Campaign Mastery

999! This is my 999th post at Campaign Mastery! Next week, four figures, a landmark achievement and one that I am quite proud of reaching! Old Words Today’s article is all about looking back, which is a natural thing to do when you approach any milestone. And yet, the connection with the currently-imminent landmark is […]

Today, as I waited for the bus, I contemplated the relationship between the 80s/90s concept of “Personal Space” and the Mid-Pandemic concept of “Social Distancing”. After all, the two mean much the same thing – ‘don’t get too close’, ‘give me enough room’. Invading someone’s personal space was as perceived as threatening as invading someone’s […]

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 […]

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 […]

How do you make Big Dungeons interesting? It’s not a simple proposition; very dependent on your source material, you may have to dig far deeper into what you have been presented with in order to achieve success. This question comes from Tom, who wrote: I DM a Pathfinder game, where the module is coming to […]

Slow combats kill games. This hard truth frustrates you and I because, as GMs, we feel it’s our responsibility to facilitate fast, sleek and exciting sessions. When combat grinds, you end up with fewer encounters in a session. Fewer encounters means less story told, less adventure and less fun. Combat grind also saps your players’ […]

So, here it is: a day late, thanks to the Easter long weekend, but better late than never! Normal Service will be restored next week… in the meantime, enjoy. We’re still working our way through what was originally intended to be Part 4 of this series, believe it or not! Part 1 concerned itself with […]

Have you heard of the five minute adventuring day? The characters blow their powers in the first combat each day and then choose to rest so they are fully charged tomorrow for the next challenge. This is not only boring, it’s terrible storytelling. We just posted a new lesson in the Faster Combat course for […]

Last week I revealed my crash and burn in 2011 and a new commitment to not biting off more than I can chew. So this week’s post is going to be a bit on the conservative side, and I’m going to talk a little about my plans for 2012 and a little about where I […]

2011 was a great year and a terrible year for me for writing and gaming. I suffered a bit of burn out, got a couple of awesome gaming products published and gamed monthly instead of every other week for much of 2011. Let’s delve into my goals for last year, and then I’ll reveal my […]

Staves have not been part of treasure piles in my recent campaigns, which is a travesty. I’m not sure when I stopped using them as treasure or NPC possessions, but that’s going to stop today. When I played first edition D&D, staves were given out like candy. Oh how we loved to roll them on […]

Here’s another excerpt from Assassin’s Amulet while you’re all waiting for the announcement of the winner of the cover contest. This is taken from the GM Advice chapter and first appeared in this week’s Roleplaying Tips. Many GMs struggle with running killer NPCs. One big goal of the book is to arm you with enough […]