Campaign Mastery

The Impossible Mission It doesn’t matter how skilled you are in your use of descriptive language and extraordinary narrative if you don’t know what it is that you are supposed to be describing. It follows that GMs need to construct and maintain a mental image of their world as it exists at any given moment […]

Season’s Greetings! Welcome to Campaign Mastery’s Great Character Giveaway, and Merry Christmas! This article is (hopefully) going to be posted a few seconds into Christmas Day (my time) so it seemed only appropriate that it contain a Christmas Gift. In fact, it’s the first of such gifts that are going to be coming your way […]

A collision of thoughts: the origins of this article The other day, I was searching through past articles looking for a particular reference for a cross-link when I found myself re-reading my article contrasting literary processes and writing for games (The Challenge Of Writing Adventures for RPGs), and – as happens to me from time […]

GMs sometimes ask more than one question. Where these directly relate to each other, or the context is important to the answers, they are generally lumped together. When they aren’t, which is far less frequent an event, they get split up and answered separately. Which brings me to today’s topic: Writing characters out when players […]

I’m writing this article on the day that the idea occurred to me, but I’ve held it back until an opportune gap appeared in the publishing schedule. I was waiting for the bus today (well, on the day that I wrote this), and that got me to thinking. More on that a little later. If […]

I was musing about Tom’s entry into the Blog Carnival (Void Travel Sickness) while approving his notification/pingback, and the thought came to me: if the players were the test crew on board the first starship to be built, they might have no idea that “jump shock” would be part of their situation. That was how […]

I’ve commented a number of times on the insights that can be achieved by looking at behind-the-scenes specials and DVD commentaries. There’s a documentary series that has just started a week or two ago on TVS, a public-service broadcaster here in Australia, called “The Art Of Story and the Narrative Game” and the interest in […]

There are some projects that excite because of their content. There are others that entice because of the track record of the creators. And some projects simply ooze style and content. Today, I’m going to write about a project that ticks all three boxes. It’s another product from Embers Design Studios, and its called Yrisa’s […]

GMs sometimes ask more than one question. Where these directly relate to each other, or the context is important to the answers, they are generally lumped together. When they aren’t, which is far less frequent an event, they get split up and answered separately. Which brings me to today’s topic: Writing characters out when players […]

I’ve worked on it up to the last minute and beyond, but the final installment of the Tavern Generator still isn’t ready. I’ve solved the problems that confronted me last week, though, so it’s now full speed ahead on wrapping it up, hopefully this time next week! In the meantime, here’s another quick little fill-in […]

GMs sometimes ask more than one question. Where these directly relate to each other, or the context is important to the answers, they are generally lumped together. When they aren’t, which is far less frequent an event, they get split up and answered separately. Which brings me to today’s topic: Writing characters out when players […]

The recent trip to attend a couple of surprise family functions was the closest thing I’ve had to a holiday in almost 3 years, and only the second in about 5. Anticipating that it would be difficult to get back into the work habits that had built up in that time period, I even made […]