Campaign Mastery

This article started out as a way to save time and at the same time present some tips and tricks that often get overlooked in my scramble to get material ready for publication here. It was also intended (originally) to be part of last week’s 1000th-post celebration – so there are certain themes that will […]

1000 posts: a personal milestone So. 1000 posts. Four figures. That’s no small achievement. It’s something to be proud of. I’ve been casting about for suggestions on how to commemorate this milestone for the last few months, but the few suggestions I’ve received haven’t really been all that helpful – “Something reflective”, “Something forward-looking”, “Something […]

999! This is my 999th post at Campaign Mastery! Next week, four figures, a landmark achievement and one that I am quite proud of reaching! Old Words Today’s article is all about looking back, which is a natural thing to do when you approach any milestone. And yet, the connection with the currently-imminent landmark is […]

Finished at last – this is only about 90 minutes late! Enjoy :) Anytime a product with the combined talents of multiple industry heavy-hitters like Ed Greenwood and Skip Williams comes onto your horizon, you pay attention. When that product made its funding targets in just 2 1/2 hours, you pay even closer attention. Clearly, […]

This is a post in three almost completely unrelated segments. I start with some sad news, follow that with our regularly-scheduled article, and conclude with a sneak preview of next week’s article, for reasons that will become obvious.   In Memorium I have to open today’s post with some sad news: Brian “Fitz” Fitzpatrick has […]

A shorter article today (by CM standards), but one with a lot of impact to offer. The head of the ruined statue lay on its side, half-buried in soil and vegetation. Three meters from crown to chin, the sculpture of which it was originally a part must have been enormous. The left side of the […]

The article that I intended to publish today didn’t just go pear-shaped on me, it went prickly-pear shaped. Nothing was salvageable. That’s Okay – I have this series as a backup for that very contingency. So, today, I present another 40 or so of my RPG-related answers on Quora. Some of these will be little […]

Whew, finished at last! Six hrs overdue, but it’s more than twice the usual length, so hopefully that can be forgiven! Is it too easy to cure disease in RPGs? I analyzed that question from various angles last week and came to the conclusion that the answer was arguably ‘yes’ – and also arguably ‘no’ […]

I saw a question on Quora the other day asking how you could give an RPG a particular style. I thought about giving an answer, but the more I thought about it, the more complicated the question became. No campaign is imbued with its own unique style right from the get-go. It takes time, and […]

Some weeks ago, I was offered a review copy of a “solo-player RPG”. I was hesitant at first because it sounded like a computer RPG, which is not the meat-and-potatoes of Campaign Mastery, but reading the invitation more closely made it clear that this was a tabletop game, and that intrigued me, in particular with […]

Today’s article was originally going to be just an example of using logical structures to construct an adventure from the middle out, but that should be fairly standard (and possibly dull) fare for anyone with a reasonable amount of experience – so I was looking for a way to dress it up and add to […]

A necessary preamble For anyone who writes articles that they intend to last (called ‘evergreen’), one of the most annoying and frustrating phenomena occurs when you have a really great idea for an article – but by the time you can get the essentials down in some permanent form, it’s vanished from thought like a […]