Campaign Mastery

General Posts about Adventures

• A Campaign Mastery 750th-post Celebration includes advice from a host of GMs on just about every subject as the climax of the party (and some from stragglers in the comments). So I’m listing it at the start of each page, as well as a handful of places where specific content warrants inclusion.
• The Plot Thickens – Hooking Players Into Adventures – Johnn offers advice about connecting existing players to a new (published) adventure.
• Downsize Your Disasters: GMing catastrophes in your RPG – How not to use disasters in your RPGs.
• Dungeonaday.com Sponsors Campaign Mastery – An article with much more than a sponsorship announcement, this contains an interview with the famous Monte Cook with Monte’s advice on dungeon and encounter design, and more!
• I’ve Been Framed – Johnn reviews a set of Pathfinder Curse Of The Crimson Throne dice and offers a random generator for a political plot that follows the pattern, “In the [Type of State] of [State Name of Your Choice] ruled by a [Type of Government], a character must undergo a [Type of Trial]. He has been framed by [Power Behind the Throne], and if found guilty of [Type of Serious Crime], his punishment will be [Spell-Based Punishment].”
• GM’s Toolbox: Prep Tools Part One: Campaign and Adventure Planning – Part of the GM’s Toolbox series by Michael Beck with contributions by Da’Vane and the occasional comment drop-in from Johnn. The series is aimed at both beginners and more experienced GMs and strives to articulate all the things that you will need tools and techniques for in order to successfully run a campaign. This article deals with the upper-level planning that goes into running a game.
• GM’s Toolbox: Running The Game Part Two: Notes and Organization – Part of the GM’s Toolbox series by Michael Beck with contributions by Da’Vane and the occasional comment drop-in from Johnn. The series is aimed at both beginners and more experienced GMs and strives to articulate all the things that you will need tools and techniques for in order to successfully run a campaign. Campaigns sprout pieces of paper like mushrooms; this article deals with the organization of all that paper so that you can find what you need when you need it.
• GM’s Toolbox: Beyond The Game Part One: Handouts and Props – Part of the GM’s Toolbox series by Michael Beck with contributions by Da’Vane and the occasional comment drop-in from Johnn. The series is aimed at both beginners and more experienced GMs and strives to articulate all the things that you will need tools and techniques for in order to successfully run a campaign. This article looks at enhancing a game with extras.
• It’s Not Cheating Unless You Get Caught: Game Fraud and Counter-Fraud in RPGs – In a fantasy, sci-fi, or superhero world, how might people cheat at games of chance – and what would casinos have to do to stop them?
• The final two articles in the A Good Name Is Hard To Find series – Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames (Part 1) and (Part 2) – discuss adventure names, with hundreds of examples (with explanations) and general principles based on style & genre of campaign.
• An Adventure Into Writing: The Co-GMing Difference – It’s unusual, but I regularly Co-GM a Pulp Campaign. This article describes the impact on how adventures get written for the campaign and along the way discusses some of the benefits and pitfalls of Co-GMing.
• The Gap In Reality: Immersion in an RPG Environment – Four years on, I update “Are Special Effects Killing Hollywood” and focus on the impact of changing expectations of immersion on RPGs, leading to suggestions for the use of multimedia in games.
• There are 7 primary types of writer’s block besides “Blank Page Syndrome”. Part Two of my series on Writer’s Block offers solutions to the first three of them Conceptual blocks (Ideas), Specific-Scene Blocks (Scenes within an adventure), and Setting Blocks (Locations).
• Part Four of the series on Writer’s Block offers solutions to Dialogue Block and Narrative Block.
• Ask The GMs: The Great Handouts Question – is “How much should there be?” if you’re wondering. This article defines a range of standards for handouts that are to be distributed pre-campaign, ranging from “The Tolerable Minimum” to “An Extreme Excess”. In the subsequent section, I describe a magic item and accompanying plotline, the “Tome Of Past Destinies,” that seemed to work very well. After some more general notes, I then describe (far more succinctly) the practices for pre-game, in-game, and post-game that I employ and best practice for delivering such background information.
• Pieces of Creation: Mortus is an extremely radical reinvention of the Marvel Villain, Thanos, one whose backstory and personality conflict with what he does so strongly that it poses fundamental questions of morality and ethics of the PCs who encounter him. In the course of this write-up, I briefly relate a couple of stories of Behemoth, because Mortus originally thought that he was a Behemoth-clone. In dealing with Mortus, the PCs of my campaign went WAY beyond what was expected of them, but I had enough notes about the “Big Picture” prepared to go with the flow – a lesson that justifies including this article in the relevant campaign and adventure plot sequencing sections. Mortus should be adaptable to any campaign in which the PCs are “the good guys”; his impact might be diminished in campaigns where that’s not the case.

Adventure Structure & Format

Includes advice on Writing Adventures.

• See also the Campaign Pacing subsection on the Campaign Plotting page.
• See also the “Cinematic Combat” series on the Rules & Mechanics page.
• See also the “We All Have Our Roles To Play” series on the Characters page.
• See also the “One Player Is Enough” series on the Game Mastering page.
• See also the Fiction & Writing content and in particular, the “Secrets Of Stylish Narrative” Series.

