Campaign Mastery

In any game with Deities or Religions (and that’s almost all RPGs), the questions that dog real religions need to have answers that are plausible, whether we as real people believe them or not. The more interventionist the Deities are, the more this needs to be true, because there is greater capacity for the priests […]

Today’s article can be viewed as a sequel to Spotlights In Focus: Plot Structure Impacts, which I wrote last November. That article examined the impact that a plot structure could have on the content of an adventure, and vice-versa, inspired by the work then being done on an plotline for the Adventurer’s Club campaign that […]

Dialogue: Essential Techniques There are three basic approaches to writing dialogue. 1. Canned Dialogue This involves writing the central dialogue in advance, making assumptions about the conversational cues that the players will provide. There are obvious advantages to this approach; you can take as much time as you need to polish and nuance the words, […]

Concluding Campaign Mastery’s contribution to the December Blog Carnival hosted by Rising Phoenix Games is on the subject of “No Dice“. In Part 1, I looked at why we roll dice for various things in RPGs and what these die rolls are attempting to simulate in game-world terms. In a nutshell, the dice represent all […]

The December Blog Carnival by Rising Phoenix Games is on the subject of “No Dice“. This is the beginning of Campaign Mastery’s contribution to the subject. There are times when it can be useful to the GM and his simulation of reality not to require a roll for something. This article is going to explore […]

So November has come and gone, and with it, Campaign Mastery’s bonus hosting of the Blog Carnival. Those who got inspired by the topic did a stellar job with some very interesting contributions, which I’ll summarize later in this wrap-up post. Sadly, there weren’t really enough participants for that to fill this article. Possibly, misunderstanding […]

I have said before that you can never have too many approaches to determining the characterization of an NPC up your sleeve. Today’s article offers a new one, and a systematic way of looking at simpler approaches that can also be useful. Let’s start by setting a baseline for comparison… 0. Going Nowhere: The Null […]

My co-GM and I have almost finished designing the next adventure in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, entitled “Lucifer Rising”. This will be the 33rd adventure in the main continuity (which doesn’t count a half-dozen of fill-in adventures along the way). This adventure is notable for having a slightly different structure to most of them, and […]

With the conclusion of the Zener Gate campaign, I’ve been thinking about what comes next. In fact, it’s fair to say that it’s been somewhere on my mind for most of 2022, if not always front-and-center. About six months ago, I decided that I would resurrect the Warcry campaign, even though it would need some […]

This weekend was the big finish to the Zener Gate campaign (exactly on schedule). Guest starring the Governator and James Cameron and the Mythbusters duo, it involved the PCs trying to convince Xi Jinping that the Chinese temporal agency was attempting to replace him with a perfect duplicate in order to abort the program – […]

Hopefully, my internet connection is now fixed. It’s been functioning perfectly since Friday when a technician attended the hardware connection – at least, I assume they did; I was notified that they were on their way, and then notified some time later that the call was completed, without ever seeing them or being informed about […]

My internet connection is still fraught. It will sometimes work for hours, and then not be available for days. Which makes this article fraught with potential problems. I’ll do my best – but it’s worth noting that less than an hour after last week’s post, the internet crashed and stayed down for about seven hours. […]