Campaign Mastery

I’m sneaking in after the deadline for last month’s blog carnival, hosted by Dice Monkey… The benefits of an established setting There are a lot of obvious benefits to the use of an established campaign setting. Because I expect a number of other carnival participants to have weighed in on this aspect of the topic, […]

Today’s article contains another Kingdom write-up from my Shards Of Divinity Campaign. My players will be examining this one carefully for any additional nuggets of additional information that I include because this particular group are tied up in their current in-game situation. They think they know who’s responsible and have a working theory – are […]

I’m going to step aside from the usual practice of talking to GMs about how to improve their game for a few weeks in favor of what used to be a popular subject around the watercooler-analogue – and still causes game companies angst and sweaty nights, even today: the perceived value-for-money of game products. If […]

* This article was updated on 23 Sept 2012 * Metagame Origins & Status Bher Yuralvus is one of the least-detailed of the Shared Kingdoms. Several Paragraphs of information concerning it appear to have gone missing during the editing process of the House Rules, so that what little remains is full of non-sequitors. As a […]

Here’s where we’re at: In order to complete my series on Names, I need to deal with non-human languages; and the best – in fact, the only – approach that I have found for explaining the procedure that I’ve come up with for the creation of such languages is to describe how I do it […]

On Monday, I attempted to post the third part of the current series on alternate damage-handling systems for 3.x. Unfortunately, time ran out when I was only half-done… A quick refresher on where we stand. There are flaws in the system of progression for healing spells that result in an unacceptable degree of overlap, especially […]

In the first two parts of this series we examined alternative approaches to the simulation of injuries that were written cold, without the benefit of actual use in play. In this third and final part, I will describe a third – but this is an update on a variation that I have actually used (and […]

The alternative damage-handling subsystem proposed in last week’s article suffers from one major flaw, as some of our commentators have pointed out – it involves additional processes and bookkeeping that can adversely impact the flow of combat. This flaw is present to a much smaller extent in this proposal. Once again, this is not a […]

What are hit points? The most obvious answer is that hit points are a numeric index between healthy and imminent death, but there are other interpretations of the significance of this ubiquitous character statistic, and some of them lead the GM down interesting paths. This article will examine the first of these options, while parts […]

One of the big questions that every GM should consider when creating their D&D campaign is how to resolve the anarchy of the theological implications of the cosmology. It’s a simple question: In a world where miracles are readily apparent at the hands of every cleric, where Gods and Demons and Devils and Heaven and […]

One of the most under-developed game mechanics in D&D is the Curse. This has so many problems its hard to know where to begin, but I’ll give it a shot: Only clerics can curse because its a clerical spell. They hold no fear for anyone because they are so easily lifted. The suggested effects don’t […]

The death of a player naturally forces a GM to reassess his campaign and plans. But this sort of tragic event is not the only reason why this might become necessary – a player might move away, or might simply tire of the campaign and want to play something else, or might even give up […]