• Leaving Things Out: Negative Space in RPGs – after exploring what Negative Space is in art & layout design, mounting brief excursions into Optical Illusions and Eyewitness Testimony along the way, I examine the benefits and pitfalls of leaving things out in eight areas of RPGs: Narrative, Descriptions, Characterization, Maps, Adventures, NPCs, Rules, and Campaign Planning.
• To Module Or Not?: A legacy article – I originally wrote this article in 2006, but Johnn never got around to writing the second half of what wa planned to be a two-part article to cross-promote CM and Roleplaying Tips. It details the differences between writing your own adventures and running published 3rd-party modules while strenuously avoiding any suggestion that one approach is better than any other. Favorably reviewed as “another article that every GM should read” in a couple of places.
• Writing to the limits of longevity – As GMs, we have to do a lot of writing. Every minute spent writing more than is needed is time wasted forever. Therefore, it makes sense to adjust the way you write to match the longevity that you need that writing to posess. I divide time into three general categories – short-term, medium-term, and long-term/forever – analyze the differences and potential problems (with as many real examples as I could sneak in), and then offer practical advice on how best to write for that degree of longevity. Even experienced writers usually find something of value in this article, because there are some mistakes that we all make, learn from, forget, and then make again.
• Growing Plot Seeds Into Mighty Oaks – At their heart, every plot idea listed in the following section (or anywhere else) is a plot seed. It may have had additional development, but that development contains assumptions, and it may be necessary to strip all of that away and get back to the core idea before the content can be integrated into your campaign. This article describes the complete process of taking such a plot seed and building it into something on the scale of The Lord Of The Rings, on the premise that steps can be shortcutted or even eliminated altogether if something less epic is required.
• Stream Of Consciousness: Image-based narrative – This article describes how to use Google Image Search to flesh out location descriptions so much that you need never be caught without specific details again. The feature image is not only on-point but demonstrates what can be done with some simple photoshopping.
• A tabula rasa – focusing the mind before writing – In response to the question, “How do you clear your mind before writing?” I wrote this article. Hint: I focus the mind, I don’t clear it.
• Things That Are Easy, Things That Are Hard – before reviewing a Fantasy Adventure raising funds through Kickstarter, The Book of Terniel, I ruminate about two elements of Campaign Design that some GMs find very difficult – Low-level adventures and providing multiple paths to success for the PCs to choose between.
• Shades Of Suspense Pt 1 – Eight Tips for Cliffhanger Finishes – I love ending game sessions on a cliffhanger, especially if I can get the players talking about how it’s all going to work out. This two-part article takes a good hard look at Cliffhangers, starting with these eight tips for employing them. In particular, I offer three methods that I reserve for improvising a cliffhanger when planning has gone awry.
• Shades Of Suspense Pt 2 – Fourteen Types of Cliffhanger Finishes – Wikipedia asserts that there are 2 kinds of cliffhanger, and neither of them are defined in such a way to be useful in an RPG. Other people also told me that they doubted there were 14 types of cliffhanger (prior to the pubication of this article, at least). For each of the 14, I describe it, describe how to implement it at the end of a session, describe the best way to restart play in the following session, and – in some cases – provide further discussion and deliberately over-the-top examples from various genres.
• An Experimental Failure – 10 lessons from a train-wreck Session – If you’re human, you make mistakes. If you’re a fair or better GM, you learn from them. Better still, you can learn from the mistakes of others. This article (and the discussion in the subsequent comments) is one big mea culpa on my part (and on behalf of my Pulp GM) for a total trainwreck of a game session. I detail what went wrong, why it happened, what could have been done to avert the trainwreck and why it wasn’t, what was done to get the campaign back on track, and conclude with ten lessons that I (and any reader) can take out of the experience, including what early warning signs were there to see but were ignored. In the comments, there’s a discussion between myself and one of the most-affected players, extending several of the threads mentioned above. How effective were the lessons identified? This was more than four years ago, as I compile the Blogdex, and not only is the campaign still running (with the same GMs) but the same player is still a regular. Now remember that the trainwreck was supposedly a bigger-than-life adventure to celebrate the campaign’s tenth anniversary…
• The Wandering Spotlight Part One of Two: Plot Prologues – The first part of a two-part article examining the techniques used to ensure each player is engaged in the plot even when the party is split up and everyone’s doing their own thing. The first part functions as introduction and foundation, looking at character Prologue Scenes and subplots, and the functions that they serve in the Adventurer’s Club campaign. This process makes the adventures longer, both to play and prep, but the benefits – not all of which are listed in the article (because I didn’t recognize them at the time) – more than justify the extra time.
• The Wandering Spotlight Part Two of Two: Shared Stories – The second part of this two-part article addresses main adventures and how we work to ensure spotlight time is shared amongst all the players. As the article closes, I also look at epilogues. One of the key points is discerning what makes an individual PC different from another PC; another key point is discerning what makes one Player different from another. These are both vectors to customizing content to shine the spotlight, however briefly, on a PC.
• Race To The Moon – a lesson in story structure – a number of superficially-unrelated thoughts come together to offer a new explanation for why America lost interest in the space race after Apollo 11, regained it during Apollo 13 and then lost it again, and why some campaigns seem incapable of holding onto more than a minimum number of players, and ultimately provide a subtle but profound insight into good campaign design.
• Pretzel Thinking – 11 types of Plot Twist for RPGs, Part 1 – Wikipedia lists 11 kinds of plot twist mechanic and for one reason or another, not one of them is relevant to an RPG. After briefly looking at the need for plot twists, I set some ground rules about playing fair with the players, and then identify my own 11 plot twist mechanics that are relevant to an RPG. I then look at the first three in detail. This inspired John Large at Red Dice Diaries to post his own thoughts on the subject.
• Let’s Twist Again – Eleven types of Plot Twist for RPGs pt 2 – summarizes the introductory material from Pt 1 (like the ground rules) and then details the remaining eight types of plot twist. Along the way, I discuss plot sequencing and the relevance to Plot Twists.
• Flavors Of Victory: Why do good GMs fail? – Some articles are easily summarized for the Blogdex. This isn’t one of them. I noticed some patterns to the reasons some clearly skilled chefs lost in a series of cooking contests, and then realized that they provided insights into why one game fairs better than another – even if the GM running the second is superior to the first in some key attributes of the GMing craft. I then looked at what the “loser” could do to correct his situation, discovered a link through to good adventure and campaign design. This is one of the more profound articles at Campaign Mastery. It would be too easy to synopsize those results and oversimplify the findings, missing half the message. So I won’t try.
• Phase X: Beginning from the “New Beginnings” series – deals with the transition from the design & construction stage of the campaign to designing and constructing adventures on an ongoing basis, and especially the (arguably) most important adventure, the first. The subjects are Campaign Prep, Adventure Prep (and why the two are different), Fixing Campaign Plot Holes, and Writing Adventures.
• The Final Twist: Dec 2014 Blog Carnival Roundup – As host of the Blog Carnival in Dec 2014, it was my responsibility to compile the posts submitted. Some just list them, I like to review the submissions and classify them into some sort of rational overview. So this contains everything offered on the subject of plot twists and surprises.
• Random Encounter Tables – my old-school way – I originally intended this to appear in an earlier article about the uses of randomness, but it started to dominate everything else in that article, which I didn’t want. So I extracted it and published it as a seperate item. I firmly believe that every geographic region and location should have its own unique random encounter table (sometimes referred to as a Wandering Monsters Table). This shows how I go about creating one. For a change, I put the process first and the logic behind using that process afterwards. I then discuss modernizing the technique so as to utilize more modern technology than pen-and-paper, leaving that option open to the reader. Finally, I conclude the article by looking at how random encounters can form part of the plotline, rather than being something superficial that gets.tacked on as an afterthought.
• Adventure Structure: My Standard Formatting – I describe the standard format and nonclemanture that I have evolved for writing the adventures that I run. Also deals with prep management. In the comments I describe how much game prep I do and how long it takes me to write an adventure.
• Ask The GMs: “Let’s Split Up.” – “Good Idea, we can do more damage that way!” – What are the best ways to handle splitting the party up – especially over the long term?
• Ask The GMs: How do you GM Player Characters as Spectators? – Something I mentioned in the last part of my series on alignment sparked the question, “How do you handle scenes where the PCs are spectators?” from one of our readers. Johnn and I offer our advice in reply.
• Back To Basics Part 1: Adventure Structures – I examine the creation of an adventure and how the plot can be structured. This was very much written with Beginner GMs in mind.
• Turning Reaction into Proaction – plotting techniques to get your players moving – After a couple of ‘soft’, speculative articles, I turn my attention back to practical measures. In this article, I consider ways to make your players active participants in campaign plotting and plot development.
• Top-Down Design, Domino Theory, and Iteration: The Magic Bullets of Creation – There are three tricks that I use all the time – and this article gives you the keys to all three. Along the way (as an example) I use the techniques to develop a master plan for a Mastermind in a generic D&D/Pathfinder campaign.
• Phase 3: Rejuvenation from the “New Beginnings” series – In addition to a proven method of recharging all your batteries before you drain your reserves to the point of mental damage and risk of breakdown (see Phase 2 for the theory), other subjects that get considered include Campaign Tone and Adventure structure.
• Phase 9: Completion from the “New Beginnings” series – is mostly about dotting i’s and crossing t’s and a few other tasks that were put off, at least temporarily, earlier in the series. In particular, the categories of Campaign Structure, Adventure Format & Structure, House Rules Theory, PCs, Races, Archetypes & Classes, Campaign Background, and how Players will integrate with the campaign are considered.
• The End Of The Adventure – Although it deals with tone on an adventure-by-adventure scale and applies an even smaller granularity, looking at how the tonal quality of an ending influences the start of the beginning that follows, this is just a close-in zoom of what happens throughout the campaign – it’s one domino after another, with limited option for taking control. It’s therefore important to seize those opportunities when they arise. To that end, this article provides a somewaht-dubious list of 31 possible tones for ending adventures, and analyzes them before considering the plot structures that enable them to be controlled by the GM.
• Always Something There To Surprise You – Plots as Antagonists – This article is all about the right and fair and practical way to use metagaming, taking the most difficult type of plotline – a mystery – as its context and example. This is an article that memory and first impressions always underestimate, for some reason, yet the techniques here can solve many otherwise almost-unsolvable problems for the GM.
• Stealth Narrative – Imputed info in your game – This builds on the techniques described in the Secrets Of Stylish Narrative series to further compress, compact, and polish narrative by sneaking it into other parts of the game. There are considerable side-benefits that result. One small section discusses perception / spot checks and when it’s least-disruptive to the game to request them.
• Ask The GMs: On Big Dungeons – Johnn and I both offer advice on handling a big dungeon, then my fellow GMs rip that advice to shreds, forcing me to discover and solve the real issue with Big Dungeons (and other larger settings like Cities). Big is not necessarily better, but it can be – if approached in the right way by the author and the GM.
• A Helping Handout – Hungry from Ravenous Roleplaying complained that his players were glancing at his handouts and then setting them aside, and that consequently, his effort invested in creating them was being wasted. He then linked to an article at Gnome Stew by Phil Veccione which promised to alleviate the problem. Having seen the “three second glance” myself, I was sufficiently intrigued to check out Phil’s article, and while it was good, I thought it didn’t go far enough. Phil identified 4 ways handouts could be used to increase their utility; I added 9 to that list in this article, and a tenth if you include maps, including how-to information.
• The Power Of The Question-mark in RPG Plotting – I struggled in deciding where this post should be indexed. It’s kind of about plot structure and kind of about plot writing and kind of about agency and giving some to players while keeping a measure of control as GM. I discuss 7 different uses for the question mark.
• Part 4 of the Basics For Beginners series, is About Players. I didn’t intend for this series to become a slayer of sacred cows, but for the second post in succession, that’s a theme. In this case, it’s spelled out in the opening line, “I’ve read a lot of nonsense and enlightened theory over the years when it comes to players”. I then go on to walk that back as being too dismissive of RPG Theory. After looking at the factors that go into making a particular part of a particular day’s play “the most enjoyable part” for a particular player-character combination in a particular campaign of a particular genre on one day in particular (try saying that three times fast!), I link to various pages discussing player types in various ways, each of which (I contend) have some validity but which also fail in various ways. Since it’s unfair to criticize without at least attempting to offer something better, I then present a richer 9-axis classification system in which preferances inhabit “zones” or “regions”, not pinpoints. After a few caveats, I discuss the nine (Character, World, Concept, Drama, Conflict, Plot, Interaction, Amazement, and Heroism) individually, especially looking at the sensitivity to GMing style, genre, and campaign. As usual at Campaign Mastery, theory is then translated into practical advice: classification of campaigns, recruiting of players, and designing campaigns and adventures, before considering the impact on player surveys and finally, on game prep requirements. After diving deeper than I really should have for an artiicle aimed at a beginner, I wrap up the article with a pair of much simpler general principles that, in combination, won’t steer beginners wrong: “Give every player a focus on something they enjoy in each and every game session, and your game will be a success,”, and “Predefining some aspects of the game to achieve that in the majority of cases frees your attention up to the task of being creative in all the other areas. The rest takes care of itself.” As a post-script, I (very superficially) review “Era: The Consortium & Secret War” in case I didn’t get to a more substantial review in time (I did, just barely).
• Part 6 of the Basics For Beginners series, Challenges is really about how hard to make challenges to overcome, and building safety nets into your plots in case you get this decision wrong. It starts by describing a challenge I was facing in real life, which seems both ironic and appropriate in retrospect. I then discuss the question, and point out the number of results produced by Google searches at the time for the term “Encounter Balance” (123 million results), “Encounter Level” (another 123 million results) and “Challenge Rating” (145 million results). This shows, I argue, that a lot of people find the subject difficult, and that there’s no shortage of people who consider it important, or even critical. I then look at the reasons why it’s so hard to do, why it’s so important, whether or not it’s actually essential, and whether or not it’s realistic to aim to ptovide balanced challenges every time. The next two sections detail the very abstract process that I employ in written adventures to get a quick and satisfactory answer, and then describe an alternative based on narrative that I employ when improvizing. I discuss plotting within character limitations (the first of two tools that I employ), how it permits the narrative solution to present multiple possible pathways to an overall success or failure, and how to use a skill-check to thus direct the narrative rather than determine the outcome. There’s a very large paragraph containing an example – make sure to read this because subsequent sections keep referring back to it. The second tool is a beginner’s checklist that I use osmotically to set the difficulty numbers of any challenge (regardless of game system). I discuss each item of the checklist seperately, some deeply, others very briefly, look at when such assessments should occur, and illustrate the whole process with a metaphor. I wrap up the article by examining a list of 5 DO’s and 5 DON’Ts (considering a couple of side-issues and the resulting advice along the way), discuss the problems of linking challenges with xp, and recommending that the two experience a permanent divorce. I wrap up with some final advice and a progress report on that real-life challenge.
• Part 7 of the Basics For Beginners series, Adventures begins by acknowleding that, (at the time of writing), there had been 140 articles at Campaign Mastery tagged “Adventure Creation”. That’s now up to 228. Most of this article selectively recapitulates, and sometimes expands upon, advice contained in this or that past article. After describing the usual growth path of GMing expertise, I look at how a GM can take shortcuts – and the limited value of those shortcuts. Next, I address the question of GMing confidence, both over- and under-confidence, before providing a simplified process for beginners to employ in creating a campaign, with an example. In the process of describing how to GM that campaign, I discuss the role of the GM and give further advice on how to avoid plot trains, before discussing sandboxing, prep schedules. and prep as an investment. In the conclusion, I provide a long list of topics that merit following up by the reader before announcing our 2016 Ennie nomination!
• Fantastic Flop: GMing Lessons from a filmic failure – I deconstruct the failure of the rebooted Fantastic Four movie to discover lessons every GM should learn from. It’s a shame that those responsible for Man Of Steel and Batman Vs Superman didn’t read the article, because they made many of the same mistakes – admittedly to a lesser degree – and compromised their products earning powers and entertainment value as a result.
• What is An Adventure? – Trying to find the perfect name for the amalgum of plot, planned dialogue, and narrative that the GM brings to the table is not as easy as you might think – but it matters. Mismatched expectations have been the cause of more than a few player drop-outs in campaigns. Finding an answer requires a close examination of what “game prep” really is.
• Getting Into Character pt 1: NPCs – If your characterization is too deep, you’ll never be able to retain it when the time comes to quickly step in-and-out of character. In this article, I offer 7 techniques for getting into character as an NPC, and they all come down to extracting key points and simplifying either the characterization or the situation in some way. But the article goes beyond that, discussing how to use plot to show off the characterization and uniqueness of the individual, and how to use characterization to solve some plot problems..
• The Challenge Of Writing Adventures for RPGs – I look at the reasons why RPGs make for the most difficult literary challenge there is. The final paragraph addresses Burnout.
• The Conundrum Of Coincidence – Players know that the GM has total control over the game world, and so expect that there’s no such thing as coincidence. Yet, if the game world is to be believable, it must have coincidence as part of its makeup. This combination makes coincidence the hardest phenomenon in gaming to simulate with verisimilitude, which is what makes this article (that explains how to do it) so valuable. As usual, this starts with theory and proceeds to assemble practical advice; I mention this because the “theory” section of this piece is some of my best writing to date. Plato, Aristotle, Quantum Theory, RPGs, and a measurable improvement in my gaming as a result – what more could you want?
• Blog Carnival: The Unexpected Reality – A submission to the RPG Blog Carnival (that CM was hosting at the time) opened a pandora’s box of a concept: deliberately leaving things out of player briefing materials so that they can be revealed as surprises in the course of play,” in other words, using Plot as a Rules Delivery System. This article uses my Shards Of Divinity campaign extensively, and especially the Illusion rules, as an example and as a tool to test the arguements along the way. I identify three specific dangers inherent to the proposal, but when examining solutions to those problems, find that there are indeed circumstances (including a variant on the sci-fi campaign rules/campaign that inspired the article in the first place) in which this can be an asset to, and positive virtue of, a campaign – if they are used properly. Mid-way through outlining the article, I realized that this sort of thing happens on a smaller scale all the time – every time you encounter a situation in which the established rules are inadequate and have to concoct a house rule to resolve the situation.
• The very-expected Unexpected Blog Carnival Roundup – This lists all the posts submitted to the Nov 2015 Blog Carnival, “The Unexpected”. I start by analyzing a couple of mistakes that I made as host in introducing the topic and blaming them for the lower-than expected turnout. There’s the “Void Shock” series, my Gates and Portals series (linked to individually), a post on the game mechanics of surprise (again from CM and listed individually in the blogdex) and some ideas for plot and narrative surprise from my fellow GMs.
• Visualizing what’s going on is a critical GM skill, but any reasonable list of exactly what’s involved makes the task seem almost impossible.Obviously, it’s not, but beginners can be overwhelmed at first. With experience, we develop new techniques that are far more efficient and effective, so subtly and gradually that we’re hardly aware of it happening. Which makes it kinda hard to study other GMs’ techniques. In I see with my little mind’s eye: The power of Visualization, I detail (with examples and an exercise for the reader) the six techniques that I use to develop and manage my visualizations, how to translate them into description, and the big differences (aside from being able to try different things to see whether or not they work) that doing it in advance makes vs improv.

