Campaign Mastery

In Part 1 of this blog post, I described nine general supplements which have been useful to me multiple times in multiple campaigns. In this second part, I add another eleven must-have supplements. I should explain that this top twenty are not presented in any sort of ranking – they were originally listed (along with […]

In the comments to a recent blogpost (“The More Things Change: An essay on the future of RPGs”) that I wrote, Johnn suggested that he’d like to see a list of my top twenty D&D supplements. It wasn’t easy, but I finally narrowed the choice down to a mere 20 choices – with an additional […]

Nobis is a game supplement about to be released by Pantheon Press for the d20/ D&D 3.x game system. Campaign Mastery was priviliged to be amongst a selected number of blog sites given a pre-release glimpse of the new release for review. Although this commentary will focus on the Background to the city-state that is […]

An Elf, a Dwarf, and a Goblin go into a bar… Oh, you’ve heard that one? Good, then you can tell it to me sometime! Humour is really hard to do WELL in an RPG, some types of humour moreso than others. Silly jokes, like Orcs in tutus, are easy, but are more likely to […]

How do you pace a campaign? How do you know if you’re giving too much or too little in experience and treasure? And how do you get the PCs to explore more than the local area? Hello Johnn and Mike, I have been gaming on and off for about 10 years but am a rather […]

This is the final part of a four-part article. The first part gave a relatively straightforward technique for creating a unique society; the second and third parts identified four ways of communicating the uniqueness of the result to the players, selling them on its credibility, and exploiting it for scenarios and subplots, and examined these […]

This is the third part of a four-part article. The first part gave a relatively straightforward technique for creating a unique society; the second identified four ways of communicating the uniqueness of the result to the players, selling them on its credibility, and exploiting it for scenarios and subplots, and examined the first two, Expression […]

This is the second part of a four-part article. The first part gave a relatively straightforward technique for creating a unique society; this part and the next (which were originally intended to be the whole article) gives some techniques for conveying the uniqueness of the resulting culture to the players, selling them on its credibility, […]

This post is being simultaneously posted here and as the feature article in Roleplaying Tips issue #433. Subscribe to the e-zine here if you haven’t already, and check out some of the GMing Articles (including three by yours truly: ‘Dragon Characters For Eberron’, ‘Putting The Fear Back Into Disease’, and ‘On Feats’) while you’re there. […]

I started to write this as a comment to Johnn’s post “Undead Are Taking Over. What Happens?”, but realised that my comments were so extensive as to require a post of their own. Note that this is an extra post, my usual blog entry for the week will follow in a day or two. Here’s […]

Help! In my Carnus D&D 4E campaign the PCs failed to stop a permanent rift to the Shadowfell opening. Now undead are pouring out like hallelujahs at a Pelor rave. So, what are the consequences? Got any ideas? Here are a few I’ve thought of: Wildlife flee in the path of undead. Most animals will […]

Imagine a spectrum of planning effort. On one end you have every possible detail worked out, including complete world development, all the adventures until campaign end, a complete cast of NPCs, everything. Let’s call this end 10. On the other end of the spectrum you have nothing planned. You show up to the table and […]