Campaign Mastery

I explained in Part 1 what the Omega Archive is, why I’m creating the contents of it, how to use the contents in your own campaigns. Instead of repeating all that, I intend to get more or less right down to the content! But first, the ongoing index list: In part 1 I covered entries […]

If I mention sailing ships designed to travel from one world to another, the game system that comes to mind for most readers will be the Spelljammer game setting for D&D, introduced late in 1989, or perhaps Planescape, which came out in 1993 as a replacement for Spelljammer. Despite the official discontinuation, every release of […]

I didn’t expect to be writing about this right now. I knew that I would need this sometime towards the end of the year for my Dr Who campaign, but I had months in hand. What has brought this forward is the February 2021 Blog Carnival, hosted by the Sea Of Stars RPG Design Journal, which […]

Just to prove that the recent two-and-a-half-part article RPGs In Technicolor (part 1,part 2, part 2a) weren’t the last word on the subject, I thought of this topic of discussion. Picture a room in which your character is located. A partially-closed door leads to a corridor beyond. Somewhere down that corridor, something is glowing in […]

I try very hard to provide balance in my coverage of different genres here at Campaign Mastery, guided by the relative popularity. Out of every 15 posts, 6 should be Fantasy oriented, 4 should be sci-fi oriented, 2 should be ‘realistic’ (Modern-day or Pulp, hence the inverted commas), 2 should be Superhero/Secret Agent oriented, and […]

I didn’t intend to create a new Doctor Who campaign. The last one, “Lovecraft’s Legacies” had trodden new territory in expanding the lexicon and history of all the great races of Dr Who – Daleks, Cybermen, Weeping Angels, Omega and the Time Lords (amongst others). It integrated elements of Dr who with the Lovecraftian Mythos, […]

The First Frontier: Appearance Early science fiction depicted aliens as having animal heads or other elements of animal anatomy. Fantasy, myth, and legend carry the principle even further back in time – the Minotaur of Knossos comes to mind. And I would not be at all surprised to be told that centaurs predate even those […]

Whew! Finished at last!! This is a long one, folks – more than 16 thousand words, or about four normal Campaign Mastery articles. Heck, that’s approaching game supplement levels… Needless to say, I had no idea it would be anything like that long when I started. I Hope it’s worth the wait! Awakened Trees Most […]

(originally titled ‘Flowing Mana and other arcane concepts’) Today, I thought I would share with you a few concepts from my superhero campaign that relate to the “science” of how magic works. I’ve addressed the circumstances under which these were presented in-play in an earlier post; this is more about delivering the high-concept ideas themselves […]

It has always been my opinion that of all the pantheons, the Norse are the most suited to application within a superhero campaign. The Greek deities are too whimsical, the Romans too arrogant; the Norse are the most level-headed in many respects. What’s more, the Vikings had a sense of the rule of law that […]

I originally started writing this as a contribution to the May 2020 Blog Carnival, hosted by Moebius Adventures, but when I wasn’t able to finish it in time, I set it aside for later completion. It is now “later”… Travel The theme of the May carnival was “Are we there yet”, and the subject matter […]

0. Fundamentals (repeated for all posts:) — The Sixes System is a minimalist game system suitable for any and all genres. — It has been used in my Dr Who campaign since September 2014, which has just come to a successful conclusion. — Characters are constructed using a point-buy methodology with NPCs generatable using die rolls […]