Campaign Mastery

“Show, don’t tell” is a common maxim when it comes to literary entertainments, and something that has been gleefully expropriated as good advice for other media. That includes TV, Movies, and, of course, Roleplaying Games. I was thinking about that during the last week, and noting how much easier it was for the other two […]

Welcome & General Introduction With each passing entry in this series, we get to ground that is more familiar to all of us – either part of, or directly related to, our everyday lives, or part of the collective zeitgeist concerning the forces that influence those lives. This makes analysis easier (I know more of […]

A Status Update It can be readily observed that this is not part 3 of the ongoing series on Economics in RPGs that I’ve been publishing for the last couple of weeks. Right up until the last moment, I was uncertain as to whether or not to continue with that series this week, but two […]

Welcome & General Introduction Following a successful Dr Who adventure in which the player started to see how a number of plot threads intersected, my head is currently full of the strange environment in which the next adventure is to occur. I mean, this is the homeworld of his current companion – a psionic sentient […]

I’ve been working on this article for several weeks now, on and off, and have come to the conclusion that it will be beneficial to the subject matter to break it into a series of related posts, dividing one concept from another. It started out as an intention to simply explain “inflation” to RPG GMs […]

There are three facts about a character that can be considered definitive of what sort of person they are, diagnostic of what sort of mistakes they will make, and instrumental in defining what sorts of adventures will consume their attention. These are not the whole sum of the substance of the character or his personality, […]

Most people – and I include many players and GMs in that grouping – have no idea how tiring it can be to run a game, and try to do it well. For many years, I didn’t notice it, either; my reserves of stamina were sufficient that I could happily GM for 5 hrs, take […]

In any game with Deities or Religions (and that’s almost all RPGs), the questions that dog real religions need to have answers that are plausible, whether we as real people believe them or not. The more interventionist the Deities are, the more this needs to be true, because there is greater capacity for the priests […]

Today’s article can be viewed as a sequel to Spotlights In Focus: Plot Structure Impacts, which I wrote last November. That article examined the impact that a plot structure could have on the content of an adventure, and vice-versa, inspired by the work then being done on an plotline for the Adventurer’s Club campaign that […]

I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but there are some creature types that automatically get tagged as the villains as soon as they appear. This is true in D&D, in Pathfinder, in a superhero game, a pulp / horror game – you name it. These are ‘the obvious villains’ and today’s article is all […]

Dialogue: Essential Techniques There are three basic approaches to writing dialogue. 1. Canned Dialogue This involves writing the central dialogue in advance, making assumptions about the conversational cues that the players will provide. There are obvious advantages to this approach; you can take as much time as you need to polish and nuance the words, […]

Concluding Campaign Mastery’s contribution to the December Blog Carnival hosted by Rising Phoenix Games is on the subject of “No Dice“. In Part 1, I looked at why we roll dice for various things in RPGs and what these die rolls are attempting to simulate in game-world terms. In a nutshell, the dice represent all […]