Archive for the ‘PCs’ Category

Function with style: 10 thoughts for NPC Creation (Blog Carnival Jan 2021)

I generated two images to accompany this article (actually, I generated 10, but these were the two that made the cut) – and could not pick between them; they both reflected the content and title in equally-compelling but distinctly-different ways. So I’m using both of them. The second image will appear a bit later. While […]

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Blog Carnival Jan 2021: Pandemic Reflections

This post is a musing on the reaction to the ongoing Covid-19 Pandemic here in Australia. It will have some relevance to citizens of other countries (and definite relevance to writers and GMs) but that wasn’t the primary goal when I was writing it – though that relevance did manifest along the way. I’m also […]

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Vortex Of War: A Dr Who campaign construction diary

I didn’t intend to create a new Doctor Who campaign. The last one, “Lovecraft’s Legacies” had trodden new territory in expanding the lexicon and history of all the great races of Dr Who – Daleks, Cybermen, Weeping Angels, Omega and the Time Lords (amongst others). It integrated elements of Dr who with the Lovecraftian Mythos, […]

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Lost Christmas: A Scenario Of Elves

This post has been badly delayed by a drunk driver who connected with a power pole this afternoon. To work on the damaged utility, the power supply had to be disconnected for several hours – and when the lights came back on, they didn’t bring my internet connection with them. At this point, I can’t […]

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RPGs In Technicolor, Part 2

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series RPGs In Technicolor

I’m going to zip right along under the assumption that you’ve read Part 1 of this article because I don’t really have the time to recap. Color impacts on Cognition There have been studies that showed that exposure to the color red can impact scholastic performance by as much as 20%; other studies looking at […]

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Full Nondisclosure in an RPG

I’m going to start this article with a bit of tooting of my own horn. One of the many steps that led to the creation of Campaign Mastery in November 2008 was the publication in early 2007 of a two-part article on “Scenario and Story Arc creation” called “Hipbone’s Connected To The Thighbone”. These days […]

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Creating a Campaign Physics

“Game Physics*” have been on my mind lately, no doubt because of my recently published article on the underpinning theory of how Magic works in my superhero campaign. This article is primarily aimed at D&D / Pathfinder / Fantasy GMs, but it may also serve in other genres in which the underlying “science” doesn’t match […]

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Pigment On Canvas – Six GMing Lessons from Oil Painting

There have been three shows that seriously went into oil painting on Australian TV. The first was the Rolf Harris Show, in which Rolf used house-paints on a large board, paining in just two or three pigments; his art was often comprised of abstract shapes until the whole image came together in a fairly impressionistic […]

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The Meta-Physics Of Magic

(originally titled ‘Flowing Mana and other arcane concepts’) Today, I thought I would share with you a few concepts from my superhero campaign that relate to the “science” of how magic works. I’ve addressed the circumstances under which these were presented in-play in an earlier post; this is more about delivering the high-concept ideas themselves […]

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Norsing Around With Jordenheim

It has always been my opinion that of all the pantheons, the Norse are the most suited to application within a superhero campaign. The Greek deities are too whimsical, the Romans too arrogant; the Norse are the most level-headed in many respects. What’s more, the Vikings had a sense of the rule of law that […]

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A Character’s Day Off

Yesterday, I took the day off (actually, this was back in April 2018 – this post has sat around unfinished for quite a while, I’;m probably due to do it again!) This morning (April 2018 again), I was reflecting on how much I enjoyed setting aside the stresses and strains of daily life and just […]

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The Great Reset Button In The Sky

I Spent much of the weekend a few weeks ago performing my regular data backup. Everyone in IT has horror stories resulting from inadequacy of backups. Even IT professionals and past professionals like myself – who know how essential backups are – have lost irreplaceable material to inadequacy of backups. That’s because there are two […]

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