Campaign Mastery

I’ve always been fascinated by the relationship between intelligence and instinct as expressed by different game systems. Most systems have an INT or IQ score of some kind, but the handling of the other side of the equation varies considerably. D&D and Pathfinder have a WISdom score, the Hero System has an EGO score, my […]

I’m taking a break from the ongoing Earth-regency Alternate History series this week (mostly because research has been taking more time than I’ve had available. Instead, the following is based on an email exchange between one of my players and myself, raising some serious questions about the population dynamics of longer-lived species and aging in […]

From time to time, I like to look behind the curtain – to see what makes the mechanics of the games that I play tick, and what the implications are. Sometimes this leads down unexpected byways, and at other times it yields a nugget or two of insight. And sometimes, it just goes nowhere. So: […]

One of my regular players and an occasional contributor here at Campaign Mastery, Ian Gray, has a simple philosophy when it comes to rewards – never ask for +5 when five +1’s will do. The Judo Of Wishes It’s a philosophy that has developed from his experiences with Rings Of Three Wishes and similar items. […]

This article is being written in advance of reading any material concerning the actual content of DnDNext from WOTC. Unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere, the odds are that you’ve heard the announcement of D&D… well, no-one’s quite sure what it’s going to be called yet. The most common handle seems to be […]

This irregular column resurrects (relevant) lost blog posts from Mike’s 2006 personal blog on Yahoo 360 and updates them with new relevance and perspective. From December 2006: There’s never enough time to do everything right – so concentrate on the little things that make everything else tolerable. It’s easy to underestimate how big a contribution […]

Pieces Of Creation is an occasional recurring column at Campaign Mastery in which Mike offers game reference and other materials that he has created for his own campaigns. A somewhat unusual example to get this first “Pieces Of Creation” off to a flying start. Normally, I would present the game materials within the column text, […]

Well, it’s that time of the month when, following a Blog Carnival, the hosting site compiles a list of the blogs posted on their chosen subject and officially passes the baton on to the next host. Hold on a minute – this month the person that has to do that is me! I guess I […]

How much is a magic item worth? Well, there’s the book value, which can be obtained by cracking open the sourcebook to the relevant page. But that just gives its price – I want to talk about how much it is worth. What is it’s value to its owner? What’s it worth from a character […]

Today, I wanted to once again cast a glance over the subject of this month’s Blog Carnival and try to give a general view of the many number of ways that Loot can be made part of the plot, without getting too deeply into specifics. This article is intended to be a companion piece to […]

Assassin’s Amulet is now on sale! For more information on how and where to purchase it, just check the link at the bottom of this article! But first:                 Legacy Items are one of the conceptual planks that form the infrastructure of the Legacies series. “A player’s Guide to Legacy Items” excerpts 15 pages from […]

We continue to inch closer to the release of Assassin’s Amulet. From months, the time scale has compressed to weeks, and now is being measured in mere Days (how many of them is still being decided). It’s so close, we can taste it! One of the ambitions that we have for AA is to break […]