Campaign Mastery

Introduction A week or two ago (as I write this) I was chatting with someone on twitter, and they wanted to show me a map they were working on – but couldn’t find where they had stored it on their computer. File organization is one of those areas that no-one ever really talks about, so […]

In celebration of Guy Fawkes Night, this month’s blog carnival, hosted by Nearly Enough Dice is all about Gunpowder, Treason, and Plots. I decided to take a comprehensive look at treason and betrayal as Campaign Mastery’s contribution…

Today’s article is in two halves. The first is a guest article submitted by Jason Falls (the “five games” part), and the second is by yours truly, adding relevance to tabletop RPGs to the mix. 5 Games That Will Wreck Your Life When I was a kid making my first tentative steps into the Mushroom […]

How to describe wonders and monuments.

Updated with an additional section in the comments Mention of Easter Island in a previous article has had me thinking about monuments and places of wonder, and what is needed to make them amazing. It’s a lesson that Australians in general don’t do very well at – hence “tourist attractions” like the “big prawn”, “big […]

In my first article for this month’s Blog Carnival, I asked the question ‘Location, Location, Location: How Do You Choose A Location?‘ and identified ten or eleven influences on the decision, and an approximate hierarchy within them, but was unable to offer even a guideline beyond those observations in answer to the question. Today, the […]

52+ techniques to vastly increase the scope of what you can depict on your battlemaps.

How do you choose a location? Where do events transpire? What considerations should you take into account, and what is the process and the chain of logic that gives the best answers most rapidly? These are questions that Blair and I will have to tackle repeatedly tomorrow, as I write this, because our next pulp […]

We all suffer from the occasional bout of writer’s block. This series started with the premise that different types of content meant different kinds of writer’s block, and needed different solutions to the problem. The immediate success of listing so many different solutions while outlining the article showed the validity of the approach; so far, […]

Everything has to happen somewhere, and that means that locations are an essential element of RPGs and RPG settings. And that makes locations a worthy subject for this month’s Blog Carnival. Posts I would like to see as part of this month’s carnival are:- How do you choose a location? How do you represent a […]

I’ve got so much campaign prep to get done that if I don’t do it here, I’ll never get it done in time…    A triple-sized serving of the Orcs and Elves series today, to make up for missing last week, and to wrap up the Clan Wars plotline.    I explained what had occurred […]

Translation blocks are a type of writer’s block which occurs when moving from one level or layer of the story that you’re telling to the next.