Campaign Mastery

Leftovers?

These are the true miscellania, the items that just didn’t seem to fit anywhere, not even within the assorted miscellaneous categories!

• 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.
• Clash of the Timetables – Inter-GM politics and the scheduling of games when there are too many GMs and not enough players. Includes brief synopses of the base concepts of a number of actual campaigns. Highlights the need for GMs to be able to compromise. Oh, and it showcases some fancy banners I did for the different campaigns being scheduled.
• Stop Procrastinating and Get Those RPG Campaign Projects Done – A post on beating procrastination at another Blog compels Johnn to build on the advice offered there with some tips of his own on the subject.
• GTD for RPG – Johnn describes how he uses the “Getting Things Done” (GTD) system to organize and manage his campaign.
• Ask The GMs: How to set up a fun fishing mini game – Johnn considers some environmental and procedural aspects of fishing in response to the specific question posed, dealing with the roleplaying aspects of the question. I put on my rules-creation hat and consider the bigger question of how to represent contests and competitions within an RPG on the way to developing a complete mini-game. The rules of that game are available as a PDF at the end of the article. And there are some fun left-of-field ideas in the comment at the end.
• Things Done and left Un-done – I maintain a list of undeveloped ideas for Campaign Mastery articles, and got to thinking about why there had been so little movement of ideas off that list. That leads to an analogy between the list and the reasons my campaigns tend to last such a long time, something I had discussed in Ask The GMs: In it for the long haul, so this article becomes a sequel to that discussion in how to produce longevity for your campaigns. I use a synopsis of my “Fumanor: One Faith” campaign as an example.
• Who Remembers AutoREALM? Call for Alpha Testers/Contributors – Unfortunately, the developer who was working on updating this software has struck difficulties and while he thought it was ready for alpha testing, it now seems that this is no longer the case. It’s been a while since there was an update, so it’s possible that the whole project has run out of steam; but AutoREALM has been pronounced dead before, and pulled a Lazarus act.
• Remembering Stephen Tunnicliff – This is more an explanation for why there was no article at the start of the month, and a memorial to my friend and player. While it touched a chord in many people, it wasn’t an article that would improve anyone’s campaign, and hence doesn’t fit the ‘mission parameters’ of Campaign Mastery, so normally doesn’t get counted in official tallies of posts.
• A Zocolo Premise: AetherCon is coming! – I get excited about the implications of a virtual convention, prompted by the announcement of the then-forthcoming AetherCon (16-18 Nov 2012). And Trivia/history buffs should check out the final comments.
• What do you give the Gamer who has everything? – I run through some out-of-the-ordinary gift ideas for gamers. This article came out a little too late – people had already done their Christmas shopping – but lots of people have asked for reminders about it in mid-November this year :)
• The Arcane Implications of Seating at the Game Table – Few people have ever thought about why people sit where they do at the game table, and still fewer have thought about the consequences of getting people to sit in different places. I take an in-depth look at both aspects of the situation.
• Two Emails and a ‘summon collective wisdom’ request – A would-be GM having trouble getting a game started asks for advice, which I do my best to provide, which leads into publicizing International Tabletop Day.
• An AcadeCon For Your Consideration – Sparked by an invitation to review a Kickstarter for a convention, I raise a number of strategies for consideration with the objective of ensuring that the next convention is bigger and better than the current one. I have extremely limited practical experience in running conventions, as explained in the article, so these are all strictly theoretical, and being raised for consideration/discussion only. Some of that discussion takes place in the comments, so if the subject is of interest/relevance, don’t skip them.
• 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.

Sources Of Inspiration

Campaign Mastery is more likely to show you how to work with inspiration than how to find that inspiration in the first place, but that doesn’t mean that the latter topic has been neglected. In fact, 336 posts (and counting) have been tagged as containing content to inspire the reader or give him or her ideas. Well, I’m not going to list 330-odd posts! This category is reserved for those posts where Inspiration is the primary subject of the article.

