Campaign Mastery

I love being able to bring something new to the attention of others. So much so that I’m diverging from the intended schedule (which called for the next part of the series on Economics on RPGs) to bring news of something exciting to readers. The subject of today’s article has so many new elements to […]

Whenever they present themselves, I like to call attention to Kickstarter campaigns and products of special RPG merit or promise. It’s been a while since I’ve done one, not since an announcement was tacked onto Image Compositing for RPGs: Project No 2, in fact. Frankly, I don’t get to do it often enough, but I […]

The Glass Spider – metagame It’s not often that you think of an encounter that would be equally at home in a D&D / Fantasy setting, a Swashbuckling Pirate game, a Sci-Fi environment, a Superhero game-space, or even – if you allow a little genetic engineering to escape the lab – a Cyberpunk game. So […]

Lately, a lot of the spam that CM has been receiving has proposed the use of AI-generated content to make the life of the writer/publisher easier, as though content creation was nothing more than the means to an end. The Flaw In The Argument Mankind has yet to build an artificial system that can pass […]

The story so far… This is the last in a set of mini-posts that I have written and published as quickly as possible (given a number of health-related interruptions), something I’m calling a mini-blitz. My normal publication schedule will resume at the end of the series. Each of the posts so far has examined one […]

This was intended to be part of a single, self-contained article – but the more I look at it, the more inevitable it seems that what did happen, would happen. Make sure you’ve read Part 1 before continuing! I intend to dive straight in and pick up exactly where I left off, but first, there’s […]

Why are dystopian settings so popular? Is that a good thing? What are the consequences and what are the alternatives? Another relatively short post this week (in theory, if all goes according to plan), because this approach worked so well for me last week – I had time to get more than 16000 words of […]

The Unexpected Microcosm A department store is a near perfect-simulation of, well, just about everything, really. Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration – but much less so than most people realize. This article will seek to simultaniously demonstrate the truth of the general statement and show readers how to use the microcosm of the Department Store […]

Back in the mid-90s, when I was preparing the campaign background for my rebooted superhero campaign, I had to think about cyberware – not the relatively reliable and semi-routine stuff that you would find in a Cyberpunk campaign, but the stuff that you would have before all the bugs were worked out. I wasn’t interested […]

Today’s post comes courtesy of an ear-worm. I recently played Glen Campbell’s Greatest Hits, and the theme from the John Wayne movie “true Grit” stuck in my head (not for the first time). Not at the time, mind, but afterwards, when it was triggered by writing about gritty reality in a Quora post and mentioning […]

Whew, finished at last! Six hrs overdue, but it’s more than twice the usual length, so hopefully that can be forgiven! Is it too easy to cure disease in RPGs? I analyzed that question from various angles last week and came to the conclusion that the answer was arguably ‘yes’ – and also arguably ‘no’ […]

A Post In Two Parts This is a post in two parts. The first is the traditional blog carnival roundup; the carnival has now moved on to a new host. Turnout for July was disappointing, though, so that wouldn’t be enough to reward readers for taking the trouble to check in. So I was already […]