Campaign Mastery

Introductory Recap This is the third post on the development of a bespoke game system for use in my latest campaign, which is now scheduled to start play on October 21st – so finishing this has become a priority. Let’s start with a recap. A couple of minor details that weren’t properly explained the first […]

For the last two days, what was an intermittent telephone and internet problem caused by excessive line noise has become no telephone and internet service at all. So I will be posting this via an Internet Cafe, but it will be the last post published until this mess is sorted out. Hopefully, that means that […]

With this item, I continue the practice of offering shorter articles to start the week. Usually, this is to make room for a longer article later (and from time to time, the sequence has been temporarily inverted), but for much of the next year, that’s the plan. This week, though, it’s not for that reason […]

For the last few weeks I’ve been (occasionally) reading a board-game development blog/newsletter – Brandon the Game Dev for anyone who might be interested – at the invitation of a relatively new twitter contact, @brandongamedev. This week’s post was about playtesting; in it, Brandon wrote, Since people can do unexpected and strange things with your […]

You can never tell where inspiration is going to come from. The best you can do is remain alert to the world around you and leap in with both feet whenever you find it. That’s what I was thinking while enjoying a chocolate treat – A mint Aero bar – the other day. For some […]

Late last week, while I was taking a break from writing the “When Undead Go Stale” three-part article, Master John – better known as @beerwithdragons – asked on Twitter, There are a number of GMs on Twitter who ask such questions as conversation initiators. When I have something to say in response that no-one else […]

There is something about “undead” that tantalize GMs and players. Maybe it’s because their very existence in a game world hints at fundamental questions about what life is. Every GM will, sooner or later, run an undead-dominant campaign or adventure arc. So it’s kind of a pain that so many of them suck in so […]

A trio of questions that take me out of my comfort zone, because I don’t know the game system, and they are – to some extent – heavily system-related issues. But I had the advantage of being able to consult my fellow GMs on this one, and also had the luxury of being able to […]

I’d like, in this article, to take a closer look at something that I mentioned in passing on a previous occasion – specifically, the concept that sports simulations and similar games can get away with less engaging storylines because competition itself generates its own narrative. In a sporting contest, one side scores, taking the lead […]

(I’m sure some have been wondering when it would resume – Part 9 was published in September 2016, after all…) I’ve been asked a number of times what advice I have for a beginning GM. This 15-part series is an attempt to answer that question – while throwing in some tips and reminders of the […]

There are five attributes to any encounter that define it, and any one of them can be the foundation of that encounter. In the old days of D&D, it used to be that there was relatively limited flexibility. You chose an encounter based on one of these five criteria and everything else was more-or-less dictated […]

This article was started way back when I was submitting articles to Roleplaying Tips, in fact, more than ten years ago, but it was never finished – until now. So “recently” means “relative to 2006″… I recently read a book describing the calamities that befell Lloyds of London in the early 80s and 90s and […]