Campaign Mastery

In the first half of this two-part article I described a game-show format designed for my use in an RPG. A quick reminder: The License The game-show format and key elements thereof, as described in this blog post and its predecessor, are © 2018 Mike Bourke. Licensing is free for any RPG-related purpose. Licensing for […]

This series is a concordance of Seasonal Summations for different locales around the world. That serves a number of different functions: it provides a climatic baseline from which any number of analogues, regardless of campaign genre, can be generated; it compares and contrasts different locations, enabling the reader (and the author) to start getting a […]

A month or two back, I perceived the plot need in my superhero campaign to have one of the PCs appear on the celebrity edition of a game show. The complication: Licensing of formats The problem was that Game Shows are licensed for big money and the owners are very protective of their rights. While […]

Long-time readers of Campaign Mastery will know that it was co-founded with Johnn Four of Roleplaying Tips fame. The most recent posting by Johnn (I’d provide a link but I think it’s probably too soon for there to be one) dealt with creating encounters on the fly, or improv encounters. While it contained a lot […]

There’s a bit of a rambling backstory to this article which I would omit if it weren’t central to the subject. Since that’s the case, I’ll have to ask you to bear with me for a bit. I was musing in the shower this morning of the significance of the Australian Music TV show, “Countdown” […]

With the 2nd part of the series containing some of the locations of greatest climatic diversity or other significant recent history that needed discussion, it threatened to grow far too large for ready consumption. That necessitated a restructuring of this series into twenty parts instead of the sixteen originally planned. Actually, the original plan was […]

You learn something new every day, and today’s example was a small factoid: IQs are increasing so rapidly that the average person today would have scored an IQ of 130 a century ago, qualifying as “gifted”. Projecting Forwards Since the average back then was defined as a score of 100, that’s a rise of 3 […]

Who among you watches “Who Do You Think You Are?” It might be that not everyone gets the opportunity, but for anyone who does, it is an excellent series that is well worth your time. By connecting actual people (celebrities, but actual people nevertheless) with history, it helps to bring history to life. In the […]

Since day one of the first part being published, this series has consistently had an entry amongst the top ten here at Campaign Mastery. Whether that magic continues or is subject-dependent remains to be seen, but – for now – I have to consider the serial blog format a success! Part 1 of this series […]

This idea came to me while watching the fifth and final Ashes test on the television. At first, I didn’t quite know exactly what I had, which is why this post has landed in the “short but profound” category! Let’s try something radical (trust me)! Pick your favorite low-to-mid-level D&D monster. Now, halve it’s AC […]

I’ll be honest about this. I originally put Winter first on my agenda for this series because I thought that it would resonate with the majority of my readers, who live in the Northern Hemisphere. That was before the incredibly brutal conditions descended upon them, however. When that happened, I contemplated starting with Summer, instead, […]

I was reflecting on the process that I use to design NPCs for my campaigns, the other day, and I don’t think that I’ve ever described it here at Campaign Mastery, let alone explained it. That simply won’t do. There are a number of considerations that go into the design of an NPC, and I […]