Campaign Mastery

I’ve been desperately trying to clear enough time to attempt to get my main computer back up and running. It occurred to me the other day that there is a clear analogy between that process and the process of creating an RPG campaign. The Computer Of Today: some context Personal Computers are everywhere – or, […]

How does Magic (in general) work? I’m not talking about how the rules work, but how Magic works within the game world. Why raise the question now? I should probably pause for a moment to explain why I’m writing about this now – in the middle of a major series about Modern Priests. There are […]

How do you tell a good House Rule from a Bad? I know, I promised something short. As long-time readers will know, I don’t do “short” very well… “Time and motion studies” used to be the favorite tool of “efficiency” experts who optimized a process for speed. They quickly became the butts of a lot […]

The second of 9 parts in the series looks at STR checks and how they relate to the other core stats that are common to most game systems – with some surprises along the way.

This nine-part series looks at opposed stat checks and what they can represent. Part 8 will create a new characterization tool, The Stat Matrix, based on the interactions described, and show how to use it to turn stats into characters, and Part 9 will warp up the series by turning that process on its head and demonstrate a way to use the Stat Matrix to turn a personality into a set of stats for a character.

“Lessons From The West Wing” is a series of occasional articles inspired by the Television Series. I’ve had this article sitting around in partially completed form for a couple of years now, waiting for the right example with which to illustrate the concluding point. Finally, that condition has been met, so it’s time to look […]

Our special effects gurus get better all the time, and at the same time, their product becomes more affordable with improving technology, making it more ubiquitous in entertainments. I first wrote about the impact of this phenomenon back in 2009, when I asked Are Special Effects Killing Hollywood?, a question which shed a new light […]

In this concluding part of my series on encounter tables, I look at Urban Settings, Dungeon settings, and talk about ways of integrating Wandering Monster encounters into plotlines and infusing them with meaning. And I might throw in the occasional new idea in other relevant areas, to boot. A quick catch-up – In part one […]

In part one of this series, I talked about the philosophical grounding of random encounters – the theoretical why’s and wherefore’s that underpin the encounters that result, and the ways and reasons why they matter. In this part, I’m going to discuss ways of creating better, smarter, encounter tables – ones that prompt you to […]

While there are a lot of things the Hero System does well, there are a few things that it does exceedingly poorly, and one of those is the Bluff. This article offers a system to correct that.

Having given Campaign Mastery’s readers (and myself) a break from the series, today’s article contains another Kingdom write-up from my Shards Of Divinity Campaign, once again in more detail than even the players have seen it before… Metagame Origins A ‘Hinterland’ is technically a region behind a coast or rivers, i.e. separated from the main […]

Hero Game’s Policy on publishing house rules is both enlightened and occasionally maddening. They have no problem with people posting their own characters, or discussing their rules, or publishing house rules – provided that you don’t quote directly from their rulebooks and your rules don’t exceed 5,000 words in length. You can’t publish variations on […]