Campaign Mastery

For a recent superhero adventure, I went looking for a map, preferably a 5′ scale map that I could use with miniatures. I couldn’t find what I needed, and that surprised me greatly. After all, there are so many maps and map tiles on offer through RPGNow – there are umpteen castles, marshlands, swamps, forests, […]

I’ve got so much campaign prep to get done that if I don’t do it in public, I’ll either never get it done in time… ************************************************************************************************* Chapters 15-17 are all in reasonably final form. I try not to change “speaker” in mid-paragraph, but the speaker does sometimes change from one paragraph to the next. So […]

Last night, I caught up with a documentary that I’ve been waiting to view (lack of time) since early February. The subject, and title, of the documentary was the question, ‘Are We Still Evolving?’. And, as with many subjects that I digest, it sparked a number of thoughts, all of which are relevant to the […]

I’ve got so much campaign prep to get done that if I don’t do it here, in public, I’ll never get it done in time… ************************************************************************************************* Chapters 10-13 are all in final form. I don’t change “speaker” in mid-paragraph, but the speaker does change from one paragraph to the next. So if it seems like […]

In the course of the last week, two different emails have been sent to Campaign Mastery that are going to form the core of today’s article. Since they are about as different as chalk and squid ink, the results might be more than usually schizophrenic, but I think it will all come together in the […]

I’ve got so much campaign prep to get done that if I don’t do it here, in public, I’ll either never get it done in time… ************************************************************************************************* A shout-out to the sources There aren’t many sources of non-original material that I have used in my Campaigns, but sometimes something is just too useful. These chapters […]

While there are a lot of things the Hero System does well, there are a few things that it does exceedingly poorly, and one of those is the Bluff. This article offers a system to correct that.

I’ve received a lot of compliments for the titles and logos that I’ve done over the years. You can see several of them in the illustrations for this article about my gaming schedule and the need to juggle campaigns to match player commitments when you have half-a-dozen GMs and a pool of perhaps a dozen […]

I’ve got so much campaign prep to get done that if I don’t do it here, in public, I’ll either never get it done in time… But First, One more piece of context: In preparing this article, and the series as a whole, it’s suddenly occurred to me that I’ve never explained just why this […]

Video Games and RPGs have shared a parallel evolution throughout their histories, going all the way back to the original such games (Colossal Cave Adventure in 1967 and [Original] D&D in 1974, which was based on 1971’s Chainmail rules for miniatures wargaming). Throughout their histories, they have fed on each other, sometimes in a fairly […]

I’ve got a lot of campaign prep to get done. In fact, I’ve got so much to do that if I don’t do it here, I’ll either never get it done in time. But first, I have to paint a picture of the background for this to be useful to the rest of Campaign Mastery’s […]

There are certain words whose literal translation can be considered telling when defining the mindset of a nation or culture. Most of these are identified after the fact, when a scholar matches a literal translation with a key insight into the profile of a particular group, but for roleplaying purposes we can define and redefine as necessary to employ selected terms as key indicators and giveaways to the psychology of a group or race.