Campaign Mastery

Warning PG-13 content It’s been suggested that I should advise readers that some of the discussion that follows touches on topics of a mature nature and may not be suitable for thos under the age of 13. Children should consult their parents before reading this article. Personally, I think most children these days are well […]

About the Casual Opportunities series: I realized recently that something is missing from my campaigns, and has been for a long time: casual opportunities for the PCs to establish their primary role within the campaign. Casual opportunities for heroes to be heroes, for villains to be villains, for geeks to be geeks. It’s easy to […]

In celebration of Guy Fawkes Night, this month’s blog carnival, hosted by Nearly Enough Dice is all about Gunpowder, Treason, and Plots. I decided to take a comprehensive look at treason and betrayal as Campaign Mastery’s contribution…

James Seals asked in the comments to Places to go and people to meet: The One Spot series from Moebius Adventures (responding to my comments about magic shops),   Mike, Can I ask – what do you do when your players want to sell magic weapons? In the past I have just allowed them to […]

In this article, I list the subgenres of sci-fi that could be encountered/created for an RPG campaign, or for a particular adventure, with lots of examples from movies and TV and more than a few original campaign concepts.

How to describe wonders and monuments.

A real-life example of solving a plot problem for an RPG.

Let’s talk about institutional secrecy. Organizations have all sorts of reasons for keeping secrets. Good ones. Necessary ones. Bad ones. I’ve watching repeats of JAG lately and recently they aired the Season 8 episode “Need to know” which is about a submarine which was lost at sea 34 years earlier, with the loss of all […]

I thought I was done with this series, I really did. But then I watched a seemingly-unrelated TV documentary series called The Genius Of Design from the BBC, (available on DVD from Amazon), and a persuasive new perspective was opened for my consideration. (You might want to read of the series to see why it […]

In part one, I looked at techniques for extrapolating from the world of today into a future world where technology has changed. These techniques have served me well in both fiction writing and developing sci-fi oriented game settings. In the second part, I examined some core technologies that everyone engaged in anything sci-fi really needs […]

In part one, I looked at techniques for extrapolating from the world of today into a future world where technology has changed. These techniques have served me well in both fiction writing and developing sci-fi oriented game settings. In this second part, I will be examining some core technologies that everyone engaged in anything sci-fi […]

When you get right down to it, there are only three sources you can use when creating the world of tomorrow in a game: Copy something you’ve seen elsewhere, filing off serial numbers as necessary; Get it from the game setting; or Create it yourself. The Problems: All three of these solutions have their place […]