In-Adventure Locations

These entries are not so much about places as locations within places. If a dungeon is a singular “location”, this would be about populating the rooms.

• Back To Basics: Example: The White Tower – Part three of two in the articles about creating adventures and hooking them together to form a campaign offers an example of the process of adventure creation and connection from one of my actual campaigns, describing a rather unique location in the process. This article was carefully written and edited to conceal the actual ideas that I chose for the real adventure in the campaign.
• Grokking The Message – The fifth article in the A Good Name Is Hard To Find series looks at naming places and campaigns, and I explain how I chose the names for some of the campaigns that I have run.
• The Poetry Of Place: Describing locations & scenes in RPGs – How to use descriptive language more effectively when conveying information about a location or event to the PCs. With a fictional D&D city invented just to serve as an example.
• There are 7 primary types of writer’s block besides “Blank Page Syndrome”. Part Two offers solutions to the first three of them Conceptual blocks (Ideas), Specific-Scene Blocks (Scenes within an adventure), and Setting Blocks (Locations).
• Location, Location, Location – How Do You Choose A Location? – I examine the various considerations that should weigh into the decision of where something is to happen. There’s also some useful advice on the subject in Parts 2 And 5 of the Breaking Through Writer’s Block series – look for the sections on “Setting”. This was to be the lead-off article in the September 2013 Blog Carnival and I wanted to make it a strong one.
• Adjectivizing Descriptions: Hitting the target – I offer a seventh entry into the Blog Carnival with practical advice on How to describe locations, especially Wonders.
• People, Places, and Narratives: Matching Locations to plot needs – Your cast of characters isn’t limited to PCs and NPCs; this article shows you how to access and use the current location as another member of that cast.
• Location, Location, Location: Nyngan – I describe my home town (and get a number of people into a nostalgic frame of mind in the process) – then adapt it to a number of different genres (Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Pulp, Horror, Westerns, Cyberpunk, and Superhero games).
• Places to go and people to meet: The One Spot series from Moebius Adventures – I review a series of new products from that collectively offer a trio of ready-to-use locations to drop into your fantasy RPG: Hand’s Goods, The Painted Man, and Angar’s Magic Shoppe.
• Big Is Not Enough: Monuments and Places Of Wonder – For my sixth post in the Blog Carnival, I raise the question of Wonders Of The Known World and the qualities they need to possess in order to live up to the label; four reasons they are hard to do well, ten reasons why they are worth doing, and 12 sources of wonders to help overcome those difficulties.
• Six Wonders: A selected assortment of Wondrous Locations for a fantasy RPG – When I sat down to list ideas for the September 2013 Blog Carnival, I only intended to do one article on Wonders. But when you get inspired… The offerings in this post are: The Broken Man, The Pool Of Reflection, The Palace Of Winter, The Citadel Of Secrets, The Spire Of Contention, and the Library Of Shelves.
• Five More Wonders: Another assortment of Locations for a fantasy RPG – My Ninth article for the September 2013 Blog Carnival continues where the last one left off, with five more Wonders Of The Known World (that I didn’t have time to complete for the previous article). This offers The Pyramid of Reason, The Caves Of Rockbeard, The Rainbow Of Eternity, The Desert Of Gold, and The Emerald Falls.
• Still More Wonders: Fifteen Amazing Locations for a Sci-Fi RPG – I snuck this one in because September 2013 wasn’t quite long enough to fit everything into the Blog Carnival (actually, it was delayed because I needed an extra half-week to deal with Fantasy Wonders and because I was having trouble gathering enough ideas. Thanks to the players in my superhero campaign, I got there in the end). This article offers The Orouberus Molecule, The Cascade Nebula, “Birth And Death” By Garl, The Dyson Superplant Of Epsilon Centauri, The Spiderweb Of Rukh-C, The Torus of Andraphones, The Confusion of Hydra, The Waltz Of Minos IV, The Diaphanous Assembly of Omicron Boötis, The Billboard Of Greeting, The Halo Rock, The Necrotis Plague Planet, The “Cosmic String” of 18 Delphini, The Arena Of Canopia, and The Fireworx Swarm.
• Location, Location, Location! – the Roundup and Wrap-up (for now) – The September 2013 Blog Carnival brought in 27 entries, including 10 from Campaign Mastery. This article synopsizes all 27 entries plus one extra that I thought belonged there.
• The Remembrance Of The Disquiet Dead: A Spooky Spot and Campaign Premise – For the October 2013 Blog Carnival I offer a cemetery that follows the PCs wherever they go. Explaining the cause of the phenomena led to three or four different interpretations, each with their own resolution to the series of encounters, so this will fit into more than one type of campaign.
• Stream Of Consciousness: Image-based narrative – This article describes how to use Google Image Search to flesh out location descriptions so much that you need never be caught without specific details again. The feature image is not only on-point but demonstrates what can be done with some simple photoshopping.
• Vampire’s Creep and other stories: Working With Places – How to choose a location, how to delineate it, how to present it, and how to use it to your benefit. Plus lots of advice on the side about travel, and the spacing between settlements, and other location-oriented tips.
• Thatch and Confusion – creating a village – “for a fantasy RPG” is what’s missing from this article title. Don’t miss the articles at the bottom of the page, which show that I got a little carried away in the writing – because I wanted to be able to set an adventure in my example village, I built it accordingly, but failed to note where you should stop if you don’t want to do that. There are also some great reader contributions there, including a reader-supplied list of 100 points of conflict around which to build your village. This article also discusses larger population centers briefly, and the process (modified as described in the article) scales up as necessary.
• Abandoned Islands – Iconic Adventure Settings – I discuss why abandoned islands are one of my favorite settings for a whole adventure or part of one, look at abandoned islands in modern settings, and in fantasy settings, then share some tips and tricks for using google image search to ferret out real islands for the purpose. Some of those tricks are still valid, even though the Image Search interface has been completely redesigned at least twice since.
• Alien In Innovation: Creating Original Non-human Species – the first of two articles for the November 2014 Blog Carnival, this one asks “How do you create an original alien species?” then immediately points out the Fantasy RPG applicability before providing three answers, with multiple examples, including an entire alien environment and ecology. More examples and discussion in the comments.
• The Gradated Diminishing Of Reality – Travel in FRPG – The players want to get to the interesting stuff, the GM wants them to feel what the world around the PCs is like, to immerse them in its colors and textures, and to make them feel like their characters are part of that world and not simply passing through. Over time, a series of level-based compromises has evolved (this article is specifically about D&D / Pathfinder and similar level-based games) in which both sides get some of what they want – and in which the GM gets compensated for giving in to the players, whether they realize that or not.
• Ask The GMs: On Big Dungeons – Johnn and I both offer advice on handling a big dungeon, then my fellow GMs rip that advice to shreds, forcing me to discover and solve the real issue with Big Dungeons (and other larger settings like Cities). Big is not necessarily better, but it can be – if approached in the right way by the author and the GM.

Maps & Dungeon Tiles

Again, this is about representing Interior locations. For larger-scale maps, refer to “props” in the metagame section.

• Maps Have Three Parts – Johnn started the very first series here at Campaign Mastery way back in December 2008 – before the site went public. He suggests that maps have three constituents: Lines, Spaces, and Negative Spaces – and examines each in detail.
• Lessons From The West Wing II: The Psychology Of Maps – The second article in my occasional series of “Lessons From The West Wing” considers how maps both influence and reflect the way we see the world – and hence, that they should be very different if deriving from another society.
• Hexographer – RPG Mapping Dream – Hexographer is a piece of software that’s been on my personal wish-list ever since I read this review by Johnn. Note that the link given in the article is out of date; while there is a redirect in place, it might not be there forever. So use this link instead: http://www.hexographer.com/.
• 8 Easy Ways to Organize Your Dungeon Tiles – When Johnn wrote this article (with contributions from other GMs), I had no dungeon tiles. That is no longer the case, since one of my players has been collecting them for use in the games I run, and has left them in my care, and I have supplemented those with some extras that I’ve acquired. So I really need to pay closer attention to this article. More tips in the comments, especially the last one.
• The Nth Level Of Abstraction – GMs abstract things to varying degrees all the time. This article attempts to put some systematic analysis into the how, when, and why of abstraction, and the consequences. In the comments, I discuss ways of expressing the different levels of abstraction within maps. This is one of those ‘deep’ articles that needs to be read two or three times to get the full benefit.
• Out Of Sight does not mean Out of Mind: Maps I Could Not Find – I list a number of game maps that didn’t seem to be on the market – anywhere – in hopes of inspiring some cartographers to plug the gaps, with some success.
• Straightening a bent line: Measuring complex distances on a map – I offer a practical solution to measure complicated distances, like the by-road distance between journey start and destination – then toss in some neat tricks that you can incorporate into the process.
• Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 5 – As a giveaway with this post I offer a high-res map of the part of the Game World where the campaign has (mostly) taken place – but bereft of labels and captions so other GMs can use it as they see fit, and another with captions detailing the PCs travels.
• 52+ Miniature Miracles: Taking Battlemaps the extra mile – My 3rd entry in this month’s blog carnival looked at ways of extending the functionality of battlemaps by adding Found and Made objects. The general response to this article has been “now why didn’t I think of that?” which was very gratifying.
• Leaving Things Out: Negative Space in RPGs – after exploring what Negative Space is in art & layout design, mounting brief excursions into Optical Illusions and Eyewitness Testimony along the way, I examine the benefits and pitfalls of leaving things out in eight areas of RPGs: Narrative, Descriptions, Characterization, Maps, Adventures, NPCs, Rules, and Campaign Planning.
• 3-D Battlemaps for the financially challenged – Updated & Enhanced – Most CM articles start by looking at the theory of something, then deriving practical advice from that study. This article is different; it shows how to transform a tissue box and some selected battlemaps into a three-dimensional structure. In response to some reader requests, I went back and added some additional details and clarifications (that’s the “Updated” part of the title); and while I was there, I thought of another (optional) refinement to the design (that’s the “Enhanced” part).
• Fogs, Clouds and Confusion: A Battlemap technique – I offer a completely theoretical technique for simulating mist and fog on the battlefield. As usual, you can simplify this down to its basic elements and get 90% of the benefits. I also suggest a variation that works for underwater scenes. Some GMs (including one commentator) thought the whole thing was excessive – “Overkill” was the term employed – while others absolutely loved it because they had everything the needed at hand and had never thought of using them in this way.
• A Helping Handout – Hungry from Ravenous Roleplaying complained that his players were glancing at his handouts and then setting them aside, and that consequently, his effort invested in creating them was being wasted. He then linked to an article at Gnome Stew by Phil Veccione which promised to alleviate the problem. Having seen the “three second glance” myself, I was sufficiently intrigued to check out Phil’s article, and while it was good, I thought it didn’t go far enough. Phil identified 4 ways handouts could be used to increase their utility; I added 9 to that list in this article, and a tenth if you include maps, including how-to information.
• Part 2 of the Basics For Beginners series, Creation, could be more accurately entitled ‘creativity’. It starts by positing the proposition that the need for creativity is overrated when it comes to entertainment, including RPGs, and then go on to discuss 8 areas of creativity and how to fake being more innovative and creative than you are in each of them. The areas are Monsters (with a new monster as an example), Maps, Places (and place descriptions, with a training exercise), Adventures (very superficially), NPCs (ditto), Dialogue and expression (i.e. the presentation of the dialogue – one is the content being delivered by a statement, the other is the the style in which it is delivered), and Descriptions. I then look at the pitfalls that creativity can open up beneath the feet of a GM, which leads me back to the subjects of New Monsters, making maps, and creating locations. I conclude the article with a couple of pieces of general advice that never go out of fashion – “The Players Come First” and “Keep It Practical”.
• Part 8 of the Basics For Beginners series deals with Depth In Plotting. Like “Adventure Creation”, there have been a number of articles that deal with expanding a GM’s plans from isolated adventures into campaigns. Like Part 7, this focuses on the plot of adventures, but instead of focusing inward at the adventure content, it looks outward to the context within the campaign in which that adventure takes place. Once again, I start by spelling out the ‘natural’ progression most GMs experience. I then clarify the purpose of Back To Basics: Campaign Structures, a relevant article when it is read and used properly, before offering a shortcut through the rather lengthy GM-development path enunciated earlier. I then present two simplified methods of constructing complex plotlines: Russian Babushka Dolls and Spiderweb Plots. I go into the first of these in some depth, with a substantial example; the second is explained by the ‘Back To Basics’ article linked to earlier. I then point out that many of the more complex techniques actually used, such as the one described in the New Beginnings series, are actually combinations of these two simplified approaches. Next, I classify all adventures as being one of just two types – plot-driven adventures, or adventure-driven plots. These discussions use the earlier example campaign to explain various aspects of the differences. I then propose just two rules that every GM (Beginner or expert) needs to remember – “Make the adventures fun” and “The Forest Mandate,” i.e. don’t get so wrapped up in making the trees look pretty that you lose track of making the shape of the Forest look attractive, too. I then point readers at the campaign ideas that I’ve given away here at Campaign Mastery, discussing each in terms of the two simplified methods of Deep Plotting described earlier, before wrapping up the article with some concluding advice on choosing the plot structure that is right for you, at your current level of expertise.
• Part 11 of the Basics For Beginners series returns to the subject of Campaigns, more specifically the differences between a campaign and a larger, multi-adventure plotline. With plot relationships between individual adventures the subject of Part 8 of this series, this takes as its topic the other ways that adventures can integrate. The discussion starts by defining, for the umpteenth time, a campaign. I then step through the way the campaigns a GM is likely to run evolve, using diagrams – and stopping at the point where things are likely to get too complicated for a beginner. I then discuss Campaign Structure, offering a couple of alternative types, which then segues into a discussion of Simulationist vs Gamist (I argue against the existence of “Narrativist”, often touted as a third axis), and Strong Continuity vs Episodic, with examples from my own campaigns. Next, I introduce (again) the concept of Sandboxing vs “Temporally-Constant” campaigns, discuss the advantages of sandboxing, and the substantial downsides; that’s followed by the downsides of “non-sandboxed” campaigns, before introducing a third option, the Phased Campaign, which is a hybrid of the two that avoids the worst vices of both but doesn’t completely capture the advantages of either. After discussing 5 campaign aspects that are amenable to Sandboxing, and 4 aspects that are always excluded (even in Sandboxed campaigns), and providing a free blank map, I explain the principles of Phased Campaigns and the impact of the solution on the downsides previously identified. After noting that Note Organization is critical to all three approaches, I look at the Sandboxable material from the Phased Campaign approach (offering another cautionary tale along the way). I then interrupt to review the Kickstarter campaign for Song Of Swords that may represent a fourth option. Discussion then turns to some advanced tools that can be used even by a Beginner to good effect – Campaign Themes and Nested and/or Parallel Plot Arcs (i.e. subplots that thread together to form a larger narrative), with a 22-episode example.

