Campaign Mastery

There are times when you need to change things up, and give yourself a break from the routine. There can be lots of reasons for this need, so its something that most GMs encounter sooner or later. I have known one GM who took this as a sign that his campaign was played out, and […]

An Earworm is one of those songs that you can’t get out of your head. Often, the only cure is to expose yourself to “just enough” of another earworm! For the last two months, I’ve been afflicted with a case of the far less-known Dreaded Plotworm. This is when a plot idea that doesn’t quite […]

Today’s post comes courtesy of an ear-worm. I recently played Glen Campbell’s Greatest Hits, and the theme from the John Wayne movie “true Grit” stuck in my head (not for the first time). Not at the time, mind, but afterwards, when it was triggered by writing about gritty reality in a Quora post and mentioning […]

Whew, finished at last! Six hrs overdue, but it’s more than twice the usual length, so hopefully that can be forgiven! Is it too easy to cure disease in RPGs? I analyzed that question from various angles last week and came to the conclusion that the answer was arguably ‘yes’ – and also arguably ‘no’ […]

I saw a question on Quora the other day asking how you could give an RPG a particular style. I thought about giving an answer, but the more I thought about it, the more complicated the question became. No campaign is imbued with its own unique style right from the get-go. It takes time, and […]

Some weeks ago, I was offered a review copy of a “solo-player RPG”. I was hesitant at first because it sounded like a computer RPG, which is not the meat-and-potatoes of Campaign Mastery, but reading the invitation more closely made it clear that this was a tabletop game, and that intrigued me, in particular with […]

Today’s article was originally going to be just an example of using logical structures to construct an adventure from the middle out, but that should be fairly standard (and possibly dull) fare for anyone with a reasonable amount of experience – so I was looking for a way to dress it up and add to […]

I love doing art-related posts for Campaign Mastery because they give me an opportunity to flex my artistic muscles and have some fun. As a result, I’m afraid that the example that I planned to use as an introduction to this post has grown rather larger than expected. It’s worth reading, though :) One of […]

Once again, the wheel of days has traversed the circle of time to Campaign Mastery’s turn at hosting the Blog Carnival, following on from Full Moon Storytelling’s Festivals, Holidays, and Birthdays. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a post up for that Carnival (sorry, Dave) – I had a post run over two weeks when it was […]

A necessary preamble For anyone who writes articles that they intend to last (called ‘evergreen’), one of the most annoying and frustrating phenomena occurs when you have a really great idea for an article – but by the time you can get the essentials down in some permanent form, it’s vanished from thought like a […]

A couple of days ago I came across a Quora post by Deb Paul describing some experiments exploring hope as a motivational force. The experiments in question were both revolting and enlightening, and I immediately shared the post with the Dungeon Masters Deep Dive group because I could see a connection to group behavior in […]

All GMs should recognize and follow the rule of cool, which states that if a player wants his character to do something cool, the GM should try to find a way to let him, even if it violates canon or what the character should normally. be capable of. Alas, in one of the great inequities […]