Campaign Mastery

The King of a troubled land and his weakling allies face a troubled future. In a distant land, two dark Princes ally with the aim of overthrowing the King and his forces. Slowly, both sides build up their forces, making moves and countermoves in secret. One by one, each recruits secret allies, seemingly headed for […]

Creating most NPCs is like boiling an egg. They should take three minutes or less and be ‘boiled’ at the game table, not in advance – though you may want garnishes at the ready. In fact, most should take no more than thirty or fourty seconds. Doesn’t sound possible? This article will show you how, […]

Human nature never changes. That’s what makes science fiction and fantasy accessible to modern audiences. Often, it is by denying that fundamental truth that poor science fiction and fantasy are created. This was especially rife in the 50s, 60s, and 70s (in terms of television and movies) and the 30s, 40s, and 50s in terms […]

Last week, I proposed an alternate approach to plotting mysteries that made them more suitable for RPGs and could also be of benefit to mystery writers generally. Due to time pressures, I didn’t include examples – and I wasn’t entirely sure they would be necessary (that’s why I spent some time working on the diagrams; […]

I was running an adventure this weekend from a module that I had downloaded from the net. Central to the plotline was a mystery, a political situation in a small town, stories of an ancient Curse, all calculated to drive the PCs to an above-ground dungeon which could also be called a Mansion. While the […]

For obvious reasons, I’ve been in a very introspective frame of mind in recent weeks. It occurred to me today that my life has now changed almost comp-letely from where I was ten years ago. Ten years ago, my primary occupation was as a bookkeeper. I hadn’t worked for a few years, but was still […]

The death of a player naturally forces a GM to reassess his campaign and plans. But this sort of tragic event is not the only reason why this might become necessary – a player might move away, or might simply tire of the campaign and want to play something else, or might even give up […]

An empty Death is a terrible thing When Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby) died in Star Trek: The Next Generation, there was an outcry amongst fans. Not because the character had been killed off so much as because she died what was later described even within the series as “an empty death” – a death without […]

Campaign Mastery was down for a few hours this week due to a configuration issue resulting from a server restore by our host. This manifested as an offer to download a file instead of opening the site. Diagnosing and solving the problem meant that this article couldn’t be finished in time to upload it on […]

Introduction (reprised from Part 1) I use scenario/adventure titles all the time. Used correctly, they can put players into the correct frame of mind to react in the “right” way to the events in a scenario, conceal the identity of a villain until or hide a plot twist until the big reveal, heighten the drama […]

I use scenario/adventure titles all the time. Used correctly, they can put players into the correct frame of mind to react in the “right” way to the events in a scenario, conceal the identity of a villain until or hide a plot twist until the big reveal, heighten the drama of a situation and/or raise […]

I’m taking a break from the ongoing Earth-regency Alternate History series this week (mostly because research has been taking more time than I’ve had available. Instead, the following is based on an email exchange between one of my players and myself, raising some serious questions about the population dynamics of longer-lived species and aging in […]