Campaign Mastery

This isn’t the post I expected to be writing today. There are two reasons why you’re reading this and not the first of a three-part article about Priests: the first is a documentary (part 3 of The Fabric Of The Cosmos) and the second is the explosion of inspiration that it produced. I wanted to […]

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 […]

Officially, the Blog Carnival for September finished on Monday, and the October Blog Carnival has already started at first-time host of Dice and Dragons on the Halloween-inspired subject of “Spooky Spots” (best of luck with it, Scot!) – but I had one more article that I wanted to sneak under the wire. My last two […]

As a final dénouement of the articles on Wondrous Locations, I am offering a collection of wondrous places, all of which have been created just for this article (none are from my past campaigns). These aren’t quite as polished as I might have liked (I ran out of time), especially in terms of the descriptions […]

How to describe wonders and monuments.

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 […]

52+ techniques to vastly increase the scope of what you can depict on your battlemaps.

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 […]

I thought I was done with this series, I really did. But then I watched a seemingly-unrelated TV documentary series called The Genius Of Design from the BBC, (available on DVD from Amazon), and a persuasive new perspective was opened for my consideration. (You might want to read of the series to see why it […]

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 […]