Campaign Mastery

Today is a Public Holiday in Australia, so I’m posting something far more concise than usual. The reason for the Public Holiday is that yesterday was Australia Day, which celebrates the arrival of white colonists from Britain, most of them transportees, in 1788 – the equivalent of the American 4th of July. While the country […]

Plans & Changes It’s strange how perceptions and plans can change as a project proceeds. This is the third in my series of articles about Prologues (spelt ‘Prologs’ in the US, and in the rest of this text) – but when I started, this was intended to be one single article, something relatively quick that […]

I was watching a movie that’s an old favorite, National Treasure (now available with its sequel as a blue-ray double-feature at Amazon, click on the link – limited copies available), prompted by a combination of availability and renewed speculation concerning a third movie in the series. It’s not as though the first two were flops, […]

Attribution This article was primarily inspired by a story published by SBS, one of Australia’s TV Channels, on their website, who in turn was republishing it from The Conversation, another website, under a Creative Commons license. Read the SBS story, Read the Original story by Julian Matthews, a Research Officer from the Cognition Neurology Lab […]

During play this Saturday past, I had reason to dissect a Save. The entire process took only a few seconds at the time, thoughts following one on another so quickly that there was barely enough time to get a fleeting impression of one before it was chased out by the next. I was helped in […]

Like most article writers, I accumulate ideas that prove to be too small to be a worthwhile post in their own right. Every now and then, I gather these up and compile an assemblage of unrelated miniature articles as a single item. That’s today’s recipe… 1. Surrounding Language English is full of synonyms, words and […]

Have you ever watched a repeat of a show that you once enjoyed and thought, “this hasn’t aged well?” Have you ever re-read a book that you enjoyed in your youth, only to discover that the magic just wasn’t there any more? When you listen to old favorites on the radio, do they ever sound […]

This is an article inspired by a bus stop. As I got off the bus at my stop the other day, I briefly contemplated the fact that I had two different routes to choose between. I always choose one over the other as being faster than the alternative, despite having to wait for a ‘walk’ […]

If you want to start a conversation with a tabletop gamer, all you have to do is ask their opinion on GMs fudging die rolls. Everyone has an opinion, a theoretical best-practice policy, and everyone has a preferred approach in the real world – and the two don’t always match. Some people even have different […]

Watching the Australian performance in the Women’s Ashes cricket series last night, where they absolutely destroyed the English opposition, inspired this article. Australia batted first, and set England a target of 270 from their 50 overs (refer to this post if you don’t know enough about Cricket to know what I’m talking about). This is […]

Pocket dimensions have been an important element of my superhero campaign for decades. Over that span of time, the understanding of their origins and properties have evolved in richness and complexity. Pocket dimensions were also much-sought-after magic items in my Fumanor campaigns, in the form of Bags Of Holding. And so I applied the conceptual […]

What if you held a Blog Carnival and no-one came? Until quite late in the most recent carnival, that’s what I thought I might be faced with. In the wash-up, only one person besides me proved willing to take the challenge. To be fair, that’s not a total surprise; I knew it was a difficult […]