Campaign Mastery

Character skills can be divided into three categories (with some overlapping): skills that enhance the character’s ability to survive/succeed in adventures; skills that the character archetype is expected/required to have; and the oddballs from left field, which I refer to as Characterization Skills. The last category also includes anything from the first two categories that […]

How do you take three plot ideas and interlink them to make one grand adventure? I’ve often skimmed over this point because it’s usually arisen in the context of campaign planning, so I thought it was high time that I went into it in greater detail. Another reason why I’ve been dodging this discussion for […]

I’ve been holding off on this article for almost 9 months because I wanted to make sure I had an RPG connection. Last week, I finally found it. 2016: The Myth 2016 is perceived to have been a horror year for the loss of celebrities. One famous face or voice left us after another. It […]

I always get far more invitations to support and review projects that I can possibly manage to satisfy. Every now and then, I bundle as many of them as I can into a goody roundup to inform those who might be interested in backing them of what’s going on. Today, I have 10 items to […]

I’ve been re-watching Season 2 of The West Wing over the weekend. I only meant to watch a couple of episodes, but as usually happens when I put it in the DVD-player, I started to binge. It’s a show that never fails to tickle my sense of optimism, my hope for the future, my love […]

You can never tell where inspiration is going to come from. The best you can do is remain alert to the world around you and leap in with both feet whenever you find it. That’s what I was thinking while enjoying a chocolate treat – A mint Aero bar – the other day. For some […]

For today’s article, I’m reaching back into my memories of the mental processes that I employed to construct the Orcish Society in my Fumanor Campaign, and generalizing them, because it works for any society in any game – heck, I’ve just been applying the same basic principles to 27th-century Scotland for my Dr Who campaign. […]

While this article starts off with political analysis, it leads into the discovery of what appears to be a universal social truth that can be integrated into multiple situations in any RPG. I’ve done my best to avoid coloring the analysis with my own opinions, and have neither intent nor desire to belittle in any […]

This is not the article that most people will have expected to see in this space. It’s supposed to be the fifteenth shelf of the Essential Reference Library, but that’s taking a lot longer to complete than expected – up to 3 hours per item just to gather and describe all the links, with 66 […]

There were only two DVDs by Derren Brown that were appropriate to the Pulp Reference Library, Items 1175 and 1176, which can be found reviewed towards the bottom of the Twelfth Shelf. These barely scratch the surface of the relevance of this man’s work in a broader RPG context, however, and so I determined to […]

This article offers an example to illustrate the process described in Part 5 of the Spell Storage Solutions series, by which much of the sting and stigma attached to relics can be designed out of them. From the footnote to that article: “I was actually going to explain the process by way of presenting an […]

A trio of questions that take me out of my comfort zone, because I don’t know the game system, and they are – to some extent – heavily system-related issues. But I had the advantage of being able to consult my fellow GMs on this one, and also had the luxury of being able to […]