Miniatures

• DM Tool: Scrabble Tiles for your Minis & Battlemats – Using Scrabble tiles as miniatures and map symbols on a battlemat. This article went mini-viral in August.
• Elevate Your Game – Tracking Airborne Minis – John examines solutions to the vexing problems of integrating the third dimension into a two-dimensional battlemap.
• D&D Minis Giveaway Contest – Another out-of-continuity contest. Note that the contest is long-over, it does no good to enter now – though you may want to read the tips and advice on Battlemats in the comments and on the entry page. All told there are about 80 of them – more than enough reason to actually count this post as one of the 500.
• Taming The Time Bandits: Some time-saving combat techniques – In Johnn’s review of the Chronology iPad app, he identified three major problems that he felt were responsible for the slow pace of combat resolution in his Riddleport campaign, but offered no solutions. In this response I offer the techniques that I use to solve the problems of 1)Not knowing the spells and supernatural abilities of the monsters in the encounter; 2)Being unfamiliar with the specialized combat subrules that applied to this particular battle; and 3) Being unable to identify which Mini went with which PC, which Mini went with which monster, and who was attacking who. There are some more great solutions in the comments, especially to the last of those three questions, and some great discussion of the first problem and my solutions.
• Super-heroics as an FRP Combat Planning Tool – An unlikely confluance of fragmentary half-thoughts came together to yield an insight and a theoretical construct based on that insight. By the time I got to write the article, that theoretical construct had evolved into practical advice – but to explain the advice (and justify the unlikely principle behind it), I had to re-create the mental process that led me to it within the text of the article. I conclude the article with mini-reviews of a couple of kickstarter campaigns – one (flat plastic miniatures) that was doing incredibly well, and another that unfortunately did not succeed for running adventures online.

Encounters

Includes new varieties of monsters

• See also the “Races” section of the Campaign Creation page..
• See also the “Casual Opportunities For Priests” series in the Character Classes & Archetypes section of the Campaign Creation page.
• See also the “Characterization Puzzle” series on the Characters page.

