Campaign Mastery

What do you do when the PCs start recruiting people as information sources? A game master writes: Hi Mike and Johnn, I’m running a 3.5 D&D campaign, where the player characters are largely based in a major city. Because of the structure and history of the campaign world, my major cities are quite large, which […]

Last night was Session #13 – Bearded in Orcus’s Lair of my D&D 4E Carnus campaign. I used to write session logs after each game night, but fell out of practice due to time pressure. However, the benefits of logging are too great, so it’s time to get back into the habit. Roleplaying Tips readers […]

I received an advance copy of the Player’s Handbook 2 and checked out the shiny new barbarian class. Yowsa. Dungeon masters watch out, this guy is mean. As a skirmisher, he’s all about movement and doing massive damage periodically during combat. “Class Traits: Striker. You use powerful two-handed weapons to deal serious damage to your […]

When Toolbox for d20 by AEG came out I scooped it up right away and have found it very useful over the years. Now, in 2009, its big daddy has arrived on the Prime Material Plane and it’s awesome. While some might scoff at a book of tables, I see the Ultimate Toolbox, like its […]

This blog post was originally going to be a review of Master Dungeons M2: Curse of the Kingspire by Goodman Games. However, once I got well into reading the module, I decided I was going to run this adventure for my Carnus D&D 4E campaign. It’s an excellent adventure, full of combat, puzzle, and roleplaying […]

What do you do when one character doesn’t trust the other characters, and it starts to degrade game play? A game master asks: Hi Mike and Johnn, I am new to GMing and play with a group of close friends every week. One of my player’s characters doesn’t trust the rest of the group. Even […]

I received a box of Campaign Coins for review and they are fun, high quality game props. They must be great because the box packaging has no less than six exclamation marks in the text. :) Each box contains 121 detailed coins depicting four metal types in 1, 10, 100, and 1000 denominations and 1 […]

I never understood mindmapping until I read one of Tony Buzan’s books, saw numerous examples, and clued-in. For game planning and tracking, mindmapping is now one of my essential tools. My mindmapping tool of choice is FreeMind, a free application you can download for Windows, Mac, and Unix. It’s a natural fit for documenting relationships. […]

I started to write this as a comment to Johnn’s post “Undead Are Taking Over. What Happens?”, but realised that my comments were so extensive as to require a post of their own. Note that this is an extra post, my usual blog entry for the week will follow in a day or two. Here’s […]

Help! In my Carnus D&D 4E campaign the PCs failed to stop a permanent rift to the Shadowfell opening. Now undead are pouring out like hallelujahs at a Pelor rave. So, what are the consequences? Got any ideas? Here are a few I’ve thought of: Wildlife flee in the path of undead. Most animals will […]

Ryder asks in my previous post about level of readiness in your campaign planning how I find time to work on my campaign between game sessions. My current recipe is very successful, based on years of trial and error and from facing a ton of time theft from other parts of my life. Bi-Weekly Game […]

Imagine a spectrum of planning effort. On one end you have every possible detail worked out, including complete world development, all the adventures until campaign end, a complete cast of NPCs, everything. Let’s call this end 10. On the other end of the spectrum you have nothing planned. You show up to the table and […]