Campaign Mastery

Hopefully, this will wrap up the article on Time Travel! Part 1 looked at the problems of Time Travel in RPGs, and reached the conclusion that the GM had to have some understanding of the nature of time in his campaign before he could adjudicate the complexities that could result. Part Two comprised excerpts relating […]

The first part of this article looked at two simplistic solutions to the question of how to handle time travel in RPGs, and found that as they stood, neither was satisfactory. A number of readers were kind enough to write in, suggesting additions that could be made to these two solutions to make them more […]

When writing my submission to the June 2010 Blog Carnival, A Medley Of Inspiring Media, I said that Time Travel was a special case. This article started off as just another section of that Blog Post, but quickly showed signs of growing into another of those monster subjects requiring a multiple-part post to completely contain […]

This is not the post that I expected to make this week. I simply ran out of time and could not finish either the article I had intended to post this week [about time travel] or the one for next week [the long-awaited followup to last year’s Pillars of Architecture article], in time. Instead, I […]

This month’s RPG Carnival, which Campaign Mastery is delighted to host, poses the question: What non-game media have most inspired your games and how? A doozy of a topic, this. Sure, there are the obvious genre-related materials – you can’t talk about Fantasy in this context without mentioning The Lord Of The Rings, first the […]

While watching the special features from Numb3rs season 3 on DVD, I got to thinking about one of the phenomena of TV shows – that some episodes you really like, and some you don’t, and some episodes are really popular and some are not (and these categories never completely coincide. This is true even of […]

How do you fix it when inconsistent roleplay or interpersonal conflicts are killing the campaign? The more restrictions on gameplay you have, and the more expectations on play style you have, the more you need to talk about this with everyone in the group and reach consensus. Assumptions kill groups faster than monsters. Campaign Mastery […]

Introduction This is not the post I was originally going to write for today, but a paragraph in one of the books I am reading brought to mind the game that seemed to be everywhere just a few years ago, “Six Degrees From Kevin Bacon”, and social networking in general, and I suddenly saw applicability […]

Campaign Mastery was asked, GM Brian: “I’m trying to run a D&D 3.5 Eberron campaign that will mostly be a solo campaign for my friend. I’m just looking for tips on how I can run a well balanced solo campaign that can still have a good amount of combat.” Johnn’s Answer: This is a great […]

All too often, treasures in a game – be they gadgets in a high-tech setting, high-powered sports cars in a modern campaign, or arcane thingies in a fantasy campaign – are about as interesting as the cardboard cut-outs sometimes used to represent them in play or on a battlemap. While it’s always possible to overdo […]

There are times when an Ask-The-GM’s question doesn’t inspire one of us, or is too attached to the mechanics of one specific game system, or doesn’t have enough depth to justify a full blog post, or has already been answered by one of our articles, or for some other reason simply doesn’t suit the approach […]

In the first part of this article, which is itself just the first installment of a series of articles, I discussed the execution and delivery of unique-ness in an RPG campaign, and derived a definition of doing so to a standard of perfection that was achievable in more than a hypothetical sense, that was actually […]