Campaign Mastery

“I attack him while he’s distracted.” That’s not an appropriate response to an antagonist Monologing, but it happened once. There came a time when a new player, unfamiliar with the genre, joined the Adventurer’s Club campaign. At one point, in an adventure, the villain began to Monologue – and that was this player’s response. This […]

The first of at least three posts looking at everyday personnel in Trade. This covers everything from wagon drivers to guards to dock-hands and farmhands. Anybody who can be considered a faceless cog in the trade machine, in fact! Credit where it’s due: The series title graphic combines three images: The Clipper Ship Image is […]

There are six types of skill roll modifier that I take into account when assessing any attempt by a character – PC or NPC – to carry out some task. Past articles have focused on just a few of them; this post is intended to provide an overview of the whole. I worked on the […]

In Part 1, I shared a simple technique for creating immersion within the specific genre of a campaign, and applied it to Fantasy campaigns. Part 2 took a solid look at Science Fiction campaigns (and was supposed to also include everything I cover this time around. These genres were not chosen capriciously; between the four […]

The break / disruption caused by my forced migration has been longer than expected, but at long last I’m back, with a reasonable expectation of being able to resume posting regularly. That disruption hasn’t quite run it’s course, so there may be one or two late / missed posts still to come, but it’s a […]

Welcome …to the latest installment of the “Value Of Material Things” series. Today’s article will focus on Pottery & Ceramics, and Peridot, with room for a sideline along the way if anything crops up. Although Jade and Ivory are also laid out and ready to write, I lost a lot of time over the last […]

Welcome …to the latest installment of the “Value Of Material Things” series. Today’s article will focus on Tesserae (Mosaic Tiles), Silk, and Moonstones. It’s sure to have been deduced, I think, that much of the content of this series is being driven by game prep, and that means that I can simply collate my notes […]

Christmas Day falls on a Monday this year – today, in fact! – and so I’m preparing this in advance, in effect doing on Sunday what I would normally do Monday, which means doing on Saturday what I would normally do Sunday, and so on. AND posting a day early as a Christmas Bonus to […]

News From the Rear-view Mirror: I’m usually pretty good at noticing anniversaries and milestones, but I have to admit to missing one. Back in August, officially, I posted CM’s 1250th article or part-article, Holistic NPCs: Creating Special Characters, which gave a process for finding consequences and ramifications of character elements that would feed back into […]

It’s been a long time since I’ve just had a ramble on about assorted semi-related matters but that’s what’s in store today. I’ll move from topic to topic with what may at times seem gay abandon, but it will all come together in the end. This is all stuff that’s derived from, or been inspired […]

How much would this be worth if it were discovered in the American backwoods today? How much more if it had been found in the early 1700s, when no-one really knew the ancient Egyptian “style”?Image by Artie_Navarre from Pixabay                     Two weeks ago, in the then-final […]

For the first time since I started it, when I went to draft the penultimate(?) parts of the Economics in RPGs series today, I found myself unsure of how best to structure the post. While I have total confidence that, given enough time, I would have found a satisfactory sequence to bring out the key […]