Campaign Mastery

This month’s RPG Carnival, which Campaign Mastery is delighted to host, poses the question: What non-game media have most inspired your games and how? A doozy of a topic, this. Sure, there are the obvious genre-related materials – you can’t talk about Fantasy in this context without mentioning The Lord Of The Rings, first the […]

While watching the special features from Numb3rs season 3 on DVD, I got to thinking about one of the phenomena of TV shows – that some episodes you really like, and some you don’t, and some episodes are really popular and some are not (and these categories never completely coincide. This is true even of […]

Introduction This is not the post I was originally going to write for today, but a paragraph in one of the books I am reading brought to mind the game that seemed to be everywhere just a few years ago, “Six Degrees From Kevin Bacon”, and social networking in general, and I suddenly saw applicability […]

All too often, treasures in a game – be they gadgets in a high-tech setting, high-powered sports cars in a modern campaign, or arcane thingies in a fantasy campaign – are about as interesting as the cardboard cut-outs sometimes used to represent them in play or on a battlemap. While it’s always possible to overdo […]

There are times when an Ask-The-GM’s question doesn’t inspire one of us, or is too attached to the mechanics of one specific game system, or doesn’t have enough depth to justify a full blog post, or has already been answered by one of our articles, or for some other reason simply doesn’t suit the approach […]

In the first part of this article, which is itself just the first installment of a series of articles, I discussed the execution and delivery of unique-ness in an RPG campaign, and derived a definition of doing so to a standard of perfection that was achievable in more than a hypothetical sense, that was actually […]

In the first part of this article, which is only the first installement of a series, I discussed the delivery of uniqueness in an RPG campaign, and derived a definition of doing so to perfection that was achievable in more than a hypothetical sense, that was actually a practical goal: “Perfection in an RPG is […]

In the first part of this article, which is itself just the first installement of a series of articles, I discussed the execution and delivery of uniqueness in an RPG campaign, and derived a definition of doing so “to perfection” that was achievable in more than a hypothetical sense – that was actually a practical […]

In the first part of this article, which itself is the first installement of a series of articles, I discussed the execution and delivery of uniqueness in an RPG campaign, and derived a definition of doing so to perfection that was achievable in more than a hypothetical sense, that was actually a practical goal: “Perfection […]

Confessions Of A Fan: A partisan review The 7 seasons of The West Wing emerged a couple of years ago from a packed field of contenders to become my all-time favorite TV series. Early in its life, it wasn’t even a contender. I wasn’t a fan of political shows, just as I wasn’t particularly opinionated […]

If you’ve been following this series from the beginning, then you are now equipped with three new techniques for character development, all of which are useful when for some reason you’re struggling to find an idea. So how do you choose between them? I can’t answer that for you. It might be that one of […]

New techniques for getting under a character’s skin don’t come along every day; the techniques described earlier in this series have been my standard weapons for such tasks for the last two decades. So, when I thought of an original one earlier this year, I paid attention. This new technique is, in many ways, even […]