Campaign Mastery

This post details two Empires contending with each other in the Warcry campaign at the moment. I’ll talk more about that in a little bit. There’s also some discussion of when a Kingdom needs to become an Empire, and a mysterious religious body that seems entwined in events. The working title of the article was […]

A bit of a fill-in article this week (and maybe next week, too), so that I can put additional effort into a larger article on Economies in RPGs. In the original version of this article, it was illustrated with a composite image created from three DALL-E (Ai-generated) images. Part of the reason for doing so […]

This post features a composite of three AI-generated images. If you disapprove of AI-generated content, you may prefer to view a version without the AI-Content. If so, just click on This Link: https://www.campaignmastery.com/blog/the-land-of-green-no-dall-e-version Having searched for jungle images before, I knew that finding the right one would be problematic, so I turned to DALL-E. The […]

There are three facts about a character that can be considered definitive of what sort of person they are, diagnostic of what sort of mistakes they will make, and instrumental in defining what sorts of adventures will consume their attention. These are not the whole sum of the substance of the character or his personality, […]

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 […]

I’ve been fortunate enough to write a number of very well-regarded articles on how to run mysteries in RPGs. There was The Butler Did It: Mystery Plotlines in RPGs (even WOTC linked to this one), The Jar Of Jam and The Wounded Monarch: Two Mystery Examples, which builds on the earlier article, Delving Deeper Into […]

Most people – and I include many players and GMs in that grouping – have no idea how tiring it can be to run a game, and try to do it well. For many years, I didn’t notice it, either; my reserves of stamina were sufficient that I could happily GM for 5 hrs, take […]

Whenever they present themselves, I like to call attention to Kickstarter campaigns and products of special RPG merit or promise. It’s been a while since I’ve done one, not since an announcement was tacked onto Image Compositing for RPGs: Project No 2, in fact. Frankly, I don’t get to do it often enough, but I […]

In any game with Deities or Religions (and that’s almost all RPGs), the questions that dog real religions need to have answers that are plausible, whether we as real people believe them or not. The more interventionist the Deities are, the more this needs to be true, because there is greater capacity for the priests […]

It’s happened to all of us – we receive some paperwork that is important, do whatever we have to do with it, and then put it away for the next time we need it. And then, when the time comes, can’t remember exactly where it is – or it isn’t where we thought it was. […]

Today’s article can be viewed as a sequel to Spotlights In Focus: Plot Structure Impacts, which I wrote last November. That article examined the impact that a plot structure could have on the content of an adventure, and vice-versa, inspired by the work then being done on an plotline for the Adventurer’s Club campaign that […]

I was reading something on Quora the other day that offered a fairly convincing argument that most people wouldn’t recognize real randomness if it bit them on the toe (in less colorful language). Now, most GMs are not ‘most people’; we work with randomness all the time. But the more I thought about it, the […]