• Break Down The Door – 5 Encounter Seeds – Johnn expands on a point he made in his two-part article on How To Be A Confident GM by describing the concept of adventure seeds – with some great examples and links to many more.
• New Generator: Roleplaying A Black Dragon – Johnn does another review of Q-Workshop dice, in this case the Black and Yellow Dragon Dice and constructs a generator using them to create personalities for a Black Dragon.
• The Perfect Monster Manual – A Wishlist – Johnn asks what would be in the Perfect Monster Manual. In the comments, I explain the technical details of how to meet Johnn’s requirements, and point out the similarities to my (theoretical) proposal in Google Groans: Misplacing the Rules.
• Drow Generator & Dice Giveaway – Johnn does another review of Q-Workshop dice, in this case the Second Darkness dice set and constructs a generator for fleshing out Drow NPCs using them. Unfortunately, this dice set doesn’t seem to be available any more; the link is to the Q-Workshop home page.
• Undead Foe Generator – The last of Johnn’s Q-workshop dice articles is all about giving personality to the undead. The contest was over long ago, but the tables are still just as functional. This article was inspired by the Red and black Skull Dice set which appears to be no longer available (the link is to Q-Workshop’s home page).
• Perfect Skin: Some Musing On The Design Of Monsters – Inspired by a free review copy of by 4 Winds Fantasy Gaming, I revisit the concept of Reskinning and ask how a Monster Supplement should be designed to best facilitate it.
• Draco Inadequatus: Beefing Up 3.x Dragons – I discuss the inadequacies of Dragons in 3.x when Epic Levels are involved and offer a custom redevelopment of the Monsters to beef them up. A lively discussion in the comments leads to an unrelated article about House Rules.
• GM’s Toolbox: Prep Tools Part Two: Encounter and Scene Planning – Part of the GM’s Toolbox series by Michael Beck with contributions by Da’Vane and the occasional comment drop-in from Johnn. The series is aimed at both beginners and more experienced GMs and strives to articulate all the things that you will need tools and techniques for in order to successfully run a campaign. This article looks at the detailed planning within an adventure or game session.
• Casual Opportunities: Mini-encounters for… Barbarians – The Casual Opportunities series was (and is) about presenting opportunities for archetypes to put their character on show. It did so by breaking the archetype down into a comprehensive set of variations, identifying the key features in common to most of these variations, then providing encounter ideas that emphasized one of the key features or stressed the uniqueness of one particular variation. The first part in the series focused on Barbarians.
• Ten Million Stories: Breathing life into an urban population – My front window overlooks the twentieth busiest road in Sydney. From traffic patterns and estimating how much busier those other roads are relative to this one, I estimate that the busiest road in the city takes part in ten million personal stories a day about the inhabitants of the city. Note that at the time this article was written, the city’s population was being officially measured as just over five million – a factoid I’m including to let you scale that 10M stories to other metropolises. “George” is an individual who is resident here. One day, he is approached by a stranger named “Sam”. From their conversation, if it’s extensive enough, George not only comes to life as an NPC, but so do various facts about the city and what it’s like to live in it, using a technique that I include and a deck of cards. This technique is fast enough that it can be applied “live at the table” and even interactively with the players contributing. This article has also been translated into French at Dix millions d’histoires de gens, and has been rated as 9.3 out of 10.
• 3 Feet In Someone Else’s Shoes: Getting in character quickly – A potpourri of techniques for bringing NPCs to life quickly and easily, enabling you to switch from “being” one to “inhabiting” another with scarcely a breath in between.
• Shades Of Suspense Pt 1 – Eight Tips for Cliffhanger Finishes – I love ending game sessions on a cliffhanger, especially if I can get the players talking about how it’s all going to work out. This two-part article takes a good hard look at Cliffhangers, starting with these eight tips for employing them. In particular, I offer three methods that I reserve for improvising a cliffhanger when planning has gone awry.
• Shades Of Suspense Pt 2 – Fourteen Types of Cliffhanger Finishes – Wikipedia asserts that there are 2 kinds of cliffhanger, and neither of them are defined in such a way to be useful in an RPG. Other people also told me that they doubted there were 14 types of cliffhanger (prior to the pubication of this article, at least). For each of the 14, I describe it, describe how to implement it at the end of a session, describe the best way to restart play in the following session, and – in some cases – provide further discussion and deliberately over-the-top examples from various genres.
• There’s Something About Undead – Blog Carnival Oct 2014 – for the Blog Carnival of October 2014, I penned this article, looking at what makes Undead what they are – in other words, I try to give them some depth. It alls starts with one of those simple little questions: What Is Life? The process of examining the answers reveals a fundamental inadequacy within the standard D&D/Pathfinder Cosmology.
• Ask The GM: Seasoning The Stew (making races feel distinctive) – a reader asks why I go to so much effort to distinguish Elves from Drow when the latter are an offshoot of the former. I spend most of the article looking at the advantages that derive from making the races of a campaign distinctive, not only from each other within the campaign, but from other campaigns, before providing some resources and sources of inspiration on the subject.
• Alien In Innovation: Creating Original Non-human Species – the first of two articles for the November 2014 Blog Carnival, this one asks “How do you create an original alien species?” then immediately points out the Fantasy RPG applicability before providing three answers, with multiple examples, including an entire alien environment and ecology. More examples and discussion in the comments.
• Phase 8: Enfleshing from the “New Beginnings” series – deals with Archetypes, Races, Villains, Other NPCs, Adventure Locations, Encounters, Plot Ideas, and Campaign Structure to form the additional ’tissue’ referred to by the title.
• Random Encounter Tables – my old-school way – I originally intended this to appear in an earlier article about the uses of randomness, but it started to dominate everything else in that article, which I didn’t want. So I extracted it and published it as a seperate item. I firmly believe that every geographic region and location should have its own unique random encounter table (sometimes referred to as a Wandering Monsters Table). This shows how I go about creating one. For a change, I put the process first and the logic behind using that process afterwards. I then discuss modernizing the technique so as to utilize more modern technology than pen-and-paper, leaving that option open to the reader. Finally, I conclude the article by looking at how random encounters can form part of the plotline, rather than being something superficial that gets.tacked on as an afterthought.
• Pt 3: Tab A into Slot B provides a template for creating exotic spell components and then dives into some examples: Perfect Octarine (carries Cosmological implications), Etherial Alloy (carries more Cosmological implications), Firesphere (logically consistent with the preceding two, same implications), Ghostwood (carries Cosmological implications, Life & Death implications, and plot implications; mandates sentient trees; consistent with Positive and Negative Planes being two poles of a single structure), Heavenly Airs (profound implications for Death & The Afterlife, profound plot implications). Many of these substances are extremely valuable. After detailing those 5, I was completely out of time…
• Pt 4: Cut At The Dotted Line contains the exotic components that I wasn’t able to complete in time for part 3. It starts with a far more compact version of the template, then looks at Permanice Frost (gives Water Elementals a new sense, carries the same implications as Perfect Octarine from Part 3), Nightmare Spinner (involves an original monster from the Negative Energy Plane known as a Dreameater, cosmological implications, planar travel implications, scary stuff!), Oil Of Cholic (implications for military and barbarians), Razorleaf (cosmological implications, unresolved cosmological questions, exotic organizations, adventuring location, Elvish society). I then offer an incomplete idea for a 10th exotic element.
• The Gradated Diminishing Of Reality – Travel in FRPG – The players want to get to the interesting stuff, the GM wants them to feel what the world around the PCs is like, to immerse them in its colors and textures, and to make them feel like their characters are part of that world and not simply passing through. Over time, a series of level-based compromises has evolved (this article is specifically about D&D / Pathfinder and similar level-based games) in which both sides get some of what they want – and in which the GM gets compensated for giving in to the players, whether they realize that or not.
• Principle, Cause, and Course – Complexities In Motivation – Reveals one of my secret techniques for getting into character quickly while consuming a minimum of my attention, freeing up my attention for other things, whether I am a player or a GM. It is based around four questions that define a personality. I go into detail using my personal ethos as an example. Principles define which Causes a character supports and how actively; they stipulate how a character will react upon finding that an organization he is a part of has adopted a more radical position than he’s expecting, or has sold out; they define the character’s sense of responsibility. Answering these four questions defines a character’s Alignment, his Morality, the circumstances that could produce a moral shift, what the character will do to improve himself and his abilities (when combined with a sense of the opportunities that are open to the character), define his biases and prejudices, explain his past decisions (in combination with the character’s capacity for percieving the options open to him), his current status, what he thinks of that status, and what he’s done and is doing to prepare for the future. The only thing they won’t tell you is how indecisive the character will be. They also enable snap decisions to be made in character. In a sidebar, I discuss an online product that I still wish for whenever I contemplate a modern form of D&D.
• Traditional Interpretations and Rituals Of Culture – Using traditions as plot mechanics and ways to impart background and verisimilitude by stealth.
• Part 2 of the Basics For Beginners series, Creation, could be more accurately entitled ‘creativity’. It starts by positing the proposition that the need for creativity is overrated when it comes to entertainment, including RPGs, and then go on to discuss 8 areas of creativity and how to fake being more innovative and creative than you are in each of them. The areas are Monsters (with a new monster as an example), Maps, Places (and place descriptions, with a training exercise), Adventures (very superficially), NPCs (ditto), Dialogue and expression (i.e. the presentation of the dialogue – one is the content being delivered by a statement, the other is the the style in which it is delivered), and Descriptions. I then look at the pitfalls that creativity can open up beneath the feet of a GM, which leads me back to the subjects of New Monsters, making maps, and creating locations. I conclude the article with a couple of pieces of general advice that never go out of fashion – “The Players Come First” and “Keep It Practical”.
• Part 5 of the Basics For Beginners series, Characters is actually about generating NPCs. It starts by examining the five general sources of character ideas, and finds them all inadequate in the same basic way. I then explain a process of organizing, filtering, and combining the ideas that work (as opposed to those that don’t) – there are 10 steps, but most of them are brutally simple. I then list (and link to) allt the articles at campaign mastery to date that are about generating ideas and NPCs, most of which was a direct cut from the original blogdex, and so is now out of date. I conclude the article by creating an NPC for a D&D / Pathfinder campaign, expanding on the concepts of the game world in the process, and conclude by deriving two adventure seeds and several additional encounters revolving around or involving the NPC.
• Part 6 of the Basics For Beginners series, Challenges is really about how hard to make challenges to overcome, and building safety nets into your plots in case you get this decision wrong. It starts by describing a challenge I was facing in real life, which seems both ironic and appropriate in retrospect. I then discuss the question, and point out the number of results produced by Google searches at the time for the term “Encounter Balance” (123 million results), “Encounter Level” (another 123 million results) and “Challenge Rating” (145 million results). This shows, I argue, that a lot of people find the subject difficult, and that there’s no shortage of people who consider it important, or even critical. I then look at the reasons why it’s so hard to do, why it’s so important, whether or not it’s actually essential, and whether or not it’s realistic to aim to ptovide balanced challenges every time. The next two sections detail the very abstract process that I employ in written adventures to get a quick and satisfactory answer, and then describe an alternative based on narrative that I employ when improvizing. I discuss plotting within character limitations (the first of two tools that I employ), how it permits the narrative solution to present multiple possible pathways to an overall success or failure, and how to use a skill-check to thus direct the narrative rather than determine the outcome. There’s a very large paragraph containing an example – make sure to read this because subsequent sections keep referring back to it. The second tool is a beginner’s checklist that I use osmotically to set the difficulty numbers of any challenge (regardless of game system). I discuss each item of the checklist seperately, some deeply, others very briefly, look at when such assessments should occur, and illustrate the whole process with a metaphor. I wrap up the article by examining a list of 5 DO’s and 5 DON’Ts (considering a couple of side-issues and the resulting advice along the way), discuss the problems of linking challenges with xp, and recommending that the two experience a permanent divorce. I wrap up with some final advice and a progress report on that real-life challenge.
• A Stack Of Surprises: Blog Carnival November 2015 – After introducing the month’s Blog Carnival (it was once again Campaign Mastery’s turn to host), listing all the things that could be written about under the heading of “Suprise” and “The Unexpected”, I turn to analyzing the sticky question of “Should Surprise Stack?” – or it’s more intrinsically comprehensible alternative form, “Do multiple surprises compound?” in both D&D / Pathfinder and the Hero System. This article does NOT follow the usual Campaign Mastery pattern, with practical application first, then generalizing and theory afterwards. As usual, when pushed too hard, I find that all three game systems’ rules have a hole that may need to be patched with a House Rule. There’s a lot of logical analysis of combat mechanics and principles, and both alternative answers are given a thorough going over before avoiding a definitive general conclusion. Instead, this is shown as one issue that each GM and each campaign could and perhaps should handle differently. The impact of genre on that choice is also discussed.
• Ask The GMs: The GMs Help Network – Where does a GM go for help and advice? I discuss the history of GM connectedness from GM Bull sessions through to social media before creating a list of places where a GM could go for advice in a reasonable time-frame (read: a couple of days or less). Most of the advice contained in this post is still 100% accurate – the one thing that stood out is that these days FBook won’t even show you all the posts that you’re specifically tagged in, just the ones that IT thinks you are mostly likely to interact with. That’s a good thing – just because I liked a movie or a book or a TV series or whatever doesn’t mean that I want my FB timeline to be filled with posts about it, and you are still more likely to get a quick response through Twitter. I’m listing this in all the categories for which help has been asked and seen to have been recieved in recent years through my Twitter account, and redundancy be damned.
• Oddities Of Values: Recalculating the price of valuables – This article starts off talking about currency conversions and getting a ‘feel’ for the price of things in a pulp campaign using modern currency values. It then defines a pair of new “units of currency”, NTDs and Ms – “NTD”s is “Nineteen Thirties US Dollars” and “M”s are “Modern US $”. These are necessary because many of the values that we have recorded are from different time periods – our main sourcebook only goes up to 2005, for example, and there’s been significant changes since then. We then turn to the pressing question that sparked the discussion – How big is a LOT of money, say, M100 million? In Pulp Campaign currency? In large bills? (The answer is, 122 lb and the size of a large suitcase). I then look at the same value in Gold, which works out to 16.6 TONS of gold; and diamonds (7.7 lb of 1-carat diamonds, or a stack 3 inches by three inches and 2 1/4 feet tall. Unfortunately, by now, most readers seemed to have decided that there was no value in the article for them because they hand-waved encumbrance in their campaigns. This is shortsighted – even ignoring the encumbrance issue, don’t you want to know how many rubies can fit in that pot? But it was at this point that the article took a turn to the left, relative to where I had expected it to go, by looking at the rarity of larger gemstones, game treasure tables (especially those in D&D / Pathfinder), and how to value them. I also look at Collectable Coins, other Collectables, Art, and Land, then devise a fast and simple universal system for deriving valuations for these things for any game system, regardless of genre or commodity. Along the way, I look at three die rolling methods for generating rare high values and routine middle-to-low values. There’s also a discussion of how to use the system as a tool for delivering campaign background information in an interesting way. So those who tuned out early missed out on a LOT of meat.
• When I create a building, there are six questions that I use to visualize it from blank page to ready-to-describe. These are simple enough that the answers can be determined on-the-spot in improvized play. Part of the secret of the power of the questions is the order in which they are considered and the impact that they have in both practical and stylistic terms. Those six questions are what Creating A Building: A Metaphor and Illustration is all about, but the value of the technique doesn’t end there – interpreting a little more metaphorically and deciding that walls are an unnecessary detail permits the creation of any space, such as a forest clearing, using the same six questions. And treating them a little less literally again lets you use the same questions to create an encounter and build a plot and context around it.

The “Creating ecology-based random encounters” series

‘Wilderness Encounters’ in D&D are as old a subject as D&D itself. This 3-part series attempts to put some rationality into those encounters. Even experienced GMs have told me that they’ve gotten something new out of it.

• Part One, The Philosophy of meanderings, examines the philosophical underpinnings and game-play purposes of the unplanned wilderness encounter, why they seem to be declining in favor, and why they should still matter.
  
• Part Two, This Eats That, looks at ways to create better, smarter, encounter tables, by creating a simplified, summarized, ecology and then converting it into an encounter table. Be warned, it’s very long even by my standards, but it defied being further subdivided.
  
• Part Three, Encounters With Meaning, applies the same processes and analogous theory to create encounter tables for Urban Settings and Dungeon Settings, and then wraps the series with integrating random encounters with your plotlines to infuse them with meaning. I also explore some strange but related back alleys along the way – like the ecology of Undeath, and Devils & Demons…

Puzzles & Mysteries

• Ask The GMs: Penetrating the veil of mystery – Campaign Mastery was asked ‘Where can you find mysteries that can be fitted into a campaign?’ We try to answer that but find that the best answer is to make them yourself – so we focus on why that’s so hard to do, and how to remove some of that difficulty. There’s some great material on the subject in the comments, as well. This is such a difficult subject that it’s one I return to in a couple of other articles.
• Ask The GMs: Puzzles In Your Games – How to find and use puzzles (that aren’t riddles) in your games. More suggestions can be found in the comments.
• The Butler Did It: Mystery Plotlines in RPGs – I consider a fresh angle on the anatomy of a mystery, and how to structure mystery plotlines in RPGs. There’s some additional discussion of techniques in the comments. In response to a request in those comments, I later wrote a sequel article offering some examples of the plotting techniques. This one got a lot of interest on Twitter.
• The Jar Of Jam and The Wounded Monarch: Two Mystery Examples – I follow up, by reader request, The Butler Did It: Mystery Plotlines in RPGs with two example mysteries that illustrate the plotting process.
• Ghosts Of Blogs Past: An Air Of Mystery – Using an RPG to write mystery fiction – I resurrect an article from my 2006 personal blog to reverse the usual process (adapting fiction to an RPG) to argue why mystery writers should use RPGs to develop their plots.
• The End Of The Adventure – Although it deals with tone on an adventure-by-adventure scale and applies an even smaller granularity, looking at how the tonal quality of an ending influences the start of the beginning that follows, this is just a close-in zoom of what happens throughout the campaign – it’s one domino after another, with limited option for taking control. It’s therefore important to seize those opportunities when they arise. To that end, this article provides a somewaht-dubious list of 31 possible tones for ending adventures, and analyzes them before considering the plot structures that enable them to be controlled by the GM.
• Always Something There To Surprise You – Plots as Antagonists – This article is all about the right and fair and practical way to use metagaming, taking the most difficult type of plotline – a mystery – as its context and example. This is an article that memory and first impressions always underestimate, for some reason, yet the techniques here can solve many otherwise almost-unsolvable problems for the GM.
• The Power Of The Question-mark in RPG Plotting – I struggled in deciding where this post should be indexed. It’s kind of about plot structure and kind of about plot writing and kind of about agency and giving some to players while keeping a measure of control as GM. I discuss 7 different uses for the question mark.
• The Conundrum Of Coincidence – Players know that the GM has total control over the game world, and so expect that there’s no such thing as coincidence. Yet, if the game world is to be believable, it must have coincidence as part of its makeup. This combination makes coincidence the hardest phenomenon in gaming to simulate with verisimilitude, which is what makes this article (that explains how to do it) so valuable. As usual, this starts with theory and proceeds to assemble practical advice; I mention this because the “theory” section of this piece is some of my best writing to date. Plato, Aristotle, Quantum Theory, RPGs, and a measurable improvement in my gaming as a result – what more could you want?
• Ask The GMs: The GMs Help Network – Where does a GM go for help and advice? I discuss the history of GM connectedness from GM Bull sessions through to social media before creating a list of places where a GM could go for advice in a reasonable time-frame (read: a couple of days or less). Most of the advice contained in this post is still 100% accurate – the one thing that stood out is that these days FBook won’t even show you all the posts that you’re specifically tagged in, just the ones that IT thinks you are mostly likely to interact with. That’s a good thing – just because I liked a movie or a book or a TV series or whatever doesn’t mean that I want my FB timeline to be filled with posts about it, and you are still more likely to get a quick response through Twitter. I’m listing this in all the categories for which help has been asked and seen to have been recieved in recent years through my Twitter account, and redundancy be damned.

