasses an unusual variety of settings in which to play. Each different circumstance involved different session lengths and conditions, and so I feel that I am uniquely qualified to discuss the subject of session scheduling. NB: The following is necessarily edited and omits a huge amount in favor of the relevant. […]

One of the most under-developed game mechanics in D&D is the Curse. This has so many problems its hard to know where to begin, but I’ll give it a shot: Only clerics can curse because its a clerical spell. They hold no fear for anyone because they are so easily lifted. The suggested effects don’t […]

Some game systems have rules built in for character aging. Others don’t. Some of those aging rules function gracefully. Others don’t, or are shockingly clumsy. This post is all about how I handle character aging in my campaigns – gracefully and relatively painlessly. The Harbinger Of Aging Quite early on in my GMing career, I […]

Most game systems are great when it comes to a precise definition of what a character can or can’t do, but there are any number of occasions when the level of precision they impart and entail is overkill. The result is that character generation takes a lot longer than is really justified by the intended […]

Only a short article this week (at least in terms of word count) because there is easily five times as much work beneath the surface! A few weeks ago, I read a really interesting analysis of the mathematics of the D&DNext advantage mechanic by the Online DM. And yet, there was a disconnect between that […]