• What inspires your games? – June 2010 meant that it was time for Campaign Mastery to host the blog carnival once again, and this time around, our subject was “what non-game media has most inspired your games?” Johnn kicks us off with his celebration of Saturday Morning Cartoons. There are some great sources cited by non-participants in the Blog Carnival in the comments, too.
• Blog Carnival June 2010: A Medley Of Inspiring Media – I follow up Johnn’s article, What inspires your games? by discussing some of the Media that have been most inspiring to me over the years. I strongly recommend all of them to everyone out there.
• Blog Carnival Wrap-Up – What Inspires Your Games? – We wrapped up the blog carnival with this collected list of articles on the subject.
• Help Me Take Your GMing To The Next Level – Johnn asks our readers for input on what his next eBook should be. There are some great ideas for me for blog posts here. This post also contained the first hint that Assassin’s Amulet was coming.
• October 2011 Blog Carnival: Making The Loot Part Of The Plot – As hosts of the October 2011 Blog Carnival, I list a number of topics that might be appropriate to the subject, “Making The Loot Part Of The Plot”. The turnout was remarkable. Since this doesn’t contain any content per se beyond this listing of what might be in the subsequent roundup, this post often isn’t counted in official tallies.
• September 2013 Blog Carnival: Location, Location, Location! – Once again, Campaign Mastery hosts the Blog Carnival. This article has no content other than suggestions for what might be in the final roundup, so it usually isn’t counted in publishing tallies.
• Trivial Pursuits: Sources of oddball ideas – I demonstrate the use of books of trivia for ideas, with a whole heap of examples interspersed throughout the article.
• The Pillars Of Assumption: A Source of Plot Ideas – It’s always good to challenge assumptions – they will either emerge the stronger and more robust for it, or you will learn something. It’s just as good to challenge the players’ assumptions about an RPG and a great source of adventures. After all, everyone knows that the sun will rise in the morning and clouds are soft, fluffy, and white – right?
• Strangers sharing ideas: RPG writings in a Collaborative World – A guest article by G.F. Pace with Additional contributions & Editing by me that looks at using idea crowdsourcing to collaborate on campaign design specifically and RPG problems in general.
• Ergonomics and the Non-human – As the title suggests, this shows simple techniques for applying the principles of ergonomics to non-human physiologies, showing how everything from furniture to staircases is affected. Elves are studied as an example.
• By Popular Demand: The Ergonomics Of Dwarves – After foolishly mentioning the possibility in “Ergonomics and the Non-human” (above), I got lots of requests for giving Dwarves the same treatment. One reason I was readily persuadable was that while many races (including Elves) had been featured in the Orcs And Elves series (see the subsection below), Dwarves weren’t one of them. One day there will be a part three, applying the principles to Octopoidal creatures, and maybe even a part four looking at Kobolds.
• 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 Population Of Dinosaurs and the impact on RPG ecologies – I get curious about how many species of dinosaur there were, so I devise some calculations to answer the question. That might be interesting enough in its own right, but then I see how quickly genetic engineering could produce new (well-adapted) species. This is so interesting that it holds my attention until I realize that it has other ecological value to the GMs of D&D / Pathfinder – for example, the same process could be used to tell you how long Dragons have lived in a Fantasy environment just by factoring in their average lifespan and the number of different varieties.
• Memorials To History – an ‘a good name’ extra – I expand the “A good name is hard to find” series by pointing out that inn and town names can be conduits to the campaign background. I then discuss integrating that conduit, and the history that flows through it, into an adventure. A very short post by Campaign Mastery standards.
• 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.
• Part 1 of the Basics For Beginners series, Beginnings, details what you really need before you start, with exercises to help you develop it if you don’t have it. Re-reading it, I was struck by how down-to-earth the advice was on Roleplaying NPCs (it’s harder than roleplaying a PC), Rules Knowledge, Materials requirements, How often you play, how long a game session will be, game complexity & continuity, explaining the fantastic in-game, setting aside time for research and self-improvement, resources and how to accumulate them, and giving yourself permission to fail. One example needs to be excerpted and echoed: Don’t try to make your dream campaign your first campaign.
• 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.

Artwork & Illustration

When Campaign Mastery started, my GM style was almost completely verbal, and all my adventures ran on hardcopy. When the technology to go digital came along, I took it, and that brought with it the capability of illustrating the campaign – cutting out hundreds of words of verbal description in the process. This process was in its infancy during the original blogdex, and so all these would have been listed as “Sources Of Inspiration”.

