Campaign Mastery

This weekend’s session of the Zenith-3 campaign was a great success, and one of the big reasons for that was the real sense that the PCs were fully integrated elements within the game world. This article is going to look at some of the major reasons for that so that you can do it in […]

I was reflecting on the process that I use to design NPCs for my campaigns, the other day, and I don’t think that I’ve ever described it here at Campaign Mastery, let alone explained it. That simply won’t do. There are a number of considerations that go into the design of an NPC, and I […]

Although I am writing this article in advance, it will be published on what is a fairly significant date in Australia: Boxing Day. It wasn’t until I saw a particular episode of M*A*S*H that I realized that many parts of the Western World don’t celebrate this particular holiday, December 26th – it’s a British Commonwealth […]

Why should the GM care about Marching Order? After all, it’s purely in the hands of the players what order their characters are in. Well, as usual, it’s not quite that simple. First, if you can anticipate the marching order, you can plan encounters either to take advantage of it, or to share the spotlight […]

Campaign Mastery hosted the November 2017 Blog Carnival and had some really great submissions in addition to my using the Carnival as a springboard for a whole heap of articles. The theme this time around was “The Past Revisited: Pick a post (your own or someone else’s) and write a sequel. Should include a link […]

I originally intended to publish the Blog Carnival round-up today, but last week’s computer failure has messed up my plans quite a bit, so I’ve given myself a couple of extra days to get that finished. This is another article that I wrote while my internet was dead, and could be viewed as something of […]

This article won’t be very helpful to readers who are visually-impaired. I apologize for that, I know I have at least one reader who falls into that category. Maybe if you could get someone to describe the diagrams to you…? I tried including such descriptions, but found that the meaning of the article became buried. […]

While this article builds on some others that I’ve done here at Campaign Mastery, I didn’t feel it was enough of a sequel to any of them to qualify for the Blog Carnival. But I wanted to remind readers that if you’re thinking of doing so, there’s still time to submit a late entry! I’ll […]

When first I listed this article as a to-do, it represented a very straightforward concept, but I’ve taken so long to get around to writing it that other notions have presented themselves. I now find myself in possession of three distinct and – at first glance – mutually contradictory ideas on the subject. With these […]

I’m tagging this post as part of the Blog Carnival. The theme is sequels, and I think that being the third part in a series qualifies. The first two parts of this small series (Part 1, Part 2) looked at the tremendous impact of a community being located close to the major social, political, and […]

This isn’t the post I expected to put up today. The other one’s ready, and will appear later in the week. The reason is because it’s almost November – and that has a significance that will become clear any second now… Once again it’s time for Campaign Mastery to host the Blog Carnival for the […]

A side-comment by one of the players in my Zenith-3 campaign the last time we played raised some interesting questions. The player was speculating that the solution to a side-mystery that the PCs are currently investigating might have repercussions beyond those the players were presently aware of, simply to cause trouble between political authorities and […]