Campaign Mastery

Some expectations are made to be confounded if it’s at all possible. If someone expects a dull and boring campaign, that’s one you don’t want to live up to. If someone expects to get favourable treatment because you owe them money, I’m happy to dissapoint them – and to repay the debt as soon as […]

How can a campaign last for decades, and what does such longevity imply? A question recently asked us, I remember Mike mentioning his decades-long superhero game a few times, and am currently planning my next campaign, so I was just wondering how y’all can extend a game so far. Even if the players are still […]

As you should know by now if you’re a regular visitor here – and with 2 new articles every week, why aren’t you, if you’re not!? – this month’s blog carnival is on the subject of mistakes, how you recover from them, and what lessons you’ve learnt for the future. I made a couple of […]

We all make mistakes. Some are trivial – I mean, who really cares in the long run if that critter did d6+1 damage and not d6+2? But I’m talking about bigger mistakes, the kind that matter. I’ve got five of them, and as part of this month’s blog carnival, which we at Campaign Mastery are […]

Mistakes – ones you’ve made in the past and how you got past them, one’s you’re making now and don’t know how to solve. That’s the theme for this month’s RPG Blog Carnival. I remember reading some great advice awhile ago: it’s ok to make a lot of mistakes as long as you don’t make […]

This month’s RPG Carnival is about RPG conventions. GMing at cons is a fine art. It’s high pressure chaos that includes a lot more table and environment management than your typical home game. Add in a group of total strangers as players with unknown skills and game knowledge, and you have a recipe for an […]

I recently had the need to design a Drow Outpost for my Shards Of Divinity campaign, and in the process, I made a few mental notes concerning how I go about designing cities, and population centres in general, that I thought I would share with our readers. Design First, Draw Later I don’t put pencil […]

Many monsters come with treasure in D&D. Taken at face value, these can quickly overwhelm a campaign. I thought I would run through a few measures that the GM can use to control how much hard currency the party gets their hands on. First they have to find it Most treasure will be found in […]

Part 1 of this blog post listed nine general supplements. Parts 2, 3, and 4 added three planar supplements, four supplements about magic, and four supplements about game settings and gaming environments. That makes a full twenty-count by my tally. This fifth part is all about honourable mentions: supplements that didn’t make the final list, […]

Someone once asked me why D&D bothers to include skills at all. After all, the GM generally tells the players anything they really need to know (rather than seeing all his hard work in preparing the game crash and burn); and even if he doesn’t, players can always take a twenty. After further discussion, this […]

In Part 1 of this blog post, I described nine general supplements which have been useful to me multiple times in multiple campaigns. In this second part, I add another eleven must-have supplements. I should explain that this top twenty are not presented in any sort of ranking – they were originally listed (along with […]

Means, Motive, and Opportunity. The M-M-O triad are the foundation of mystery stories and crime fiction in general, and have been for centuries. To be fair, most stories rely on the fallability and limitations of the triad as a means of solving those mysteries, especially on the first and third of the trio. Motives, after […]