Campaign Mastery

It happens in virtually every campaign. The longer the game runs, the more overprotective of their characters the players become. They become more and more attached to the characters and more adverse to exposing them to serious risk. The GM, on the other hand, wants to continually raise the stakes and up the ante, in […]

In part one of this series, I demonstrated that a pause or interruption in play can be enormously beneficial, if used correctly. Last week’s article examined before-pause and after-pause content and found that these had to match in order to extract that benefit, and that the type and length of pause was a critical variable […]

Having established in part one of this series that a pause or interruption to play or to the primary plot being deployed within the game can be more than a necessary inconvenience, it can be a tool whose manipulation by a savvy GM or TV producer can enhance the game or production, it’s time to […]

Discovering The Principles This was originally envisaged as one small and relatively quick article. It didn’t work out that way. Instead, this is the first part of three… I was watching a repeat of an old TV show the other week – one that had been subsequently re-cut to facilitate more ad breaks – and […]

Another filler post, I’m afraid – the next part of the New Beginnings series is turning out larger than I expected! I intended to get an early start on it yesterday, but thought of an article for later this week and started putting thoughts down on electronic “paper”, and totally lost track of time. Have […]

This question comes from GM Roy, who wrote: “I need some inspiration to create cool names for spell components. I have 5 [scales of rarity = Mike]: Common (flesh, breath, water, dust) Uncommon (earth from a cemetery, humanoid blood) Rare (head of a Medusa, Minotaur’s horn, black dragon blood) very Rare (Essence of the ghost […]

It’s been quite a while since I looked at the topic of the one-player campaign, also known as the solo campaign. The last time was back in May of 2010 in an Ask The GMs article, “Ask The GMs: How to GM solo PCs (especially in combat), and because the question was specifically about a […]

This was originally intended to be part of my recent article, Pieces Of Everyday Randomness, but it quickly grew to dominate everything else in that article. So I’ve extracted, edited, and enhanced it into this stand-alone piece. Some people are really opposed to the concept of Random Encounter Tables, aka Wilderness encounters, aka Wandering Monster […]

A very unusual article, this one. More than half of the article is contained within a set of images that I’ve put together in dribs and drabs over the last week or so. The idea for what you’re about to “read” came to me when I opened a box of tissues – a box measuring […]

November 2014 The November Blog Carnival hosted by Roleplaying Tips, is winding up – there are just a few days left to post your articles on the subjects of Aliens and Races. December 2014 That also means that its time for me to gear up for the December Carnival, because I’ve put Campaign Mastery’s hand […]

When you’re designing a battle for an FRP adventure, how do you make it different from every such battle that you’ve had in the past? How do you make it more interesting than a mere dice-rolling exercise? It’s even more difficult than it sounds. I have a novel solution to offer to these problems, but […]

Pulp Rules for Healing, and how & why Pathfinder & 3.x GMs should consider adapting them to their games.