Campaign Mastery

A review of One Spot No. 3 from Moebius Adventures and some musings on a consequence of the rise of crowdfunding.

What’s the first thing you think about when considering a location in an RPG? There’s no one right answer to that question. A lot depends on why I’m thinking about that location at all. Location: a place for things to happen A location is not a simple thing to pin down. Let’s say that we’re […]

How much character do you need? Or, to phrase it another way, how much character construction do you have to undertake in advance when creating an NPC? You could simply have a random character generator throw up something to avoid any character construction, but the results never seem to mesh properly with the situation in […]

How do you GM when you have more players than you can handle?

Back in “Exceeding the Extraordinary: The Meaning Of Feats” (April 2012), I promised that a future article would discuss the approvals process for feats, prestige classes, etc, in my 3.x Fantasy campaigns…

How to use a chessboard to sandbox parts of an adventure and move beyond simple linear plots.

Dwarves make the ideal illustration of how range of motion, aka Kinesiology, can affect the anatomical profile of a race. And that affects everything else…

Ergonomics is one of those little things that can greatly add to the verisimilitude of any campaign. This article will show how to get maximum bang for minimum effort.

There’s a debate that has been fought ever since man invented games that have an element of chance has been, “Is it better to be lucky or skilled?” It’s a debate that has a number of unique resonances within the sphere of an RPG. How should a player or GM simulate a character who relies […]

Every minute spent writing more than you need is time wasted. Write to your target longevity to boost efficiency while avoiding the traps that lurk in the dark for the unwary writer.

I didn’t want to split this article in two. You really need to have read part one before you can get full value from what’s below. So I’m going to assume that you’ve done just that, and don’t need a synopsis to refresh your memory, and just dive straight in… Transitions & Global Emotional Flow […]

I’ve been thinking about some very basic HQ construction rules for use in Superhero campaigns, Pulp Campaigns, etc, for quite some time now, after a number of earlier attempts failed because they got too complicated. At last, I think I’ve solved the major issues… As I’ve mentioned before, Hero Games have very specific, but reasonably […]