Campaign Mastery

Sometimes we old hands, tired of a subject that’s been talked to death, or thinking that everything there is to be said on the subject has been said, forget that a lot of players and GMs have come into the hobby more recently than we have, and hence weren’t privy to those discussions. This produces, […]

Pieces Of Creation is an occasional recurring column at Campaign Mastery in which Mike offers game reference and other materials that he has created for his own campaigns. All images used to illustrate this article are public-domain works hosted by Wikipedia, Wikipedia Commons, or derivations of such works, with the exception of the “fistful of […]

Pieces Of Creation is an occasional recurring column at Campaign Mastery in which Mike offers game reference and other materials that he has created for his own campaigns. All images used to illustrate this article are public-domain works hosted by Wikipedia, Wikipedia Commons, or derivations of such works.   The Empire Fractures – 1945-1953 (~100 […]

Pieces Of Creation is an occasional recurring column at Campaign Mastery in which Mike offers game reference and other materials that he has created for his own campaigns. All images used to illustrate this article are public-domain works hosted by Wikipedia Commons or derivations of such works, save for the illustration of The Mao.   […]

Pieces Of Creation is an occasional recurring column at Campaign Mastery in which Mike offers game reference and other materials that he has created for his own campaigns.       All images used to illustrate this article are public-domain works hosted by Wikipedia Commons or derivations of such works. Introduction The Magna Carta was […]

Pieces Of Creation is an occasional recurring column at Campaign Mastery in which Mike offers game reference and other materials that he has created for his own campaigns.     Welcome to part two of this series of articles introducing the history of Earth-Regency. Part 1 showed how a small change in one weak Baron’s […]

Introduction Let’s talk about the art of naming characters, especially NPCs. This is one of the (thankfully few) aspects of the GMing craft that doesn’t come naturally to me. I can usually get there in the end, but off-the-cuff names can be a real struggle. To deal with this handicap, I have evolved a system […]

Pieces Of Creation is an occasional recurring column at Campaign Mastery in which Mike offers game reference and other materials that he has created for his own campaigns.     Introduction A couple of weeks ago I described my ground rules for handling alternate histories in RPGs and promised to excerpt the writeup I did […]

The latest iteration of my superhero campaign has just gotten underway. Being set (mostly) on an alternate-history Earth, it holds a number of elements that may be of interest to readers, especially if I explain the thinking that led to the various choices that were made and my approach to the construction of a detailed […]

The Campain Structure series: Back To Basics Part 1: Adventure Structures Back To Basics Part 2: Campaign Structures Back To Basics Part 3: Example: The White Tower Back To Basics Part 4: Example: The Belt Of Terra In my recent posts on campaign structure (refer the panel above), I made a big point of the […]

In Roleplaying Tips #536, Johnn ran a tips request (reproduced below) asking for tips on how to GM computer hacking. I decided that simply offering a few tips wasn’t quite going to cut it, and that the subject deserved a slightly more in-depth treatment. I’m currently running a sci-fi future campaign where computers are an […]

This is part four from two (yes, you read that right) in a discussion of the basic principles of creating adventures and hooking them together to form a campaign; I wasn’t originally going to include these examples, feeling that the principles would be clearer to the reader if they weren’t distracted by another narrative threat […]