Campaign Mastery

It’s happened to us all at some point: the adventure has sidetracked down an unexpected alleyway and brought the PCs face-to-face with a character that you’ve made up on the spot. When this happens, you’re generally thinking only in physical terms, at least in the immediate term; that is because the first interaction that the […]

When a deity shows up in your game, how do you make sure the PCs – and more important, the players – know what they are dealing with? How do they recognize that the being that stands before them is something more than mortal? Of course, sometimes it’s obvious that the creature before them isn’t […]

I’ve always had problems with traps in D&D. Some of these problems have their origins all the way back in AD&D, others are more recent in origin. Rules changes with the different editions have solved or mitigated some of my concerns while creating whole new headaches to take their place. I have solutions to these […]

Pocket dimensions have been an important element of my superhero campaign for decades. Over that span of time, the understanding of their origins and properties have evolved in richness and complexity. Pocket dimensions were also much-sought-after magic items in my Fumanor campaigns, in the form of Bags Of Holding. And so I applied the conceptual […]

The March 2019 Blog Carnival challenges GMs to revisit and re-purpose material from the first half of their career behind the scene. For Campaign Mastery’s first entry (I have another in mind but might not have time to write it) I’m going Waaaay back – all the way, in fact, to my very first AD&D […]

The February 2019 Blog Carnival is being hosted by Sea Of Stars, with the subject of Making Magic Wondrous. This wasn’t an easy subject, because I’ve already done so much in this area regarding magic items of various types. I suspect others may have found it so, too, because entries are thin on the ground […]

Today I want to share a simple technique for elevating your narrative text. It requires you to follow just two rules: Ignore the sense of sight for as long as possible. Don’t use a noun or a verb unless you have already described the object using rule 1. Sounds too simple, doesn’t it? But let’s […]

This is something of an unusual article. As many of you know, I got my start submitting guest articles for Roleplaying Tips, and eventually co-founded Campaign Mastery with the writer/editor/publisher of that email newsletter, Johnn Four. A recent article was about “How To Think Like An Alien” – Johnn no longer numbers the issues in […]

There’s a bit of a rambling backstory to this article which I would omit if it weren’t central to the subject. Since that’s the case, I’ll have to ask you to bear with me for a bit. I was musing in the shower this morning of the significance of the Australian Music TV show, “Countdown” […]

Although I am writing this article in advance, it will be published on what is a fairly significant date in Australia: Boxing Day. It wasn’t until I saw a particular episode of M*A*S*H that I realized that many parts of the Western World don’t celebrate this particular holiday, December 26th – it’s a British Commonwealth […]

The Elephant In The Gray Room is a metaphor that I have created to represent Plot Holes. These are matters of huge significance or importance that everyone is overlooking because they are not immediately obvious, but that once you see one, you can never forget that it’s there. This is a series about methods of […]

I get far more invitations to review products and Kickstarter campaigns and the like than I could ever hope to satisfy. Every few months I gather several of these together for a round-up set of mini-reviews. This time around, with Christmas Shopping on the immediate horizon, I have no less than 25 products to bring […]