Campaign Mastery

When you create an RPG adventure, what’s the first question you should ask? This very issue became a factor when my co-GM and I set about writing Adventure 31 for the Adventurer’s Club Campaign a week or two ago. The First question should not be how you get the PCs involved. It should not be […]

It’s September again (already!) and that means that Campaign Mastery has its regularly-scheduled hosting duties for the Blog Carnival (The one back in March was an ‘extra’ because no-one else stepped forward to host, and I thought of a topic). So what have I got to offer this time around? Places Of Exotic Reality Describe […]

Have you ever watched a repeat of a show that you once enjoyed and thought, “this hasn’t aged well?” Have you ever re-read a book that you enjoyed in your youth, only to discover that the magic just wasn’t there any more? When you listen to old favorites on the radio, do they ever sound […]

Last time we played my superhero campaign, the players got through all the material that I had prepared and polished with more than an hour of playing time remaining. (I thought that I had prepped enough – but, oh well…) While I had some vague ideas about what was to follow, I hadn’t yet put […]

This is an article inspired by a bus stop. As I got off the bus at my stop the other day, I briefly contemplated the fact that I had two different routes to choose between. I always choose one over the other as being faster than the alternative, despite having to wait for a ‘walk’ […]

If you want to start a conversation with a tabletop gamer, all you have to do is ask their opinion on GMs fudging die rolls. Everyone has an opinion, a theoretical best-practice policy, and everyone has a preferred approach in the real world – and the two don’t always match. Some people even have different […]

This is an article about a technique for repairing continuity and plot problems that is especially suited to long-running campaigns and to campaigns deriving from published sources. I’m not going to leave anyone who hasn’t mastered telepathy in suspense: the technique is Patching one plot hole with another. For some that will be enough of […]

Watching the Australian performance in the Women’s Ashes cricket series last night, where they absolutely destroyed the English opposition, inspired this article. Australia batted first, and set England a target of 270 from their 50 overs (refer to this post if you don’t know enough about Cricket to know what I’m talking about). This is […]

Distillations Of Personality is an unfinished series at Campaign Mastery about the tips and tricks that I use for designing NPCs in my campaigns. As originally conceived, and as it will be executed, this article was not part of the 3-part series. So don’t bother searching for parts 2 and 3 – they haven’t been […]

One of the oldest plots in the RPG canon is the search for a lost treasure, guided either by a map or trail of clues. This, like any other puzzle, gets solved like a detective novel or TV show – a mystery to be divined, one clue or step at a time. But there are […]

This month’s Blog Carnival is being hosted by Pitfalls & Pixies, and the subject is all things Fey. I’ve never been very satisfied with the way D&D handles Fey. There was not enough information in AD&D to run them properly; they seemed to be just dressed-up humans, or monsters like any other (just a little […]

Style without substance is a soap bubble, all surface glitz and no depth – and just as fragile. Substance without style is utilitarian and contains no room for fun. For anything – including RPGs – to succeed, you need something of both. I once saw an interview with a comedy TV writer – I forget […]