Archive for the ‘Planning & Preparation’ Category

Five (Plus One!) Effective Combat Tactics for Assassins

Here’s another excerpt from Assassin’s Amulet while you’re all waiting for the announcement of the winner of the cover contest. This is taken from the GM Advice chapter and first appeared in this week’s Roleplaying Tips. Many GMs struggle with running killer NPCs. One big goal of the book is to arm you with enough […]

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Roleplaying Assassins: An excerpt from Assassins Amulet

Assassins should be compelling NPCs in every encounter in which they appear. This article, an excerpt from the forthcoming Assassin’s Amulet, describes how to run Assassins as compelling characters to roleplay and deadly adversaries to fight. And don’t forget to vote for the cover! Step 1: Pick an Archetype or Example Creating an assassin NPC […]

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Theme vs Style vs Genre: Crafting Anniversary Special Adventures

300 and other landmarks This is our 300th post here at Campaign Mastery! Over the last couple of months we’ve seen a number of other landmarks come and go, but this is the biggest of them. While we thought about making a fuss over the others, it just didn’t seem that long ago that we […]

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Forging Unexpected Connections: Putting PC Dossiers To Work

Real Life has caught up with me this week, so this won’t be as extensive an article as I was originally intending. But I’m going to do my best to turn that into an asset. This post was also intended to be Campaign Mastery’s entry into this month’s Blog Carnival, which was going to be […]

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By The Seat Of Your Pants: Six Foundations Of Adventure

Last week I offered seven-and-a-half secrets to the art of successfully creating ‘adventures on the fly‘, with minimal or no prep. The fourth “secret” (everyone knows it now, even if they didn’t know it before!) was incomplete, presented only in summary form, because I could tell that it was going to take more room and […]

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By The Seat Of Your Pants: Adventures On the Fly

There was a period, a year or two into my Champions campaign, where work was taking up almost all of my time, leaving virtually nothing for game prep. I usually got a lift into the facilities used by the games club that we were using at the time, located at the time in the suburb […]

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A potpourri of quick solutions: Eight Lifeboats for GM Emergencies

Sometimes GMing is flashy, and fun. When everything is ready, and you’re in the groove, when you know what is going to happen and can lose yourself in the game, and simply present the PCs with the consequences of their actions and concentrate on your performance in the guise of NPCs and on the delivery […]

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Wood and Silver or Iron and Gold? – Historical Inaccuracy in FRP, Part 2

This is the second half of a two-part guest article by Phil McGregor. To anyone who doesn’t know who he is, check the brief bio at the bottom of the article. Silver or Gold The other thing I find really interesting in almost all D&D descended/inspired FRPs is the 1/10th (45.4 grams* gold (or any […]

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Wood and Silver or Iron and Gold? – Historical Inaccuracy in FRP, Part 1

This is the first half of a two-part guest article by Phil McGregor. To anyone who doesn’t know who he is, check the brief bio at the bottom of the article! The second part will appear on Thursday. Wood or Iron? One of the reasons I got into roleplaying games way back in the mid […]

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Objective-Oriented Experience Points

Why do we hand out experience for combat? No, I’m serious – this is a question that’s been preying on my mind as a consequence of an article I wrote earlier this year, “Experience for the ordinary person” – you should probably go and read at least the first section (down to and including “Reward-matching […]

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Creating Alien Characters: Expanding the ‘Create A Character Clinic’ To Non-Humans

Introduction Back in late February or early March, Holly Lisle’s books came to my attention – I’m no longer sure how, but it was probably a Twitter link to her blog. Several of her e-books sounded interesting, so I passed the information on to Johnn, who surprised me in late March by giving me several […]

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Prep-Tools II: Encounter and Scene Planning

This entry is part 3 of 14 in the series GM Toolbox

Written by Michael Beck, with contributions and editing by Da’Vane. GM’s Toolbox, looks at tools, tips, and techniques you can use to improve your games. Toolbox offers you a skeleton for running a campaign, rather than fleshed out tips. This series is presented in a discussion style, and we ask you to contribute with comments […]

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