Campaign Mastery

Inspiration can strike anytime, anywhere, sparked by some completely unexpected collision of thought and random sensory experience. There have been several articles here at campaign mastery with such origins; this is another, sparked by a random comment made during the pre-game conversation and socializing that normally takes place before a session of my Zenith-3 campaign. […]

I’ve been asked a number of times what advice I have for a beginning GM. This 15-part series is an attempt to answer that question – while throwing in some tips and reminders of the basics for more experienced GMs. I plan to complete the series in blocks of three articles, with fortnightly spacing. I’ve […]

One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to get more of the ATGMs backlog dealt with – which has been the case for a few years now. Each year, I’ve done better at satisfying it, but not well enough. Things improved when I started asking the other GMs that I play with, but that also […]

The Impossible Mission It doesn’t matter how skilled you are in your use of descriptive language and extraordinary narrative if you don’t know what it is that you are supposed to be describing. It follows that GMs need to construct and maintain a mental image of their world as it exists at any given moment […]

I’m writing this article on the day that the idea occurred to me, but I’ve held it back until an opportune gap appeared in the publishing schedule. I was waiting for the bus today (well, on the day that I wrote this), and that got me to thinking. More on that a little later. If […]

Welcome to the final part of Campaign Mastery’s major contribution to the November 2015 Blog Carnival. The theme this time around is the Unexpected, and this series is all about taking something that is usually assumed to be basic and reliable – portals and gates – and throwing some unexpected surprises into the mix… To […]

Welcome to the third part of Campaign Mastery’s major contribution to the November 2015 Blog Carnival. The theme this time around is the Unexpected, and this series is all about taking something that is usually assumed to be basic and reliable – portals and gates – and throwing some unexpected surprises into the mix… To […]

Welcome to the Blog Carnival Host Page for November 2015! In the coming month it is once again Campaign Mastery’s turn to host the Blog Carnival (if you’re quick, you can still catch the tail end of the October Blog Carnival about creepy things coming to town over at Of Dice And Dragons). This time […]

GMs sometimes ask more than one question. Where these directly relate to each other, or the context is important to the answers, they are generally lumped together. When they aren’t, which is far less frequent an event, they get split up and answered separately. Which brings me to today’s topic: Writing characters out when players […]

This is the second of a two-part article that I wrote while away attending a brace of family functions. (Actually, technically, it’s the third of four-and-a-half, but why get picky?) It’s so much easier when you’re dealing with an NPC. You have total control over everything. The character is what you define it to be […]

Chatting with a fellow GM on twitter recently, I was reminded of a technique that I use from time to time to generate backstories, that I thought I would share, in somewhat fuller and more developed form than I was able to convey in a handful of 140-character tweets! There are two ways to use […]

This month’s blog carnival is being hosted by Johnn over at Roleplaying Tips. The subject is Curses…. Curses are pretty weak and trivial things in D&D/Pathfinder, let’s be honest. This is especially the case in light of the spell level of Bestow Curse and Remove Curse – I mean Cleric 3, Sorcerer/Wizard 4, just for […]