Campaign Mastery

“Sometimes I’m a foodie, and sometimes I revert to good old American comfort food.” That was said, in-character, by one of my players in the course of this weekend’s game session, and it is at the heart of today’s article. First, some information on the narrative thread that led to this line of conversation: Four […]

Today, as I waited for the bus, I contemplated the relationship between the 80s/90s concept of “Personal Space” and the Mid-Pandemic concept of “Social Distancing”. After all, the two mean much the same thing – ‘don’t get too close’, ‘give me enough room’. Invading someone’s personal space was as perceived as threatening as invading someone’s […]

I’ve written a lot of articles about luck and a lot of articles about plot, but very few about how the two intersect. Time to change that. A linear plot, like that depicted in Figure (1) Below, is very boring. Nothing the players say or do – and, more importantly, nothing the players have their […]

If I mention sailing ships designed to travel from one world to another, the game system that comes to mind for most readers will be the Spelljammer game setting for D&D, introduced late in 1989, or perhaps Planescape, which came out in 1993 as a replacement for Spelljammer. Despite the official discontinuation, every release of […]

I’ve been an active Quora user for the last few years, as long-time readers would know. Since August 2017, more than 1200 answers have been viewed almost 250,000 times. My content there averages more than 2000 readers a month (my content here averages more than three times that number). I’ve even built whole articles here […]

This article is likely to ramble a bit. There will be times when I have to talk around the subject so as not to give away any surprises to my players, or to provide a proper foundation for the point of discussion. That’s an unfortunate reality for life as an RPG Blogger; the only alternative […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]