Combat & In-Game Environment

• See also the “This Means WAR! series in the “Actual House Rules” section of the Rules & Mechanics page.
• See also the “Cinematic Combat” series on the Rules & Mechanics page.

• A strong wind blows: Environmental effects for RPGs – This is the second of four articles containing the House Rules in use within the Pulp campaign that I co-GM. This is all about cold weather and wind-chill and their very dangerous effects, bringing together research from a number of sources. The rules are available as a free download from the site. These rules can be adapted to any campaign. I recommend anyone reading this article to also read the unexpected follow-up, Stormy Weather – making unpleasant conditions player-palatable about how to use weather in-game as something other than a boring-but-deadly background element.
• My Group’s Time Thief Revealed – Chronology iPad App Review – Combat takes a long time to resolve in most tabletop RPGs. Johnn uses the Chronology iPad to work out why that’s the case in his Riddleport campaign and comes to a surprising conclusion, reviewing the product in the course of reporting his findings.
• Taming The Time Bandits: Some time-saving combat techniques – In Johnn’s review of the Chronology iPad app, he identified three major problems that he felt were responsible for the slow pace of combat resolution in his Riddleport campaign, but offered no solutions. In this response I offer the techniques that I use to solve the problems of 1)Not knowing the spells and supernatural abilities of the monsters in the encounter; 2)Being unfamiliar with the specialized combat subrules that applied to this particular battle; and 3) Being unable to identify which Mini went with which PC, which Mini went with which monster, and who was attacking who. There are some more great solutions in the comments, especially to the last of those three questions, and some great discussion of the first problem and my solutions.
• Fastest Pathfinder Combat Ever – How We Did It – Johnn tries out some suggestions for improving the speed of combat. They seemed to work for him at the time, but as my comment shows, I thought he might comparing apples and oranges. Or not. If your combats are dragging, there are worse ideas than trying Johnn’s solutions.
• Five (Plus One!) Effective Combat Tactics for Assassins – Another excerpt from Assassin’s Amulet, this time offering techniques on how to make them more effective in combat.
• GM’s Toolbox: Running The Game Part Three: Rules and Combat – Part of the GM’s Toolbox series by Michael Beck with contributions by Da’Vane and the occasional comment drop-in from Johnn. The series is aimed at both beginners and more experienced GMs and strives to articulate all the things that you will need tools and techniques for in order to successfully run a campaign. This article details a subject that many GMs and players seem to obsess about – the rules.
• 11 Table Rules For Speed – Johnn offers an expanded excerpt from the Faster Combat course he and Tony Medeiros co-authored, in which he discusses 11 rules of table etiquette designed to speed up combat.
• The Tactical Masterclass – Preparing a player to lead on the battlefield – How to prepare a player who’s character has to lead the other PCs into battle.
• Part Three of my series on Writer’s Block addresses two of the remaining primary types of writer’s block: Action (Combat) and Personality Blocks (Characterization).
• Stream Of Consciousness: Image-based narrative – This article describes how to use Google Image Search to flesh out location descriptions so much that you need never be caught without specific details again. The feature image is not only on-point but demonstrates what can be done with some simple photoshopping.
• There’s Something About Undead – Blog Carnival Oct 2014 – for the Blog Carnival of October 2014, I penned this article, looking at what makes Undead what they are – in other words, I try to give them some depth. It alls starts with one of those simple little questions: What Is Life? The process of examining the answers reveals a fundamental inadequacy within the standard D&D/Pathfinder Cosmology.
• Super-heroics as an FRP Combat Planning Tool – An unlikely confluance of fragmentary half-thoughts came together to yield an insight and a theoretical construct based on that insight. By the time I got to write the article, that theoretical construct had evolved into practical advice – but to explain the advice (and justify the unlikely principle behind it), I had to re-create the mental process that led me to it within the text of the article. I conclude the article with mini-reviews of a couple of kickstarter campaigns – one (flat plastic miniatures) that was doing incredibly well, and another that unfortunately did not succeed for running adventures online.
• The Unexpected Creeps Up Behind You – Dec 2014 Blog Carnival – I take a look at the effects of being surprises in the real world and discover that most game mechanics get it wrong to a greater or lesser extent – then put together some alternatives for consideration. There’s some discussion of the issue and the proposals in the comments, but most of them are pingbacks or announcements of other posts in the Blog Carnival (this post was the anchor for the month).
• Part 10 of the Basics For Beginners series covers the under-utilized subject of Rhythms. “All of the prep and improv practice and knowledge of rules and experience in the world can’t really assist GMs in nailing down pacing and rhythms and flows of the game,” wrote J.T.Evans at Ravenous Roleplaying when reviewing this article. Nevertheless, however disconcerted it might be, all games have a rhythm, and that’s the subject of this article. It might seem esoteric, especially in an article for beginners, but I contend that awareness of the rhythm of the game you are running can be a vital, neglected, and useful diagnostic tool, and one that’s more easily accessed by beginners. What’s more, attuning your inner ‘ear’ to that rhythm is the first step in tweaking it to make it more engaging and satisfying. The article first dives into the phenomenon – when it’s most observable (during combat) and noticeable (when it’s interrupted, eg by someone not being ready to take their turn). I then describe how I handle that particular problem, and offer two alternatives – one disastrous and one that works. After that brief practical interruption, I continue exploring the principles, including ways of manipulating the rhythm, before turning to ways of applying them. After an exercise that enables GMs to find their own natural rhythm, the first practical application (after combat, already noted) is in improved dialogue, both improvised and prepared (with examples), then GM-Player interaction in general. I specifically call out the relevance to another pair of related series (“Emotional Pacing,” “The Yu-Gi-Oh Lesson,” and “Further Thoughts On Pacing”, all collected in a single subsection of the Campaign Plotting page). This is one of the shortest articles in the series.
• A Stack Of Surprises: Blog Carnival November 2015 – After introducing the month’s Blog Carnival (it was once again Campaign Mastery’s turn to host), listing all the things that could be written about under the heading of “Suprise” and “The Unexpected”, I turn to analyzing the sticky question of “Should Surprise Stack?” – or it’s more intrinsically comprehensible alterntative form, “Do multiple surprises compound?” in both D&D / Pathfinder and the Hero System. This article does NOT follow the usual Campaign Mastery pattern, with practical application first, then generalizing and theory afterwards. As usual, when pushed too hard, I find that all three game systems’ rules have a hole that may need to be patched with a House Rule. There’s a lot of logical analysis of combat mechanics and principles, and both alternative answers are given a thorough going over before avoiding a definitive general conclusion. Instead, this is shown as one issue that each GM and each campaign could and perhaps should handle differently. The impact of genre on that choice is also discussed.
• The villainous pair named Maxima and Minima are devotees of a radically-extreme televangelist, and are described in Pieces Of Creation: Maxima and Minima. Their powers are designed to be complimentary and Force Multipliers (a Combat / Military concept) for each other, a potent demonstration of what can be done in the Hero System with only a little deep thought about the design – so much so that many GMs wouldn’t hesitate to house-rule them out of existence. I briefly mention the Roman Catholic Church of this game world and it’s leader, Gregorovich II. St Barbara and Blackwing are explicitly involved in the backstory of the first (and so far only) encounter with the duo. There are suggestions for adapting the concepts and design techniques to D&D / Pathfinder and other genres such as Cyberpunk through magic items and rewards.

The “Hazards Of Combat” series

Johnn defines a combat hazard as an “element other than the PCs and their foes that brings danger, risk, or difficulty to the fight” – and then begins a series dedicated to examining possible combat hazards in detail.

• Part one, What is a combat hazard?, asks what – beyond terrain – might actually be a combat hazard, and offers many ideas in answer to the question.
  
• Part two, Craft a spirited name for your hazards, considers an essential element of combat environment psychology.
  
• In part three, Terrain, looks at the terrain as a critical combat element.
  
• The fourth entry in the series, Environment, looks beyond ‘terrain’ to a more comprehensive appraisal of the conditions under which combat takes place, and how these can be enhanced to further enliven combat.
  
• The final part, Traps, focuses on what has always been a staple element of fantasy RPGs (and Pulp/Superhero RPGs!) in isolation, and how integrating their presence into the combat can dress up an otherwise routine encounter.

Rewards

• See also the “Ask The GMs: Some Arcane Assembly Required” series in the “Magic, Sorcery, and The Arcane” section of the Campaign Creation page.

