Campaign Mastery

The first part of this sub-series analyzed the basic character of the modern priest archetype, identified elements that representatives of that archetype all have in common, and along the way considered how to employ casual encounters to enhance and reveal the character’s basic role in a campaign. In this second part, I’ll take a closer […]

About the Casual Opportunities series: This series seeks to offer opportunities for PCs to reflect their primary role within a campaign. Opportunities for heroes to be heroes, for villains to be villains, for geeks to be geeks. It’s easy to become so focused on the primary plot, or on the things that the PCs are […]

In this article, I list the subgenres of sci-fi that could be encountered/created for an RPG campaign, or for a particular adventure, with lots of examples from movies and TV and more than a few original campaign concepts.

I buy cheap books of trivia all the time. The quality of them as reading material varies from excellent to abysmal, but they can be an excellent source of ideas. Did You Know… The spruce trees in the forest of the Canadian Lakes district is so densely populated that winter snow stays on top of […]

In my first article for this month’s Blog Carnival, I asked the question ‘Location, Location, Location: How Do You Choose A Location?‘ and identified ten or eleven influences on the decision, and an approximate hierarchy within them, but was unable to offer even a guideline beyond those observations in answer to the question. Today, the […]

Nyngan (pronounced Ning-gan) is the small town in central New South Wales where I grew up, so I know it well – at least as it used to be. It’s so remote that I haven’t been back there for years. In the following passages, I hope to bring it to life for my readers, then […]

How do you choose a location? Where do events transpire? What considerations should you take into account, and what is the process and the chain of logic that gives the best answers most rapidly? These are questions that Blair and I will have to tackle repeatedly tomorrow, as I write this, because our next pulp […]

In part one, I looked at techniques for extrapolating from the world of today into a future world where technology has changed. These techniques have served me well in both fiction writing and developing sci-fi oriented game settings. In the second part, I examined some core technologies that everyone engaged in anything sci-fi really needs […]

In part one, I looked at techniques for extrapolating from the world of today into a future world where technology has changed. These techniques have served me well in both fiction writing and developing sci-fi oriented game settings. In this second part, I will be examining some core technologies that everyone engaged in anything sci-fi […]

When you get right down to it, there are only three sources you can use when creating the world of tomorrow in a game: Copy something you’ve seen elsewhere, filing off serial numbers as necessary; Get it from the game setting; or Create it yourself. The Problems: All three of these solutions have their place […]

There are certain words whose literal translation can be considered telling when defining the mindset of a nation or culture. Most of these are identified after the fact, when a scholar matches a literal translation with a key insight into the profile of a particular group, but for roleplaying purposes we can define and redefine as necessary to employ selected terms as key indicators and giveaways to the psychology of a group or race.

Earlier this week I received an email from Richard Hetley, a writer & game designer from Megara Entertainment. Magara have a new kickstarter-funded project, and Richard was inviting me to write an article about that project. I’ve received a number of such invitations in the past, and turned them down (politely and with words of […]