Campaign Mastery

There’s a bit of a rambling backstory to this article which I would omit if it weren’t central to the subject. Since that’s the case, I’ll have to ask you to bear with me for a bit. I was musing in the shower this morning of the significance of the Australian Music TV show, “Countdown” […]

You learn something new every day, and today’s example was a small factoid: IQs are increasing so rapidly that the average person today would have scored an IQ of 130 a century ago, qualifying as “gifted”. Projecting Forwards Since the average back then was defined as a score of 100, that’s a rise of 3 […]

I get all sorts of articles offered to me here at Campaign Mastery. Some are completely irrelevant to the purpose of the site, others so poorly written as to be unpublishable. On rare occasions, one hits the ball out of the park. Some, however, are like this guest article: very well written, articulate in making […]

Who among you watches “Who Do You Think You Are?” It might be that not everyone gets the opportunity, but for anyone who does, it is an excellent series that is well worth your time. By connecting actual people (celebrities, but actual people nevertheless) with history, it helps to bring history to life. In the […]

This idea came to me while watching the fifth and final Ashes test on the television. At first, I didn’t quite know exactly what I had, which is why this post has landed in the “short but profound” category! Let’s try something radical (trust me)! Pick your favorite low-to-mid-level D&D monster. Now, halve it’s AC […]

If you need to save time or mental bandwidth, consider using dice roll averages for rolls of more than 4 dice. Disclaimer: nothing in this article should be considered prescriptive. You know your game system, your players, and yourself best. Use what seems useful and put the rest in your back pocket for when you […]

Part 1: Introduction This is the first Campaign Mastery post for 2018, and that’s rather significant. New Years are always a strange synthesis of two things: beginnings and retrospectives. The first is fairly obvious, but the significance of the second often gets overlooked as everyone gets wrapped up in newness and new beginnings. But for […]

I was reflecting on the process that I use to design NPCs for my campaigns, the other day, and I don’t think that I’ve ever described it here at Campaign Mastery, let alone explained it. That simply won’t do. There are a number of considerations that go into the design of an NPC, and I […]

There’s a documentary series that airs on Australian TV sourced from an American Cable channel, or maybe an Internet platform, called Cyberwar. As part of the advertising for the series, one of the people interviewed offers the statement, “The next war will be cyber.” And that got me thinking: what if there was a global […]

Why should the GM care about Marching Order? After all, it’s purely in the hands of the players what order their characters are in. Well, as usual, it’s not quite that simple. First, if you can anticipate the marching order, you can plan encounters either to take advantage of it, or to share the spotlight […]

Campaign Mastery hosted the November 2017 Blog Carnival and had some really great submissions in addition to my using the Carnival as a springboard for a whole heap of articles. The theme this time around was “The Past Revisited: Pick a post (your own or someone else’s) and write a sequel. Should include a link […]

I originally intended to publish the Blog Carnival round-up today, but last week’s computer failure has messed up my plans quite a bit, so I’ve given myself a couple of extra days to get that finished. This is another article that I wrote while my internet was dead, and could be viewed as something of […]