Campaign Mastery

The Glass Spider – metagame It’s not often that you think of an encounter that would be equally at home in a D&D / Fantasy setting, a Swashbuckling Pirate game, a Sci-Fi environment, a Superhero game-space, or even – if you allow a little genetic engineering to escape the lab – a Cyberpunk game. So […]

You may not know it, but it’s possible to be too creative. Last week, as usual, I spent some time thinking about what I would be writing about in this post, and almost immediately, three different ideas came to mind in what felt like a single flash of inspiration. Well, by the time I had […]

I realized, the other day, that it has been a while since I posted a fantasy-dominated article, so I set about thinking of one. In no time at all, in a singular flash, today’s article came to me, inspired by the singular concepts of D&D / Pathfinder character classes. But it didn’t take me long […]

Lately, a lot of the spam that CM has been receiving has proposed the use of AI-generated content to make the life of the writer/publisher easier, as though content creation was nothing more than the means to an end. The Flaw In The Argument Mankind has yet to build an artificial system that can pass […]

It happens to everyone eventually – you look at your plot and realize that one of your PCs is going to have to interact with an NPC in a one-off scene, an NPC with whom they might never come into contact again. There are many different ways of handling this. Some GMs will use a […]

The story so far… This is the last in a set of mini-posts that I have written and published as quickly as possible (given a number of health-related interruptions), something I’m calling a mini-blitz. My normal publication schedule will resume at the end of the series. Each of the posts so far has examined one […]

This post has taken a lot longer than expected, delayed by medical testing that was like a black hole sucking in time. And there’s more of it to come, I’m afraid… The story so far… This is the third in a set of mini-posts that I’m writing and publishing as quickly as possible, something I’m […]

The story so far… This is the third article in this series, and the second of a set of mini-posts that I’m going to be writing and publishing as quickly as possible, something I’m calling a mini-blitz. My normal publication schedule will resume at the end of the series. Each post will examine one of […]

Attitude and Intensity We all have NPCs who are more driven than most, more obsessed or more sassy. This is never as easy as it sounds. We all have to raise our voices a little just to be heard clearly from all parts of the gaming table. Simply employing the “intense whisper” for the dialogue […]

While introducing the players to the characters for the chase mechanics playtest a couple of weeks ago, I found myself ruminating on (of all things) the Charisma stat and what it represented. You might think that this is a simple question – but it’s not, as readers will see by the end of this article. […]

It took so much longer to plan out the article that I intended to publsh today, and it contains so many sections that I hasd grave doubts that I could finish it in time. Rather than risk having nothing to post in what is already shaping up to be a very busy week, I decided […]

I’ve written over 1,800 answers on Quora and for every one, I’ve read 40 or 50 answers (probably more) written by other people in response to a question by someone else again. A surprisingly small amount of what I’ve read has been directly RPG-related. That’s because most of the content that gets offered derives from […]