• A Picture Should Be Worth 1,000 Words – I talk about illustrating your campaign – when and how to do it, and when and how not to do it. With some examples from my own campaigns, and past campaigns that I have played in.
• Creating the Orcs And Elves Series Titles – I reveal the construction process from start to finish, with tips and techniques that can be applied to other art projects. Written as much to document the process for my own use because I knew I would have to make more of the titles before the series was complete. Every RPG book ever published has a title, and GMs (should) be making props for their games all the time – so while this article may be a small niche, it’s also a relevant one.
• 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.
• Inversions Attract: Another Quick NPC Generator – “You can never have too many quick NPC generators,” the opening paragraph of this article asserts. This article describes one that I often use when I need the NPC to have one specific character trait for plot reasons, with a couple of real-world examples from the same starting point. There’s an art tip in the comments.
• By Popular Demand: The Ergonomics Of Dwarves – In the comments, I discuss CM’s policy on artwork and copyright.
• 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 somewhat-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. Part of the article looks at the best way to employ a gosh-wow illustration to end play.
• Incredible Truth and Improbable Stories: Oratory in an RPG – This isn’t here for the article content; click on the link in the caption of the image of Pinocchio.
• Pt 3: Tab A into Slot B, from the “Some Arcane Assembly Required” series, 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. Each exotic material is accompanied by a high-resolution image for reader’s use in printed materials.
• Pt 4: Cut At The Dotted Line, also from that series, 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. Each exotic material is accompanied by a high-resolution image for reader’s use in printed materials.
• 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.

Philosophy & Opinion

Perhaps the most traditional “blog” posts, I’ve never held back from sharing my opinion and philosophies when they seemed relevant, and being ready to discuss and defend them if necessary – and even to admit to error when that seems justified. Most posts at Campaign Mastery have practical value, but some of these are purely reflection or anticipation. There’s a surprisingly large catalog of these posts when you put them together into a list like this.

• See Also the “Touchstones Of Unification” series on the Genre Overviews page.
• See also Parts 1 and 4 of the “Plunging Into Game Physics” series on the Metagame page.

