Campaign Mastery

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 […]

An empty Death is a terrible thing When Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby) died in Star Trek: The Next Generation, there was an outcry amongst fans. Not because the character had been killed off so much as because she died what was later described even within the series as “an empty death” – a death without […]

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. […]

Sometimes we old hands, tired of a subject that’s been talked to death, or thinking that everything there is to be said on the subject has been said, forget that a lot of players and GMs have come into the hobby more recently than we have, and hence weren’t privy to those discussions. This produces, […]

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 […]

Confession Time: This is not the article I intended to post today. I simply ran out of time – after my sense of the day-of-the-week was thrown off by the Holiday Season, leading me to start late. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible! Over the last few weeks, I’ve re-read the Foundation […]

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, […]

Today I’m going on a journey a long way down memory lane, in support of the Kids In Gaming initiative at RPGNow. Specifically, I am trying to remember what it was like GMing for my brothers Paul and David. It must have been around 1981, which means that David would have been about 15, and […]