Campaign Mastery

I’ve got a lot of campaign prep to get done over the next few months. In fact, I’ve got so much to do that if I don’t do it here, in public, I’ll either never get it done in time – or be so distracted that Campaign Mastery will suffer. I’ve chosen the former course… […]

A hero is only as good as the villains they fight – but what makes a Villain great? It’s not exactly an easy question to answer, is it? I have three basic answers, for three different kinds of villain – the Mastermind, the Combat Monster, and the Character Villain. the final part of the article […]

A hero is only as good as the villains they fight – but what makes a Villain great? It’s not exactly an easy question to answer, is it? I have three basic answers, for three different kinds of villain – the Mastermind, the Combat Monster, and the Character Villain. In this part of the article […]

A hero is only as good as the villains they fight – but what makes a Villain great? It’s not exactly an easy question to answer, is it? I have three basic answers, for three different kinds of villain – the Mastermind, the Combat Monster, and the Character Villain. The first part of this article […]

I’ve always found that I can get a lot of mileage out of exploring nuances, fine shades of differentiation between synonyms, when I’m looking for adventure ideas and character concepts. Sometimes I will introduce a character to do nothing but that, especially when the PCs are in the other camp – even if they don’t […]

We’ve all made mistakes, done things that we regret, mourn missed opportunities. We all have shameful little secrets that we would not want to have exposed, usually deriving from our childhood or youth – but sometimes from later in life. This is actually a sign of maturity and moral growth in the individual by virtue […]

Having given Campaign Mastery’s readers (and myself) a break from the series, today’s article contains another Kingdom write-up from my Shards Of Divinity Campaign, once again in more detail than even the players have seen it before… Metagame Origins A ‘Hinterland’ is technically a region behind a coast or rivers, i.e. separated from the main […]

If you’ve followed the advice that I proffered in the first part of this article, your proposed sequel campaign is now brimming with ideas but they are scattered and incomplete. Some of these campaign seeds will flower and bloom, others will wither and lie dormant and unused. They are not yet part of a campaign. […]

It happens to all GMs if they stay behind the screen long enough: a campaign comes to an end, and the players insist on a sequel – but the whole reason the campaign has come to an end is that the GM has run out of ideas for the original campaign (or at least, out […]

I mentioned in my last article that each GM evolves their own standard style and formatting for the adventures that they write. This time around, I thought I would look at exactly how I format adventures for my campaigns. I write most of my adventures on a PC – the same one I’m using to […]

Debate is still going strong over my last article taking a closer look at what constitutes good storytelling techniques (Deus Ex Machinas And The Plot Implications Of Divinity), but – never one to back away from potential controversy – I’m about to dive headlong into another, and one from the same technique. Anton Chekhov famously […]

Wikipedia defines a ‘Deus Ex Machina‘ as a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object. It can be roughly translated, they say, as “God made it happen,” with no further explanation. They also state that the […]