• Happy New Year! – Lessons from yesterday – Food for thought. I lament the absence of the “sense of wonder” of the 21st century, and comparing it with the premature ending of a campaign.
• Are Special Effects Killing Hollywood? – The impact of special effects on the ability of players and GMs to suspend disbelief, and why I can still hope that it is a temporary phenomenon.
• 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.
• “The more things change…”: An essay on the future of RPGs – As part of the May ’09 Blog Carnival, I wrote this analysis of the future of the RPG Hobby & Industry. It’s interesting to look back now and see which forecasts were right, which are happening now, and which missed the boat (not as many as people thought at the time). Some great discussion in the comments, too.
• The Moral Of The Story: The Morality and Ethics of playing an RPG – For the October 2009 Blog Carnival, I discuss the moral responsibilities that players and GMs have to themselves, their fellow players, and to the game they are playing.
• Create the Perfect Turn and Results Will Take Care of Themselves – Johnn takes a lesson learned from his board-gaming days about hyper-competitiveness & enjoyment of the game and applies it to RPGs.
• Two ways to play: Roleplaying and Rollplaying – I discuss the differences between the two, and how to bring them together.
• Grow The Hobby With Great Game Mastering – The July 2010 Blog Carnival was about how to grow the hobby, RPG Gaming. Johnn approaches the question from the perspective of being able to tell compelling stories about your campaigns – and that requires you to become a great game master. I add my 20-cents-worth in the comments.
• A Monkey Wrench In The Deus-Ex-Machina: Limiting Divine Power – I argue against the use of a Deus-Ex-Machina in RPGs, and why that means you should give limits to the Gods. Along the way I show how you can have up-close-and-personal encounters with The Gods in unusual Genres for such occurrences – Wild West, Super-spies, and Hard SF/Cyberpunk. There’s some great discussion in the comments. Unfortunately, Da’Vane’s website is gone, and so is the article she wrote in response to this, and attempts to find it using the Wayback Machine failed. Fortunately, Da’Vane summarizes her points in the comments.
• Jolting The Status Quo – I start by talking about a significant change in my personal life, and the anticipated impact on Campaign Mastery which leads me to write about upsetting the status quo for characters in a game, and how the game can benefit. I still love the illustrations that I put together for this article – the one showing an office type who is smugly proud of his achievement in stacking boxes on the ceiling, the other a befuddled type struggling to comprehend a scene in which a river flows across the sky and a tree grows downwards from its banks. You can almost here him saying “What’s going on here?”.
• 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.
• Top-Down Plug-in Game Design: The Perfect Recipe? – I apply the principles of good software design to work out how the perfect game mechanics for a tabletop RPG should be constructed. There’s interesting discussion in the comments.
• 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.
• The Future Is Bright: The coming boom in RPGs – I take a look at current social and economic trends, inspired by an article at enworld by Ryan Dancey, and reach the conclusion that RPGs are set to boom in coming decade or two.
• What does “Old-School Gaming” really mean, anyway? – I grew irritated by the hard-line nay-sayers complaining about WOTC/Hasbro’s announced goal of uniting the best of both “old” and “new” games and rebuke the advocates of both schools while summarizing the benefits of each approach. What follows in the comments is a reasoned, respectful discussion – and as a result, this became one of the most widely-circulated articles at Campaign Mastery. The goal was to inject some clarity and perspective into the debate before it degenerated into an edition war before the game system was even published, and all indications are that it succeeded, at least at the time.
• Stop me if you’ve heard this one: An RPG, A Videogame, and a Bingo Game sit down in a bar… – I consider the parallels in the evolutions of RPGs, Video Games, and online Bingo (you heard me right) through the years, then step forward to consider potential future developments. There’s some great discussion in the comments.
• Fireflies in the Lamplight of the Law: Protections in Crisis – I cast a slightly-cynical eye over developments in the field of intellectual property and attempt to speculate on where it all seems to be leading. I don’t like the destination, and forecast trouble…
• Social Media, SEO, and the dying of comments – I ruminate on some observed trends in internet usage patterns (especially related to social media) and the impact they are having on sites like Campaign Mastery. Ironically, having identified a reduction in blog comments as one of the consequences, this article attracted 26 comments forming a substantial dialogue on the issues raised and the possible solutions to avoiding the negative impact.
• The Soundbite Of Tomorrow is 140 Characters Long – An article that is as much about social media and its impact on communications, both past and future, as it is about RPGs. While there have been a few developments that weren’t anticipated, like Presidential Decree by Tweet, most of this article’s forecasts have come to pass. In the second half, it draws parallels between social media and Gm-Player communications, both of which can siffer from similar problems.
• The Ethical Reviewer – I enunciate and review what Campaign Mastery considers ethical behavior when it comes to reviews. These policies formed organically over time, but have remained unchanged since I described them here.
• 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.
• Epigrams Of Life and Gaming: Selection #1 – A parade of my passing thoughts and insights about RPGs and about life in general, taken a double-handful at a time from my twitter feed, plus analysis and discussion.
