Archive for the ‘Campaign Management’ Category

The Echo Of Events To Come: foreshadowing in a campaign structure

The Campain Structure series: Back To Basics Part 1: Adventure Structures Back To Basics Part 2: Campaign Structures Back To Basics Part 3: Example: The White Tower Back To Basics Part 4: Example: The Belt Of Terra In my recent posts on campaign structure (refer the panel above), I made a big point of the […]

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Ghosts Of Blogs Past: All The World’s A Suggestion Box

This irregular column resurrects (relevant) lost blog posts from Mike’s 2006 personal blog on Yahoo 360 and updates them with new relevance and perspective. From December 2006: There’s never enough time to do everything right – so concentrate on the little things that make everything else tolerable. It’s easy to underestimate how big a contribution […]

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Back To Basics: Example: The Belt Of Terra

This is part four from two (yes, you read that right) in a discussion of the basic principles of creating adventures and hooking them together to form a campaign; I wasn’t originally going to include these examples, feeling that the principles would be clearer to the reader if they weren’t distracted by another narrative threat […]

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Back To Basics: Example: The White Tower

This is part three from two (!) in a discussion of the basic principles of creating adventures and hooking them together to form a campaign; I wasn’t originally going to include these examples, feeling that the principles would be clearer to the reader if they weren’t distracted by another narrative threat running concurrently – and […]

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Have WordPress, will game

WordPress has a lot going for it – that’s why we use it for Campaign Mastery! For a long time now, I’ve been thinking that it has many of the advantages of a campaign Wiki, and a few more on the side, that would make it an ideal platform for game documentation – with the […]

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Back To Basics: Campaign Structures

A short time ago, we received an ATGMs question that made me stop and think for a minute. The question was straightforward; Angeline wrote, “I need some help, I’m a starting DM and I just have so much trouble coming up with Campaigns or good plot lines. Please help!!” Last week, in Part One of […]

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Back To Basics Part 1: Adventure Structures

A short time ago, we received an ATGMs question that made me stop and think for a minute. The question was straightforward; Angeline wrote, “I need some help, I’m a starting DM and I just have so much trouble coming up with Campaigns or good plot lines. Please help!!” Every now and then in this […]

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Running the Game II: Notes and Organization

This entry is part 9 of 14 in the series GM Toolbox

Written by Michael Beck, with contributions and editing by Da’Vane and Johnn Four. GM’s Toolbox, looks at tools, tips, and techniques you can use to improve your games. Toolbox offers you a skeleton for running a campaign, rather than fleshed out tips. This series is presented in a discussion style, and we ask you to […]

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Loot As Part Of The Plot: Making, Earning, Finding, Analyzing, Using, Selling, and Destroying Loot

Today, I wanted to once again cast a glance over the subject of this month’s Blog Carnival and try to give a general view of the many number of ways that Loot can be made part of the plot, without getting too deeply into specifics. This article is intended to be a companion piece to […]

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Making The Loot Part Of The Plot: Loot as a plot mechanic

From everything I’ve read – starting with early issues of The Dungeon, continuing with “Through Dungeons Deep”, and running all the way through to numerous blog posts – a lot of GMs have trouble connecting the desire to “make the loot part of the plot” with techniques for actually achieving this goal. It’s my impression […]

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Dark Shadows In The Night: Lessons from the writing of Assassin’s Amulet

Intro Rather than present another excerpt from Assassin’s Amulet, I thought that today I would take the time to extract a few valuable lessons from the experience of writing it. Several reasons commend themselves for doing so: first, there are some ideas there that we would be happy to see adopted by our peers in […]

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Forging Unexpected Connections: Putting PC Dossiers To Work

Real Life has caught up with me this week, so this won’t be as extensive an article as I was originally intending. But I’m going to do my best to turn that into an asset. This post was also intended to be Campaign Mastery’s entry into this month’s Blog Carnival, which was going to be […]

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