Campaign Mastery

This is part four of this six part series. Part 1 and Part 2 discussed the fundamental concepts needed to simulate a unit of 100 soldiers. Part 3 began discussing the practicalities of war in play, introducing the Initiative and Action Phases, the Action Order and handling Initiative for army units, and unit Morale. Part […]

What do you do when the PCs start recruiting people as information sources? A game master writes: Hi Mike and Johnn, I’m running a 3.5 D&D campaign, where the player characters are largely based in a major city. Because of the structure and history of the campaign world, my major cities are quite large, which […]

The subject of this month’s blog carnival is War. As part of that canival, I present an article on how to referee a war in an rpg. Not one that happens in some distant country, or a neighbouring city, but up close and personal – so close that the PCs can touch it. And not […]

Part 1 began discussing the fundamental concepts needed to simulate a unit of 100 soldiers, dealing with the number of hits that they could inflict in a round of battle, and the amount of damage that they could inflict. Part 2 picks up right where we left off… Part 2: Fundamental Concepts (continued) Ranged Attacks […]

This blog post was originally going to be a review of Master Dungeons M2: Curse of the Kingspire by Goodman Games. However, once I got well into reading the module, I decided I was going to run this adventure for my Carnus D&D 4E campaign. It’s an excellent adventure, full of combat, puzzle, and roleplaying […]

What do you do when one character doesn’t trust the other characters, and it starts to degrade game play? A game master asks: Hi Mike and Johnn, I am new to GMing and play with a group of close friends every week. One of my player’s characters doesn’t trust the rest of the group. Even […]

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, […]

“Don’t Bore Us, Get To The Chorus”— conventional wisdom in the popular music industry, also used as the title of Roxette’s Greatest Hits compilation album. I’ve blogged before about my Seeds Of Empire campaign. Following our last session over the New Year’s holiday, a problem arose that I had not had to deal with before, […]

Ryder asks in my previous post about level of readiness in your campaign planning how I find time to work on my campaign between game sessions. My current recipe is very successful, based on years of trial and error and from facing a ton of time theft from other parts of my life. Bi-Weekly Game […]

(Too many GMs, not enough players!) NB: This is an extra post outside the normal schedule. My usual post will take place in a day or two. One of the duties I have reluctantly taken on for my fellow gamers is the organisation of the timetable. When I started playing with the eclectic collection of […]

I’m in a strange sort of mood as I write this. I don’t feel like doing anything in particular, but can’t stand to do nothing; I can’t work up any sort of enthusiasm even for the things that I enjoy doing, and nothing in my video/dvd/cd collection holds any appeal. And the only thing that […]

I had my spring cleaning just the other day (living in the Southern Hemisphere, the seasons are the reverse of what most readers would consider normal), and it reminded me of something that should be an annual tradition with gamers – spring cleaning of their games. For Players, that means looking at any long-standing character […]