• Epigrams Of Life and Gaming: Selection #2 – Some of these are more directly gaming related, which only made it more surprising that these articles did not seem very popular on the website. I might bring them back as an occasional “extra post”, because I fervently believe there’s some good stuff here. In this particular post, there are insights about Genres, Writing, Randomness in real life, and Values, amongst others.
• The Loss Of Innocence: Some unexpected insightsAn examination of the social progress depicted within television series leads to an insight into the Edition Wars and some general observations about the social impact of TV Hyper-Realism, which are relevant to choices of campaign Tone. Not everyone agrees with my position on the subject, and the examples were marred somewhat by a few inaccuracies as pointed out in the comments.
• Taming The Wild Frontiers – This article starts out as a think-piece inspired by the oft-cited comparison between the early internet and the American Wild West and marches headlong into the subtle but profound impact on RPGs of Political Correctness and then the socio-political models on which most Sci-fi games (and novels!) are traditionally based – and showing that there have been opportunities missed on all sides, and that the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater, in particular serious examination of the issues surrounding colonialism, equality, and exploitation. This article struck a chord with a lot of readers; one even told me that using it, he finally understood what he had been missing in modern games that turned him back towards “old-school” gaming.
• The Blind Enforcer: The Reflex Application Of Rules – The speed of events in the computer world mandate that rules be codified and violations detected, and acted upon, automatically. Yet, human behavior does not readily boil down to neat straight lines, and that opens the door to rules being enforced when they shouldn’t, or not being applied when they should. Human Error is an inherent part of the system. I use these thoughts to re-examine the question of how much dominion the GM should have over the rules and update a previous article, Blat! Zot! Pow! The Rules Of Genre In RPGs, which examined these issues from a genre-and-campaign perspective.
• The Premise Of Falsehoods – Luck Vs Skill in RPGs – I start with a question that’s been around forever – “Is it better to be lucky or skilled” – and proceed to analyze just what luck is and what skill is. In the process, an understanding of RPG concepts from different perspectives emerges that verges on the revelatory. Several side topics of relevance are explored, including the role of players in how Campaigns evolve, and by the end, even the concept of what a campaign is has been redefined. While it contains nothing of practical value, this is practically certain to give you a changed awareness of the world, and of the hobby of RPGs – which is either worthless or infinitely valuable to you.
• Prodigious Performances Provided In Due Course – There are thousands of feats in print and on the net. Some of these will stack improperly, others will have broken mechanics, still others will simply not fit the campaign. This article describes the approval process that I developed and insisted on implementing within my Fumanor campaign to weed out the intolerable and flag the unsatisfactory for revision if and when there was time. Actually, in most cases, the changes that needed to be made (if any) were so obvious that I could make them at the same time as rejecting the original and accepting the modified version.
• It’s Not ‘Just A Game’: The legacies we leave – I muse on the legacy that I will leave when my time comes, and what has to be done to live up to whatever celebrity it attracts (even if that is just amongst friends and family), and find that it – and that of every GM and player – are greater and more substantial than they think, and that their activities should never be written off as being ‘Just A Game’.
• 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.
• Layers Of Mis-translation: RPGs and Dubbed TV – you have a TV show filmed in a foreign language, full of foreign cultural references, that has been dubbed into your language by skilled translators and voice-over artists. What you see and hear becomes the basis of your relationship with the character on-screen. How much of that relationship stems from the original performer and how much is added by the voice-over artist? That question unlocks this article on the reality of an RPG as perceived by players, on the reality of player actions as perceived by the GM, and of the individual projecting themselves into what may be printed before them in black and white.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 perceiving 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.
• Shadows In The Darkness – The nature of True Evil – My pulp co-GM and I debate and discuss the question of what is “Absolute Evil”? The goal was to define a functional answer that was universal in nature. Did we get there in the end? Well, kinda…
• Overprotective Tendencies: Handling Player Risk Aversion – the longer a player lives with a particular character in his pocket, the more attached to that character he becomes, and that can lead to overprotective tendencies and over-planning by players. In this (brief) article, I look at six solutions to the problem, several of which I don’t personally recommend. This post seemed to connect with a lot of readers at the time.
• Traditional Interpretations and Rituals Of Culture – Using traditions as plot mechanics and ways to impart background and verisimilitude by stealth.
• A target of inefficiency: from Dystopian trends to Utopia – Starting with local issues, I highlight a disturbing trend in infrastructure collapsing because maintenance is too expensive, and couple that with other modern issues like Climate Change and the distribution of income to show that they are all connected by a common thread. Dystopian expectations have become near-universal, and utopias are considered unbelievable fantasies. All this is grist for the mill if you want a Dystopian setting for your sci-fi campaign; less so if you want something more optimistic. But then I thought of a simple solution to the problems in two steps…
• 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.

