Campaign Mastery

Snakes & Spiders in RPGs tend to one-size-fits-all construction. Use reality to make them exceptional! I got curious this morning. Australia is well-known around the world for the number and variety of deadly fauna we live alongside. The likelihood of your home being robbed drops by a ratio of between 100-1000 times if you live […]

Running a campaign is a lot easier if there’s a clear process that maximizes opportunities for success and avoids the worst traps and pitfalls. Campaign Mastery has again been recognized as one of the top 20 blogs devoted to the subject of RPGs. Given the caliber of the opposition, I consider this to be a […]

Starting and Running a campaign is a lot easier if there’s a clearly understood process that maximizes the opportunities for success and avoids the largest traps and pitfalls. As usual, I worked on the next part of Trade In Fantasy until it became clear that it wasn’t quite going to be ready in time, then […]

I was recently offered the opportunity to review a copy of Mythwoven, a new RPG supplement by Sphynx Tale Games, by the Author Brett Moore. His description sounded intriguing: a collaborative worldbuilding game designed to enhance session 0 and immerse players in the game world’s lore. From the additional details that his email disclosed, I […]

It’s my contention that with every encounter, the canny GM will expand on the lore surrounding the creatures encountered. I’ve been plugging away steadily at the next part of the Trade In Fantasy series, in which a lot of the elements discussed start to come together into a coherent picture of the processes, but it’s […]

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 […]

The subject this week is adventure writing and structure. I have evolved a fairly functional process to translating ideas into ready-to-run plots over the years, and today I’m going to share it. This can be viewed as a companion piece to One word at a time: How I (usually) write a Blog Post, which has […]

0. Introduction Even if the main subject matter doesn’t interest you, or doesn’t fit the genre of your campaign, there’s still content of value for you within the article – look for the sidebars, they contain useful tools, techniques, and fascinating side-issues, and apply to D&D / Pathfinder / Cthulhu / Pirate / Western games […]

Okay, so here we go with #2 of three locations generated for my campaigns. This is definitely sci-fi in nature, and would especially suit Traveler campaigns, though it can be used more generally. As usual, a bit of a preamble, but I’m setting it off in a text box so that those with no interest […]

A Status Update It can be readily observed that this is not part 3 of the ongoing series on Economics in RPGs that I’ve been publishing for the last couple of weeks. Right up until the last moment, I was uncertain as to whether or not to continue with that series this week, but two […]

This post details two Empires contending with each other in the Warcry campaign at the moment. I’ll talk more about that in a little bit. There’s also some discussion of when a Kingdom needs to become an Empire, and a mysterious religious body that seems entwined in events. The working title of the article was […]

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 […]