Campaign Mastery

There are six types of skill roll modifier that I take into account when assessing any attempt by a character – PC or NPC – to carry out some task. Past articles have focused on just a few of them; this post is intended to provide an overview of the whole. I worked on the […]

In Part 1, I shared a simple technique for creating immersion within the specific genre of a campaign, and applied it to Fantasy campaigns. Part 2 took a solid look at Science Fiction campaigns (and was supposed to also include everything I cover this time around. These genres were not chosen capriciously; between the four […]

This post details a more tactical combat system for D&D and similar rules systems than the standard one. At the heart of the system lies not d20 or 3d6, but a standard deck of 52 cards. The core concept of the mechanism came to me when I was shuffling cards for a game of patience […]

This was originally going to be one monster post containing three locations that I have devised recently for different campaigns. I quickly realized that this was too ambitious, so this will be a trilogy of articles, one every 2 weeks. This is an idea that hints at deeper connections in the game world, metaphysical relationships […]

For the first time since I started it, when I went to draft the penultimate(?) parts of the Economics in RPGs series today, I found myself unsure of how best to structure the post. While I have total confidence that, given enough time, I would have found a satisfactory sequence to bring out the key […]

A Status Update It can be readily observed that this is not part 3 of the ongoing series on Economics in RPGs that I’ve been publishing for the last couple of weeks. Right up until the last moment, I was uncertain as to whether or not to continue with that series this week, but two […]

I was thinking about the perception of time and how that doesn’t match up with the mechanism of time-keeping in the standard initiative systems in games. I mean, it’s certainly possible to design additional mechanics to take these variations into account, and reinvigorate a system that has become predictable. More interesting AND more realistic at […]

Concluding Campaign Mastery’s contribution to the December Blog Carnival hosted by Rising Phoenix Games is on the subject of “No Dice“. In Part 1, I looked at why we roll dice for various things in RPGs and what these die rolls are attempting to simulate in game-world terms. In a nutshell, the dice represent all […]

The December Blog Carnival by Rising Phoenix Games is on the subject of “No Dice“. This is the beginning of Campaign Mastery’s contribution to the subject. There are times when it can be useful to the GM and his simulation of reality not to require a roll for something. This article is going to explore […]

Hopefully, my internet connection is now fixed. It’s been functioning perfectly since Friday when a technician attended the hardware connection – at least, I assume they did; I was notified that they were on their way, and then notified some time later that the call was completed, without ever seeing them or being informed about […]

My internet connection is still fraught. It will sometimes work for hours, and then not be available for days. Which makes this article fraught with potential problems. I’ll do my best – but it’s worth noting that less than an hour after last week’s post, the internet crashed and stayed down for about seven hours. […]

The Glass Spider – metagame It’s not often that you think of an encounter that would be equally at home in a D&D / Fantasy setting, a Swashbuckling Pirate game, a Sci-Fi environment, a Superhero game-space, or even – if you allow a little genetic engineering to escape the lab – a Cyberpunk game. So […]