Site Milestones & Announcements

A little bit narcissism and a lot of gratitude, Campaign Mastery has always celebrated it’s milestones, usually with an out-of-continuity post. Most of these have little content value other than as an ongoing history of the site, but their function as milestones mean that they are usually counted in official- but not always. Some posts are more susceptable than others of being left out – these have been highlighted in the list below.

• Reconstructing the Campaign Mastery Blog – A complete reorganization of categories and tags along more functional (and hopefully useful) lines. Sometimes not counted in official tallies.
• 100 posts and we’re just getting started! – Johnn & I celebrate the 100th post at Campaign Mastery, and reminisce about our first year.
• Celebrating 100,000 Hits! – One of our earliest milestones is celebrated in this extra out-of-continuity post.
• Oops… – An out-of-continuity post apologizing for a breakdown in our RSS systems, not counted in official tallies.
• 150K! – Celebrating our 150,000th hit!
• Theme vs Style vs Genre: Crafting Anniversary Special Adventures – To celebrate the 300th post (and some other great stats) I look at ways of celebrating campaign milestones with special adventures.
• The meaning of 400 – I pull out (almost) all the stops in this celebration of 400 posts at Campaign Mastery (by strict count). Along the way I recount the history of Campaign Mastery and how it has evolved through the 400 posts.
• I wrote the news today, Oh Boy – I announce changes to the content structure of Campaign Mastery (short, quick articles on Mondays and fuller articles on Thursdays) as Johnn began to disengage (amicably) from the site – a plan that has been honored more often in the breach than in the observance, especially lately. It remains the theoretical blueprint for the site, though.
• 300, 550, 37, 40, 3300, 387 – Thank You! – Campaign Mastery celebrates some major milestones, and Johnn’s withdrawal from participation is made official.
• OMG, We’re Nominated! – 2012 ENnies (Updated) – One of Campaign Mastery’s first crowning glories was being nominated for an ENnie in 2012. This also started a pattern – nominated one year, don’t get the paperwork in on time on the next. This out-of-continuity post announces the nomination with pride, but isn’t normally counted in blog tallies.
• Voting for the ENnies has opened! – Another out-of-continuity post announcing the opening of Voting in the 2012 ENnies. Not normally counted.
• Fighting The Spam War – an extra, unscheduled post to announce new anti-spam measures that were being implemented in response to a then- unprecedented wave of spam attacking the site. Over the next 8 months, CM would fight off more than 750,000 examples – averaging more than 3000 per day, or 128 per hour. The significance of those numbers is revealed when you realize that if it takes 30 seconds to identify and process one of these pieces of spam, those 128 would take 64 minutes to process – every hour of every day, 24/7. The situation at the time was untenable. This policy worked very well for a number of years, before (temporarily) being replaced (again, by necessity) with a more aggressive approach again – and my current anti-spam regime is very similar to this – with (unfortunately) a restricted window for comments.
• Happy New Year! from Campaign Mastery – At the start of 2015, I look back over 2014. Includes a list of the most popular articles of the year.
• The Absence Of Mechanics, Part 3 of the “Cinematic Combat” series, looks at the potential for doing away with combat mechanics altogether. I start, once again, by looking at the “why” and “why not” of the proposal, then the how – and then, an even simpler how, which is the one that I normally use. The article wraps up by acknowleding a site milestone, 1,000,000 page views.
• 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!
• 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. In addition to that massive pile of great advice, there’s the usual analysis of blog performance, hints at the coming mega-series “The Essential Reference Library For Pulp And Others” (referred to as ‘Project X’, and an “interview” aimed at helping Beginners get the maximum from Campaign Mastery.
• The Best of 2008-9, The Best of 2010, The Best of 2011, The Best of 2012, The Best of 2013 – I debated about including these articles, which contain hand-curated lists of the best articles here at Campaign Mastery. The Links are all to the dedicated page on the Blogdex.

Contests & Special Offers

All these contests have long-ago closed, and most have little residual value, so they aren’t usually counted in the official tallies of published articles.

• Win a copy of Underdark – Unfortunately, the contest has long ago ended, leaving little value in this post. This was an extra post, not part of our regular publishing schedule.
• Win a copy of Martial Power 2 – Unfortunately, the contest has long ago ended, leaving little value in this post. This was an extra post, not part of our regular publishing schedule.
• Win Players Handbook 3 – Unfortunately, the contest has long ago ended, leaving little value in this post. This was an extra post, not part of our regular publishing schedule.
• New Contest to Celebrate 500 Issues – Johnn sets up a contest to celebrate the then-forthcoming 500th issue of Roleplaying Tips in this our-of-continuity extra post. It contains three city encounters/plot seeds, so it’s an exception to the ‘usually not counted’ statement.
• For A Limited Time Only, “The Empty Chair” on special – An out-of continuity post announcing a limited-time discount on “Filling the empty chair” as part of the GM’s day sale at RPGNow.

