Campaign Mastery

I’ve received a lot of compliments for the titles and logos that I’ve done over the years. You can see several of them in the illustrations for this article about my gaming schedule and the need to juggle campaigns to match player commitments when you have half-a-dozen GMs and a pool of perhaps a dozen […]

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.

I have a list of the topics that I intend to cover here at Campaign Mastery that I simply add to whenever I have an article idea. Sometimes when I look at the list, though, I don’t feel sufficiently inspired to write about any of them – then what should I do? I have a […]

There are three tricks that I use all the time when designing adventures, characters, races, campaigns, cultures, NPCs and Villainous Plans for RPGs, and for rebooting tired old characters. I call them the magic bullets of design, and I’ve written about most of them several times before – but there is always something new to […]

In any modern-day team environment, there is usually one member of the team who focuses on the tactical situation. Characters that each go their own way tend, sooner or later to get in each other’s way, or make the mistake of two going for the same target while another target is left uncovered; the team […]

I’ve tried every way I can think of to set this topic aside until after I had finished the series on names, but it just doesn’t work. So I guess it’s time to take a side-trip into the wonderful world of creating and simulating Alien Languages in RPGs… I once, back in the early 1990s, […]

(As any viewer of Babylon-5 knows, a Zocolo is a marketplace or gathering place). The unusually observant may have noticed a new link in our right-hand Navigation. AetherCon is an idea that has arrived at exactly the right time – just as the required technologies and their distribution intersect with the realm of possibility that […]

AutoREALM is open-source mapping software for RPGs. It operates as a vector-art program that operates on various layers, similar to the commercial software Campaign Cartographer. In 2005, development ceased on the software as the people working on it found the need to prioritize activities that actually put bread on the table. As a result, the […]

At my workplace there’s a poker group. At my previous job there was a group. Players in my Riddleport campaign play in such groups. Games are even broadcast during prime time TV. When did this game become so popular? If you have a player in your group who is a raving poker fan, I thought […]

Welcome to “part 3a” of this series on names and naming things – and finding the right choice. Today’s post was actually intended to be part of the previous entry in the series, but the subjects of Mononyms (got it right this time, thanks again elijah!) and bi-structured names just sort of grew… a lot. […]

This is the third part of this series on character names. Part 1 discussed the value of a good name, and examined the attributes and benefits that characterized a good choice of name. In Part 2, I explored “Name Seeds”, the heart of a system that I have developed for the creation of passable-or-better names […]

Want a quick game in the break room? Run a game session from your smartphone! Introduction Modern technology has revolutionized many aspects of everyday life, and – since it’s a slightly geeky hobby – tabletop gaming was one turf very quickly invaded by the latest in mobile computing devices – the telephone. In this article, […]