Campaign Mastery

The Sixth Shelf: Hardware I: Weapons, Things, and Science – Introduction by Mike Pulp technology and science is a very strange animal. It can encompass everything from steampunk to space opera, Monoplanes to UFOs, and yet it remains grounded in the very real technology available in the 1920s and 1930s. The difficulty is always not […]

Finally, it’s done! This has turned into the largest single post ever published by Campaign Mastery, and by a huge margin. So, what happened? Well, when the initial blowout took place I calculated, based on the Europe results, that I could expect to have to add another 216 entries or so, at an average of […]

The Fourth Shelf: The Exotic Places Another delayed post, caused by the same expansion that caused trouble last time – and will again cause delays once more. Reluctantly, it has become necessary to revise both the breakdown and publishing schedule to insert an additional shelf. For consistency, Part Zero will be revised accordingly at the […]

The Third Shelf: More-Ordinary Places We struggled a little in trying to find a good summary for this shelf’s contents, the first of two dealing with locations and geography. Locations are important to any RPG – that’s why Campaign Mastery devoted an entire Blog Carnival to the subject a while back (you can read summaries […]

The Second Shelf: Villains & Famous Real People Heroes are nothing without villains, at least not in a Pulp environment (though it’s also true of most other forms of gaming). Each of them has to be distinctive and interesting and challenging in an entirely different way, requires their own personal style, their own flair, their […]

The First Shelf: Heroes & PCs Heroes are at the heart of a Pulp campaign, as much if not more than any other genre (with the possible exception of Superheroes – but you could draw a continuous line running from Pulp Heroes through to powerless heroes like Batman, Green Arrow, Hawkeye, the Black Panther and […]

It started with a very simple idea. I had, some years previously, published a list of my top-twenty 3.x supplements (Part 1, Parts 2, 3 and 4, Part 5) – why not do the same thing for pulp reference books? Approach Because I don’t consider myself an expert on the genre (even after co-GMing a […]

A guest article by Boris R. If you think that slot machines and RPG games are complete opposites, you’re wrong. You can enhance your game world by taking a lesson from slots and increasing the unpredictability of your game. Pure Luck Let’s talk about Slot machines, also known as fruit machines and poker machines. These […]

In the course of the 750th-post anniversary article here at Campaign Mastery (almost 50 posts ago, how time flies!), I became aware of The Dark Eye, an RPG that was more popular than D&D in Germany and had been around for over 30 years! The fact that I didn’t know about the game greatly surprised […]