Campaign Mastery

Last week’s post was (technically*) the 1000th here at Campaign Mastery. Appropriately for such a number, it dealt with big-picture abstractions and the fundamental principle upon which the blog is founded – having more fun at the gaming table. That make’s this post (again, technically*) the 1001st – a number that itself both the seeds […]

There are lots of good reasons to have a strong supporting cast in an RPG. They permit interactions which reveal or highlight aspects of a PC that otherwise might get an infrequent airing, for one thing. Trusted NPCs can serve as proxies for the PCs, or can supplement their skill-base. Or, fourth, they can facilitate […]

Anagathics (n) – drugs and treatments that halt and reverse the progress of aging. At least, that’s what they are called in Traveler – since we don’t exactly have any proven medications that achieve this yet, nor even research into the science on which such treatments could be based that’s advanced enough to make treatments […]

Or, “Dwarves are from Marz, Elves are from Venusia”, which was almost the title of this article! I was thinking about another post (that you will hopefully see in a week or so) when an idea for a completely original D&D/Pathfinder cosmology occurred to me. In a matter of minutes, it had become a fully-fledged […]

The GM puts a problem in front of the PCs – a couple of thugs extorting the locals. The players come up with a plan to solve the problem which works perfectly. The public shower the PCs with rewards and gratification. Sounds pretty boring to me. Where’s the challenge? Where’s the adventure? Roadblocks, Tripwires, Deceptions, […]

This is something of an unusual article. As many of you know, I got my start submitting guest articles for Roleplaying Tips, and eventually co-founded Campaign Mastery with the writer/editor/publisher of that email newsletter, Johnn Four. A recent article was about “How To Think Like An Alien” – Johnn no longer numbers the issues in […]

Although I’ve lived in the state capital for more than half my life, and am a creature of thoroughly urbanized habits and propensities, at my core, I come from a small town almost 600km away named Nyngan, as explained in Location, Location, Location: Nyngan, in which I describe the township and how to adapt it […]

How do you design your dungeons? For me, the only technique worth contemplating is the Narrative Approach, in which the dungeon’s location and structure derive from the adventure in which they are to be found, and the encounter content and similar details derive from the location, structure, and adventure. Sounds good, doesn’t it? But, as […]

I’ve been reading a fascinating book lately: “The Biology Of Human Survival” by Claude A Piantadosi, M.D. This relatively hard-to-find book from Oxford University Press deals with the biological processes by which humans react to various conditions, and hence the hazards posed by those conditions, in a way that is both technically accurate and yet […]

Long-time readers of Campaign Mastery will know that I love concepts that re-imagine standard game elements like races and classes through the prism of a completely new context. During a conversation at the game table a month or two back, I found just such a new context for a staple D&D/Pathfinder race, Dwarves. Traditionally, D&D […]

I’m interrupting my planned schedule of posts to talk about what happened this weekend past in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, because it will be relevant to all campaigns regardless of genre. I was notified on Friday Afternoon that one of the regular players could not make it that weekend. My first thought was to whether […]

Inspiration I have to be honest and say I’m not completely sure who to thank for inspiring this article. At some point in the last month or so, a tweet appeared in my Twitterfeed proclaiming that the GM sending the tweet always liked to hand out useless magic items – or possibly it was a […]