Campaign Mastery

November 2014 The November Blog Carnival hosted by Roleplaying Tips, is winding up – there are just a few days left to post your articles on the subjects of Aliens and Races. December 2014 That also means that its time for me to gear up for the December Carnival, because I’ve put Campaign Mastery’s hand […]

Pulp Rules for Healing, and how & why Pathfinder & 3.x GMs should consider adapting them to their games.

This is part 3 of a series presenting the various House Rules that have been introduced into the Pulp Campaign that I co-GM. Today I’m presenting everyman skill rules that were developed for the campaign, and long overdue, too. Although designed for a Pulp Campaign built with the Hero System, the principles apply to almost […]

This is part 2 of a series presenting the various House Rules that have been introduced into the Pulp Campaign that I co-GM. Today I’m presenting some cold, heat, wind-chill, and altitude tables that were developed for the campaign in preparation for a midwinter race against time in the Frozen Wilds of Western Canada. Although […]

This is the first of a four-part* series outlining the house rules that Blair Ramage and I have adopted over the years for the Adventurer’s Club campaign, a Pulp-genre campaign run using Pulp Hero, which is a Pulp-genre variation on the Hero System. There are four major chunks of rules, that have developed at four […]

So we’ve looked at Themes, and we’ve looked at Concepts, and even touched on the relationship between the two. But now it’s time to address the elephant in the room – twin elephants in fact – Genre and Style, and how these modify that relationship, how it all comes together to form a unique fingerprint […]

Part 2 of the article trilogy looks at concepts within an RPG, how they relate to the campaign themes, and throws in some free game content as a bonus.

I was watching an interview with Jim Keays from 1975 the other day, discussing what was then his latest album. He was explaining that he had started with three or four songs that all had similar subject matter, and realized that he could build the entire album around that subject. The interviewer, as part of […]

How do you GM when you have more players than you can handle?

Back in “Exceeding the Extraordinary: The Meaning Of Feats” (April 2012), I promised that a future article would discuss the approvals process for feats, prestige classes, etc, in my 3.x Fantasy campaigns…

This article is the result of a confluence of many different vectors, from reading a review in the current issue of KODT of the original “Paranoia” RPG to reading an article at E Pluribus Unum about Twitter mistakenly suspending an account as a purveyor of spam. Setting aside the questions of anti-spam techniques and technologies […]

I’ve been thinking about some very basic HQ construction rules for use in Superhero campaigns, Pulp Campaigns, etc, for quite some time now, after a number of earlier attempts failed because they got too complicated. At last, I think I’ve solved the major issues… As I’ve mentioned before, Hero Games have very specific, but reasonably […]