Campaign Mastery

GMs sometimes ask more than one question. Where these directly relate to each other, or the context is important to the answers, they are generally lumped together. When they aren’t, which is far less frequent an event, they get split up and answered separately. Which brings me to today’s topic: Writing characters out when players […]

The concept of “coincidence” was a thorny problem for philosophers starting from the ancient Greeks. Plato, in Phaedo, defined “inquiry into nature” as a search for “the causes of each thing; why each thing comes into existence, why it goes out of existence, why it exists”. Aristotle went further, developing a theory of causality, commonly […]

The Context Saxon, one of my players and a fellow GM who has contributed guidance through ATGMs on a number of occasions was telling an anecdote the other week about what transpired in the D&D 5e campaign that he plays in. It seems that one of the players was unable to attend. That happens in […]

Preface to Part 2, by Mike This is the second half of Ian’s article on Vehicles. The first half concentrated on the PCs acquiring a vehicle; this half is all about using one. I’ve also tossed in my two-cents worth here and there with the occasional aside and also jumped in with a few small […]

Preface, by Mike Today, I’m providing the first half of a guest article by my long-time friend, Ian Mackinder. Ian’s been nuancing this article for quite some time, and that shows in its depth. Part one deals with acquiring and designing vehicles, part two with using and abusing them. I’ve also tossed in my two-cents […]

I was recently invited to review the Morgalad Starter Book by John McNabb, available through DrivethruRPG. Publication of Morgalad is the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign which, like the result, is an interesting mixture of flawed ambition and success. The initial attempt at funding Morgalad sought to raise $20,000 and was a dismal failure; […]

I originally intended to present the Tavern Generator that I promised on Monday as today’s post, but it will take longer than I initially thought. Probably one more day of designing the tables and two days to format them – largely because what I am offering is far more robust and advanced than the basic […]

Why should the pace of gameplay be held hostage by combat mechanics? Anything else we can take or leave – we can assume success on any skill roll and get straight to the results. But combat? No – not unless we hand victories to the players on a platter. In part one of this series, […]

Hungry, over at Ravenous Roleplaying, is a long-time supporter of Campaign Mastery through his regular “Friday Faves” column, in which he collects links to the articles that have most inspired or interested him from the past week. When he has time, he accompanies those links with some comments; these are always interesting, and sometimes genuinely […]

A ‘Game Physics’ can shape plots, be revealed and extended by plots, but its greatest impact is usually more subtle and cumulative, and only experienced at a Campaign Level, where it can serve as a binding influence that ties disparate plots into a unified whole. Game Systems in service of plot This section was originally […]

In this series, I’ve been looking into the subject of Game Physics. Part one examined what a ‘game physics’ is, and what one can be used for. Part two focused in on one particular application, the generation and validation of House Rules. In this third part, the subject is the relationship between Game Physics and […]

Sorry for the delay in posting this – my ISP is conducting maintenance of some sort, and my connection kept dropping out, making it hard to upload and format the article in the usual manner. Combinations So far, I’ve been looking at the different elements of pauses-in-play in as much isolation as possible, going beyond […]