Campaign Mastery

In celebration of Guy Fawkes Night, this month’s blog carnival, hosted by Nearly Enough Dice is all about Gunpowder, Treason, and Plots. I decided to take a comprehensive look at treason and betrayal as Campaign Mastery’s contribution…

In this article, I list the subgenres of sci-fi that could be encountered/created for an RPG campaign, or for a particular adventure, with lots of examples from movies and TV and more than a few original campaign concepts.

I buy cheap books of trivia all the time. The quality of them as reading material varies from excellent to abysmal, but they can be an excellent source of ideas. Did You Know… The spruce trees in the forest of the Canadian Lakes district is so densely populated that winter snow stays on top of […]

For the October 2013 Blog Carnival, I offer a “spooky spot”: A cemetery that follows the PCs wherever they go…

Everything needs somewhere to happen, and in terms of gaming, that’s what the September 2013 blog carnival was all about. When I launched the Carnival, I outlined several types of suggested articles. In logical sequence, and synopsized, they were: Choosing/Designing a location; Improvising a location; Describing a location; Representing a Location with battlemaps; Modifying locations […]

Officially, the Blog Carnival for September finished on Monday, and the October Blog Carnival has already started at first-time host of Dice and Dragons on the Halloween-inspired subject of “Spooky Spots” (best of luck with it, Scot!) – but I had one more article that I wanted to sneak under the wire. My last two […]

Last Thursday I delivered six locations for GMs to insert into their campaigns that celebrated the fantastic. You could argue that at least one Wonder Of The game-World should reflect what is unique about that particular campaign, and that by leaving a slot free, I achieved the mythical seven; but that presupposes that each of […]

As a final dénouement of the articles on Wondrous Locations, I am offering a collection of wondrous places, all of which have been created just for this article (none are from my past campaigns). These aren’t quite as polished as I might have liked (I ran out of time), especially in terms of the descriptions […]

How to describe wonders and monuments.

In my first article for this month’s Blog Carnival, I asked the question ‘Location, Location, Location: How Do You Choose A Location?‘ and identified ten or eleven influences on the decision, and an approximate hierarchy within them, but was unable to offer even a guideline beyond those observations in answer to the question. Today, the […]

52+ techniques to vastly increase the scope of what you can depict on your battlemaps.

Nyngan (pronounced Ning-gan) is the small town in central New South Wales where I grew up, so I know it well – at least as it used to be. It’s so remote that I haven’t been back there for years. In the following passages, I hope to bring it to life for my readers, then […]