• A Different Experience: A variation on the D&D 3.x Experience Points System – In which I describe the alternative 3.x Experience system that I use in my campaigns.
• Breaking The Bank: controlling treasure in D&D – I run through a few measures that GMs can use to control the amount of hard currency in the PCs hands.
• With An Evil Gleam: Giving Treasure a Personality – I talk about ways to give objects personalities in RPGs – and why.
• 6 Ways to Enhance Magic Items – Johnn’s article offers exactly what it says on the label. There are some “fun” ideas and important thoughts in the comments.
• Treasure Detail Generator & Dice Giveaway – Another Generator based around Q-workshop’s dice sets, this time their Green-and-Black dragon dice set. This generator is all about adding color by using one or more of the tables to make treasure more interesting.
• Objective-Oriented Experience Points – I extend the line of thought offered in Experience for the ordinary person to completely revise the experience paradigm.
• An excerpt from ‘A player’s Guide to Legacy Items’ – Part 1 – As part of the blog carnival, I offer an excerpt from one of the free bonus eBooks that are part of the Assassin’s Amulet package. Legacy Items are a new form of magic item, and the bonus eBook aims to give players everything they need to know about how they work.
• An excerpt from ‘A player’s Guide to Legacy Items’ – Part 2 – The second part of the two-part excerpt, which discusses the powers of Legacy Items – from a Player’s point of view. This should all have been one article, it was split for practical reasons, so I haven’t counted this second half toward the overall total.
• Making The Loot Part Of The Plot: Loot as a plot mechanic – I consider just what “loot” might be, and how it can be used as a plot mechanic. There’s a link to an interesting related article in the comments.
• Loot As Part Of The Plot: Making, Earning, Finding, Analyzing, Using, Selling, and Destroying Loot – As part of the Blog Carnival, I consider the many different ways in which loot in general might be made part of a plot. Along the way I get to vent about the Identify Spell in D&D, how easily rare/valuable items can be converted to cash in most Fantasy Games, about Fantasy Economics in general, and about another D&D Spell, Mordenkainen’s Disjunction. There’s a discussion in the comments about the relationship between videogames and tabletop RPGs.
• Making The Loot Part Of The Plot: The Value Of Magic – As part of the Blog Carnival, I analyze the possible meaning of the term “value”, and evolve a classification system for GMs to use in deciding what magic items to place as loot in their campaigns.
• The Bargain Arcane: Selling Magic Items – As a followup to an Ask-The-GMs question I was asked what I want to do when players want to sell magic items. The article starts by examining the economic foundations of fantasy societies, goes on to provide systems for determining how many people can afford what, and then looks into the population density of levelled characters (very D&D) before showing that the standard assumptions built into most Fantasy games simply don’t work. With all that as preamble, I then provide three basic answers to the original question.
• Why I Fell In Love with Staves Again After 10 Years (PFRPG) – Johnn returns to Campaign Mastery with this article on how Staves have changed in the Pathfinder game system – and why the changes are good for his campaign. This was part of the Blog Carnival.
• October Blog Carnival Wrap-up: A cavalcade of posts about goodies – The Blog carnival produced a huge number of great entries. I review them all. There are a couple of clarifications in the comments in response to what I had to say, and at least one more article worth reading on the subject.
• Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 4 – In part four of the background to the Orcs and Elves story, I start to update the campaign history so-far, building on material I had already published. Don’t worry, there are links in the article telling you when to revisit that material. There are lots of editorial asides to offer glimpses behind the curtain and context. The Giveaways continue, this time I offer an original magic item, The Spirit Blade of Clan Takamuchi.
• Stride The Earth in 7-league boots: Travel (and Maps) in FRPG Pt 2 – I look at the concept of a league, and what 7-league boots are therefore capable of. I then discuss map scales, making the radical suggestion that travel time instead of distance be the scale. I then use those maps to put the whole concept of 7-league boots into perspective. I then turn my attention to the map-making techniques that would be used in-game, and the resulting error rates in positioning of locations, and then feed that back into the 7-league boot concept, before applying the error rates to the standard scales that I recommended earlier in the article.
• Part 9 of the Basics For Beginners series discusses Rewards With Intent. This is one of the longer and more complex articles in the series. In fact, I would find it difficult to defend against an allegation of forgetting who it was supposed to be aimed at. Fortunately, if that was the case (I don’t recall), I discovered the problem before it was too late to do something about it. I start by making the bold statement that thinking of rewards as having no meaning beyond powering up PCs and being either dreaded or reveled in when they threaten the campaign has probably destroyed just as many campaigns as giving away too much in rewards. After justifying that assertion, I move on to listing four purposes for rewards; later in the article, I will argue that the fourth is by far the most important. I then break rewards into 15 categories, and how to value each of them; along the way, I offer the occasional bit of specific advice. The categories of Secrets, Reputations, and Enemies get special attention. There are lots of adventure plot hooks offered. After the fifteen, I describe an unresolved debate over the entitlement of PCs to rewards. I then discuss an expanded version of the rewards system described in Objective-Oriented Experience Points, which was itself an expansion of principles spelt out in another article. After describing the basic premises of the system, I offer two variations on the approach, and then propose an entirely new system that is simpler and hence better-suited to use by Beginners. I then walk back through the two basic mistakes that GMs make, time and again – too much and too little reward – and describe a third situation, the Dirty Snowball, just as deadly to campaigns, before offering a method of breaking that cycle by changing what magic items can do, within limits. I also point out that the presence of identify as written in the standard rules will completely destroy this solution, and recommend that readers adopt one of the solutions to the problems posed by this spell in Making, Earning, Finding, Analyzing, Using, Selling, and Destroying Loot as a House Rule if they are going to employ this approach. I then sum up the article into eight bullet points that I want to be the takeaways from the article.
• The Care and Feeding Of Vehicles In RPGs 1 – First part of a two-part guest article. This part deals with PCs acquiring vehicles. Lots of adventure seeds result. If the PCs have, or are likely to acqiure, a vehicle in your game, you need to read this.
• The Care and Feeding Of Vehicles In RPGs 2 – Second part of the two-part guest article, with rather more content from myself than the first. This part is all about what GMs should do with vehicles once the PCs have one. Lots of adventure seeds, and serious questions about campaign planning and locations and adventure design for the GM to answer. Once again, if the PCs have, or are likely to acqiure, a vehicle in your game, you need to read this.
• Sequential Bus Theory and why it matters to GMs – I start by looking at the logic (some might say, ‘Illogic’) of bus timetables and why any given bus is almost always early or late. I then use the phenomenon of passangers getting on or off the bus to create a means of getting rid of monty haulism once and for all, and the distribution of game rewards like wealth and treasure, and (finally) consider a hypothetical way of letting PCs benefit from good character design without coming to totally dominate combat. That last is more of a thought experiment, not yet ready to be seriously advocated.
• Oddities Of Values: Recalculating the price of valuables – This article starts off talking about currency conversions and getting a ‘feel’ for the price of things in a pulp campaign using modern currency values. It then defines a pair of new “units of currency”, NTDs and Ms – “NTD”s is “Nineteen Thirties US Dollars” and “M”s are “Modern US $”. These are necessary because many of the values that we have recorded are from different time periods – our main sourcebook only goes up to 2005, for example, and there’s been significant changes since then. We then turn to the pressing question that sparked the discussion – How big is a LOT of money, say, M100 million? In Pulp Campaign currency? In large bills? (The answer is, 122 lb and the size of a large suitcase). I then look at the same value in Gold, which works out to 16.6 TONS of gold; and diamonds (7.7 lb of 1-carat diamonds, or a stack 3 inches by three inches and 2 1/4 feet tall. Unfortunately, by now, most readers seemed to have decided that there was no value in the article for them because they hand-waved encumbrance in their campaigns. This is shortsighted – even ignoring the encumbrance issue, don’t you want to know how many rubies can fit in that pot? But it was at this point that the article took a turn to the left, relative to where I had expected it to go, by looking at the rarity of larger gemstones, game treasure tables (especially those in D&D / Pathfinder), and how to value them. I also look at Collectable Coins, other Collectables, Art, and Land, then devise a fast and simple universal system for deriving valuations for these things for any game system, regardless of genre or commodity. Along the way, I look at three die rolling methods for generating rare high values and routine middle-to-low values. There’s also a discussion of how to use the system as a tool for delivering campaign background information in an interesting way. So those who tuned out early missed out on a LOT of meat.
• The villainous pair named Maxima and Minima are devotees of a radically-extreme televangelist, and are described in Pieces Of Creation: Maxima and Minima. Their powers are designed to be complimentary and Force Multipliers (a Combat / Military concept) for each other, a potent demonstration of what can be done in the Hero System with only a little deep thought about the design – so much so that many GMs wouldn’t hesitate to house-rule them out of existence. I briefly mention the Roman Catholic Church of this game world and it’s leader, Gregorovich II. St Barbara and Blackwing are explicitly involved in the backstory of the first (and so far only) encounter with the duo. There are suggestions for adapting the concepts and design techniques to D&D / Pathfinder and other genres such as Cyberpunk through magic items and rewards.

Adventure Plot Ideas

• See Also the “Touchstones Of Unification” series on the Genre Overviews page.
• See Also the “Portals To Celestial Morphology” series in the Magic section of the Campaign Creation page.
• See Also the “Character Hooks” series in the Plot Ideas section of the Campaign Plotting page.

• Sophisticated Links: Degrees Of Separation in RPGs – We’ve all heard of the “Six Degrees Of Separation” game. I apply the concept to RPG Characters and come up with ways to take advantage of it within the game. This article only scratches the surface of what can be done with this tool.
• Ethics For Sale? – The Role of Native Advertising – Inspired by a mini-documentary on the subject, I look at Native Advertising, it’s implications for society, media, publishing, and RPGs. This is an especially fascinating article to re-read in light of the whole “Fake News” obsession certain quarters have.
• The Pattern Of Raindrops: A chessboard plotting technique – a technique of building up plotline that is more white noise than orchestrated plotline. The concepts can be really hard to follow (and almost as hard to explain), but everyone whose read this concurs that there’s a brilliant idea in there somewhere. One of these days, I might draw on my additional years of experience and have a stab at a simplified process, because I can almost see one…
• Domino Theory: The Perils and Practicalities – I can’t do better than quote the article itself: How to create the most spectacular domino-theory chain-reactions of events within a campaign, what can go wrong, how to use them to create adventure seeds, and – ultimately – how to ride the whirlwind as the dominoes start to tumble.
• Thatch and Confusion – creating a village – “for a fantasy RPG” is what’s missing from this article title. Don’t miss the articles at the bottom of the page, which show that I got a little carried away in the writing – because I wanted to be able to set an adventure in my example village, I built it accordingly, but failed to note where you should stop if you don’t want to do that. There are also some great reader contributions there, including a reader-supplied list of 100 points of conflict around which to build your village. This article also discusses larger population centers briefly, and the process (modified as described in the article) scales up as necessary.
• Abandoned Islands – Iconic Adventure Settings – I discuss why abandoned islands are one of my favorite settings for a whole adventure or part of one, look at abandoned islands in modern settings, and in fantasy settings, then share some tips and tricks for using google image search to ferret out real islands for the purpose. Some of those tricks are still valid, even though the Image Search interface has been completely redesigned at least twice since.
• Ask The GM: Seasoning The Stew (making races feel distinctive) – a reader asks why I go to so much effort to distinguish Elves from Drow when the latter are an offshoot of the former. I spend most of the article looking at the advantages that derive from making the races of a campaign distinctive, not only from each other within the campaign, but from other campaigns, before providing some resources and sources of inspiration on the subject.
• Gifts In Gaming: Overlooked Seasonal Plot Hooks – a serious seasonal plot idea, suitable for any genre, dressed up with some fun quotes (both real and invented). Give the PCs a gift…
• Phase 4: Development from the “New Beginnings” series – Detailed examination of the process of Campaign Development is made, touching on Campaign Plotting, Research techniques, Societies and Cultures, Races, Rules Conflicts, House Rules Theory, Rule Importation, Plot Organization, Campaign Structure, and Plot Sequence. This constructs the major “bones” of the campaign skeleton.
• Phase 8: Enfleshing from the “New Beginnings” series – deals with Archetypes, Races, Villains, Other NPCs, Adventure Locations, Encounters, Plot Ideas, and Campaign Structure to form the additional ’tissue’ referred to by the title.
• Phase X: Beginning from the “New Beginnings” series – deals with the transition from the design & construction stage of the campaign to designing and constructing adventures on an ongoing basis, and especially the (arguably) most important adventure, the first. The subjects are Campaign Prep, Adventure Prep (and why the two are different), Fixing Campaign Plot Holes, and Writing Adventures.
• Pt 2: Sourcing Parts of the “Some Arcane Assembly Required” Series takes my revised version of the draft scale from part 1 and looks at populating it. Along the way, it asks the extremely profound question, “How Industrialized Is Adventuring In Your Game World?”; so innocuous but it has the potential to tear a poorly-visualized campaign world apart. After an overview of some of the consequences, I provide a concrete example from the Fumanor campaign, providing some background information that I don’t think has appeared anywhere else. I then throw in some possible social consequences to making spell components important in the manner under discussion before returning to the question of populating the different categories, providing five ways in which any given item might be relevant to a spell. I then bring up another of those thorny implications raised by the principles under discussion – “Can You Make Your Own Ad-Hoc Divine Focus?” – in a sidebar, but make no serious attempt to resolve it. I look at frauds and huxters and how they would react to spell components being important (i.e. more plot ideas to derive from the concept), consider components that have to undergo some sort of process before they can be employed, consider innately magical components and magic institutions as components (more plot ideas), the impact of cosmology on the question of rarity, and other exotic qualities that rare spell components might possess. There are massive worldbuilding, social, economic, and cultural implications that derive from some of these ideas.
• Inn Through The Side Door – Reinvigorating the cliché – This was a filler article that I wrote and then set aside until the next time I was caught short. After discussing the cliché of starting a campaign with the PCs gathering in an Inn, I offer 26 plot seeds for interesting and new twists on the idea.
• Pt 3: Tales From The Ether from the “Plunging Into Game Physics” series shows how a Game Physics can be used to generate adventure ideas that are unique to a specific campaign.
• Part 5 of the Basics For Beginners series, Characters is actually about generating NPCs. It starts by examining the five general sources of character ideas, and finds them all inadequate in the same basic way. I then explain a process of organizing, filtering, and combining the ideas that work (as opposed to those that don’t) – there are 10 steps, but most of them are brutally simple. I then list (and link to) allt the articles at campaign mastery to date that are about generating ideas and NPCs, most of which was a direct cut from the original blogdex, and so is now out of date. I conclude the article by creating an NPC for a D&D / Pathfinder campaign, expanding on the concepts of the game world in the process, and conclude by deriving two adventure seeds and several additional encounters revolving around or involving the NPC.
• The Care and Feeding Of Vehicles In RPGs 1 – First part of a two-part guest article. This part deals with PCs acquiring vehicles. Lots of adventure seeds result. If the PCs have, or are likely to acqiure, a vehicle in your game, you need to read this.
• The Care and Feeding Of Vehicles In RPGs 2 – Second part of the two-part guest article, with rather more content from myself than the first. This part is all about what GMs should do with vehicles once the PCs have one. Lots of adventure seeds, and serious questions about campaign planning and locations and adventure design for the GM to answer. Once again, if the PCs have, or are likely to acqiure, a vehicle in your game, you need to read this.
• Fantastic Flop: GMing Lessons from a filmic failure – I deconstruct the failure of the rebooted Fantastic Four movie to discover lessons every GM should learn from. It’s a shame that those responsible for Man Of Steel and Batman Vs Superman didn’t read the article, because they made many of the same mistakes – admittedly to a lesser degree – and compromised their products earning powers and entertainment value as a result.
• The Backstory Boxes – Directed Creativity – I describe in detail the concepts and processes involved in one of my most useful creative tools. What makes this technique so powerful is a method of free association that is especially capable of direction and stepwise refinement. In effect, you shake ideas loose and then shape them into useful constructions. There are two primary uses for the tool: reinventing old content that has reached its use-by date, and inventing new game content. The list of subjects to which the tool has been applied also determined where in the blogdex this article should be listed: Characterization, PCs, NPCs, Villains, Races, Societies, Character Classes, Theologies, Organizations, Deities, Plots, Subplots, and Plot Threads. At the end of the article, I briefly review Fantasy Coins’ Kickstarter campaign for their Treasure Chests, which continued the trend of mostly backing winners.
• The Breakdown of Intersecting Prophecies – Using conflicting prophetic techniques to generate history and settings. Followed by a brief review of a Kickstarter that, unfortunately, didn’t make its funding target, “Fortune’s Wheel The Game”.
• The very-expected Unexpected Blog Carnival Roundup – This lists all the posts submitted to the Nov 2015 Blog Carnival, “The Unexpected”. I start by analyzing a couple of mistakes that I made as host in introducing the topic and blaming them for the lower-than expected turnout. There’s the “Void Shock” series, my Gates and Portals series (linked to individually), a post on the game mechanics of surprise (again from CM and listed individually in the blogdex) and some ideas for plot and narrative surprise from my fellow GMs.
• Ask The GMs: The GMs Help Network – Where does a GM go for help and advice? I discuss the history of GM connectedness from GM Bull sessions through to social media before creating a list of places where a GM could go for advice in a reasonable time-frame (read: a couple of days or less). Most of the advice contained in this post is still 100% accurate – the one thing that stood out is that these days FBook won’t even show you all the posts that you’re specifically tagged in, just the ones that IT thinks you are mostly likely to interact with. That’s a good thing – just because I liked a movie or a book or a TV series or whatever doesn’t mean that I want my FB timeline to be filled with posts about it, and you are still more likely to get a quick response through Twitter. I’m listing this in all the categories for which help has been asked and seen to have been recieved in recent years through my Twitter account, and redundancy be damned.
• When I create a building, there are six questions that I use to visualize it from blank page to ready-to-describe. These are simple enough that the answers can be determined on-the-spot in improvized play. Part of the secret of the power of the questions is the order in which they are considered and the impact that they have in both practical and stylistic terms. Those six questions are what Creating A Building: A Metaphor and Illustration is all about, but the value of the technique doesn’t end there – interpreting a little more metaphorically and deciding that walls are an unnecessary detail permits the creation of any space, such as a forest clearing, using the same six questions. And treating them a little less literally again lets you use the same questions to create an encounter and build a plot and context around it.