General Seasonal Articles

Campaign Mastery has always celebrated the holiday season at the end of the year, either with seasonally-themed content or an article about the season itself. The first may be found in the relevant categories on other blogdex pages; this category contains the latter.

• Johnn’s 2009 RPG Goals – Johnn sets some gaming goals for the next year.
• How many 2009 resolutions did Johnn achieve? – Johnn reviews his 2009 resolutions, those he achieved and those he didn’t – and why, and what he can learn from the experiences.
• How to Design a Cool Holiday for Your Game – 3 Templates – Johnn excerpts one of his books to tell our readers how to create a seasonal holiday for their game world.
• The Hidden Key: Resolutions as a window to personality – I ponder the question “Why do people make the same New Year’s Resolutions year after year?” and discover a new tool for exploring a character’s personality.
• Johnn’s 2010 Year in Review – Johnn goes over the goals that he set at the end of 2009 to see how well he did. More hints that Assassin’s Amulet was coming, but it still wasn’t announced by name.
• 2011 Goals and Content Announcements – Johnn reveals his goals for 2011.
• 2011 In Review For Johnn – John looks over his goals for 2011 and how well he succeeded in achieving them, and explains more fully the circumstances that led him to reduce his involvement in Campaign Mastery.
• What’s In Store For Johnn In 2012? – John looks ahead to his goals for 2012. I gatecrash the end of the article to talk about my ambitions for 2012.
• A year in retrospect, Another in prospect – I review 2012 and look ahead to what I expected to occur at Campaign Mastery in 2013.
• What do you give the Gamer who has everything? – I run through some out-of-the-ordinary gift ideas for gamers. This article came out a little too late – people had already done their Christmas shopping – but lots of people have asked for reminders about it in mid-November this year :)
• A Legacy Of War: The Founding Of National Identities – It’s funny how you can think an article is about one thing when you remember it, only to find that it’s about something slightly different when you re-read it. It doesn’t happen often, but I’ve encountered the phenomenon often enough while working on both this one and the original Blogdex that I don’t trust memory to remind me of the content or classification of an article; I re-read it to be certain. In this particular case, I discuss the emergence of those national traits that would define the collective “Aussie character” for generations thereafter, and the forging of those traits into a national identity during a time of conflict. I then point out the obvious – “Every sentient race should have at least one event per society that defines them as a culture” (within the campaign background). After discussing the point, and the consequences – statues, place-names, traditions, and the like – I segue into hints and tips for generating such formative incidents.

About Mike

I get a lot of questions about me and my gaming history. These posts answer those questions. More importantly, they establish my credentials for doing what I’m doing (i.e. offering advice). There aren’t many posts in this category.

• “Dice And Life: Bio of a gamemaster” tells my story – how RPGs have shaped my life, and how all my life can be seen as preparing me for Campaign Mastery. In two parts to celebrate the 5th Anniversary of the site: Part 1 1981-1985 and Part 2 1986-2013.
• Tourism in Sleepland: Sleep management for GMs & other creative people – lessons from a lifetime of coping with not-enough-sleep are distilled into this rather lengthy article, produced because people kept asking me. How would you like to add an extra 5 productive years to your lifetime? Or more than 8 extra 35-hour weeks a year free from work commitments each year? Those are the sort of rewards that Sleep Management can confer. Because of my conditions, these days, I rarely get more than 4 1/2 hours sleep a night – and usually get awoken three or four times a night from pain and discomfort. These are no longer optional extras to me, they are now survival techniques. Fortunately, in my case at least, I know what I’m talking about, having practiced for decades. Your mileage may vary.
• The End Of The Adventure – In a sidebar at the bottom of the page, I discuss a new health drama that afflicts me to this day. In fact, it never seems to run out of new curve balls to throw my way!
• 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 perceiving 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.
• 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. In addition to that massive pile of great advice, there’s the usual analysis of blog performance, hints at the coming mega-series “The Essential Reference Library For Pulp And Others” (referred to as ‘Project X’, and an “interview” aimed at helping Beginners get the maximum from Campaign Mastery.