Campaign Mastery

If you need to save time or mental bandwidth, consider using dice roll averages for rolls of more than 4 dice. Disclaimer: nothing in this article should be considered prescriptive. You know your game system, your players, and yourself best. Use what seems useful and put the rest in your back pocket for when you […]

Part 1: Introduction This is the first Campaign Mastery post for 2018, and that’s rather significant. New Years are always a strange synthesis of two things: beginnings and retrospectives. The first is fairly obvious, but the significance of the second often gets overlooked as everyone gets wrapped up in newness and new beginnings. But for […]

I was reflecting on the process that I use to design NPCs for my campaigns, the other day, and I don’t think that I’ve ever described it here at Campaign Mastery, let alone explained it. That simply won’t do. There are a number of considerations that go into the design of an NPC, and I […]

Why should the GM care about Marching Order? After all, it’s purely in the hands of the players what order their characters are in. Well, as usual, it’s not quite that simple. First, if you can anticipate the marching order, you can plan encounters either to take advantage of it, or to share the spotlight […]

Campaign Mastery hosted the November 2017 Blog Carnival and had some really great submissions in addition to my using the Carnival as a springboard for a whole heap of articles. The theme this time around was “The Past Revisited: Pick a post (your own or someone else’s) and write a sequel. Should include a link […]

Late last night (as I write this), one of my favorite Anime movies (outside of the works of Studio Ghibli) was repeated on television. The Castle Of Cagliostro is a complex interaction of several different plotlines, but at it’s heart is a variation on that old plot standard, The Heist. More pure representations of that […]

This article won’t be very helpful to readers who are visually-impaired. I apologize for that, I know I have at least one reader who falls into that category. Maybe if you could get someone to describe the diagrams to you…? I tried including such descriptions, but found that the meaning of the article became buried. […]

While this article builds on some others that I’ve done here at Campaign Mastery, I didn’t feel it was enough of a sequel to any of them to qualify for the Blog Carnival. But I wanted to remind readers that if you’re thinking of doing so, there’s still time to submit a late entry! I’ll […]

I’m listing this as an entry in the Blog Carnival because it builds on several past articles about villains and villainy. See: The Anatomy Of Evil: What Makes a Good Villain? Shadows In The Darkness – The nature of True Evil Making a Great Villain Part 1 of 3 – The Mastermind Making a Great […]

When first I listed this article as a to-do, it represented a very straightforward concept, but I’ve taken so long to get around to writing it that other notions have presented themselves. I now find myself in possession of three distinct and – at first glance – mutually contradictory ideas on the subject. With these […]

With my internet still down (at the time this article was written), I’ve been taking the time to write, and to catch up on a number of documentaries preserved until just such an opportunity came to catch up on them. One of the programs time-shifted in this fashion was something from the BBC, “The Science […]

Introduction Since I first participated in my first session of D&D 3.5, what I enjoyed most was the feeling of sharing a fantasy with other people. There is something liberating in the idea of a bunch of people participating in a history, shaping and characterizing it in every moment. 15 years later, I remain fascinated […]