Seasonal Adventures

• A strong wind blows: Environmental effects for RPGs – This is the second of four articles containing the House Rules in use within the Pulp campaign that I co-GM. This is all about cold weather and wind-chill and their very dangerous effects, bringing together research from a number of sources. The rules are available as a free download from the site. These rules can be adapted to any campaign. I’m including them in this category even though they aren’t an adventure because they detail a problem that could become a serious factor in a seasonal adventure. I recommend anyone reading this article to also read the unexpected follow-up, Stormy Weather – making unpleasant conditions player-palatable about how to use weather in-game as something other than a boring-but-deadly background element.
• Holiday Hell: Re-creating real holidays for RPGs – How to transform a real seasonal Holiday into a festive occasion within an RPG
• ‘Tis The Season: A Christmas Scenario – To celebrate Christmas 2010, I pass on the outline of a quick-and-easy Christmas Scenario that I ran a couple of years earlier. And, for good measure, half-a-dozen variant ideas.
• The Season Of Optimism – As a celebration of Christmas, I examine the concept of celebrations taking place within RPGs, generally. Using Christmas and its many variations in other cultures as a template, I derive a framework for integrating original celebrations into a campaign.
• Parable and Play: Fables and Morality Plays as the basis for adventures – Every year, the Christmas season brings variations on the same old stories. There’s a reason for this – there are certain plots that just work better that time of year due to the Holiday Season. This article discusses the process of deriving adventures and new plots from traditional sources.
• Gifts In Gaming: Overlooked Seasonal Plot Hooks – a serious seasonal plot idea, suitable for any genre, dressed up with some fun quotes (both real and invented). Give the PCs a gift…
• There’s Something About Christmas” examines some of the often-overlooked aspects of the holiday season that can be used by the GM to amplify his plots or even make some things possible that would be unlikely at any other time of year.

Complete Adventures

• The Flói Af Loft & The Ryk Bolti – A complete adventure from my Seeds Of Empire campaign, published here in three simultaneous parts for practical reasons only, modified to stand alone from the campaign. Complete with three-D-layer map. This was part of the Blog Carnival for February 2009.
• Back To Basics: Example: The White Tower – Part three of two in the articles about creating adventures and hooking them together to form a campaign offers an example of the process of adventure creation and connection from one of my actual campaigns. This article was carefully written and edited to conceal the actual ideas that I chose for the real adventure in the campaign.
• Back To Basics: Example: The Belt Of Terra – Part four of the two-part article contains a larger and more complete example, illustrating all the steps in the process of creating an adventure, structuring it, and inserting it into a campaign plan. Along the way it expands both the game physics and game mythology and touches on or references no less than 20 other plotlines, showing how tightly integrated a plotline can be within a campaign.

Ad-hoc Adventures

See also the “Improv” section of the Game Mastering page.

• A potpourri of quick solutions: Eight Lifeboats for GM Emergencies – There are times when everything seems to go wrong for the GM, and he needs help. When you’re in an emergency and the ship is sinking, you need a lifeboat. Here are eight to choose from.
• By The Seat Of Your Pants: Adventures On the Fly – I share my secrets for generating adventures on the fly, and doing it so well that most of the time your players won’t notice. This article focuses on the process.
• By The Seat Of Your Pants: Six Foundations Of Adventure – I follow up the previous article by expanding on the sources of instant adventure ideas.
• Fire Fighting, Systems Analysis, and RPG Problem Solving Part 3 of 3: Complexity and Nuance completes a series on GM problem-solving with more general but practical advice for more complex situations, covering everything from Surprises to Insoluble Problems, with a bit of advice on ad-hoc GMing on the side.
• By the seat of your pants: the 3 minute (or less) NPC – I break an NPC into smaller pieces: three general framing decisions, the eight most important details, a list of secondary items that aren’t needed for every character, and a pair of optional extras that may be needed for some campaigns – and show how to employ the structure to generate an NPC in less time than it takes to hard-boil an egg. Even experienced GMs get something out of this article, I’ve been told. It’s a perennial favorite amongst our readers. I’d completely forgotten that I intended to develop a worksheet for it – but I mentioned it in replying to a pingback. So that’s back on my radar, for anyone who’s been waiting!
• Boxed In: A problem-solving frame of reference for players & GMs alike – Using a box as a metaphor for problems you may encounter at the game table can reveal surprising solutions. This article shows you how to apply the concept as a problem-solving tool. I provide an original political D&D/Pathfinder adventure (and a variation) as one example. And discuss some possible relationships between the concepts of Life and Death.
• By The Seat Of Your Pants: Using Ad-hoc statistics – There are always situations that the official rules don’t cover. This article offers a guideline that can help solve them – while adding color to the game world.
• Refloating The Shipwreck: When Players Make A Mistake – For the April 2013 Blog Carnival, I look at how GMs can cope when the players make a major, potentially campaign-ending, mistake.
• Part Five of the series on Writer’s Block discusses translation blocks, also known as transition blocks, and shows that the solutions already provided work just fine – if you have plenty of time to implement them. But, when you need a solution in a hurry, this article will come to your rescue with emergency solutions to five subtype types.
• Which leaves five more to be covered in Part Six, plus a solution to another type of problem, “Crowding Blocks”, and some final advice on the subject.
• 3 Feet In Someone Else’s Shoes: Getting in character quickly – A potpourri of techniques for bringing NPCs to life quickly and easily, enabling you to switch from “being” one to “inhabiting” another with scarcely a breath in between.
• Shades Of Suspense Pt 1 – Eight Tips for Cliffhanger Finishes – I love ending game sessions on a cliffhanger, especially if I can get the players talking about how it’s all going to work out. This two-part article takes a good hard look at Cliffhangers, starting with these eight tips for employing them. In particular, I offer three methods that I reserve for improvising a cliffhanger when planning has gone awry.
• Shades Of Suspense Pt 2 – Fourteen Types of Cliffhanger Finishes – Wikipedia asserts that there are 2 kinds of cliffhanger, and neither of them are defined in such a way to be useful in an RPG. Other people also told me that they doubted there were 14 types of cliffhanger (prior to the pubication of this article, at least). For each of the 14, I describe it, describe how to implement it at the end of a session, describe the best way to restart play in the following session, and – in some cases – provide further discussion and deliberately over-the-top examples from various genres.
• The End Of The Adventure – Although it deals with tone on an adventure-by-adventure scale and applies an even smaller granularity, looking at how the tonal quality of an ending influences the start of the beginning that follows, this is just a close-in zoom of what happens throughout the campaign – it’s one domino after another, with limited option for taking control. It’s therefore important to seize those opportunities when they arise. To that end, this article provides a somewaht-dubious list of 31 possible tones for ending adventures, and analyzes them before considering the plot structures that enable them to be controlled by the GM.
• Always Something There To Surprise You – Plots as Antagonists – This article is all about the right and fair and practical way to use metagaming, taking the most difficult type of plotline – a mystery – as its context and example. This is an article that memory and first impressions always underestimate, for some reason, yet the techniques here can solve many otherwise almost-unsolvable problems for the GM.
• When I create a building, there are six questions that I use to visualize it from blank page to ready-to-describe. These are simple enough that the answers can be determined on-the-spot in improvized play. Part of the secret of the power of the questions is the order in which they are considered and the impact that they have in both practical and stylistic terms. Those six questions are what Creating A Building: A Metaphor and Illustration is all about, but the value of the technique doesn’t end there – interpreting a little more metaphorically and deciding that walls are an unnecessary detail permits the creation of any space, such as a forest clearing, using the same six questions. And treating them a little less literally again lets you use the same questions to create an encounter and build a plot and context around it.