Campaign Mastery

It doesn’t take much more than a quick flip through the pages of “…And A 10-foot Pole” to realise that it’s an extensively-researched volume. Aside from breaking history into twelve periods covering everything from the stone age (prior to 9000 BC) to the information age (1980+), it divides commodities into standardised categories and gives prices […]

Many monsters come with treasure in D&D. Taken at face value, these can quickly overwhelm a campaign. I thought I would run through a few measures that the GM can use to control how much hard currency the party gets their hands on. First they have to find it Most treasure will be found in […]

Part 1 of this blog post listed nine general supplements. Parts 2, 3, and 4 added three planar supplements, four supplements about magic, and four supplements about game settings and gaming environments. That makes a full twenty-count by my tally. This fifth part is all about honourable mentions: supplements that didn’t make the final list, […]

Someone once asked me why D&D bothers to include skills at all. After all, the GM generally tells the players anything they really need to know (rather than seeing all his hard work in preparing the game crash and burn); and even if he doesn’t, players can always take a twenty. After further discussion, this […]

In Part 1 of this blog post, I described nine general supplements which have been useful to me multiple times in multiple campaigns. In this second part, I add another eleven must-have supplements. I should explain that this top twenty are not presented in any sort of ranking – they were originally listed (along with […]

In the comments to a recent blogpost (“The More Things Change: An essay on the future of RPGs”) that I wrote, Johnn suggested that he’d like to see a list of my top twenty D&D supplements. It wasn’t easy, but I finally narrowed the choice down to a mere 20 choices – with an additional […]

How much, if at all, should the final villain of a long running campaign pull his punches? My campaign boss [villain] is a high level wizard with access to epic spells, and my party just made 20th level. They are on the way to fight him. Should I open up with his most powerful abilities, […]

This isn’t the blog post that I intended to make this week; unfortunately, I’ve been struck down by the ‘flu and had no time to get anything finished except for something that I’ve been able to recycle from my house rules for the various D&D campaigns that I run. That’s also why I’m posting a […]

I have received a number of questions about my Fumanor campaign, especially following the posting of the Microplane Of Earth adventure location and encounter (parts one, two, and three). Several people have expressed interest in the campaign story to date. So here are some elements of the current campaign that might be interesting, possibly a […]

This month’s RPG Bloggers carnival is themed on D&D. The guest article below by Mike E. has some great ideas for modifying your D&D experience by borrowing what he likes from one edition and adding it to another. I’d like to think I’m a fairly good DM. I know I have my strengths, and I […]

The Roleplay of Prestige Classes My games normally enforce the roleplay (non-game-mechanics) requirements for Prestige Classes (and, where relevant, feats and level progressions). It’s not enough for the character (PC or NPC) to simply meet the prerequisites, they usually have to DO something. Pages 204-205 of DMG II, in discussing the design of new prestige […]

Introduction I recently reformulated the way I calculate experience in my D&D 3.5 campaign. [Actually, what happened was that my computer’s power supply failed and I had nothing better to do with my time for a few hours. But anyway…] It took about a page and a half of 4 x 5½-inch notepaper, and consisted […]