Campaign Mastery

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 […]

Well, it’s that time of the month when, following a Blog Carnival, the hosting site compiles a list of the blogs posted on their chosen subject and officially passes the baton on to the next host. Hold on a minute – this month the person that has to do that is me! I guess I […]

Recalling the creation of a Divinity We’re continuing to build up to the big release of Assassin’s Amulet, and my excitement is reaching fever pitch (I can’t speak for Johnn & Michael). As part of that buildup, next week I’m going to present you with another excerpt from the book – but before I do, […]

There was a period, a year or two into my Champions campaign, where work was taking up almost all of my time, leaving virtually nothing for game prep. I usually got a lift into the facilities used by the games club that we were using at the time, located at the time in the suburb […]

There’s been a lot of commentary over the years about different styles of campaign. Most distinguish between Episodic and Serialized campaigns, and many writers seem to assume that those are the only types of campaign there are. This is a position with which I don’t agree; there are more layers and levels within this classification […]

As someone who writes about RPGs a lot, I am naturally interested in game design techniques and philosophy. As a former I.T. professional, I have discovered that a lot of the principles of sound program design practice also apply to rules design. With those as my starting point, I thought I would have a stab at defining […]

Two of the most important skills that I added to the Hero System when I was writing my House Rules for my Champions campaign were Paranormal Physics and Paranormal Biology. The first explains how powers work using game physics – and therefore can also be used to determine potentials that the character had not thought […]

During the last week, the RPG Bloggers Network brought an interesting post to my attention: “Discussion: Time Gaps” at Reality Refracted. This got me to thinking about the hierarchy of abstraction, and how often we (GMs) move from one level to another in the course of a typical game session, and how we can use […]

If all has gone according to plan, you are now looking at the final part of what’s been a massive series on the Pulp Genre. This article is mostly afterthoughts and GM advice that I’ve culled from many discussions with players and with my co-GM, Blair Ramage, together with some stuff straight from my own […]

This article is being co-written by Blair Ramage, with whom I co-referee a Pulp Hero campaign. Although it started as a single item, it has grew so substantially that it became necessary to split it into multiple parts. The first part dealt with the relationship of genre to other aspects of a roleplaying game, and […]

This article is being co-written by Blair Ramage, with whom I co-referee a Pulp Hero campaign. Although it started as a single item, it has grew so substantially that it became necessary to split it into multiple parts. The first part dealt with the relationship of genre to other aspects of a roleplaying game, and […]